The Dark Feminine in Operation

 On day three after the latest Biggest Hollywood Debacle of All Time, the incident the whole world is talking about, the online conversation has swung back a bit towards the person whom some folks think  ought to be the person people are talking about. That of course is the woman. I watched a decent video by someone running a channel and claiming to be a "body language expert", who watched the woman's reaction on camera. She was pissed off.

As I mentioned, according to classical standards she is Jezebel. This phase of Postmodernity is obsessed with erasing all stigma on any behavior of any women, with the assumption that the old morality was simply a "construction" engineered in part to keep women oppressed. This is typical Marxist thinking based on the model of human beings as materialistic machines, the psychology of which can be "manufactured" according to an outside will. This is in direct opposition to the Christian belief that such aspects of human psychology are baked into us by the Creator, and any attempt to re-engineer them will result in disaster. The Christian belief is also that, unfortunately, such attempts tend to lead to short-term "benefits" to society in the form of looser, more relaxed human behavior, and a feeling of liberation. This is part of the Sin Cycle, in which Sinful behavior leads to short-term pleasure but long-term disaster. To Christian eyes, we are seeing this play out not only a personal level but a societal level.

To the Marxists, and the Nietzscheans too, this kind of thinking is the result of a having a weakened soul and a tired spirit. Christians are feeling whose batteries of life-energy have run down, and who no longer can appreciate the truth that the lust-driven passions of our youth are in fact the real purpose of life, and the driver of all human activity. The Christian mythology is an attempt to create an excuse for giving up as a human being. 

To the Illuminist eyes, human beings as a whole live in this run-down state, as the uneducated, vulgar masses. Part of the gnosis of personal growth is becoming aware of this, and discarding the shackles of conventional morality, which is a necessary Platonic Lie to keep society in order.

All of these ideas are currently at war. To Christians, it feels like an End Times war because there is already a widespread recognition among most Christians who still hold traditional beliefs in any form that the phase of civilization known as Christendom has passed. We live in Post-Christendom. We still have enough Christian presence for Atheists and Marxist to point at, in order to say that the remaining ills of perfecting progressing society are due to "our Christian culture."  This itself is a typical example of the use or irony as the weapon of choice by Marxists. Invert. Invert. Invert. That is their motto.

All of these currents are being manifest in the Hollywood incident, and in particular the behavior of the principals--the husband and wife. Hollywood is teaching us the New Rules of New Marriage. Marriage is an arbitrary coupling of Two People Who Love Each Other. Men are subservient to women. The only equality is marriage is between two members of the same sex (as this is free from the oppression dynamic).

The woman in the marriage should be able to have sex openly with other men, if that is her performance, and she need feel no shame about it. Her husband's job is to support her. If the man sleeps around, he is still scum. It need no make sense. It fail feel a bit unfair. That's just the sting of male ego from so many years dominating women, both personally and in civilization. Men need to understand that the era of Christian marriage is over, and to have to put up with a wife's shenanigans is part of the liberation. Young women of today will get to experience a freedom the women of the past were denied. It needs to be an excessive freedom, to make up for the past.

The utter illogic of all that I described must have been swirling like a hurricane in the mind of the man who went up on stage and lost his cool for all time, and blew the cover off Hollywood. God bless him. He was completely in the wrong. Classical rules say that he was allowed to strike the man on stage only if he had laid hands physically on his wife. He should be punching out her lovers. Instead he delivered a mortal-combat invitation slap. Slaps are what women do. It is allowed for them to slap where a man cannot. By all classical rules, if anyone had been supposed to slap the comedian, it should have been her.

The empowerment of women has proceeded to such a degree that she was disempowered from delivering the slap that was allowed her by classical rules. Instead her husband was demoted to the feminine role of delivering it. Inversion achieved!

Yet, there is a feeling that somehow all of this has backfired. It wasn't supposed to happen. Nothing that wakes the vulgar masses up from their slumber too quickly is to be held good by the Inverters. 

There is a feeling that things are in chaos. Such is the Dark Feminine in operation.

There is a Feeling That

 From time to time, sometimes as I am in bed waiting for sleep to overcome me, I wonder what my purpose here on earth is, and if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, according to the Creator's will, with the talents He gave me. In my youth my I believed my toolset of talents to be immense. As I've grown older, I see how small that toolset actually was, and one by one, I discarded the fantasies of indulging talents I did not actually possess.

