NOT a True Believer & why you can't water ski on Lake Winnegago in Winter

Ok.  I am not having a good time with things.  I'm sitting here waiting for my sister to call with my Mother's  funeral arrangements.  It will be a small affair. But waiting is a bitch and it leaves the mind free to wander.  
The shit that went down in Arizona still bothers me.  It should.  Just like my mother, I will leave this world soon enough, in a appropriate time, but it makes me think of how it will be for my children in a world...... of hurt.  And this world is hurting.  You can smell the fear, the uncertainty, the dread and you see faces looking for a semblance of sanity in blank mirrors.  People are signing up to any movement that will offer them any kind of respite from all the unknown that greets  them with every breathe they take. And they are really not thinking of what they are signing up for.  It made me think back to a book I first read as a freshman in college, Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer".  It still makes sense after almost sixty years.


“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”

Eric Hoffer
  of course, now we can watch as well as read the message


Go ahead... watch this if you want to think...otherwise...go away 


 It reminds me of why, after all these years, that I am still not much of a 'joiner'.  Oh, I participate.... but I never wanted to be grouped.  I still have a deep sense of appreciation for Randal Graves at  L'ennui Melo-some-fucking-thing 
for coining the name to this blog..... I mean.... what's in an Eggroll anyways?  It could be nothing.... or the best of something.  Who knows?  Who cares?  Randal practices the ART of WHATEVER better than anyone I have read on the blogs.  I think he knows it and is proud of it.... and is also rather adamant in not giving a shit about anything as well.


Anyways....I started re-reading Hoffer this morning, mostly cause I was in no mood for Emily Dickinson, though she may come later today, and something else jumped out at me.


“When we lose our individual independence in the incorporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”



Now that makes sense to me.  I don't want a label.... I don't want to join anything....if everyone else is doing it.....I am going the other way. I think what I think, I will vote the way I want to, I will drink plenty of the Tap Beer of Truth, Justice, Kindness........ and maybe have a doughnut or two.

These are troubling times, sisters& Bros.... just remember, there is no half-time in the game of madness