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I Gotta Be Some Kinda Nut!
It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon and civilization is unraveling around us. Well, the great thing is that we’re supposed to just suck it up and let it happen.
The Advantages Of Marriage
A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing. ~Joey Adams
It’s been said that married men live longer. It’s been said almost as often that it only feels longer, but that’s just rude.
The advantages of being married far outweigh the alternative. Your spouse will often provide a suitable alternative to a variety of paid professionals.
Nobody is good at everything, though.
As much as the pooled resources of two dedicated individuals can offset the need for various professionals, sometimes you just need outside help.
As for us, it’s mechanical stuff. I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to mechanical stuff. My dad was a master mechanic but that’s apparently not a skill that’s genetically transmitted.
Our van just required massive repairs to get it inspection-ready and there was absolutely zero possibility of me doing any of the work. Fortunately, our friendly neighborhood repair shop was able to get it road-worthy again.
What we did in the meantime was what we do best.
We coped.
Kelly and I have been through a variety of difficult situations. Being without a van for a week and a half was certainly among the least of these. Being able to keep such things in perspective helps to keep us close.
I know I’d probably go completely 🍌 bananas 🍌 without her, so I’m sure to show my appreciation as often as possible.
The New Religion
Speaking of going bananas, the world at large appears to be coming apart at the seams.
To a certain extent, this is cabin fever writ large for a world held hostage by an engineered virus, the typical duck and cover of a communist dictatorship who let it get loose, the overreaction of health officials who were operating with a dearth of information and the extraordinary overreaction of nanny-state governors and mayors who saw this as an opportunity to seize as much power as they could while everyone was panicking.
After a stint in the pressure cooker, everybody has a tendency to want to break loose and shake loose. It’s a natural human reaction.
Another natural human reaction is to start pointing fingers and calling out boogeymen. In some cases, the boogeymen identify themselves loudly and proudly.
The problem with a witch hunt is that there are always more witches to point the finger at. When it becomes a religious crusade, everybody becomes a witch. Unless you’re singing their hymns, you’re a warty, horrible, evil witch and anybody who defends you is a damned witch, too.
Serious problem with this kind of thing. Just like Political Correctness, religiously zealous Anti-Racism presumes a moral high ground that it actually doesn’t possess.
Nobody in their right mind likes or tolerates racism.
That being said, painting broad swathes of the population as being somehow complicit in such moronic fictions as “institutional racism” and “white privilege” with cult-like fervor is just as abhorrent. I have not harmed any member of any minority simply by existing.
This is the claim being leveled at us daily. The very fact that we exist somehow makes us complicit with every bad thing that a member of our demographic has ever done in the history of humanity. That’s as ludicrous as it is offensive. Don’t be surprised when I express my dismay at being lumped in this way.
Don’t be surprised when the opposition uses some idiotic straw man argument to try to make my legitimate claim of innocence look racist.
The major problem with these jackasses is that they’re so invested in this pathetic new religion (which is actually a pathetic old religion known as being a useful idiot) that there is nothing you can say that will actually get through to them. Just the same, I will continue to beat my head on the wall with these blinkered schmucks because letting them have the last word only emboldens them.
Well, I had a handful of peanuts for breakfast. If you are what you eat, I’ve gotta be some kinda nut…
How Anti Racism Hurts Black People – John McWhorter
This is the really annoying zeitgeist that has supplanted the pandemic paranoia that gripped the world since mid-March. I believe the video speaks for itself, so ’nuff said.
Everybody Has A Story
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. ~Oscar Wilde
Storytelling depends entirely on perspective. If you took a hundred writers and provided them with the same setting, characters and plot points, you’d wind up with a hundred different stories.
Everybody has their own take on events.
Even though Marvel and DC have characters who are clearly rip-offs of each other, they still manage to tell completely different stories with these characters because the writing staff are different people with different perspectives.
Variety is the spice of life!
So, if someone asks me why I would bother writing a superhero series, I can tell them it’s because I have a story that is uniquely mine to tell. Nobody else could have come up with The Sentinels or their struggle against the forces of chaos.
I couldn’t have written Soon I Will Be Invincible no matter how much I enjoy reading it. I could not have invented a character like Glop even though I totally want an I ❤️ Glop coffee mug. I’m sure Enola will get on that sooner or later. Spider-Man wouldn’t be as quirky if Stan Lee hadn’t inserted his own adolescent struggles into the character.
Even though we make our characters in such a way that many people identify with them, they’re still uniquely our own creations. Only we can tell these stories the way we tell them.
Ask two comedians to recite a comical short story that you’ve told them and those two versions automatically take on the unique spin that only those comedians would give them.
That’s human nature. That’s creativity. That’s endlessly amazing.
I’d have to be crazy to want to do anything else…
Keeping it short and sweet today. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend.