Misanthrope

A frelling week of cold rain, and now the sun's out.
But it's still cold...and I cannot get warm, it seems.
Especially my feet.
There's a thick layer of dew on everything.
Cold wet feet discourages work...especially the scaffold-kind...
I despise heights.
After a couple of weeks of too much family(brother's bunch came up, and before that it was my fucking former uncle's tornado of greed and stupidity(probate))
and Terror, out there in the world...another clinic shot up...Paris exploding...and a refugee crisis...this time from Syria...and a Pakistani-American couple, shooting up a place in Cali....
….and the knee jerk, ugly reaction to all of this....the Sniper for Freedom Charity Event next week, and the total lack of awareness of the brutal irony....
….and I think of all of the folks I know in meatspace, and despair.
I get reports from wife and kids about the various insanity that is routinely uttered, in public, by Good Christians and Ordinary Folks...Hang them all...Kill them All...Drop the Bomb...
Round them up...Kick them Out...
Take it Back...Fuck the Poor, the Brown and the Different....
God will know what to do...
Now, the news is filled with dire warnings of climate disaster...while a Super El Nino is busy causing the cold wet I so lament....
….and the comments below these terrifying dispatches: outright denial of established science...it's easier to believe in a giant nefarious conspiracy, somehow...
More ugliness....
You libtards are forcing it down our throats...
and sticking it in our ass...
We must go into the closet, with the Lord(just like it says, it turns out...)
Woe is us...gnash gnash...rend, rend....
A lack of ashes, because they have long ago forgotten the use of fire...
All of this....this, and the usual “Holiday” ennui and apathy, and patient, painful endurance...and I find that I hate Humanity.

All of our Systems select for Psychopathy...
One cannot take the High Road, because one's opponents are constantly dragging everything into the mud...
Probate...we say, “let it be fair and just and simple”
But No....
we must quibble over the least bit...what we are entitled to, by law(like an accounting of the estate) is withheld...so it's fight, tooth and nail...spend all manner of jack on lawyers, who further confuse the matter, until what should have taken a day, takes a year, or more.
This same thing obtains all through Human Life...at least where there's more than one Human...
The Good...the Sane...are well hidden, and largely unknown...
But the Screamers, and Grubbers, and Meddlers...psychopaths, all...are forever underfoot...under bed...in one's pockets...and in one's ears...
That it's Rational to take refuge in misanthropic solitude doesn't negate the weight of such feelings.
I snarl at passing cars...yell at airplanes...and cuss under my breath the cops and war mongers, racists and stupid people that I have known...

This is the Age of the Arrogantly Stupid.
Folks shout their Ignorance to the world...demand to be praised for their Mendacity and Greed....loved for their World Ending Hatred...and obeyed, for their Ignorant Certainty and Willful Blindness.
Bronze Age camp fire tales and Medieval fairy stories...borne out of confusion and pre-scientific unreason, are paraded as Rules to Live By...Reason is rejected out of hand, inasmuch as it contradicts the Mythos, never examined...
To examine it would be a Sin.

So I retreat, at long last...and resolve to hide my phone...and I kindle a fire, and wait for the 3 rooms of the central Library to heat up so I can remove my long johns...
I kindle another fire under the Hot Tub/Think Tank....for later...when it reaches a balmy 60 degrees.
Bach...violin concertos....
Dope...a cheap Chianti...and Hefeweissen and Shiner for later, if needed.
Commune with the neighbor's cows, visiting our back pasture...
I can see them from my window by my desk.
I realised the other day, that in four short years, I will be a half a century old.
Of course, I usually feel much older than that.


I worry
a lot.
When my eldest goes to a Junior High dance, I worry.
When my youngest goes on a field trip, I worry.
This is the world we're bequeathing them...full of violent and well armed crazy people, whom we cannot point out, because other violent, well armed crazy people might be offended.
Similarly, nothing can be done about disastrous climate change, or economic dysfunction, or the widespread systemic racism...because we're not allowed to speak of such things objectively.
The folks who most benefit from all of this destruction and disarray are exempt from being called to account.
Millions of our neighbors are delusional apologists for avarice and doom, who cannot brook any rational discussion.
I worry that when my boys are ready for college, that I will not be able to afford it...or, worse, that it will no longer be worth the expense.
Why go into massive debt, only to flip burgers?
Why learn a trade, or gain a work ethic, or get an education, when none of these things are valued...as evidenced by the employment situation?
Everything is broken...and we cannot even begin repairs, since we cannot even agree with half the population that there is an actual problem...let alone how to attempt to fix it.