Invigorating New Life

I should have started working for myself long ago. It's both rewarding and challenging, and for the first time in a long time I feel truly alive.

On the rewarding side, I have a small but growing number of clients who send me repeat business, and one of them was so pleased with my work that he told me to keep the balance of his retainer deposit, well beyond what I had invoiced him. To have someone express appreciation for my work is a refreshing change of pace. My liberation from office politics and neurosis is icing on the cake.

On the challenging side, I need more clients to reach full cruising altitude, and the future of this enterprise remains far from certain. But this is the stuff of life -- risk, uncertainty, danger, and the fight for survival. I could last about two or three years if I didn't earn a cent, but if blowing through my savings and flirting with penury are what it takes to build something that is mine, so be it. We all die eventually anyway.

Best of all, I continue to work on my book, which I have decided to make my own rather than a joint project. My buddy believes America can be saved with a series of political ploys, but I believe we are way beyond that and confront a full-fledged societal collapse. You cannot save a nation that no longer even exists. Americans lack any shared fundamental principles or "mystic chords of memory" (to quote Lincoln) necessary to define and sustain a nation, plus the reigning philosophy among political and cultural elites is one of collective suicide. Will anyone read it? Who knows, but I do these things not for calculated result, but rather because I am compelled to. Those of you who love to hate me will get a kick out of this sneak preview of the chapters I've written thus far (and there's more to come):

The United States Constitution, Once Functional But Now Historical

The Scourge Of Political Correctness

The Proper Role Of Government In A Free Society

The Great Stereopticon, Revisited [this is a reference to Richard Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences]

The Breakdown Of The Family

From Christianity Back To Paganism

Unintended Consequences

I started this blog primarily to blow off steam, but also in the hope that others could identify with my feeling that something is terribly wrong and unsustainable about modern life in the West. For more than two years I have pursued this theme across different realms such as politics, law, history, language, relationships, and common occurrences.

Despite the almost total lack of comments, a steady flow of readers keeps returning and displays habits that strike me as rather interesting. For one, they flock to posts that I put the least thought into, such as musings about dodgeball, daily nuisances, and sex. For another, they get enraged when I voice ideas and experiences they dislike. This demographic tips its hand through real-world behaviors that are hard to miss; Google Analytics isn't that powerful, but suffice it to say that I have angered people where I live as well as thousands of miles away.

In other words, the bulk of readers I've managed to draw here are 1) shallow; and 2) hypersensitive. This is clearly not what I intended. No matter, though, because I can continue to blow off steam while helping this audience to re-think a few things.

For the shallow folk, if I draw you here with talk of office trysts and childhood sports, just maybe you'll take a glance at other posts concerning fundamental matters that you otherwise might ignore. There is far more to life than working, eating, sleeping, defecating, and procreating. Pause for a moment to consider right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and slavery, and where on the spectrum modern life fits. Be a human, not a mollusk.

For the hypersensitive folk, get over yourselves. Your worldview is not holy writ; indeed, it has several gaping holes in it, and your anger at me is a measure of your own insecurity. America is not a free country. Government re-distribution of wealth for welfare, healthcare, birth control, the arts, or any other pet cause is robbery and tears the social fabric. America is far more misandrist than misogynist. Obnoxiousness is not strength. Vampire and zombie fiction are sub-literate crap. Adultery is a mortal sin. . . .  If you come here and get enraged at reading such sentiments, it's on you.

Preach It, Fred Reed

My favorite curmudgeon, Fred Reed, shares my disdain for all things modern but has a greater reservoir of memory from which to draw comparisons between the sane world of yesteryear and the raging insanity of today. In this article he tackles the feminist war against education and boys. Great stuff (here's a small sample):

All of my teachers in grade school, and perhaps half in high school, were women. They were fine. The reason was that they accepted the masculine view that schools existed to teach content. They did: first arithmetic and then math, and history, English grammar and composition, literature, Latin, and so on. Bless them.

What I dislike is the feminized, therapeutic view of schools as places not to teach anything but to engage in Pavlovian conditioning of kids to female norms of syrupy goodness, non-violence (tag, dodge ball, and wrestling) docility, conformity, and warm interpersonal glop. Learning anything gets short shrift.

An examination of the intellectual qualifications of teachers, such as rankings against those in other fields on the Graduate Record Exams, will show them to be at the bottom. These are averages, of course, and there are exceptions. Still, people of low voltage do not naturally have much interest in academics. They easily become prey to a pedagogy focusing on “interpersonal relations.”

EDIT: And here is an inspiring story of resistance against the very tyranny Fred was describing -- a young boy steadfastly refuses to pledge allegiance despite his teacher's efforts to geld him in front of the class. Even though the teacher was aware that the boy is a Jehovah's Witness, she apparently didn't know that they do not pledge allegiance (there's even Supreme Court precedent on this), driving home Fred's point concerning the dim nature of modern pedagogues.