So yes it’s important tonight to load up and consider the rain terrain.

I have a secondary subject for the session though too, and that is fearhate.

It has always been true that there is too much of it in me, shooting out at too many targets.

But it distresses me that never before have there been so many targets, so close to home, over so long a time. I’m supposed to be getting older and mellowing. This is not happening.

Partly I think this has to do with the way the society has evolved. There are a whole lot of more or less guys of more or less my age and ethnicity who are just completely broken, or going more or less over the edge into the kind of fearhate that hurts people even fatally.

In varying degrees these are the Trumpistas too. The fearhate blows up toward ‘Illegals’ or Jews or the military-industrial shadow government complex.

We can blame Fox News or Donny Tinyhands himself, but millions of these people voted for him, and fell prey to Fox because Fox spoke to something real in them.

There are not many ways to actually be a Man any more (ask Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby–and this is in NO way a defense of those shits). There are even fewer ways to exercise privilege gratuitously, and if you don’t have lots of money, there are none at all. It’s not the broken promise of flying cars that causes the fearhate. It’s the broken promise that if you were good, your standard of living would rise, and that you could have pride in building and owning things.

Michael Moore is a lot more articulate about this than I am. Go read him.

Meanwhile, I’m in an active state of fearhate right now with my landlord and even my scattering of neighbors (and their stupid dogs).

I remember a time when I had nice chats with my landlady over the washers and dryers downstairs.

I remember a time when I loved the place I worked and the mission we were about and the people I was on the mission with and the standard of living it afforded me.

Yes I was always lashing out anyway. But in a way that had a slicing humor to it, a defining dash of creative deconstruction.

I don’t feel cynically brilliant in this space. I just feel like I’m in a constant battle against evil bastards and despair.

Don’t worry. I’m winning. Or at least holding my ground.

It just costs far too much to do it and it smells like trench warfare instead of trenchant commentary. Most days.

This too must must must change.