Touch of Gray

I've been having a difficult time working up the energy to blog lately.

A hell of a lot of it has to do with what my friend Labrys discusses in this post.

"At a certain point, one wonders, if opinion — expressed in writing to friends, the public, elected officials — reaps no positive result, why bother? What is the use of participation at that point? To keep inundating myself with the horrors happening around my country is maddening; this IS the sort of thing, with no relief in sight FROM government that makes people go a bit loony."

It doesn't help when the first thing I come across in scanning the Intertoobz is stuff like this: "Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever."

After tanking the global economy. And walking away whistling. Except when they whine that people talking all mean about how they managed to fuck up, loot, pillage, and burn, and still get paid waaayyyyy too much.

Fuckadoodledoo.

The world outside my little house and my home city just seems eaten up with idiotic dickishness, and this small forum seems utterly inadequate to deal, or even comment on, the vast wasteland of appalling dickitude on display; everything from gigantic, existential threats like anthropgenic global warming to this, a silly pair of articles about men and women.

This was the first I came across, a wife's blogged reply to attacks on her husband's confession that he had begged her to keep dyeing her hair dark because he "...didn't want to be married to the Queen of England."

Putting aside the insanely immense skweechieness of imagining sex with the zillion-year-old-royal-sourpuss Elizabeth Windsor-nee'-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the rest of the guy's rant is fairly standard. Gray is old, I'm not old, I don't want you to look/be old, because then it will mean that I'm sticking my dick in old and then I will be old and that's fuckin' horrible and scary!

Read it if you want. Meh, same old, same old dickish whine that every guy has whined ever since he looked around and realized he wasn't as rich, or as powerful, or important, or fucking the sleek girl he thought he deserved.

The wife's reply, though, is kinda sweet and kinda stupid, in my opinion. She starts by noting that many of the readers of her husband's original piece commented that he sounded like a jerk and a narcissist.

(And for the record, if you're married to a smart, funny, active, sexy woman and you're pissing and moaning because her hair is gray? You are a big ol' fuckin' narcissistic dickish jerk. Just one man's opinion.)

She goes through what a nice guy her husband really is, not objecting to her wearing ratty old sweats and a T-shirt to bed and generally being a Nice Guy. She concludes:

"The dyeing or the not-dyeing is ultimately irrelevant to my point, which is that it’s okay for one member of a loving partnership to care about looking attractive to the other, but in the end, the decision belongs to the one whose body it is. May we all be honest and kind to each other, not necessarily in equal measure, but in the exact right proportions for marital bliss."

Which is the summation of both the sweet and the stupid part of her take on this.

Sweet, because I think she genuinely loves this guy and sees him as "caring about" how she looks.

Stupid, because, frankly, this screams to me (as a kinda-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy) as another very-dickish-late-middle-aged-white-guy getting all dickish about sex and death and the death of sex.

He's looking at his wife's gray and inside there's this guy-siren shrieking "Warning! Warning! Incoming Grannie Panties! Sexual Shutdown Imminent!! Warning!"

He even admits to thinking what we all try and pretend we don't think; that while we see your every line and wrinkle, your every sag, droop, and softening we look at ourselves in the mirror and our brains sort of airbrush away OUR sags, wrinkles, and bloat. "Dammit, I'm still a fine figger of a man!" we dickishly preen to ourselves, while looking at the slight loosening at the top of your thighs and thinking...aaaagh! Old Queen Bess!

That thought isn't far from, as the dickish saying goes, "breaking a forty for two twenties" and is pretty solidly behind the whole dickish business of trying to pretend that the women's bodies we're intimate with are not supposed to get older because even as old men we don't want to have sex with old women.

It's a dickishly bad attitude, and I don't think this woman gets how corrosively dickish it is, and, yet, there she is not seeing that this dick is probably going to dump her for some sleek barista with a nose stud and a tramp stamp because he's a dick who is scared to pieces by his own inevitable death.

And that's just one couple's domestic business.

Don't get me started on the destruction of the world for fun and profit, the serfening of the world's workers (though I highly recommend the Economic Penguin's recent series on the whole business of how the 99% of us are in the process of being bent over as an inevitable function of how our current crony capitalist system works), and the overall boneheaded political and economic dickishness of human beings in general and in the modern U.S. "conservative movement" in particular.

So, as I told Labrys...I just find it hard to work up the give-a-shit enough to write political posts anymore. Or economics.

The critical mass of dickish stupidity, greed, and indifference seems so huge that I just don't see what there is left to say.

That the Public is an Ass?

That the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket because a critical mass of our fellows are dickishly unconcerned about anything outside their own groins, or religious delusions, or hates, or prejudices, or greed to look around and fucking see that?

That about a third of our fellow “citizens” appear to be perfectly happy to left the Radical Right turn the 21st Century U.S. into a bad parody of the 1890s only with more domestic spying and blowing up random foreigners? That we’ve dug ourselves into a ginormous global-warming hole and can’t even work up the concern to agree that we have, much less actually DO anything about it? That we can’t get the same 27-percent-toxic-stupidz to agree that taxes are the price of civilization, that, no the Zombie Negroes are not coming to Take Their Stuff, that more guns doesn’t = more Freedom, that you can't kill enough brown people to make the survivors love (or fear) you unless you kill a kajillion of them?

Lots of people who are smarter and better read and have bigger fora than we have have been banging these drums for days, months, years, decades, and what the hell have we got to show for it?

I still enjoy writing about things I enjoy and the small incunabulae that please me.

Nature. My family. Soccer. History. The Army I knew. Current-event-oddities and silly humor.

But politics, or economics, or the current State of the Union and the World?

No.

All it does is get me pissed off. Pissed off realizing how utterly fucked we are and pissed off realizing that there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it that won’t end up with me either dead or in prison.

All the more when I write about those issues I just feel very old and tired and sad, and it's not helping me write anything here that I don't end up hating even as I write it.

I'm sorry, but there it is.