Seeing things in the rear-view mirror…

Come mid-August, it will be 11 long years since the ex left me, getting on a plane to Europe to disappear forever.

Looking back on it now, I dodged one hell of a fucking bullet; I’ve kept track of my ex, and I know what happened to her, the man she ended up marrying, and her kids. There, but for the grace of God, go I, my sons.

I don’t think my ex ever consciously meant to use me as an ATM–if she had, she would not have told me so much of the man she did end up with. But, she did–and she would still be doing so today, were we still together.

It was this post that got me to thinking about my initial meeting with my ex, and the mistakes that I made; Lord Almighty, I cringe at the mistakes I have made–yes, even the flowers I brought to the first date. I was Beta (Gamma, by Vox Day’s metric), and she treated me as such. Every day, from the point I found out my cancer had departed, must be a day that I say, “Never Again”–and mean it.

Which is why this post is so bloody disheartening. Nothing sucks the wind out of one’s sails than to realize that one can fall back into old habits so damn easily–and I have; I’ve tipped my hand to one of the hotties up on 9, and I can see her contempt in her eyes every time she walks past the desk.

“Hindsight is wonderful-it shows you how you busted your skull after you’ve busted it.” ~Robert Heinlein, Friday

Fuck it. Regroup, recover, and soldier on. Move forward, or die–and I’m not going to face God like this, damn it.

I could have written that letter.

Obsidian posted this letter on his blog, and only half-way through, I found two thoughts racing through my head:

1) A sympathetic “Oh, you poor bastard”; and,

2) “I could have written this letter.”

Truly we live in a world run amok. I have experienced moments like those the author relates, and have heard stories from others just as bad (and in some cases–worse).

Ultimately, this is a letter of despair: “why bother?” is the rallying cry of those men who have decided to go omega, to just chuck the whole nasty mess and do without. It’s a bothersome question, one that a lot of people can’t answer. Lord knows, I’ve asked myself that question a number of times down through the years–and the only response I could muster was, “why indeed?”

But a wise man once told me, “Despair is a sin”, and the sin of despair has its opposing virtue: Hope. By all accounts, I should be lying in a palliative-care unit somewhere, drugged into a stupor by morphine as the race to see what would run out first–my cancer-ridden liver or my health insurance. Yet, here I am–alive, and kicking like a motherfucker. Where there’s a chance, there’s hope. You have to have faith that that one out of ninety-nine women will say yes, and that it will be worth it.

Mind you, it’s not all faith; part of the problem with the author of that letter seems to do a lot of reading about Game, but he hasn’t internalized any of what people like Roissy et al teach. I mean, consider the moment that his hook-up said “Do you think I just have sex with random people”?, he should have flipped the script and thrown her last minute resistance in her face (“No, I don’t; I thought you were into me. I’ll see you later.”, and then go back downstairs and sarged right back into the crowd.). All the theory in the world doesn’t mean shit if it isn’t tested and tried–you don’t go swimming without getting wet. It’s the whole point behind that proverb by Alexander Pope:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.”

Or, to put it in more colloquial terms: “Do, or do not! There is no try!”

Edit: Ok, having read some of the responses to the letter over at TOF, I realize my advice wasn’t the best–he should have said, “No, I don’t”, and gone for the kill. See why I’m not getting any? Live and learn.

It’s not like I’ve been having any more success that this kid–Mr. Wiggly is starving here, folks. But giving up now begs the question of why I should have survived cancer–what’s the point of going through all the pain of surgery and chemo if you’re going to live life in a dark hole in the ground?

Fuck that. I can do better. I fucken’ deserve better–and so does this guy, if he’d actually think about it. We all do. I have faith in that.

So, I’m going pub crawling this weekend. I’ll probably get shot down again; maybe I’ll get a slap in the face–the modern equivalent of a “red badge of courage”. Sooner or later, I’ve got to find that one-in-ninety-nine (or nine hundred ninety-nine)–I have to, dammit.

