You understand that it is comically obvious that your affection for the NRA derives entirely from your desperate attempt to...
Yeah dude, while I’ll defend the merits of all those in their own right, I’m well aware that I seek out subcultures and experiences of aggressive masculine competition (pinball too!) specifically in reaction against being born into an enervating bourgeois role! That’s not a rare dynamic! It perfectly fits with the rest of my performed identity! And I know my extensive explorations of my self in a public forum result in readers well-knowing said self, that’s the point! Jeez Louise.
(It’s also the dynamic behind my periodic performative outbursts against my mother and desire that my childhood and childhood in general included more violence and dog-eat-dog exploitation.)
Though you get at something in trying to josh on me for not joining the Army - I’d been around to see my peers who went that path and eh, it didn’t deliver the goods anyway. And I can’t really kick myself for not jumping on any of the other masculine paths and digging in, doing the hard work, etc. because similarly I see it’s not like the guys who did ended up with a life of macho adventure.
Whatever their virtues, today’s techbro founders aren’t the Promethean heroes of ‘90s legend; “hip media type” sure doesn’t mean what it used to; the guys who embrace fatherhood as an identity don’t impress me even if you factored out my skepticism towards emotion-bound childraisers as seen above.
Was starting to get into being just one more pillar of quirky Portland, and I guess I still got the “fixing up the house/garden with hand tools” (shoulda dinged me for that!) that culture’s dying and the one replacing it I don’t know that I care for. Maybe I’d be better suited to big fish/small pond, and I suspect at some level my thought to find a failing town and repurpose it as an arts colony/tourist retreat/wevs. is accepting my role as a puffed-up provincial on the arrogant presumption that I start at the top.
I dunno, you seem to have a lot of close interest in my relationship to contemporary masculine ways of being, insult anon, you have any recommendations or thoughts?