Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Monday ADD Irregulars, all of you dear Purveyors and Patrons of the Weird Shit Niche'! I hope you had a great weekend. Hot as blazes here in nowhere's Missouri, but enjoyable none the less as things go.

How about some fun quotes from The Portable Curmudgeon this week? While Fred, Rich & I are self-professed curmudgeons, it certainly is not limited to us or just to men. Any fine soul wearied of the bullshit, skeptical of the current narrative and and at times just puzzled, perplexed and occasionally pissed at the mess that is humanity and culture. A fun definition as it were from The Portable Curmudgeon:

A curmudgeon’s reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They’re neither warped nor evil at heart. They don’t hate mankind, just mankind’s excesses. They’re just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. They snarl at pretense and bite at hypocrisy out of a healthy sense of outrage. They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. They hurl polemical thunderbolts at middle-class values and pop culture in order to preserve their sanity. Nature, having failed to equip them with a serviceable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit. Offense is their only defense. Their weapons are irony, satire, sarcasm, ridicule. Their targets are pretense, pomposity, conformity, incompetence.

OFF TO THE QUOTES! - The Heart of a Curmudgeon

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing To be alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die. - Oscar Wilde.

A person of faith could find such a quote off-putting, but I don't. Doubt does not exclude faith, one can wrestle with many doubts and still profess faith and seek its growth. I tend to think that when there is no doubt, faith and belief run the risk of becoming stagnate and to comfortable to help the Believer grow and mature. Life is an adventure or it is nothing at all. Helen Keller knew that truth and lived it in world of exploration beyond what could have been a life long imprisonment prior to her awakening to understanding.
To be lulled into security ironically is one of the things that often compromises the security you thought you possessed. It is a bitter irony that is only discovered after it has failed to protect you. I think many parents found that out in 2020 when they realized that their children no longer needed to go to college to screw up their lives and minds. It can begin as early as grade school thanks to the corruption of "higher education".

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. - George Santayana

Few things can withstand the assault of good humor. It punctures pride and pretense quicker than anything else. While wisdom can build character, humor serves as a a rather abrasive polish to knock away the rust and smooth the edges. Arrogance is such an insufferable reality. It used to be the sole property of the overly religious, the wealthy and the famous, but now it is available to ordinary types like you and I if we just subscribe to the CULT of WOKE. I know I could only be a low-tier member and disposable ally as it were as a old white hetero-male who carries the "sins" of my heritage as an inescapable reality. 🤮 I can only be a stepping-stone for some trans-species-ist declaring their new found conceptive reality. Rubbish! How does some adhere to such insanity? There is no humor among the WOKE, just a sense of pending offense and injury, what a miserable way to live.

And finally . . .

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. - Albert Camus

Salty, humorous, high definition scorn is some of the best medicine to receive from others and to provide to others. When done well, it lances all the mental and emotional boils and pustules that can form from the distortions of thought and emotion.

July sunrise over Lake Superior at Brighton Beach in Duluth MN