Look at “before and after” photos of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton or Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton.

Though extremely cynical and righteously angry, I nevertheless have a bedrock optimism steeped in Faith:

Faith that THIS life, “here and now”, as we know it, is NOT the whole shebang.

Faith that choices and comportment in THIS life impact my FUTURE-future.

Faith that, for my festival of vices and transgressions, I’m getting BETTER at this living thing. Not to suggest that I am not part o’ the ol’ Problem.  On the contrary, I have been literally guilty as sin.  But I haven’t “just” SEEN, I am LIVING the error of my ways.  I am RESISTING evil and temptation NOW, boy.  Yes indeedy, big picture, I am fighting the Good Fight.

And not to suggest my mind is entirely free, because it ISN’T.  I often often often, heart-achingly often, dwell on Sorrows seemingly against my will and certainly against my contentment.  But I AM a Free Thinker, and I choose to have Faith that in the vastness of cyberspace, there assembles, ever so slowly, a Readership.

I address them…or him or her.  I mean, there MUST be one.  If only by accident.

Political posts will hopefully still follow, adding to and archiving my body of work, but I liken it to the lobby restaurant remaining open while the hotel is under renovation.

I’m gonna get someone who knows what they’re doing to MAKEOVER my internet presence.  Big fan of Specialization of Labor, right here.

WANTED:  Partner.  Principals with principles only.

Time flies whether or not you’re having fun, that’s been my experience.  It follows that new years arrive, happy or not.

I lately heard a science-y segment on the radio, in which Brainiacs posited that Time really IS going faster.  They said TIME BENDERS will fare better, people who can separate from the clocks and calendars that set inflexible limits.  Otherwise, like cartoon characters, people will be hustling faster and faster to fall further and further behind.

Today I learned that Samoans voted to SKIP A DAY, thereby jumping the international dateline.  Hey!  Maybe WE can vote to skip 2012, jump right over the Mayan innuendo that the world ends on 12/21 of this year.

Traders and Arbitragers and their ilk oughtta be able to finagle plenty of unfair advantage from being a year ahead.  Money Men having unfair advantage IS a national priority, is it not?

Meanwhile back at the Rationalization Ponderosa, because the ol’ quitting smoking resolution went up in smoke before noon, I have voted to CHANGE my New Year’s Day.  Chinese and Jews have THEIR own New Year’s Days.  Surely I am equally free?  Moreover, THEIR New Years aren’t married to the same date year after year.

MY new year will fall on The Epiphany this year . . . unless I need to push it to Independence Day.

Come on in, the bullshit is warm!

Ready or not, here I come!

It helps me not give in to Despair to imagine there are actually a few Readers out there in the world who are acquainted with my idiosyncratic Numerology.

11.11.11 is a powerful alignment.

THEY will not change, probably.  They COULD.  They MIGHT.  But, historically speaking, they PROBABLY will not.  Absent Fear or Force, it is entirely up to THEM whether they change.  They have all the Money=Power.

COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN has gotten short shrift in the Serenity Prayer for as long as I have been on the Recovery Circuit.  With so many 20-Something and 30-Something Talking Heads, I figger DECADES of experience surely makes ME an Expert Of Sorts.

Grant me the Wisdom to know and the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, yeah yeah, sure sure, of course.

THAT WHICH IS TOO EVERYTHING TO BE NAMED, more than ever in this dark hour, grant me courage and strength to commemorate this date with a constructive change in ME.

As with the wars conducted by the nation in which Nine Eleven occurred, the costs of 9/11 fall not just disproportionately, but OBSCENELY disproportionately.

We will never forget to remember special occasions. Remembering special occasions is BIG BUSINESS.

And BUSINESS AS USUAL is all the rage.

But roaming around, I am.

By the by, you must commit quite a bit of time to the exhibit and snap quite a few photos to get a picture of the Liberty Bell without one or two or 10 or 12 strangers in the frame.  Tourists come and go so QUICKLY around monuments.  The Liberty Bell reposes behind a barrier with radius longer than an arm (presumably to prevent superstitious Unwashed Masses from TOUCHING it), which is protected by state-of-the-art security and armed guards.  Irony and Human Nature go together like Unpredictability and Economics.

Whereas I formerly got a new car roughly at 4 years and 5000 miles, I crossed the 100,000 miles mark with my 10-year-old car.  I say that NOT with embarrassment or fear, but pride and hope.  Most of those miles were put on by ME including cross-country more than once, and Charleston Bay to San Francisco Bay all by my lonesome.  In my new world, some bragging rights attend this accomplishment.  D’ya reckon I could plug the MAKE of my trusty car for MONEY?  People offer to BUY my car on a regular basis.  ”Speaking truth to Power” just doesn’t pay. THEN, ‘cuz I take good care of my car and ‘cuz it’s a European model designed to GO a couple hundred thousand miles, I have the audacity of hoping it will serve me for ANOTHER hundred thousand miles.  If I play my cards right and Providence shines upon me, I may never have to buy another car as long as I live.  HERESY, I know.