Among the talents I still believe I possess is one I've been aware of since my childhood, when I was obsessed with current events and the news, which is the talent to step back from the cultural dialogue and say, with confidence, "there is a feeling that..." I am very bad at predicting the future, but I am much better at predicting what folks' reactions to various events will be, like watching a stream of floodwaters, and making a guess as to where it will head, based on the terrain.  I'm not one-percent accurate, but I have a good track record. Part of it, if I can be objective about myself, is my ability to step back from my own convictions and point of view, to see the world as others see it, even those with whom I have great disagreement.

When I was a liberal, I was accurately aware of how conservatives saw the world. I knew how they would react and filter events and news. I was rarely surprised by the trends of politics and events. Likewise I now retain a very good notion of how progressives and Leftists will react to any bit of events or news. These guesses are valid on the collective level. On an individual level, people always surprise you. In the collective, they rarely do.

Right now there are many feelings going on in the world. Has this always been true? Not really. For example in the Nineties, it seemed that few people cared much about world events. Ever since the rise of the web, we are a lot more concerned about things in general, and since 2020, we have a hyper-reactive awareness of events and their possible meanings.

Even in the communities I follow, there are overlapping feelings regarding events. For example, with the Hollywood debacle on Sunday night, about which I was just writing, there is a feeling among some that all of this entertainment is a distraction from the important things in the world, and that the less said about it, the better. Even my own blog posts here are contributing to the distraction. Such people sometimes scold those us who talk about the frivolous things such as what movie stars are doing.

Simultaneously there is a feeling that such supposedly frivolous entertainment-level things are a core part of the crafting of the narrative that we are supposed to believe, and that by studying it, we are deconstructing the methods of control that "they" have over us. 

As usual, I tend to sympathize with both points of view, and I try to strike a balance in my approach to these topics. Among the aspects of the compromise on this particular issue (Hollywood entertainment) is that while I no longer give direct attention to Hollywood because I no longer consume their products, I am a big fan of the countercultural commentators on Hollywood (such as Gary@Nerdrotic and others I've mentioned) who watch these products on behalf of folks like me, so that I don't have to watch them. 

Is it a good compromise? I don't know. I'm still giving attention to them, aren't I? But are we going to ignore the control-levers that are manipulating us? No I can't do that. I'm too much a believer that Postmodernity is essentially dramaturgical, and that theater is the most potent weapon our enemies possess. By extension, the awareness of the concepts of theater are the most important routes of liberation.

It was easier to do this when the cultural products of Hollywood were actually watchable, and had artistic merit. Nowadays their products are parodies of art. It took a great deal for me to do what I did in 2008-2010 when I started this blog, namely watching as many Hollywood movies as possible in actual movie theaters. I couldn't do this today, even just watching from home. It feels like drinking sewage. So I'll let Gary and the other folks don their protective hazmat gear and go into the cultural sewer for me.

Above all this Hollywood-level stuff, there is a feeling among many people that the entire world order is being held together by rubber bands and string, and that it may come apart at any moment. I would bet almost everyone knows what I am talking about it.

My assertion about this feeling is not an assertion that the feeling is true. I don't know if the world is being held together by rubber bands at the moment. That may be a big delusion. But I am one-percent confident that this is the feeling at the moment.

Part of this confidence on my part arises from the observation that a great many people are weary of the world, and want to see everything about it change. There is a feeling that we have been living out of sync with nature. We have been living in a way against the order of nature. We have been living on borrowed time. It was only a matter of time before we reached a reckoning, and it seems we could be facing it any moment.

Again, I don't know if any of what I just said is actually true, but there is certainly a feeling that it is true.

The Matrix of the New Hollywood

The topic of the Oscars debacle was, not surprisingly, fodder for at least a second day of long discussions on Youtube streams among the usual suspects. Gary was on Az's channel with a couple other guests, including the females, both saucy and quiet helper types, and together that had grand time hashing the lingering comedy and pathos of the incident. 

