I've ran into a couple of girls in my lifetime-- fine, quirky girls with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder-- who remind me a lot of ole' Winona. I don't know what it is, the two traits almost go together. An intensity, a burning in their eyes, an added animation in their features that I find well-nigh irresistible.

There was "Lacie", a cute girl I spontaneously got into a conversation with at a record store-- how a hand fits right into a glove as we talked about music, her eyes rubbering around the room with the irony of this jovial moment we were enjoying together, right out of nowhere. She was moving to another city, and if I hadn't met her in just the space of five minutes I would have driven cross-country to help with the transition.

Then there's "Amber", a joyous barista who works at a local restaurant whom I have long conversations with about higher physics. Sometimes she goes on about how she used to be "a tomboy" and "talks so tough her feet doesn't touch the ground" but we all find it so hopelessly endearing. All the young men love girls like this, and are drawn to them like "the lost boys" to Wendy in the "Peter Pan" stories. Obviously, these adorable young women in their early to mid 20's are "taken" but that doesn't mean that they won't be your sweetest friend.

Just listening to a young woman think is such a beautiful experience. . . . . and surely warms our weary hearts when we're "on the ropes" in the boxing ring of life, needing some inspiration and feminine goddess energy before we go back into the breach. Feminists of the strictest school might call it "patronizing", conforming to a male fantasy, but liberals are far guiltier of this when they assign inherent moral authority to certain "oppressed" minorities and won't take an individual for what they are without "loaded subtexts" of a bent that trash the white, patriarchal mainstream of capital and natural law whose validity speaks for itself in this world of battle.

As a rule, it's perfectly acceptable for women to be swept up in their emotions, a slave to their passions, a little bit "daft" even. But not men and boys. In our culture, males are supposed to be square-jawed and strong and "firmly in control of themselves". If not, they're seen as pathetic or unmanly and fit for scorn in situations where it really counts, such as in business or war or courting a woman. These days, the rules still hold firm, but many men have found crevices in our society where they can live without higher standards.

You can see the Blackberry geeks fiddling away with the tiny buttons as they walk around the malls, the end result of "The Gameboy Generation"-- such as the oft-told story about the man who took the thing to the opera as his date looked on mortified with her palm to her forehead, the sound of "Tetris" playing from the rows. It's as if we've grown up to become a nation of little, round gnomes with their toys, like a bunch of 13 year-old's who never found an incentive to mature.

What I remember about life at that age was how degraded it was. It was all about "the cheap laugh", "the cheap fuck", a state of restless boredom that headed toward a vanishing point with the fear of annihilation and being afraid to apply oneself. Investment seemed so shaky, effort so futile in a world where "all the money had been made", and all that was left was something so useless as scraping pennies off the cracked sidewalk when the lure of "instant gratification" was so much more inviting.

Who I remember was this big, stocky, heavy kid who was always half-wheezing because he was carrying too much weight around-- the consequence when you consume more than you produce, when you don't "maintain your perimeter". People like this are hardly the most disciplined of characters, and for them life gets especially onerous and difficult. They tend to take "the easy way out", or find excuses instead of honoring their obligations, and huff n' puff "to catch up" with much strife and irritability, not to mention "taking more than what they're entitled to" and grasping the goose that lays the golden eggs and strangling it in their very greed.

Then there is nothing. . . . . the price of doing business this way.

It's the nothing-feeling when you're exposed to sex in about the worst manner possible, like when the first time I saw a vagina how horrified I was. It was in a triple-XXX movie with all the misogyny, crudeness, and vacancy of the very worst of male fantasies, with not a single hint of tenderness. It's like seeing a splattered golden retriever out on the highway, or finding out that your middle school principal is a gay pedophile who has been molesting his flock (-- and what surely awaits him in the state penitentiary), or a pyramid scheme a friend or loved one gets involved in and how it sounds great because you're just a kid who doesn't know anything. . . . . and then you're present when the whole thing collapses and people are scurrying for cover like seals flopping away from a breaking ice-shelf. For a moment, the whole world yawns opens and totters, like a crack opening up in the earth and threatening to swallow you with the full darkness of existence.

Yet this is natural law in action-- metaphorically speaking, the workings of the market-- the consequences when people make bad decisions, and the price of doing business. . . . . hell, even of being alive. If you leave an unwrapped cake under the sink, your kitchen will soon be swarming with cockroaches. This is why I find it amusing when liberal idealists go on with the notion of a return to "good government" in these lost, wayward, and cynical times but can't seem to understand how lack of standards in our declining society generates "what is". There is a large blindness there, when you refuse to judge anyone or hold them socially accountable out of fear of "intolerance"-- but only breaking out of your politically-correct rectitude to trash so-called "backward people" who don't share your "progressive values", turning up your nose like a bunch of finicky cats.

(For what is a liberal but a conservative who hasn't had their face shoved up against a wall yet?)

The white, colonial order of old has lost its grip-- its will to survive-- when the planet seems to be slowly handed over to the rising black and brown and yellow peoples, first co-opted by the twin super-powers, then melded into a transnational free market globalism that respects no borders, no right to ethnic self-determination though there's certainly going to be friction, a world out of the post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" movies if we're not careful.

I halfway saw the consequences of this in action in a classroom in the mid '90s.

