In the spirit of the season…

I’m thankful for having a forum on which to express my badthoughts, for however long those are still tolerated.

I’m thankful that someone actually reads those badthoughts, even if it’s only about fifteen someones.  In fact, I’m grateful that it is only about fifteen someones.  Our Thing trends toward megalomania — with the noble exception of the Z Man, everyone who writes on Our kind of topics seems to go the Col. Kurtz route the minute he gets more than a few dozen readers.

I’m grateful to the co-bloggers.  When we started this thing a few years ago, I thought Morgan, Philmon, and CylarZ were the best e-migos a guy could have…. my opinion of them has only gotten better with time.

At the risk of sounding like the Pharisee, whose thanks God that he is not like other men, I’m grateful that I have some limited ability to sit still and shut up.  Yes, extremely limited — I’m writing this, after all, and I spent a lot of years in one of those professions where “loving the sound of your own voice” is a job requirement — but still, it’s there.  If History has taught us anything, it’s that the inability to sit quietly is responsible for 75% of all the disasters that have ever befallen humanity (and the rest were bad luck).  I may be the only guy not actually in religious orders who reads the Desert Fathers as a how-to manual.  Even they struggled with sitting quietly, and they’d withdrawn from the world specifically to do just that.

Finally, I’m grateful for the commenters.  We’re a saturnine bunch; lots of us are playing the back nine of our lives; I’m pretty sure most if not all of us drink a bit too much for our own good… but we’re doing what we can to keep Western Civ’s rickety ship afloat a few more years.  I’m not sure any of us would be the life of the party out in the world, but I am sure we’re going to have some high old times together in the reeducation camp.*

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

*PS I’ve added a “contact” link at the lower right.  It’s mostly just to see if I get any “Greetings, fellow teen!”-type emails from the Feds or Soros-bots (if there’s even a meaningful difference anymore), but if you want to drop me a line with questions, comments, or concerns, go for it.