Anyhoo, individuals MAY change — more often as a reaction to Extreme Bad rather than Extreme Good, it bears mention.  Sigmund Freud described such change as PROFOUND PSYCHOLOGICAL REORGANIZATION.  The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes it as BEING BEATEN INTO A STATE OF REASONABLENESS.  Either way, it speaks to INDIVIDUAL transformation.  By contrast, thousands of years of chronicled history attest to the REALITY that Human Nature does NOT change.I invite you to take the wreckage being wrought to FORCE a better way upon those who obviously cannot trusted with Free Will.  ’Cuz, y’know, effin’ Foreigners don’t CARE about THEIR families, houses, villages, cities, monuments, museums, markets and temples.  Left to their own devices, they would OBVIOUSLY attack peoples of far greater military wherewithal, inviting retaliatory annihilation.

I invite you also to ponder the following quote by Denis Diderot, and it’s in-your-face relevance to The American Problem.

“In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don’t have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.”

Skullduggery of ADVANCED-DEGREE complexity and international reach has conferred unimaginable fortunes on the Few, the Proud, the Masterminds.  They wear expensive suits and expensive watches.  The roll in expensive limos and fly in private planes.  They dine and lodge at five-star properties and they regroup in luxurious, well-fortified Ivory Towers.  They seem very important indeed, as they jet-set and hobnob in opulent style — one might say UNTOUCHABLE.  But they are Bad Guys nonetheless.  In MY new world, sophisticated White Collar Crime is WORSE than run-o-the-mill crime, for being steeped in EGO and GREED.

Speaking of Human Nature, I GET why sophisticated Sociopaths turn to Skullduggery.  It IS their Nature.  I GET why corrupt &/or weakling Officials ACCOMMODATE sophisticated White Collar Crime.  Money is EXTREMELY seductive.  And we ARE talking about big BIG bucks…in a country where Money IS the national god.

But Taxpayers TOLERATING Officials accommodating sophisticated middle-class-eviscerating White Collar Crime?

Tom Hanks in the film BIG: I don’t get it.

GET RID OF THE ANGER.  GET RID OF THE ANGER.  If I had a thousand bucks for every time a NON-INJURED party said that me, I’d have not financial pressure — and I’d be considerably less angry.

Anger isn’t a stout and uncomplaining workhorse that you can ride hard and put away wet.  Anger has to COOL DOWN before you dare put it away, or something is liable to CATCH FIRE.

LOL, I actually started getting so PISSED, I walked away from the screen…for DAYS.  Not the computer, mind, the screen.  I am on the computer so much, I occasionally wonder if I’m getting 17-cats-minus-the-cats disconnected.  But then I remember what it’s LIKE out there.  The very MOMENT I go back out there, I am reminded why I PURPOSEFULLY withdrew.  It was a LONG PROCESS, and not cheap.  I think it’s high time I start making some MONEY for how much I write online but, even if I don’t, at least presently, it seems like exactly what I SHOULD be doing and, within the constraint of  NOTHING BEING PERFECT, I reckon I am landed in a fairly excellent place, to do what I should be doing.  In “this day and age,” which is to say when MIGHT MAKES RIGHT & RICH MAKES MIGHT, I guess that’s about the best I can do, until the next Right Thing presents itself.

The next Right Thing usually DOES present itself.  And it never does BEFORE it does.  Sometimes you just don’t know.

It’s my DIRTY DIAPER THEORY.  Poor Baby has to sit there in it…squirm…cry…up the ante, writhe and wail…but sit in just the same, until someone comes along and changes it.  As “grown ups” (good one), someone or SOMETHING or SELF may instigate Change — a mixed blessing, to be sure — but it still doesn’t happen til it happens.  Life is hard.  That’s been my experience.  To enjoy Life, which seems to me to require being successful enough at Something Not Wicked, without resorting to ignoble methods, that it affords Personal Security & Contentment.  No indeed, this is no easy assignment.

I think of this go-round as a CLEARING HOUSE…whose Essence moves forward, whose backward, whose stagnates.

Yep, total tangent.

Apple.  My once Shining Knight turned Corporate Marauder.

Yeah, yeah, I know Steve Jobs much revered AND sick.  I don’t care.  Steve Jobs is ARCHETYPAL for Built-In Obsolescence.  Planned obsolescence — and its twisted sisters CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION, CONSUMER DEBT & ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE — is a big part of our problem.  Huge.

I’ll tell you-whoever-you-are another thing, techno-retard though I am, I have made a LOT of progress computer-wise.  Two steps forward and one back, ‘CUZ THEY CHANGE THE GOALPOSTS OFTENER THAN TEENAGE GIRLS CHANGE CLOTHES, but a lot of progress just the same.  Manufacturers, Marketers and Politicians would be stunned to learn, I think, how very many people are WAY behind me, computer-wise.  Equivalent of 12:00 flashing on the old VCR.  Leave ‘em behind at your peril.  They vote, and they’re getting seriously PISSED.

