About Last Week

“I’d better call my housekeeper.” – Independence Day

The Mafia just started a new online banking system:  PayUpPal®.

So, this will be just a general housekeeping sort of post, and it will be shorter than usual.  I do try to make these posts mainly not about “me”.  I’m fairly uninteresting, but if I have a funny thing that happened to me, well, I’ll share it.  Mostly, I like to write about ideas and their implications and how they combine to create and change the world we live in, so writing about me is far less interesting than that.

Monday, normal stuff will be back, with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.

First, thank you (sincerely!) for all the well wishing in the past week.

I almost fell down one at night – I couldn’t see that well.

Second, I’d like to stress that, in every sense, the last week that I took off from blogging was really one of the best weeks of my life – not the “not blogging” part, but the “finishing the project” part.  I really like writing the blog because it helps me work out questions that I have.  I sometimes return to the same topics as my understanding increases, or sometimes just because I think I’ve found a better way to get my point across.  The Mrs. says, “Just take off your hat and everyone will see your point,” but I still keep writing.

And to the point of “blogging or not” I only promised to keep writing (about four years ago, I think) until the end of March 2024.  I’m going to keep going.  I found that during the week-long hiatus, I was always thinking about how to fit something I read or heard or talked about with The Mrs. into a post.

The result was, when I got back to writing, that it felt like a hand going back into a well-worn baseball mitt, one that’s perfectly broken in that snaps shut around a fly ball, where your fingers fit into the nooks and crannies they made over the years.  It felt like I was doing what I needed to be doing.  In that, the vacation was instructive – the desire to write is still there and won’t be turned off casually.  I mean, unless there’s a lot of PEZ® and cigars.  I can be bribed.

I came in second place in a Fidel Castro lookalike competition.  Close, but no cigar.

That’s good, because putting out 3500 plus words a week on multiple topics with a minimum of 18 memes a week, well, that takes some time. Sometimes, the topic is easy and “closes” well, like Monday’s.  Sometimes, it’s harder, and I have to fight to get the paragraphs together in a good sequence.

Oddly, some of the ones that I thought were my best stuff got a “meh” reaction and some of the ones I thought, “well, at least it’s finished” have gotten the strongest positive reactions.  That actually doesn’t bother me, because the results are in your hands.  I mean, if the person who got the idea judged it, communism would have been rated top notch.

Just goes to prove what grandma always said, “If you’re having trouble writing a blog post, the secret is just to put a nearly naked hot chick in a bikini in a meme or make a fart joke.”

My first high school girlfriend was like a super spicy burrito.  It hurt when she left me.

That being said, writing takes time.  It takes less time as I work harder to get better, but it still takes time.  In the best-case week, it’s still more than a dozen hours.  Add in the other stuff I have to do, and I often skip sleep to finish a post.  But less so recently, since I’ve found a way to use some otherwise non-productive time to shift a large chunk of the writing to time I used to waste.  So, overall, less missed sleep most weeks in 2024.

Third, I’d love to tell you more about the project I finished!

But I can’t, at least not right now because I haven’t figured out how to write it up in the right way.  Again: it was all positive, and everyone is healthy, all relationships are intact and strong, and exactly zero bad things happened.

The things I learned, of course, will ultimately make it into the blog.

Do British people call monkeys who share an Amazon™ subscription “prime mates”?

Fourth, to be clear:  despite all of the gloomy stuff I write, I am exceedingly positive about the ultimate outcome.

Of everything.

I do not pretend to know that path that, ultimately, will lead to victory.  But I do know that the true, beautiful, and good are very, very powerful and rarely lose for long.  The true, beautiful, and good exist today.  They will exist tomorrow.

Horrible things will happen, have happened – things we don’t, can’t understand.  I wish I could explain them all.

I can’t.

That is above my ability and is in His hands.  But I promise everyone reading this that He does exist because I’ve seen too much in my own life to believe anything else.  Norman Vincent Peale, who I believe was the lead singer of Mötley Crüe, once said, when asked about the afterlife gave an amazing analogy:  imagine a child in the womb.  Unbothered.  Moisturized.  Happy.  In their lane.  Focused.  Flourishing.  Then the pain hits, the squeezing, and the light, so bright, the air – for the first time air hitting my lungs, and who let that cat in here?

This movie is why I’m married now.

I can scientifically show, six ways from Sunday, that there is no way that you are randomly here in this place and time.  None of this is an accident, and there is a purpose, a much deeper purpose.  I didn’t write your part of the script, so I don’t know your part, but I do know:

We all play a part in it.  Our part.  And I believe yours is probably more important than mine, so what are you going to do with it?

Me?  I’m just lucky I get to write for the greatest audience in the world.

You.  That way I get to take partial credit for the great stuff you’re going to do.

Okay, post about me is over.  No homework for the weekend, enjoy yourselves, kids.  Wait for the bell!

See you back here again on Monday.