Fading Light of Youth

I adopted Bubby with my then girlfriend Tekla in the fall of 2006. I had graduated college just a few months earlier and was still reeling from the immediate and permanent splintering of my social circle. Going to school had been my purpose my entire life, more than twenty years. I hated my "college" job, resented my social circle for splintering, and had a tumultuous relationship with a beautifully complicated woman who desperately wanted a cat. The White Doe of Rylstone by John William Inchbold

There was a dark age during which I was not a blogger. I don't like to think about it because the sheer amount of lost content is just dizzying. Episodes of Dr. Phil, and important cultural events like...well I'm sure there was something. For the record, this was 2014-2016. I was SO depressed that even when I got excited about being creative, by the time I had actually sat down to do so the feeling was long lost. I'm just grateful I was able to hold down a job and help put food on the floor because I wasn't good for much else. I certainly wasn't achieving the level of human potential that I am today, running a blog with several readers, attending important artistic and society functions if there were any. The only reason I mention that hideous, murky and fortunately interim bloglessness is because I was reminded of the lone bright spot of my "creative" life during that time: a Reddit forum called Music Theme Time. Every day a new person would pick a th...

Tomorrow is the fourth of July, American Independence Day. If you're like me and don't drink alcohol or light fireworks, it is just yet another day to watch Independence Day, The Patriot, Natural Born Killers, and all the other classics of American film. You know, bald eagle shit that makes you wanna rev up the dualie and head down to the quarry. I studied American history a great deal in college and there's no denying the American Revolution and "our" independence is worthy of celebrating. I'm just not sure what we have to celebrate in the last thirty-seven years outside of me being born and this blog. And that goes doubly for tomorrow, as I'd be hard pressed to find a single thing America as a geographical entity has had going for it in 2020. One (supposed) trait of Americans is our resilience, typically in reference to some problem we created ourselves through stupidity. It seems like a big piece of that resiliency in modern America is just surv...