“Silence often says much more
Than trying to say what’s been said before.” — George Harrison, “That is All”
…which is why I chose this humble, yet majestic, closing track from his 1973 “Living in the Material World” release to announce that I’m shutting down the Goodboys Nation blog for good.
It’s time.
Hard to believe I’ve been doing this blog for nearly fourteen years. Fourteen years. That’s a long time! Heck, I was just fifty-one at the time. George W. Bush was POTUS. I still remember working with the DreamHost web-hosting team from my Gateway Center work cubicle to put it all together as if it were yesterday. Had someone told me when I made the very first post around the 27th of January 2006 (somehow the first few have been lost to antiquity courtesy of one of the WordPress or DreamHost server upgrades) I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are.
Originally, the idea of the having the blog was to try and eliminate all the e-mails going back and forth between the Goodboys at the time – social media not anything near what it is today, and blogs were, at the time au courant: they were how one socially communicated over the internet. I figured all the guys could use the blog to communicate and write whatever else came to their minds for informational and entertainment purposes. That idea never took off – the Goodboys still prefer e-mail as the primary form of communication – but I enjoyed the prospect of writing just for the sake of it so the blog ended up as my vehicle for commenting on the ways and the whims of the world.
Initially, I did a lot of posts on western religion (primarily, the Episcopal Church and Protestantism in general), and I wish I wasn’t proven right about my views on liberalism’s ultimate goal of destroying the Christian Church and the nuclear family. One only has to see the current state of both and how precarious our situation is without the strong foundations of both to guide and protect our culture and traditional values. And it was fun to write about golf, politics, and music, or to just be silly and let my imagination run away for the fun of it. And it was really cool to get comments from people I used to know many years prior who had somehow come upon a blog post in their travels.
But the writing was on the wall the very moment I decided to formally retire from being a Goodboy this past July. I hadn’t really thought of ending the blog until one of my fellow Goodboy friends commented about me writing things on a blog referencing the Goodboys that didn’t reflect his views and opinions. And while the saying goes, “once a Goodboy, always a Goodboy”, it got me thinking that perhaps he was right, especially since I wasn’t an active Goodboys participant anymore. And especially since the whole blogging thing had increasingly become more of a chore and less of an exercise in creative writing. I found myself writing to “feed the blog” more than anything else, and I had reached a point where I was basically repeating the same themes over and over again – as Harrison’s lyric alludes to, saying what has been said before.
I mean, how many times can one write about the abject hypocrisy of liberals and Democrats who espouse the virtues of acceptance, tolerance, and diversity when they’re the very ones who seek to destroy anyone who, regardless of their race, creed, or color, doesn’t adhere to their own rigid orthodoxies regarding abortion, immigration, globalism, COVID-19, climate change, etc. etc. etc. Don’t believe me? Just look at how conservatives are being treated by major media and the Big Tech companies: if you don’t kow-tow to their belief systems you get shut out or risk getting shut down. I used to think these people were simply misguided; after a year of enforced lockdowns, nanny-state mandatory mask-wearing, and the media covering up the reprehensible actions of Democratic governors responsible for murdering tens of thousands of elderly citizens by placing COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and assisted-living communities, I have come to see them as evil.
And while I enjoy writing about the music I listen to and and my music collections, who really cares, anyways? I’m a dinosaur who knows he’s a dinosaur and is comfortable being a dinosaur. I’m not in that regard I’m entertaining anyone else but myself. The same holds true as far as my golf game is concerned: it’s a constant struggle and will always be a struggle, but heck, 98% of all golfers struggle with their game, so what’s the big deal there?
At some point it all starts to become a bit stale. Never mind the fact that when one turns 65 there’s only so much left to write about and time left to write about it. Whenever the inevitable health issues arise I don’t want to feel an obligation to have to blog about chemo treatments, coronary angioplasties, broken hips, or lengthy hospital stays. No, there comes a point where a body of work written over nearly fourteen years, for better or for worse, has to be allowed to stand on its own as a period piece. And after the kind of year we’ve all collectively had, it seems the right time to call it a day.
I haven’t decided if I will resurface in some form or another in another social media venue. I quit Twitter because it’s a cesspool and a reflection of the worst of human behavior. I enjoy writing, but I don’t enjoy seeing things going down the tubes as I believe things will in 2021. I truly believe things are about to get very dark, far darker than anyone of us in my age group might ever have imagined. I am extremely pessimistic about everything and anything associated with this country and its institutions, and I don’t relish the thought of commenting about the so-called “American Experience” as it disappears over the horizon. Because, to be frank, under a Biden / Harris administration ruled by the “Deep State” globalists in Washington and protected by a media and the “Big Tech” companies actively stifling any form of dissent, we are fucked. So instead of feeling the need to write about it, I’ll satisfy myself with playing “pool supply guy”, enjoy watching the sparrows flittering and fighting around the bird feeder, ride my bike around the neighborhood, maybe work on my golf game, and try to enjoy the remaining years I have left as “off the grid” as I possibly can.
In closing, I want to express my deepest tanks and sincere appreciation to all of you who over the years made this place one of your regular (or at least occasional) stops in your internet travels. I hope I have at least entertained you in what I have written over these past fourteen years. You may not have agreed with everything I have written, but (most especially with the posts involving work back in early 2018), I never lied to you and always wrote honestly from my soul. It might not always have been pretty and/or entertaining, but it was always from the heart.
Of course, the blog itself isn’t going anywhere; it will be kept around for posterity’s sake as long as I pay the hosting costs, which I will continue to do. I will, however, be shutting off the comments feature after a week’s time – I’m not willing to pay a monthly fee to keep the spammers away and they’re currently inundating the site to the point where it takes valuable time to clean them up on a regular basis. Besides, one of these days, perhaps when I’m much older, it might be interesting to go through the posts over the years to see what I was doing at the time and get melancholy at the posts of all the bunnies we took home and then said farewell to years later. Of course, y’all can still contact me with a call, text, or e-mail. And if I do end up on some other social media platform I’ll put up a post telling y’all where that might be. It won’t be anytime soon, however – I’m ready for break.
Thank you for allowing me onto your computer screens over these past fourteen years, it’s been an interesting ride.