BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

It's a long story . . . and it's a long, strange, trip. If you are reading this, God Bless You. I have chosen my confessions, trying to keep up. Lke a hurt, lost, and blinded fool, trying to keep an eye on you. Now I've said too much.  I don't need to cry away each lonely night. PROSE WISHES IT WERE POETRY, POETRY WISHES IT WERE MUSIC.   MUSIC SIMPLY WISHES. AND ALL THE WHILE,  IT'S LOVE THAT FULFILLS.  Listen well, my children, and you will hear. If you dare . . .  © 2026 by Roy B. Santonil

[NOTE: This was originally posted in 2018 in English Swill.]    ENGLISH SWILL   ... Wordsmithery at the Bottom of the Barrel by Roy Santonil "DREAMING OF THE LAST AMNESTY " Tuesday, January 23, 2018  You may call me lazy. You would be wrong, and you wouldn't be alone. I know too many people who mistake my efficiency for laziness .  Nowadays, I don't care what you think , as long as you didn't SNEAK into my country against the law.  This is not xenophobia.   This is self-defense in the face of your lawless aggression, you jerks. From American Greatness , I've condensed a written piece by Victor Davis Hanson entitled "Mythologies of Illegal Immigration."    Professor Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was Professor of Classics at Fresno State University, and is currently the Martin and Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University Ho...

I like words. But words don't like me. The more I try and use them, the more they stick around, and the more they haunt me for using them. Using the wrong words can get you in trouble. Sometimes, words make ME laugh. Sometimes, words make OTHER PEOPLE laugh. And sometimes, words make other people BIG MAD. The internet is a big place. It is bigger than I imagined when I first connected to it with an IBM clone , running MS-DOS on a x286 CPU through a 14.4K baud dail-up modem in 1994. Back then, we lived out of a two-bedroom apartment, and I worked graveyard shifts to help raise our newborn baby girl. My my, hey hey. It is the best of times. It is the wierdest of times. It is time to communicate on another level because words to not do justice to explain reality. Justice seeks  --- its own resolution. Justice pays  --- no heed to the foibles of human desire.  What is the point?  I haven't posted since before what's-his-name was inaugurated to preside over the disso...

OPENING SCENE: A patient is lying unconscious in a hospital ICU. The camera pans down to follow the plastic tubing from his catheter, flowing and bubbling bodiliy fluids into a plastic tank. DR.HOUSE: "The drug addict . . . is peeing blood." CUT SCENE: A med school class where Dr. House is lecturing. He looks at a handful of yellow crayons, chooses one and begins coloring in a coloring book. DR.HOUSE: "How do they teach you to tell someone that they're dying?" (Blank looks from students wearing white coats.)   DR.HOUSE: "It's kinda like teaching architects how to explain why their building fell down." (Continues coloring book) "Do you role play at stuff?" STUDENT: "Yeah. One of us gives the bad news, and one of us gets the bad news." DR.HOUSE: "What do you have to do to get an A in - You're Dying 101? Do they grade you on gentleness and supportiveness? Is there a scale for measuring compassion?" (Changes crayons) ...

Play it safe. A brief review --  Part 1. Conscience is annoying.  Jiminy Cricket represented that part of an incomplete persona, the part that relentlessly tweaks our moral compass. He irritates our inchoate spirits, urging us, never stopping until that moment you take a chance, opening your heart to being "real." Conscience is self-knowledge. With it, you objectify yourself, and you recognize the possibility that, " Hey, maybe I can expend some energy thinking a thought, maybe two, maybe more - discerning whether certain propositions, certain thoughts, words, and actions are inherently right - or wrong. " Part 2. Culture , on the other hand, is one of the primary exogenous forces that shapes the thoughts, feelings, and to be sure, significant opinions affecting humanity. It lends credence to the rules under which we choose to live.   To minimize the impact of art, music, literature, architecture, animation, language, sports, etc., on human experience, will lead i...

Start here . Hello again, Boomers, Jonesers, and Non-Boomers alike. Nothing to talk about lately? What do we Americans do when the temperature starts climbing above 80, and the lawn needs mowing?  Well, for the last couple of centuries, there was this thing called Our National Pastime. Notice the word  "pastime" suggests an activity unabashedly and unequivocally meant to be an acceptable and civil  way to pass time . I would even go so far to say, pre-Internet distraction, there was a tapestry. a weaving of the fabric of your cultural character in sport, a mythos, conjured and nurtured for the benefit of inter-generational respect and  civility. Heck, even affection. Love you, dad. Alas, locusts and honey will have to suffice anymore "Oh, there you go again Roy, being literal, and trying to find out what words mean." I suppose so. Unfortunately, in my blogging experience, if you are a fan of scholarly etymology and  reasonable contextual usage, with a dash of tr...

