There will be no blog post today. The requirements of the Missoula XC preclude my fealty to the attention to detail to which you are accustomed, and which you deserve. I have no excuse beyond that I am sleepy. I hope that you will find it within yourselves to forgive my sloth, and check back next week for a new and exciting edition from The Gentleman at Large.
There will be no blog post today, but not for lack of thoughtfulness. I tried, I really did! I even had lots of ideas.
I considered for a while that only two weeks after the last edition, we’re already past due for a third installment of the God Bless Our Parks series.
I thought about laying out a study on how long a person can subsist (thrive?) on caffeine and cortisol alone.
I explored for a few minutes how our current national discussion might be different if that bigot from New York had been arrested on a fluke but that redneck from Indiana had carried of his plan instead. Would the conversation still have migrated toward xenophobia? Or would we have considered for a moment that religious extremism is religious extremism whether the evangelist is brandishing a Quran or a Bible, and that heaping additional punishment on the perpetrator of a violent crime (to say nothing of his or her community) based on his or her ideological convictions is a violation of the rights guaranteed to said violent criminal by First Amendment to the Constitution of Our Great Nation, and that if we actually have any interest in stopping such violent crimes we might be better off exploring the disenfranchisement and alienation that fuels extreme ideology in the first place. And that’s not even to mention that there is only one common thread that runs through every single mass shooting foreign and domestic, which exists more consistently than ideological extremism and even hate. That is, of course, that a gun was used to kill a large number of people.
But then I figured that by press time we’d all have just shrugged our shoulders and written off violent crimes like those that took place in Orlando and Los Angeles the other day as inevitable, as an unfortunate byproduct of living in the Best Goddam’ Country On Earth, and gone on with our lives. (Well, some of us, anyway.) I was also busy with race promotion stuff, and didn’t have the opportunity to read up on today’s mass shooting; I was worried the post might have come off as stale. In the fast paced world of blogging, it’s important to stay relevant!
So to you, my adoring fans, I am sorry. But I promise to do better next week with a new edition of witty, biting, and insightful commentary on how you’re hanging the toilet paper wrong, or the best way to level a wobbly table in a restaurant, or something. But to tide you over, here is a quick clip of what I’m pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he founded the Park Service:
To Make Driving Safer, Make Cars More Dangerous
Each morning we get out of bed. We stumble into the kitchen, grope around for the coffee machine, and flip on the TV to check ... Read more
Try This One Dumb Trick
Try this one dumb trick to improve your health and make new friends. It cures cancer and burns that pesky belly fat. It's an ancient ... Read more