‘Bout time, sayeth I.

Parenthetically, the original exclusive between iPhone and AT&T was CONSPIRACY IN RESTRAINT OF TRADE.  I am a champion of the Sherman Act.

Anyhoo, THIS was the last straw.  I waited YEARS to buy another MacBook Pro.  I finally did a few months ago.  I was “lucky” the perky salesperson said…it was the last non-glare 15″ screen in the store.  SOLD.

NOT ONE WORD about the Lion operating system coming out in brief months.

Here’s how that works, going forward.  I speak not highly of Apple.  I still use/know/need my laptop…got me a brand new one with an old operating system…but I am NOT gonna “do” iPone or iPad, and I am NOT going to speak further about Apple except to say EMPLOYEES SHOULD ORGANIZE.

As they should everywhere.

Only LOOK AROUND to know puny Individuals are no match for Corporate Titans.

Happily, while a thousand words is not too many for me to write, PRESUMING I BEGIN, they are too many words for others to READ on a steady basis.  I’m not gonna consider the word count at all.  If I feel tired/bored/agitated enough to quit, Readers probably feel the same way.  If there ARE any Readers.  The silver lining of the DISMAY I feel at how much traction I am NOT getting and how many marketing overtures I AM getting is that maybe this suitably perfectionist and guilt-prone Recovering Catholic can WING it…fast and furious, so to speak…good enough for government work, so to speak.

I am rooting for myself to feel further liberated to “just write” because I have mounting confidence that a Key Person or Professional will rightly manifest, and that a complete REMODEL will cast my work-to-date not into a big dumpster but a deep drawer.  Go, me.

With downsizing all the rage, who doesn’t get excited about STORAGE?

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THOUSANDS of them.  And I either CAN’T or can’t figger out out HOW to delete them en masse.  Which I WANT to do, before changing the theme concurrent with starting over again, kinda, but not really, more like reincarnating.

Not that that has anything to do with this phenomenon of PRETENDING to be a real person responding to a real person, but really just pimping product  programmatically and indiscriminately.  But actually it kinda DOES, ‘cuz I don’t want the reincarnation cluttered with all this bullshit.  Particularly if I have to delete them individually.  And I DO actually wanna check each one — I mean, OF COURSE.  I AM trying to get this writing thing off the ground.  It hardly serves my purpose to ignore/overlook/disregard/MISS genuine correspondence.

Comments, within the context of blogging, DO fall under Correspondence umbrella…NOT the Marketing & Sales umbrella.

But seriously, does THAT constitutes Internet Marketing?  True enough, PEOPLE PRETENDING TO BE REAL, ADDRESSING REAL PEOPLE UNDER FALSE PRETENSES, FOR PURPOSE OF PIMPING PRODUCT is pretty much foundational to Marketing & Sales…but willy nilly and incessantly?  It would never happen on TV, radio or in print.  No one could AFFORD such a blitzkrieg.

But because it’s dirt-cheap or free, because technology allows it to occur automatically via programs, it’s okay to invade my space and interrupt my work?

What am I THINKING?  I spoke out of turn, Your Highness.  I momentarily forgot my position and imagined that I matter.  A thousand pardons. What I meant to say, Your Grace, is that I feel certain your advertising efforts and monies are not expended optimally, and therefore do not produce maximum benefit to Your Excellency.  Who graciously permits me to blog and to whom I am bent-knee grateful, no how many ads and interruptions that I am honored to endure for the good of The Economy, which lords over us all.

Who didn’t like the film GLADIATOR?

Maximus:  I’ve seen much of the rest of the world. It is brutal and cruel and dark, Rome is the light.

Marcus Aurelius:  Yet you have never been there. You have not seen what it has become. I am dying, Maximus. When a man sees his end… he wants to know there was some purpose to his life. How will the world speak my name in years to come? Will I be known as the philosopher? The warrior? The tyrant…? Or will I be the emperor who gave Rome back her true self? There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish… it was so fragile. And I fear that it will not survive the winter.

Who doesn’t remember this line from GLADIATOR?

Maximus:  My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius. Commander of the armies of the north. General of the Felix Legions. Loyal servant of the true emperor Marcus Arelius. Father to a murdered son. Husband to a murdered wife. I will have my vengence. In this life or the next.

Emphasis, mine.

American Idiom: PAYBACK IS A BITCH.

No indeed, celebration is not in order.

I would remind my increasingly shackled countrymen that America was the epicenter of the MANMADE “financial crisis” that continues to rock the whole world.  WE CAN NO MORE BOMB OUR WAY OUTTA DEPRESSION THAN WE CAN SPEND OUR WAY OUTTA DEBT.

Cause, meet Effect.  Action, meet Consequence.  War, meet Devastation. Devastation, meet Reconstruction. Reconstruction, meet Investment.  Investment, meet Returns. History, meet yourself coming and going.

Choice, meet Karma.