I 💓WRITING   Start here . “By a faction , I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison Break it down, nerds.  If not, we will know how it feels to be thick as a brick.  So I had a nice two-week travel break, thanks.  I got to see the kids. I got to visit one of the oldest lighthouses in United States -- Beavertail. I also got to revisit a "road not taken" by taking pictures at the gate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis.  And last but not least, I found another topic that interests me. These next few weeks, I will talk about the heavy conflicts in the political realm, circa 2022. Social life is so fractured, yet, it isn't as if great minds haven't thought of these social problems before. It may be good to review the...

Start here . Welcome to Part 3, The Series Finale.  Part 1 and Part 2 did surely go by quickly.  Time flies when sorting through the lies. Where were we?  That's right! The subject was cheat codes, and the linguistic fuckery that is more than prevalent in MSM, so much so that Hunter's Laptop was "Russian Disinformation" only until the crime boss could begin pretending to lead the United States. In less upright sectors of the legal profession, it is called "terms of art." The lies we have uncovered (together) are too numerous to review. Their deceptions create dragons, imagined and real, munching mushroom clouds on the world stage. Their stratospheric falsehoods wear legal trappings, sheepskin garbed, traps to hypnotize, pervert, and enslave our sad, opiated, and most of all, unthinking fellow human beings. I have no doubt that you folks, you, the rational, and the rest who cannot care less about political agendas, have long disspelled the notion that legac...

Start here .  Part One of this series adds context to my deep concern about what I call "linguistic cheat codes."  Picking up where we left off, I present to you my Top 5 language cheats as part of a new drinking game. How many cheats can you catch while listening and watching the globalist spin doctors and sociopathic corporate lawyers battle for control over our hearts and minds?  Listen for these: 1. "Honestly," --- [ translation : " I'm lying. "] This cheat word slips by listeners so often, and so subliminally that, honestly, speakers will drop it when they are making an especially weak and invalid point. Honestly, if you hear it, just know the speaker is scraping for words to convince you of something, but unfortunately, the absence of merit in their argument and speaker's lack of veracity suggests they are not being forthright. They know you are not buying what they are selling, and (honestly) you shouldn't buy it. 2. "The American ...

Start here .  I'm not lazy, dammit.  I'm efficient, and to some that looks lazy. Of course it doesn't help to be middle-aged and (slightly) overweight. Some stereotypes are justified. But even if 60 is the new 40, that doesn't affect my work.  I happen to think that stereotypes serve a comedic impulse. Unfortunately, when misused, they exacerbate improper discrimination. Clearly, a person's immutable physical attributes are an awfully unreliable predictor of their attitude. Fellow Boomers, my prevailing attitudes about life were shaped in a crucible of American military tradition.  Have you identified  your crucible? This week's comment (BTW, yours are welcome, too) deals with codes. No, not the millions of lines of mathematical computer codes that people smarter than me write in exotic languages like Python, Perl, Pascal, Forth, Frink, Erlang, Haskell, C, C+, C++ (D), Eiffel, Oberon, Occam, ChucK , or one of many scripting codes such as Beanshell or Mondrian ...

さとり the sea is parting. was Pandemic a real thing? payback coming soon *** ever write a poem? haiku can get you started neat quick and easy *** this Japanese style can sometimes get annoying but writing is fun *** this is what I do Nice Work If You Can Get It time to hit the course *** one more for the road words are cages for your thots I dislike spell check *** subscribe to my blog humor will lighten the load--- dad jokes for the win ***  seventh stanza here don't want to use too much Time another post Done *** fingers help me count the syllables i needed two finish this Peace *** /end fugue state  © 2022 Roy B. Santonil

Start here .  What a difference a dot makes. OK, Boomer, do you remember this MTV hit by the band Crowded House?  That song, "Don't Dream It's Over," used the same words as those in the title of this post. Because we are speaking and writing in English, spacing and punctuation rules are less strict than many other languages. Unless we practice writing in Far Eastern or Cyrillic characters, we don't have to bother much with diacritical marks, where, for example, the French circonflexe  (the little hat) means the difference between jeune (young) and jeûne (fast). More on foreign tongues later. For now, let's just agree there's a place in the world for old and slow . One dot, one period, one space bar, one programmer's keystroke, and POOF!, meaning changes. A glitch occurs in the matrix, and hordes of weasels begin to libel and slander your character. What's worse is they openly criticize your hair color and tan lines. Meaning is interpreted throu...