It matters that it was on Az's channel, not Gary's, as Az will get the "superchat" donations that viewers pay for, to have their comments read aloud--if not in this stream then in a "superchat square up" stream several days later. I've done my share of contribution that way, at least back when their channels were small enough that I would actually get the comment read during the stream and not bumped to later (what's the fun of that?). It's much harder now that they have gotten so popular.

One of the topics that came up today in regard to the Oscars incident was a conversation that almost word-for-word what I had been saying with Ginger the night before, which a musing over the matrix of alternate combinations of sexes and races of the same type of incident, and what outcome they would have produced. Everyone agrees that Black Man on Black Man was the worst popular one for Hollywood, and the one giving everyone else the most pleasure in seeing them squirm over it.

Had the violence been Black Man on White Man, then the audience would have cheered and carried the Black Man around on their shoulders. Had it been White Man on Black Man, then today we would be in the midst of martial law, with Armageddon raging. Had it been White Man on White Man, then the attacker would have been ejected and arrested, and everyone on social media would be saying that White Men should be banned from the Oscars altogether.

Everything I just said is absolutely one-percent undoubtable. Even liberals would have to agree with what I said, but at this point some of them still thing what I described is the necessary good situation that we have to live in, for a season or two of history, until things get squared off social-justice-wise. Things were so unfair in the past that they have to be unfair in the other direction for a while. In other words, the only disagreement is whether there is anything wrong with what I described, or if it is, in fact, fair in its own way.

For true Marxists, it doesn't even matter that it need be "fair." The idea of balancing history through a social justice reverse discriminatory era is just an excuse to offer tender-hearted liberals in order to sign up with the program of tearing down everything that exists in order to rebuild it according to their will.

Of course,  you can throw sex swapping into the matrix I described, and other gender combinations, and you have other results. It's a fun parlor game.Very 2022.  Who says the Oscars aren't still entertainment.

Among the things that folks agreed upon during the stream today was that it would be almost impossible for the incident to have been staged, as Hollywood is simply incapable of providing this level of entertainment these days.

Every Last One of Them Without Honor

 Yesterday morning I woke up to find the online world talking about the Academy Awards presentation the night before, which I did not watch, as I had no interest in doing so. It was more than the fact that I hadn't seen a single movie last year, but an active disdain for watching the broadcast. How far things have changed from 2008-2010, when I first started writing this blog, when I could claim to have seen nearly every movie (including shorts) nominated for any award. 

Of course everyone was talking about how one of the Best Actor nominees physically assaulted a comedian who had been bantering about him and his wife, who were sitting in the front row, awaiting their award presentation. Having not watched a single moment of the broadcast, I listened to several hours of live streams on Youtube of my favorite culture-commentators, like Gary @Nerdrotic, who hashed over the event with his guests, including discussing the question of whether the event was real or a publicity stunt. Consensus seems to be on the latter.

In the evening, Ginger and I sat around discussing it, having fun with it. I went through a long discussion of the precepts of classical honor (as portrayed in classical  Hollywood movies) in regard to conditions under which a man is allowed to strike another man on behalf of a woman. This situation was not one of the conditions. 

Among other things the woman in this case (who is also a famous Hollywood actress herself) is, in classical terms, completely without honor, as she is living in open, notorious violation of her existing marriage.  This is different than infidelity, or an honorable separation. She is an unrepentant Jezebel, expecting applause for having multiple sexual partners in addition to her husband. If this were an old Hollywood movie, we would expect a very severe ending for her.  Among other things, her behavior is destructive to the very institution of marriage in our culture.

One thing that made me laugh in hearing the discussion on Gary's Nerdrotic Youtube channel was when someone suggested it was ok for the actor to strike the comedian because it was a slap and not a punch. A slap, said the guest on Gary's show, was like saying "you sir are no man!"

I laughed because of course that is true in a classical honor sense, but only as a prelude to mortal combat. A slap to another man is effectively an invitation to a duel. 

How far we come, in losing our sense of honor. The women in the audience at the awards later gave a standing ovation to the actor who struck the comedian. All of them are disgusting. They effectively said that if any man dare criticize their appearance (the sacred hair), then that man deserves to be physically assaulted. 