Whether out of boredom, or searching for a sense of streetwise "authenticity", there were some kids who reveled on the edge of danger-- the license for edgy MTV/Nike brand sociopathy. Here was a skinny, 15 year-old young man who made the black cause his own. The worship of brutality, as in the broader sense of politically-correct social justice. Riots were permissible, beat-down's were fine, so long as it was in retaliation for "racism". "Racist" mall security guards who wouldn't let gangs of marauding black youth get too large for fear of boisterousness and looting. "Racist" people who were skeptical if a million black men really did show up at the "Million Man March", whatever the pump-fisted insistence that claimed Cleopatra was black and that Louis Farrakahn really boarded a UFO in 1985 with his "Nation of Islam" loopiness.

(Of course, this student went to my sheltered liberal arts alternative school so the blacks wouldn't tear him to pieces in the city)

One time, he got into a quarrel with a stony black girl with a personality disorder and called her "a bitch". He sat there with his arms crossed, a slight smile of satisfaction on his smug face. Well, she got up and decked him right there with a sinister mean streak that would have clawed at people's faces like a rabid panther, if there weren't laws against murder. He got up and ran out of the room with tears in his eyes with the sudden shock of violence, the eruption of black hatred as smooth and sleek and efficient as volcanic glass and not a jangled "put-on" by someone "trying too hard". It was like standing out in the mean prairie winds when death or something ominous passes you by, when you panic or shudder or start crying. If there was the notion of being a 100% square-jawed man, those values didn't add up and he found himself a humiliated kid who couldn't "step up to the plate" and do something Roman and impossible because he was overextended and essentially human, taking the creeping and subterranean way out.

Just like in our society.

The power structure is undergoing rapid, degenerative change. Our society has little respect for the law, few standards of excellence-- the government fears its own citizens and has just about lost all moral authority and credibility with the people it governs. Fewer and fewer people vote, and if anything they have long ago voted themselves a share of the public treasury with "entitlements"-- leading to a bloated, incompetent system that works like a "spoils game" to various interest groups all jealously holding on to "what's theirs". Great howls rise when officials talk about making unpopular decisions, and careerism prevents the government from facing the problems head on. The government and media increasingly supply "bread & circuses" to a populace almost like "a Roman mob" in scope, unwilling to sacrifice anything for flag & country and just about ready to riot over the slightest provocation.

We don't produce anything anymore; everything of value is on paper-- and our financial system is collapsing. We're slowly and inexorably turning into a third world nation, and men are scrambling to load up on "the winning team" which only makes the problem worse. Conservatives are deliberately wrecking the government-- selling it off piece-by-piece and cutting all regulatory functions that keep the system from overheating. When the government does get involved, however, it seems to be in such a stupid, piddling, incompetent way that folks back home want it abolished altogether. They are outsiders, permanent revolutionaries, next to a snobby, liberal elite of bored intelligensia and hipster kids who turn up their nose at the hoi polloi with no sense of loyalty to masculine values as they gather around the most rootless, degenerate things.

These days, "a new marketing strategy" is supposed to be the save-all solution. . . . . the "Arch-Deluxe" from McDonald's, basically a "Big Mac" with mayonnaise on it. Katie Couric as a primetime newscaster. . . . . a trend that is fizzling. The hope around Barack Obama, the "trans-racial messiah" who people romanticize because he's black but act like they're not and what he'll be up against, when meaningful change is impossible. . . . . except for the worse.

Call it. . . . . "the price of doing business".

Knowing how the world worked, I was not too surprised of how things developed out on 9/11. I was shocked, certainly, but it was not the end of my world. New York and Washington were very far away from St. Louis, and I never felt in any personal danger. No one I knew was injured or killed, so my life went back to normal very quickly. America wanted to take the stand, "we're all selfless victims" but that's 100% bullshit. Whether it's a crime of omission or a crime of ignorance, our fate is our own responsibility for the most part. Like it or not, we have a controlling stake in a lot of the world's misery and to the enemy, what they did was striking deep into the evil heart of hell. This is about power, and the President said that "the terrorists must be brought to justice" because such a large swath of the country can't face up to the hard truth that they must either be captured or killed. There is a picture I have saved, a helicopter shot of all the smoke covering "ground zero" on that fateful day that reminds us what happens if we don't "keep it real".

In the aftermath of the incident, what I was reminded of was the time a student at my school died, Sam. A bare wisp of a 7th grader, a good-hearted soul. A brain aneurysm over the weekend, rather unexpected. It happened when he slept over at a friend's house, after a Saturday at an amusement park having the time of his life. My consolation was that he died happy and painlessly, the eternal memory of a nice, shy young man. No one would have missed him otherwise, or would have cared much, except for the fact that he was dead.

They called in the entire 7th and 8th grade and announced the news to great disquiet, kids sniffling and holding their heads in their hands, even the black girl who was ready to claw out that other kid's eyes. Classes were called off that morning, as the students wandered around outside in the warm spring sun, pondering on the meaning of it all.

The whole school came out to the funeral the following night, and some of the more public-spirited older girls in the elder grades I had crushes on-- quirky and mildly obsessive-compulsive types like in the beginning-- threw themselves weeping on the closed coffin. And I certainly knew in my heart of hearts that now was no time "to put on the moves". Just stand there with your hands clasped before you, and stare on with deep regard. . . . . it was all any 13 year-old could do under the pinched-yet-expansive circumstances.

The school raised $4000 and bought a special edition of "Hoop Dreams"-- the documentary biopic about inner-city youth reaching for their dreams on the basketball court-- in his cherished memory. Funny thing was, Sam was half-Iranian and didn't play basketball. But in a heavy-handed, schmaltzy, liberal way, it somehow worked out for the sentimental better. . . . .

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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

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("I heard that, Missy!")