Age of the Sun

For anyone who was reading here last year knows, blog activity is about to slow down. This is the time of year when Lent begins. As a consequence I'll be staying away from social media and the internet for the duration. I'll still pop on to check e-mail and notifications, but won't be out and about.

I will still be putting out a post every week for those of you loyal enough to stop by every week, but they will definitely be shorter and less involved affairs than usual. My attention will be on my writing and real life duties. Hopefully I will have bigger and better posts for you when my sabbatical is over.

You can also still see weekly posts at the Cannon Cruisers site while I'm gone though season 2 doesn't start until March. That is the most you will see of me online.

Otherwise you can find me at my e-mail should you need anything: lonewolfandjd@gmail.com

Keep in touch!

I want to leave you with a positive word, but all I have are anecdotes. So, here's a recent one. I live in an area full of miserable (not necessarily "bad") people who have only gotten worse as the years have gone on. The world hasn't turned out the way they were promised and they just don't know how to deal with it. The utopia they were promised decades ago never came to be and it is increasingly obvious that it never will. Depression is a natural result of hoping for things that are impossible.

That said, for the first time in my life I have seen several different (and unrelated) individuals take a self-assessment and have begun to change their lives, seemingly unprovoked. One went to Confession for the first time since... longer than I've been alive. Another, who was a Richard Dawkins-style pop atheist during its peak a decade ago, has attended more than one Mass that I'm aware of. Others have started families and have realized what is important to be truly whole instead of just happy, and yet more have begun to recognize deep issues with the way they are living and realize they must work to turn things around. It was remarkable.

This isn't to put a thumb in the eye of the non-religious among you but to point out how much the climate has changed in just the last decade. Where once sneering against the sincere and genuine was commonplace it is now filled with those too tired and worn down to simply not care anymore. They need something more. As well they should because the last few decades has been a vacuum of offering anything of substance. There is no utopia coming, but that is okay. There is still something to fight for and connect with.

Those of you feeling discouraged or forlorn with the modern situation simply don't need to be. You might not see it yet, and you might not for years to come, but things are changing. After what the Western world has been through, it is more than due.

Sure, entertainment and art is in the trash-- but it won't always be. Subversion is a parasite that can't live without a host body. It's been living off a corpse and has no blood left to drain. Subversion is dying because everyone has figured out the shell game. The ball has been pocketed and the audience was scammed from the get-go. Remakes and relaunches are all that remain because the audience's trust is gone. And as they realize the creators' remakes are far worse than the originals it will only hasten the decline.

Subversion has killed itself, but it's not over yet.

It's time to start building and to give that little bit to those that are awakening and looking something more, anything at all. We need to help them discover a bigger universe than the one they were fed on--the one that pulled them into the mud, spat in their eye, and told them misery was good, ignorance is strength, and slogans are knowledge. That universe is a dry husk in the desert sun. Ours has hope and a future that connects with a long-standing tradition. The choice is obvious.

We appear to moving on from the cynical, super irony (superirony?) age into a more hopeful and positive one. It's only a matter of time. Soak it in.

There is more to life, never forget that. I'll be enjoying my copy of Miami Connection to remind myself.

What will you be doing in the meantime?



You could always read my most recent book. Think of it as Streets of Fire with more action and less Boomer-isms.