When I watched the clip later, it occurred to me that the worst was not the physical assault on the comedian, but the follow-up, in which the aggrieved actor lashed out at the comedian after taking his seat, using angry profanities.  Why was this worse? Because the rules of honor dictate that by his physical assault of the comedian (as wrong as it was), the actor's sense of grievance should have been fully satisfied. It was an insult to the woman's hair, after all! Effectively by his follow-up words he stated that the assault did not go far enough in satisfying his wife's non-existent honor.

I could probably write a Ph.D. thesis about the concept of honor in classical Hollywood movies, and how it differs for men and women under various circumstances, including the conditions under which physical violence is condoned.  The rules are subtle but ironclad, once you understand them. I think they exist in our souls still, even though we have, within Pop Culture at least, lost the very idea of the existence of honor.

Having written all this, I can now deliver my own comedic punchline. Here it is. At the end of the day yesterday, having absorbed all of this, I realized that except for the Best Actor award (given to the assaulter), I did not know the name of a single winner of any award, including Best Picture. I still don't know. I don't want to know any of them. 

On the Good Side of Oregon

 Here in our apartment in Scottsdale, our television watching is very seasonal in nature. During certain times of the year we watch a lot of television. Other times we watch hardly any for weeks on end. During football season, we tend to watch the games, and we have the television set playing various games on Saturday and Sunday. I hardly care who wins anymore. It's mostly just for the spectacle, and makes me feel comfortable having the games on, as if it is part of a normalcy of life that feels illusive to us lately.

When Christmas approaches, we usually catch up on various new and old releases from the Hallmark Channel. Comparing the story lines and seeing how they have evolved over the years is the last vestige of my intense movie-watching days. There is something pleasing in being able to see how the narratives are crafted in these productions, and I can do usually without being offended by the overt politics and forced "diversity and illusion" of most mainstream productions. There is something brutally refreshing about the need for women to see certain stories without being encumbered by that kind of ideological superstructure. They would tune out, which is why the Hallmark Channel feels traditional and regressive in many ways. 

Without the holidays and football season over, we usually take a break, although this year we have the television on quite a bit, perhaps more than ever. It started two years ago when Ginger got somewhat hooked on professional rodeo on the Cowboy Chanel, which thankfully is carried on our cable network. We began watching the live events and I found myself excited to see the bull riding in particular. Then, right as we were getting into it, the pandemic struck and all the live events were canceled. The Cowboy Channel showed reruns of past events, but it wasn't the same. There is a magic in watching live events, which is why I watch football games.

Last year the rodeo came back a bit, so we watched a little. Finally this year everything is back to normal and we have the Cowboy Channel playing almost every evening now. We almost never change the channel. We just turn the television set on and off.

A couple weeks ago we actually went to a live rodeo--the Scottsdale Rodeo, which takes place less than a mile from us at Westworld. Westworld is an enormous equine event center on Bell Road. I have walked over to the grounds multiple times on my hikes, as the trail Scottsdale network has a trial head there (on which horses are allowed, of course). This time of year there are a constant string of horse events at Westworld, which is ironic, since my nieces are horse fanatics and it is rightfully they who should live so close to such a place.

The rodeo we attended there was marvelous, although it's not a particularly big event. The Cowboy Channel (which is headquartered in Fort Worth) had a live feed on their site, but it was not the main event on their channel, because the Scottsdale Rodeo pales in comparison to the annual one in Houston, which was going on at the same time, and thus was featured (big rodeos typically last for over week, ssometimes several weeks).  We went to the Scottsdale one with Fred, who was about to turn eighty. Afterwards he said it was the best time he had had in many years.

This past weekend we watched the finals of Rodeo Austin on the Cowboy Channel. It had begun while the Houston rodeo was still in progress, and many of the cowboys went from Houston over to Austin in time to compete in various events. As Austin was winding down, they began showing the High Desert Stampede, which is a rodeo in Redmond, Oregon. If you don't know Oregon, Redmond is a small town but nevertheless one of the larger population centers in Central Oregon, which is the part east of the Cascades, and which is much drier. Central and Eastern Oregon are very "western", much more so than the slice of the state along the ocean called "Western" Oregon (which is where most people live, and the part of the state that most people think of it). 

