This Can't Happen to Me

They say that the great ideas occur to one while one is in one's early to middle twenties. I'm starting to understand why: with a baby on the way, a new job that is higher paying but also much more demanding, etc., at 28 I'm discovering that I am rapidly becoming that most despised thing: a bourgeois. Yes, one of those dreadfully conventional middle-class bores whose mind has calcified. I sense the borders of the universe contracting until the cosmos begins to resemble a cubicle; I greatly fear that soon I shall not be able to distinguish between the two. Suddenly the critiques of both Marx and Nietzsche make so much more sense to me, which is frightening in itself.

The worst part of this is the dearth of those who understand or care. "Dude, I'm becoming a bourgeois" is not the sort of complaint most otherwise interested persons would find intelligible, so one finds one's bourgeoisification advancing at a rate proportionate to the general lack of interest in the malady. Simultaneously, of course, one finds oneself becoming more inverted and idiosyncratic as one struggles to cope with bourgeoisification on one's own. My only solace is that the bourgeois mind seems to consistently lack cognizance of its own constriction, so I wait patiently for the Lethean waters of conventionality to o'erflow me. Soon the depths from which I longed to speak will no longer exist as a memory, or even as a theoretical possibility, and I will have become an adult.

Building a Legacy

The Last Day is not a topic often broached in discourse these days, regardless of the discoursers. The "legacy" that one leaves behind is, though. The oddity of the current situation is that the preparation currently urged for leaving an honorable legacy is similar to the preparation that used to be urged for a successful appearance at the Judgment Seat of Christ. It is as though history has become a convenient secular stand-in for the Ultimate Justice which all men long for.

The irony of the anti-Christian Judgment Day is that it is cruel, merciless, and unforgiving. As is typical of non-Christian thought, there is no room for redemption--which is painfully appropriate in the particular case of Judgment, since it is precisely the Redeemer who has been removed.

Matthew 25 is bleeding heart pandering when compared to the New York Times editorial page.

Frere Jean

Johnny Calvin, we hardly knew you. We thought we did, but you never played by our rules, so we wrote you off as a theocratic sadist, or perhaps as a sainted prophet descended from the heavens--a sort of Aryan firstborn, a demiurge, a minor deity. Both without paying much attention to the actual content of your thought--beyond the P-word, of course--times 2. Most of us hated it. The ones who liked it were generally somewhat disturbed persons of slightly below average inteligence who, with occasionally good intentions, made cornmeal mush of your exquisite dogmatics. But at least your beard was timeless. The skullcap, however--that skullcap made you look like a meanie-head. Very bad PR, for which I expect Beza is to blame, as Farel would never have approved. Never trust the sensible ones when it comes to image control.