It ain’t much to have hope for, to have faith in–but it’ll do, for now.

Some truths are so obvious that they are as rare as as diamonds.

Scrolling through the comments section of Infidelity and prole drift at In Mala Fide, I was struck by Snark’s comment to David Alexander:

DA:“You are an alpha, not an idiotic anti-social dysfunctional sub-human male that’s clumsy and bumbling and incapable of making a basic decision. From my perspective, it’s far easier to let her lead and pick everything because there’s a sizable chance that I have no idea of what to do, where to go, or how to do it properly. Why risk the embarrassment?”

Snark:The way to deal with this is to believe that you are always completely correct, and if it comes to it, everybody else is wrong.

Stick fast to this and other people will start admitting that you’re right. See? You always were.

That is so fucking brilliant and so fucking obvious that it is a truth as rare as a diamond. You have to have faith in yourself. It’s one of those things never talked about, because everyone assumes that everyone knows it.

But I–and I suspect, many others–did not; I grew up having no faith in my abilities, and believing that I couldn’t succeed. And because I learned very early on that the price of failure is punishment (either physical or psychological/emotional), I did the only logical thing–I stopped trying. And it had been that way for years, even after the actual threat of punishment ceased to be real (it’s an amazing thing, to realize your father can no longer physically beat you), because the perception of punishment–the fear of punishment–is usually enough to keep you in line.

At some point, you have to develop faith in your own abilities. Amazing how often that is missed.

Funny numbers, new math, and running towards the edge….

Remember this video?

(HT to FB over at In Mala Fide–I believe that’s where I had seen it first.)

Now consider this post on the CBO being “married to the model” over at Vox Popoli (HT Alkibiades at Seasons of Tumult and Discord).

The commenter “Good Will” is entirely right: we are in deep trouble, and the vast majority of Americans are completely oblivious to the threat. I’ve already seen the first signs at where I work; my unit is loosing a “post” starting 7/1, which means two jobs will be lost. Management is determined to cut my unit in half; which means I’ll be on the street again–this time, literally. It’s just a question of when.

Well, imagine that–someone read the Healthcare Bill

There’s a pdf to go with the video: http://candicemiller.house.gov/pdf/hr3200.pdf

And people wonder why I’m voting for Brown.

Never *wound* the King…

With regard to the whole Roissy in DC/Lady Raine dustup, I think Ferdinand Bardamu says it best: Extremely incisive and incredibly foolish.

Having seen some of the back-and-forth first hand (Jesus Christ, the woman just. would. not. go. away.), I think it’s safe to say that Roissy was employing The Other McCain’s Rule 4. Lady Raine is such a parody of white trash that it staggers the imagination to believe that she isn’t someone’s Oxycontin-fueled fictional character splashed across the pages of a 21st-Century equivalent of the “penny dreadful”, but there she is–in all her trailer-park glory. Roissy’s mistake was in not spiking her once and for all after he found her MySpace page–in short, “Never Wound The King”. That’s why I (and others) recommended that Obsidian not bother engaging in debate with her–the woman has no grasp of logic beyond the service of her own justifications. Obsidian seems to have done better than I would have expected, but I would re-iterated the same advice today as I did then: She’s a living example of what Catherine Aird warned: “If you can’t serve as a good example, then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.”.

The Devil just bought 10,000 snow shovels today…

I never thought I would live to see a Republican give a Democrat this tight a run for a Senate seat–not in Massachusetts! Not with ol’ Ted in the ground less than a year!

Poll shocker: Scott Brown surges ahead in Senate race

Mind you–I have very little faith in the GOP; the Bush II years proved that they are as oblivious to how bad the nation’s economy is, and they’ve become entrenched in the same Big Government bureaucracies that the Democrats favor.