"The good side of Oregon," is how I've come to call that part of the state, although when I was college I wasn't interested in that kind of experience at all. I was the typical young person looking for a urban carefree life, which means I understand the kids who move to Portland. I was exactly one of them, once upon a time.

At times, especially when it is very hot here, Ginger and I have mused about the things we miss about Oregon (which is where we met). Then we think about how life has been for Oregonians during the shutdown. The lefties of Oregon made a special point of showing just how much they believe in the "science". No other state, even California, was going to be allowed to outdo them in their righteousness of forcing people to wear masks.  Of course all of that comes from a couple counties, namely the ones containing the cities of Portland and Eugene, which can dominate the rest of the state and force the other Oregonians to do their bidding. Such is the wonderful "voluntary" nature of everything the Left gives us. Anything good is something we ought to be forced to do, and dad gum, we'll be the judge of what's good for you.

Even as all that phoniness crumbles, and the narrative shifts to other things, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the people at the rodeo in Redmond, having to live under the tyranny of the legislature in Salem. It goes without saying that there have been successive movements in the desert regions of Oregon to secede from the rest of the state and, say, join Greater Idaho. 

The High Desert Stampede was founded only in 2017 as part of the professional rodeo circuit, but it has already become very popular. On Saturday night it was standing room only. I was touched watching the young people sing the national anthem (in a rodeo event, usually the lights are turned down and spot light is placed on a young woman on horseback bearing the flag while the anthem is sung). 

"There are people in Oregon who will still sing that anthem, " I said, with a smile on my face. I joked with Ginger about fascist vegan Antifa miscreants from Portland driving down to Redmond and disrupting the event on animal rights grounds. But I corrected myself. Those people are rank cowards and will engage in confrontation only when they have superior numbers (like the progressive "caring bullies" on Facebook, who know hundreds of their friends will swarm to help them in an argument). No way would Antifa come to Redmond, because they would imagine that they would not make it out alive, because of all the gun-toting country folk there. In reality, they would have nothing to fear, as country folk are generally laid back until they are pressed hard. At first at least, they would probably just scratch their heads and say, well those folks are a little weird. I'm glad the cowardly fear among the Lefties keeps them out of places like Redmond. at least the miscreants. A few of them will find their way there, as I once did, and learn that the world is much different than they imagined.

When the Hyper-Righteousness Era Began

 It was the spring of 2015 and we were living on East Burnside in Portland, at the apartment building with the parking garage below it and the rooftop lounge, just down the street from the Hawaiian restaurant where we ordered takeover at least once a week.

We didn't have cable television at the time. We got our television over the air, so we watched lots of PBS like reruns of Ric Steeves European travel shows. I got my news mostly from Reddit, which I didn't think of as particularly political.

That the time that the guy famous for having won the Decathlon at the Montreal Olympics 1976, and who was on then on the cereal boxes for his feat, announced to the world that he was in fact a woman, and would henceforth go by a different name befitting his womanhood.

I had felt for long time that we had been living in an extended version of the 1980s, that just kept going on and on, but at that moment,  I knew for certain we had turned a page of history. We were in uncharted waters. I felt queasy and weird, the way the 1970s felt, I remembered thinking. Then within months we had Charleston shooting, followed by the Confederate flag issue, and almost simultaneously we had the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. 

We also had the producer of the Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, Donald Trump, announcing he was running for President, which was a great comedic sideshow, until the polls came out that showed him with solid support. Nevertheless we knew he would wash out by the Iowa caucuses, and drop out after New Hampshire by the latest.

Those were the Great Days of Woke, when the Woke Train was gathering steam. It was a fake train, one that existed only in Virtual Reality as a simulacrum, but nevertheless it felt real enough within the virtual reality world to serve our needs for momentum through cultural time, towards progress.

The train was at full speed by the time Trump was elected, and the team around Hillary, with the full knowledge of Obama and Biden, set about manufacturing phony evidence, and going through the painfully easy process of "leaking" it their press lackeys, in order to create the grounds for a real investigation that could keep Trump from taking office, even though Hillary herself had manufactured it all with her allies. 

It was among the worst crimes in American political history, the epitome of everything associated with dictatorships and fascism. By the brilliance of their Postmodern awareness of the Law of Irony, the coup plotters put forth the message that they were acting to combat fascism, and that anyone who hated fascism (which itself need never be defined with a meaning) would rally behind them. 

