New Year's Day 2021
“I’m getting myself a husband, Sadie. I suggest you get one too — one that doesn’t belong to someone else.”
I didn’t expect those statements to endear me to the woman who was the object of my honesty, but neither did I expect petty spiteful revenge from her. A candid person needs to be aware of the vengeance potential within others, especially cowards, and especially whenever a lily-livered snot-nosed person is bluntly faced with her own truth.
The unvarnished truth can drive some despicable people to commit the most vile acts, worthy only of them. I am presently working from that reality, and the variations upon it, in penning my Westerns.
While working on those Westerns, I have had to cull through past hilarities and horrors, often intermixed! The world is a fascinating place of all sorts of characters. Once a writer fully understands such human specimens, the fun is perhaps taken out of some of her work, but there are many fewer battles to royal, and fewer people who can get away with thinking they are “royals” to be battled.
Upon encountering the latest Regional Director at her federal agency, My Dear Friend and former proofreader immediately asked: Who died and left him King?
Nowadays, the narcissists do not wait for the Monarch to die; they simply pretend he does not exist!
I think that stance is a very effective attitude for the sane among us to utilize against the raucous virtue-signaling yet prurient-prudes in our midst: They simply do not exist!
There aren’t that many of the mountebanks among the surface population anyway, but they appear to be everywhere, circumnavigating the globe. Ant they insist upon being noticed! Ignoring them thus becomes a moral imperative for the truly virtuous among us. This alliance with a dignified purpose then makes the world a much more chummy place for us to inhabit.
It is a small world after all, not due to the splinter groups of vicious hypocrites and haters who make the world “small”; in actuality, their world is the small, very small, one. The real world out there is a cozy, intimate space as a direct consequence of the remarkable family of man, and of woman, who transcend bitterness and bile, and who permit kindness, charity, tenderness and hope to reign supreme, not merely on Certain Holidays, but every day.
In my new home-town, I am learning how the real residents go about achieving their goals of work, play, and thriving to be alive. These individuals are primarily the long-timers here. They dwell in this small town because of what it is, not because of what it is not. They fulfill their business in this neck-of-the-woods through the virtue that they don’t stretch their necks into other people’s business or property. They pay attention to their own back and front yards, and keep their eyes, and hands, off of what does not belong to them.
This town is not a replacement for what used to be. It’s a road to what-will-be.
These rugged individuals cherish the day-to-day routine of the here-and-now. They do not look back to what-was in order to fume over having lost it. Truth to tell, the resentful ornery crowd never really had whatever it was they deem they possessed with such vehemence and vitriol. Miserable beings are miserable beings no matter where they go, or where they move, or where they insta-plant their latest roots.
Today is the first day of a new year of a new way of looking at life. That day can be any day of the year, and, for me, it oftentimes has been, along the paths that led me to this moment. Take this moment, and cherish it for all that it wants to offer you. Forget, for the moment, what you intended to do with that unit of time. Permit time to give to you, rather than take from you. Grant to the moment the occasion to bless you, and toss away the narrow notion that you must create the occasion.
Life flows through you, so much more than you flow through life. If God leads you to it, He will lead you through it. On that river of hope and faith, you can reach your goals, realize your dreams, if you believe in life as an adventure.
On the wings of your audacious spirit, with the flight of your intrepid soul, dare to reach toward the stars, past the past, and into the new year. Adventure awaits the noble heart worthy of its own dream.