All About You

It doesn't do to let your friends have too much fun. I was, until recently, quite content to let them do just that. They all blog, and it's not like they're jumping off of bridges or smoking crack or voting Republican or otherwise taking candy from babies. Then my friend Jolene told me to look at her blog. This after my friend Sasha has been blogging for quite a while. And when I looked at Jolene's blog, I realized that all my friends were hanging out there, loving her more than they love me. And that they all have their own blogs. And are thusly acquiring more love than I am. And this? Cannot stand.

So I started this thing, here. It's all Jolene's fault and she will bear all responsibility, legal, moral, and otherwise. Oh yes she will, the love-bogarting bitch.

If you're reading this, there's a very high probability that you already know me, but I will give you some noninvasive tidbits by way of sourcery. I am nearly 45 years old, the "nearly" now being measured in days instead of years. I am twice divorced; women love me until they hate me. I generalize a lot. I had a heart attack once but still smoke cigarettes. I have many friends and a few very close friends. My passions in life are minimizing my workload while maximizing my income, playing games (board games, computer games, and especially a little game we like to call Diplomacy), watching a very few selected stupid television programs, avoiding entirely the flow of certain kinds of information--most particularly news--eating things I shouldn't, and...well, the rest is personal, but her name, for purposes of this thing here, shall be Ilse.

Oh yeah. I'm liberal. Although I prefer to cut my liberalism with a strong dose of red-meat eating and leather wearing and road-building. I like to think of it as Hamiltonian liberalism. Because, like my man Alex (Colonel Hamilton to the rest of you), I think that Americans are by and large too fucking stupid for democracy. That strain runs consistently through the political spectrum. Your duck-loving treehugger who doesn't want me to be able to drive to the next county via the hypotenuse is no better off in this regard than your fundamentalist Jebus-totin' Christian who thinks I'm more than just a cartoon. You? May choose to think that you're not in the collection of people too fucking stupid for democracy; that serves my purposes just fine.

I don't know how much energy I'll have for this. I write carefully, in a technical sense, so some effort goes into this, despite appearances. For now, don't be sitting there clicking the Refresh button.