And that's exactly what the Woke did, having turned off their discernment in order to feel comfortable among the quiet ongoing applause of social media, even the reactions they imagined getting from their celebrity crushes, who would say "you are truly one of us, the good and enlightened people."

Now that virtual reality railroad has run its course. Its physics were always self-contradictory. The virtual reality experience is running into walls and tottering towards the top of staircases. Those of us Beyond the Woke are hoping to Wake the Woke from their delusions of believing their virtual railroad is a real one.

May God help us.

Desperate for Righteousness

 A couple days ago Ginger read aloud to me a post she had been reading in a naturopathic medicine forum, and was in reference to an international organization of naturopathic physicians. The post was from a naturopathic doctor who was urging that all Russian physicians currently in the organization be expelled immediately.

Of course it was in reference to the "current war." When I heard the post, I burst out laughing. I explained how it was typical of these times, of people who are desperate for righteousness. These are the people who have no real system of values other than what is being fed to them by the media and the culture. They have no backing for their beliefs other than what other people on social media will applaud them for (or what they believe others will applaud them for).

None of these people had any interest in the Ukraine before last month, or would have cared at all for the people there. What are the problems of a bunch of white Europeans worth? Nothing at all--until they could be thrown on the fire as fuel for their righteousness.

These are the people who "addicted" to the ego-hit of righteousness from Trump, COVID, vaccines, masks, etc. For them, January 6 was like a drunken binge of substance abuse of righteousness. But the phony hits of righteousness don't last long. They are fleeting, and when they go away, there is a desperate need for another hit. Right as the "COVID-mask-vaccine" righteousness binge was fading, and being exposed for the phoniness it was, they were beginning to feel those cravings again. Then the war came and in lock step, they swarmed to put Ukrainian flags in their profiles alongside the preferred pronouns, like a heroin addict scoring a hit and pumping it into their veins in the nearest alley. 

The surprising thing about the post by that physician was the pushback he was getting. Instead of the round of applause he was hoping for, the comments sections was filled with skeptical WTF responses calling him out for his manufactured outrage. 

Ginger andI both concluded that we are reaching a critical point when the righteousness addiction hits are decaying away in real time, and no longer able to sustain the ego-shells of the logicless unthinkers. They look to their familiar celebrity icons on social media for reinforcement, finding only confusion because it doesn't feel the same anymore, as when they could browbeat anyone they disagreed with into submission. They can still do that on Facebook, but Facebook and the other social media sites are dying. They could never last. They were mass-media performance art, but the show is coming to the end of its run. The righteousness addicts know that they can drive anyone off Facebook, but they know that the world is going on without them, out there, and they are no longer the cool-kids party, but the butt of jokes. How do you come back from that, when you have staked your whole life's being into being in that cool-kids party? For some it feels hopeless.

In the meantime they are milking the war for all its worth. What a gift to them it was, to feel again the flush of being right simply by parroting the things that you know will get you applause on social media.

Playing Bob Hope at the Strange War USO

 A couple nights ago I sent an email to Patrick, designed as a promo for Threadfest 2022, continuing on one I'd sent him a couple days before, introducing myself to folks in the audience as the co-emcee.  In the second message, I said I wanted to take my job seriously, and with a month before the conference, I wanted to begin introducing some of the speakers. I stared with J.B. White, whom I had met in Las Vegas last October. I said that as we try to figure out "the narrative," that I get to play Bob Hope at the USO to the "wartime celebrities" in our community.

By wartime of course I don't meant the conflict that started last month, that the media thinks is World War III in the making, but rather what we in the community call "The Strange War," a phrase coined by one of Patrick's listeners, in reference the uncanniness of what has been going on since 2020 at least, and which the Continuity of Government (COG) after the end of Trump's first term is following something akin to a clandestine plan which we call "Devolution." 

For now I letting the heavy-hitter writers in our community hash over the details of Devolution, and also the continuing fallout of Russiagate--that is, the scandal of the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign spying on and cooperating with the media and the Obama Administration to keep Donald Trump from taking office, and trying to take him out in a coup before was even sworn in. Several in our community, including Brian Cates who writes for the Epoch Times, and who will be a Threadfest speaker in Nashville next month, are among the war time celebrities I mentioned. Brian has been a bulldog following Russiagate and the ongoing investigations into it, that he has long been convinced will bear a heavy crop of fruit in the form of indictments against the Deep State coup plotters (perhaps even Hillary herself).

While the heavy-hitters build the narrative, I am concentrating, on the show business aspect of it. The idea that I get to be on stage in Nashville in less than a month puts a smile on my face. It's not the ego of it, but rather just the idea that I get an excuse to up my game.

Lately it means doing a great deal of research, especially about the history of media in the United States, and in particular, the show business of Country Music, which is fascinating. Also Daniel Boone, and Andrew Jackson. What could be more fun?

My main goal is to have the conference be successful, and to make everyone there feel like they had a good time, and especially that the speakers feel good as they start their talks. I don't care if anyone even "sees" my presence on stage. I told Patrick that mostly my prep will be to have lots of material---way too much--that I could talk about in quasi-extemporaneous fashion for minutes on end to cover gaps of continuity in the show. 

My own little personal ambition is to somehow find an excuse to sing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" while on stage. If I can squeeze that in, then I will have had a great deal of fun.

Go Bengals

 It was eventual January. J's father came with his wife and spent almost week here. We took the opportunity to visit Taliesin West--Frank Lloyd Wright's winter compound, which is just a couple miles from here. We hadn't bothered to visit it yet--that's the way things go, when you live near a tourist attraction. During the visit I was ashamed at how long it took me to enjoy that marvelous place, which has existed in its current location long before the rest of Scottsdale grew up up around it, to almost surround it.  We also visited the Desert Botanical Gardens. J had been before several times but it was my first time, andI greatly enjoyed it as well. 

One thing both places--Taliesin West and the Desert Botanical Gardens--have in common is that they are currently the location of an installations of Chihuly glass sculptures. The guide at the Frank Lloyd Wright compound made a big deal about this, as if it were more important than Wright himself, who is old and boring. I have to admit I don't particularly like Chihuly's work, and I found it almost a form of postmodern graffiti to have it placed in front of the great architect's buildings. It seemed typical of our era, the experience.

The next weekend, on our own, we spent a night in downtown Scottsdale at a boutique hotel solely for the purpose of attending the Parada del Sol parade and watching the Pony Express riders come into town, which they do once a year. It was on our list of things to do while we were still in Scottsdale. I gave us a chance to walk around downtown while the streets were blocked off. It struck me how much Scottsdale is still the tiny little farming community that it once was. I could see the old community beneath it all, and how much the current Scottsdale is basically a bunch of sprawl grown up around it.  It made Scottsdale more interesting to me to see that, and feel connected to the history which is not so distant. 

It was nice to have this peaceful, fun January to start the new year. Then we got hyped up for the fact that the Cincinnati Bengals were in the Super Bowl. It was fun to watch their run, even though they lost. No one really expected them to be there. J got reports from her friend back in Cincinnati about how the whole town was going nuts over it. Then there was the Winter Olympics, which we sort of watched, while Canada was absorbed in its turmoils in Ottawa, and everyone speculated about the possibility of war. Then war came and it has absorbed everyone, in the way that the pandemic did two years ago. 

Along the way I left my remote job, as it was not the right circumstance for me, and have resumed a freelance project to keep me busy.

I refuse to be drawn into emotions about the war. At least I tell myself that. Yesterday I felt the emotions of it for the first time, as I had dared to watch some Tik Tok videos people made. I cannot know what is going on, and I don't trust the news. By declaring myself unwilling to jump into the emotions of it, or to take sides publicly, of course I make myself anathema to certain people who believe that to be silent in this is to be complicit in some kind of crime. It's exactly what we have heard for the last couple years. Use the right vocabulary. Make the appropriate gestures on social media with the correct symbols. Wear a face covering to show you care. Kneel. Raise your fist. Say the slogan. etc. To me it is the evidence of a society empty of values looking for something to give it meaning, desperately clinging to the passing fads to show ourselves evidence of our meaningfulness all the while knowing its emptiness. That being said, I hope the war is over soon. Already the Bengals being in the Super Bowl seems like a quaint relic of a simpler time.