New Political Post

I am putting a one or two day limit on the composition of this, even if I have to cut myself off mid-word. The subject does not merit more than this.

In fact I am not even going to write about politics, at first anyway. I am going to write about other people's old girlfriends. I have discovered, in cruising the internet in search of anything halfway good that I can relate to, that the demographic of blog-keepers most similar to myself--earnest, perhaps not entirely stupid but stagnated and leading lives largely devoid of incident, excitement and tension--really enjoy reminiscing online about old flames, sometimes in great detail. This includes everything from long ago one night stands, painful breakups, unrequited loves that were actually (and fruitlessly) pursued, the stranger at the punk rock concert who aggressively rubbed her thigh against one's own for ten minutes, the intent of which one was too dense to pick up on until about fifteen years afterwards. I cannot do this, that is with regard to anything remotely real; it does not apply to recollections of girls who once passed me on the sidewalk eating an ice cream cone for five seconds at a Fourth of July parade in 1985 and those sorts of things, which I can go on about for days. Even including such reminiscences as are still wince-inducing, or in their substance so embarrassingly scant as to hardly qualify as any kind of human interaction at all, they are so few in number that I cannot afford to waste them should I ever need to use a variation of them as material in one of my literary efforts. Nonetheless I am astonished at how many bona fide nerds of my generation have an extent of experience in matters of groping and necking and stripping of clothes and so forth that I would have at least entered into negotiations with the enemies of Heaven to have been granted access to. In the details and smaller snatches of time which produce art and most of whatever else gives a rich texture to life, I am usually in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Another common reminiscence among the Bourgeois Surrenderesque school of bloggers is of old and not unhappy family memories--dad in his recliner, the annual week at the lake in Minnesota, fishing trips, the valuable lessons of taking apart appliances together or whatever fathers in the more wholesome corners of America do with their sons. I don't do this much. Maybe a little for my grandparents, but with regard to my own parents I see almost everything through the filter of how the event under consideration contributed to my not being cool/not being prepared to thrive in the world and take the essential steps toward adult competency during what one old British writer I read recently termed "the important years of life", roughly ages twenty to twenty-five, and so even this many years on the memory of almost the whole of this nuclear family life remains distasteful and uncomfortable to me.

Whenever righteous modern Americans--and admittedly we are usually talking about women here--go off on one of their periodic denunciations of the Roman Catholic Church's positions on various matters that are dear to them, I have to confess my visceral responses are very conflicted. Obviously I am not even, nor ever have been, an active member of this church, let alone any kind of devout one, and I am pretty indifferent/wishy-washy about the issues that are usually the sources of greatest contention in America--I generally endorse/practice the mainstream liberal view while being secretly in some degree sympathetic to/persuaded by the church position, even though I could not bring myself to submit to the discipline, as well as the symbolic estrangement from the progressive part of society that I feel is where I socially most belong which following that plan of life would entail. My prejudices lead me to think that the church's current positions are consistent with, or at least more consistent with, the culture and theology and approach to life that it has developed over the last 2,000 years than adapting them whole hog to relatively recent trends in a few nations in what doubtless would appear to the Vatican hierarchy to be a state of advanced decadence. Obviously I still believe, or I want to believe, that the Pope and the other supposedly deeply educated scholars and leaders of Catholic universities and schools and so forth around the world are serious people who understand something important about humanity and its history and its nature and its basic soul and so on that has eluded the understanding of the more obnoxious of its contemporary detractors...