Written from May 2022 – November 2023

1. It is a visceral anxiety —éloignement—that is felt when one is awake at the midnight hour: The lust of avarice and decadence as our cultural decline.

2. We hold these truths to be self evident…life, liberty, and the pursuit of power: An American Tale

3. With ineffable suffering one longs for presence. “Fear not! For I am with you.” Compassion in its highest form.

4. Out of a grateful heart springs a font of love, but grumbling spirit bears no fruit.

5. As friendship is an ineluctable ingredient for earthly happiness, so too is mutual respect for a marriage of honor.

6. Voraciously does the black raven feast on a decaying carrion in the desert, yet the white dove is satisfied with its fruit, seeds, and grain. As Nietzsche said, we as humans stare at the abyss—and the abyss stares back at us. Notwithstanding, we have Liberty of spirit. The aves do not. Be Thou Wise, sayeth the Sages of old.

7. Those damned, old Puritans that branded the Scarlett A on Hester are alive and well. For they merely have withdrew themselves from the Massachusetts Bay to a much more insidious colony, the World Wide Web. The witch hunts persist! Forsooth, they remain the veritable gatekeepers—inscrutably factious—while generating arbitrary litmus tests for the left and the right alike. “Cancel Culture” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. No longer commonly found in our American population, it has rebranded itself in name as “rare-sense.”

9. Woe to Zarathustra! For if he were to herald the message of the Übermensch to our sickly society today would not he thereupon reap vengeance on his own head. God is dead? Yea—and so too his dancing prophet. But a post-Christian society we need not when god has been resurrected by Americans as consumerism, indulgence, avarice, and pride. The last man? The societal mores have shifted yet again. Nietzsche is reeling: perspectivism veered off course! Where are ye philosophers of the future now? if not weary in soul, belabored, exhausted, and despairing. ‘O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gain!’ Says Baudelaire, ‘the world says our own age is little and vain, Forever, yesterday, today, tomorrow, ‘Tis horror’s oasis in the sands of sorrow.’

10. For even the most proud and irreligious of men are men of faith if they have confidence.

11. 2+2=both 4 and 5. The tale of two users—a Google algorithm.

12. Nostalgia is a trap, remorse is a snare, and worry is a pit, but he who remains in the present shall be filled with gratitude.

13. The impetuous drunkard acts too quickly while the feckless sluggard remains inert. In both cases it is fear that poisons the mind.

14. Awe—sparks of wonder that flit and flutter around in childlike amazement: an antidote to the all-too-humanly suffering condition.

15. True love lets the other go in freedom even unto death for the sake of the other: the crux of history

16. “I can do it myself” saith American individualism: the rise of self-check out stations