Well, I ain’t dead, or near it, just tired and hopeless. The world doesn’t do what I think, doesn’t care what I think and never will - same as everyone else here (and everywhere else). We all think differently, and we get on each other’s case for that. So what’s the point? Sometimes I want to write, but I know that it will make no difference. I know that I find the whining of other men to be boring and useless, and I am perceptive enough to know that other men think exactly the same about me. Point it out, and they get mean about it (not that anything going on in their lives puts them in a position to be judging anyone). Solutions? Well, I think I have them to a variety of problems, but nobody cares, or will. And other men are the same, and are similarly irrelevant. About the only solution to all of it is to just die, but that will come soon enough anyway, whether you want it to or not. About the only joys in life are very temporary - momentary sexual pleasure (but as one ages, this is all in the mind), a good meal (increasingly eaten alone), a game won (generally against a computer). Religion provides some people moments of satisfaction (but it is usually be hectoring others, and God never comes through in the end). I guess the point is that ultimately there is no point other than raw economic activity, and one need only look at others who have a more to realize their lives are shipwrecks too. Trump’s a billionaire: his life’s a mess. In a few years he’ll be gone too. As will I. And you.
So yes, the place has shrunk and men have fallen silent, and it’s easy to point at it and laugh… from your own dung heap of loneliness and broken dreams. If it gives you a moment’s pleasure to do so, go ahead. It makes no difference. Nothing does.
No. I was not Mudboy. Mudboy did not destroy it the first time or the second time. Somebody was here for about a year posting a good selection of articles but garnering no participant audience. Mudboy was not the problem. Mudboy's one or two threads could always be ignored if one chose.
Nothing “destroyed” it. People got older, and saw the world simply not going their way, and become discouraged and defeated. There is unrealism at the fringes, and when the world keeps disappointing by not flying off its axis, but still feeling generally shitty nonetheless (being disappointing in a more mundane, grinding, less apocalyptic way), men get tired and just stop. Right now, for example. It’s an election season. Trumps flaws have always been obvious. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be president, but he clearly doesn’t walk on water. And Harris? She’s not senile, like Biden; she did well in the debate. She’s had some kooky ideas in the past, but she’s a Democrat, and the ones allowed to become leaders by the billionaires club that owns that party are never going to be allowed to take the country off a cliff. These truths, which are kind of obvious, don’t fit any of our narratives very well. In the past we’ve all gone incandescent in our own special ways, and nothing came of it. Nobody cared. We’re each spinning, charged particles in our own little worlds, while the real world moves on without us. As the French say “The dog barks, the caravan passes.”