But the Democrats have made it personal with this Health Care shit: The Great Liberal Fallacy. (A tip ‘o the hat to Ferdinand Bardamu at In Mala Fide for that link–his blog is better than mine). I was informed at work yesterday that, should the Senate pass the Obama Health Care plan, my employer would dump our current plan and adopt the Fed’s plan–leaving me and the members of my unit paying 40% more for health coverage. Sorry folks–me and my mates are barely scraping by as it is; I can’t afford that kind of hit. I’ve already noticed a little looseness around my waistline–and it ain’t because I’m doing more sit-ups in the morning.

So, if having 41 Repuglicans in the Senate means, at the very least, that I don’t take another whack to my paycheck every month, all I have to say is: Go, Brown Go!

Edit: Goddam, he just might do it!

Edit: 01/19/10 21:29hrs–Holy shit–he did it!!

In pace requiescat–you miserable, misandric bigot.

Mary Daly, radical feminist “theologian”, is dead at the age of 81.

Mary Daly, radical feminist theologian and a mother of modern feminist theology, died Jan. 3 at the age of 81. She was one of the most influential voices of the radical feminist movement through the later 20th century.

Daly taught courses in theology, feminist ethics and patriarchy at Boston College for 33 years. Her first book, “The Church and the Second Sex,” published in 1968, got her fired, briefly, from her teaching position there, but as a result of support from the (then all-male) student body and the general public, she was ultimately granted tenure.

It was the 1998 incident when Daly was sued for banning men from her classes at Boston College that first woke me to reality of misandry–the idea that there was a deep seated contempt for men in Western Civilization. Even then, I didn’t believe that it was a wide-spread phenomenon; I thought it primarily restricted to the Ivory Tower hothouses like Boston College, where it existed as a fringe. It would take 10 years before I realized just how deep it runs, and how wide the river of hate is.

Mary Daly was one of the primary architects of the hideous mess Gender Relations are today. May God have mercy on your soul, Ms. Daly–for were I He, your just reward would be positively Dante-esque.

Edit: For those who don’t understand just what Mary Daly was like, I offer this for your contemplation (with a tip ‘o the hat to Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury):

If you don’t think that the lecturers were as dumb as rocks themselves, consider that I was once told that gender was a social construction and that what men and women did in adult life was completely and exclusively determined by the toys that they had been given as children. Holding my face as straight as I could, I asked the lecturer whether this meant that men would be able to have babies if they were given dolls to play with when they were little. She gave me a puzzled look and said that she would have to think about it before giving me a definitive answer.

No, I am not making this up!

Did I mention that another service offered by some lecturers was to provide coaching in lesbianism for those students who had not yet decided that this was an essential lifestyle choice? Now I want you to imagine how long a male academic would last if he started offering to take girl students home for the weekend for some sex education.

(She told one interviewer that she hated even having to say the word “man” and was going to refuse the interview because the magazine had once published a photograph of the Dalai Lama!)

One of the feminists loons that I was forced to associate with told me that using only female subjects in clinical trials of contraceptive pills was an example of how the patriarchy treated women as disposable, worthless objects. My questions about the usefulness of including men in trials designed to test the disruption of embryo attachment to the endometrium were brushed aside as examples of patriarchal ignorance.

This is the woman who stuffed young womens’ heads full of shit for years under the guise of “enlightened teachings”.

I would definitely place her in the 8th Circle, but I cannot decide which bolgia she belongs in; the 4th, 8th & 9th fit her so well.

I’d take this writer seriously…

….if she could tell me the name of the guy who collects her garbage.

The Tiger Woods scandal is a tale of sex — and sexism

Sorry, Ms. Givhan; I can’t bring myself to feel any outrage over the treatment of Tiger’s mistresses, because I know all-too-well how women treat beta males. Maybe when women give as much social import to garbage collectors, butchers and security guards as they do to lawyers, doctors, and corporate CEO’s, I’ll start worrying about the social image of cocktail waitresses, lingerie models and porn stars.