Re the previous post - "Lunae Dies..."

Now the antidote for those male-female preoccupations is to imagine the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, how hot, hot, hot they will be in their "clothing" and gear, how tired, aching, fearful, hard-hearted, and aching they must be as they strain to keep up, stay sane.

Lunae Dies, Veneris Vehementia

Returning to work this Monday, ill-rested, nodding off before the "profit center contribution" screen (my work pc), the morning shot, I give up and go out for lunch. The avalanche ensues.

I mean, of course, the flood, the cascade and chaotic cavalcade, of beautiful women. How, at age 56, can I still be astonished at the numbers, beauty and particulars of women on the street? A few is more than enough, but here are hundreds and hundreds, most all possessed of this or that sort of fatal charm.

This is silly; a female is a person, a living thing, a biological sample, with both species marks and unique flaws and endowments; that is all. And the supposed 'beauty' that I respond to is, after all, a complex of traits within me, part natural impulse, part learned values, part longing for adventure. Seen from that angle, there is, in effect, no beauty, only impulses and responses to visual stimuli. In other words, I should be able to change the subject and ignore the presence of the females.

A large part of the mystery is the fact of visual & physical proximity combined with near-total social removal or distance and my own fierce social alienation. That is to say, they are "all up in my face" presence-wise, but I am socially mute & valueless, and each and all of them are in a hurry to avoid needy males.

Nor should I even appear to be a needy male since I AM married to a decent and attractive girl. But, of course, I am - little has changed, really, over the years regarding my regard for female form.

As I said above, I should be able to shift my viewpoint & ignore the vital, curvaceous, liquid presence of the females. Ah, "Should", yes, yes. Despite my perturbation and over-stimulation, despite the sad one-sided ineptness & frustration, at heart I still desire the delusion of desire, the wanting, the impulsive unrepressed ache - despite its absurd futility.

I get so exercised over this! But that is life - a thousand promises, a thousand angers, a thousand fears. Out of that we have to carve a life.

A Place in the World....

Since I have never found any positive place in the world, except in my simple prolix role as progenitor & dad (les enfants sont facile a faire, plus difficile de proteger, enseigner, sopporter), I still wonder, at age 56 & facing faiblesse & the downward spiral to death, where I might have made a difference (that is, a positive one) and how I might have gained the ability to do so.

What does the world need that a petty, timid, conflicted creature like myself could supply? Instead of waiting for the answer - the wrong approach, to wait for an answer - I have to waive the question and proceed. Part of the answer must be my family.

But another part could be the Stoic College. Even my pathetic hash of a brain and my too-soft little slip of a soul might help in the transmission of the Stoic wisdom (as opposed to obsessive duality and polar extremism) to people. And that would be a positive thing on this divided, bloody-minded, madness-driven Earth.

Hmmm. Question answered?

Lax Lenders, Keenly Kept

Logging in at work today I see that my firm's team of attorneys "Defeats Class Certification in Billion-Dollar Mortgage MDL" (MDL = Multi-District Litigation, which here was apparently prevented from becoming a proper class action of the aggrieved against the lenders). Initial response? Darn. Those lenders, who refuse to play fair and deluge everyone with ads for loans they can't afford, deserve to be taken to the cleaners on a regular basis until they start policing themselves. The class of dupes who were already taken to the cleaners by these same politically invulnerable lenders need to wise up, yes, indeed: learn the ropes, learn arithmetic, don't sign unless it's both a good deal AND affordable! But it's the dupes who are loosing their homes - not the alien, removed, exploitation-bent banking functionaries or their fortress-like corporations and lawyers.

Of course, for lender corporations and so on to "police themselves" would mean stopping their flood of advertising (unlikely, because then the artifically inflated loan market would falter), which advertising is intended to sucker people (and I mean here human people, as opposed to the corporate 'person') into bad loans (a loan being defined as bad for human people if it has variable interest rates, balloon payments, or - of course - high interest rates, ie, a loan more of a threat to the borrower than a help) and providing, instead, good loans (fixed interest rates, required background checks, low interest rates, built-in mediation in case of disaster to the borrower, legal penalties for borrowers who lie about their assets and income to begin with).

Since some 90% of polled Americans think they are smarter than average (!? see note), "pulling a fast one" is the modern borrower's method of choice for getting ahead in the world. This, like bad tenants in real estate situations, creates an adversarial position between borrower and lender. And the lenders, of course, are not stupid - they have adopted exactly the same ethos with regard to lending - make the loan then sell it to another 'buyer' who will then sell it to another, and so on - with no regard for honesty or for the borrowers involved.

Good old class warfare - exploit the loopholes, steal from the downtrodden, ransack the blind engines of economics! Of course, the people who are hoodwinked by these barbarians on both sides are the rest of us, the ones who want to live rather than "pull a fast one".

So, when I see a legal class action against the bad guys shot down, I'm disappointed. A normal moron, unlike the present one, would think, "Oh, good - my company is doing well!" But I think, "Oh, crap, the people lost another round; the old cycle continues."