I wrote this on Facebook last night :

To all the misogynists turning “nice guy” into a dirty word, here are some suggested alternatives to get the same idea across :
1. Relatively inoffensive
2. Not particularly evil
3. Not quite as bad as I could be
4. Comparatively fairly okay
5. The good kind of mediocre
6. Not actively harmful
7. Less toxic than some
8. Helpful if it’s not too much work
9. Hotness minus testosterone
And finally, our number 10…
10. Hey, you could do worse!

And I am proud of it. That’s some sharp comedy writing. I should do that kind of thing more often. Then again, there’s a fucklot of things that I should do more often, and I don’t do any of them.

Anyhow, it gave me the idea of seeing what other gems there are in my Facebook posts.

There is this one :

To all the thinkers of the world : beware the time (and it will come) when you begin to shun that which causes doubt.

How aphoristic! You can tell I have been reading Nietzsche.

Anyhow, as my faithful readers, you already know about my theory of conservatism as being basically the ideology of convince people that things really are as simple and straightforward as they can handle. Its message is “Good news! There’s nothing you don’t understand! Everything about the world is so simple and straightforward that you don’t even have to think in order to understand it. Just go with your gut (in other words, your emotions) and everything will be just fine. And absolutely everyone who says different is an evil lying degenerate villain whose sole goal is to hurt you and your family. ”

It’s ideology for people who don’t like thinking, can’t stand doubt, and thus who need all the crusts cut off their milquetoast before they can digest it.

And that’s what the above quote is about. At a certain point, as our minds lose elasticity just like our bodies do with age, we will begin to resent anything that forces us into a state of doubt and thus requires the kind of high level thinking that we just do not feel up to any more.

Because we’re tired.

And that is the exact point where even lively intellectuals like myself start to turn into static minded conservative fossils. You don’t have the energy or the mental maneuverability to change your mind about things. It starts off with a few little things, like whether Pluto is a planet or a new host on your favorite game show, but little by little, more of the mind calcifies, and eventually you can’t change your mind about anything.

Now I don’t want to make this sound too dire. That’s not the only possible outcome. There’s lots of evidence that keeping mentally active keeps your brain from getting too stiff, so there is hope for us all.

But already, I feel it happening in my own mind. The urge to greet things which conflict with what I already know with a sneer and a “fuck you, leave me alone!” is within my mind, and growing.

Conflicting information causes pain in your stiff old mind, and you instinctively want to fight it in order to make it GO AWAY and stop hurting you.

Reason does not enter into the picture. Is the new information true? Who cares, it hurts.

Another recent post :

I don’t know who you are and have only a vague idea what you do, Grammy Award Winner Joe Bonnamasa, but thanks to your enormous Youtube buy, I now hate you.

Trust me, I did not get to that point overnight. But seriously, this YouTube ad for some concert of his at the Queen Elizabeth Theater has played before 90 percent of the videos I have watched for more than a week, and I am really fucking sick of it.

So by making such an enormous ad buy that I saw his ad a zillion times, his people have made me hate a guy I know nothing about. Doesn’t matter. I hear the name and have a deep down GRRR reaction.

Fuck you, Joe. Fuck you sideways with a baseball bat.

I also responded to this image :

… by saying this :

See this, you billionaire bastards? THIS is the ground trembling beneath your feet. Raising wages for your low end people is *cool* now. That means the people doing it will become socially dominant over you. Soon, you will become an embarrassment and your peers will distance themselves from you like you had the plague. After that, you will be about as welcome at the fancy to-do’s that make up so much of your life as a Nazi pedophile. THIS IS YOUR HELL.

And looking back on it now, I have to say, that’s some powerful language. Maybe being someone who is desperate to be heard really does make one into a writer.

Or in the case of the above, a firebrand reformer like Martin Luther, who is a hero of mine. I would love to nail my critiques somewhere everyone would read them. Civilization is under threat from these billionaire bastards. They bribed the gatekeepers and now they are looting the palace. Someone has to stop them, and I am more than willing to be that person. If, like Luther, I can stir people to action with my words, I would be willing to be the lightning rod for that revolution.

The problem with lightning rods, of course, is that you have to put them in a very high place in order to attract the thunderbolts. And I, as of this writing, am a subterranean creature, well below even the floor of society, and the only way for someone to find me is with a pick and shovel.

And there is always the issue of making choices. If I choose “firebrand”, then I give up on “comedy writer”, “science fiction writer”, “comedian”, and so many more.

My closet contains many hats, most of them seldom worn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.