New Name, Purpose And Other Updates

What is the purpose of this site?  I hope to provide to the blogosphere is my own ramblings and observations on our society as a whole.  My purpose is also to get comments from you, gentle reader, in reaction to my observations as well as to things going on in YOUR lives, and concerning your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations and your concerns.  I will probably venture, at least at times and perhaps frequently, into the political sphere, as it is one of my long-standing interests and as I believe that it is very important for the continuation of our nation in any form in which many of us who are over 40 would recognize it or care to live in it.  Some of you will agree with my views.  Some will not.  Be that as it may, I think that we all need to listen to each other.  Some of us are good listeners, though these seem to be in precious short supply in America these days.  Some of us need to become better listeners.  Some need to begin listening (or take it up again; let's not waste our time with superfluous details).

A little about me:  I am a 53-year-old white man (note I did not say "male"; there's a difference).  I live in the middle of the United States in one of those awful "red" states (so christened by our media.  Frankly, I never HEARD or SAW the term until election night, 2004).  "Flyover territory" to the more-benign or less-political of you on the coasts.  I am divorced; the father of two fine (grown) children, one of whom lives in my hometown and the other about 225 miles away.

Like many people here in America these days (and it seems more men than women if you watch the statistics) I am unemployed.  Well, actually, underemployed.  I have my little part-time job.  Oh, it pays 10 cents--oh, excuse me, did I say cents?  I meant dollars.  It pays 10 dollars an hour, which many of you will tell me is nothing to gripe at compared to unemployment.  This is true, and yet--ahem!!--let us still assume that this hardly supports the lifestyle which I wish to attain!!  Having had very little luck with getting full-time employment (with the unemployment--and it's "unemployment"--not "jobless"--much less "between jobs", "seeking opportunity" or any other of the euphemistic crap being floated by state bureaucracies and politicians) in an atmosphere in which the unemployment rate, when you count the chronically unemployed (those whose unemployment benefits have run out and have quit looking) and those who realize the hopelessness of trying to meet bills, maintain your independence and/or feed children on $7.55 an hour (or whatever ridiculous sum the minimum wage is these days).  Not to mention the equation which seems to run like this:  the less a job pays, the more of your time that they take and therefore the less time you have to seek meaningful, productive, fulfilling employment and the harder they work you.  Okay, I know I'm on a rag and not every low-wage job is like this.  Still, I think that there are enough to make the equation an accurate generality.  And no, that isn't an oxymoron!  Can't something be true let's say 66 percent of the time and be "generally" true?  So, I looked up some of these "work-at-home" or more accurately, "work-on-line" sites.  The one thing which I found consistently was that about the only thing available which wasn't either an outright scam or bugging my friends, trying to sell something I had absolutely no interest in, to people who probably wouldn't give a rat's patootie and worse yet would resent the intrusion, was writing.  I used to write for a living.  Really.  I was in the radio news business for nine years back in the early '80s to early '90s.  Yes, the world's changed quite a bit since then but I still figured that maybe somebody, somewhere would be interested in what I wrote or at least find it interesting or entertaining enough to resist the temptation to wrap fish with it or use it to train a puppy (I know:  old-fashioned analogies but you know what I mean.)  So, I visited some of the sites advertising for writers, and lo, what did I find?  First of all, let's ignore the sites the owners of which want you to complete a project and then they'll decide whether they want to pay you.  Let's also ignore the budding entrepreneurs who want to pay you a flat fee for writing on a specific topic.  The fee perhaps sounds at least acceptable..until you think about the hours you'll have to spend in research to write anything which sounds even halfway intelligent.  Next let's go to the online news sources and magazines.  A couple of the ones I've seen want you to write on a specialized area of expertise..three-to-four times a week.  Now, I don't know about you, but I can't come up with fresh stuff to write about three or four times a week on any subject!  Thus, we come to the subject of today's entry:  I will try to get to the blog at least several times a week but I may not be here every day.  Of course, the more response I get the more I will have to respond to and thus the livelier the blog will be.  I have written to friends and family members in the hopes that at least some will choose to respond.  I will pick and choose the comments to which I choose to respond, however.  While I trust the people I have contacted (pretty much, anyway.  Have to obey Google's rules.) to operate within the bounds of propriety, one only needs to take a short, short look around the web to see the lunatic mayhem which often passes for commentary.  It is frequently not a place in which one will find intelligent discussion.  In fact, on some sites and on some topics one is challenged to find anything resembling evidence of a normal thought process!  This being said, I don't mind if it gets a little crazy.  I'm capable of going there myself.  However, let's try to keep the discussion clean and avoid ad hominem (personal) attacks and I think we'll all be just fine!