Good Monday Folks! Well the time is upon us, fall. Kids everywhere are headed back to school in droves, from elementary students to college students.
We here at Cantankerous Old Coots are following suit in a way. We are opening the Cantankerous Old Coots University! Yes today brings in a whole new era in the pursuit of Cantankerosity.
The Coots University will be your ultimate source for all things Cantankerous. Forums to discuss cantankerosity and lessons to bring out your inner coot will be paramount.
Today We release the first set of lessons in how to be a Cantankerous Old Coot in the finest of PDF EBooks. This set of lessons is absolutely free for the time being when you sign up for our mailing list. Plus anyone who signs up for said mailing list between now and Labor Day (September 6) and the first day of Autumn, September 23, will be on a list to receive special discounts on tuition as well as other goodies as they come along.
Our first set of subscribers is very special. Become one of the students at Cantankerous Old Coots University today and you will be well on your way to becoming part of the faculty.
Ha! I am back with a new podcast, dusted off and back from the grave. I bet you were thinking there would be no more of my ramblings, or some of you hoping it. Or you could be one of the 7 listeners that actually sticks it out to the end without turning it off or wanting to stick a gun in your mouth.
At any rate here is a new podcast, just begging for you to listen to a lot of begging. And I am not really sure what this picture has to do with anything in this post, but the plugin has some strange ideas of things to accompany a post.
[powerpress]
Thanks for listening, don’t forget to stay Cantankerous!
-Justin.
PS. I was serious about the feedback, topic ideas and ramblings. Go and look now at your heart and contribute.
If you didn’t bother listening to the audio clip above you missed out on some great Peter Frampton. Today, I get to bring up the rear on this whole “feelings” theme.
First of all, did you like the themed edition of the Coots? We are thinking that the first week of every month will be a theme week and you, the loyal readers of the Coots (i.e. Heather, Hansi and Dave) will be responsible for choosing that theme. Go ahead and cast your vote right over there in the sidebar for March’s theme. And if you have a suggestion for a theme by all means hit us with it via the contact form or in the comments.
Now onto the Cantankerousness. We spend a lot of time here at the coots talking about basically feelings. What feelings to have, what feelings to discard, and whose feelings to stomp into a mudhole when the time is right. Ralph has reintroduced the Cantankerous Old Coots University to our growing audience and, hopefully, has started more and more people on the path to true Cantankerousness.
In a lot of ways, Cantankerousness equals freedom. To be truly cantankerous, you will be embracing all of the core values that are wrapped up in the First Amendment. Coots say what they think. We say what needs to be said without regard for the sissy feelbads of this generation.
Sometimes, you just need to hear the hard stuff. Like Denis Leary says, “Life sucks, get a helmet.” Your feelings shouldn’t get in the way of the truth. The history of America is filled with insensitivity and lack of regard for feelings. We are stubborn and, well, cantankerous. Do you think that the Revolutionary War would have been won or even fought if the colonists worried about the “feelings” of King George? He sure didn’t care about us and we gave him the collective finger.
Think of the government policies regarding Indians. (Yes I said Indians. That is what they always were Native American is a whole other rant. And my Great Grandmother was full blooded Arapaho so don’t give me any crap about it.) The Indians that basically ruled what would become the United States were slaughtered and pushed to little tiny plots of undesirable land. More than once. And the ones who had the balls to resist (see Geronimo, ass kicker extraordinaire) were eventually snuffed out by the Government.
Cantankerousness is not just bitching about the world. It is taking a stand and forcing your position down the throats of all the namby pamby do gooders who just don’t get what it means to be assertive. Feelings are an invention of those who need something to explain their lack of intestinal fortitude.
This is the main mission of the Coots. To try and jump start that intestinal fortitude that is lying dormant in so many people these days. To show people that it is ok to put your feelings in a dark place in your heart and let them fester until they just can’t be contained anymore and you make someone cry telling them the truth and not holding back because of their “feelings”.
Now, watch this video, it sums up much of my personal philosophy very nicely.
Now tell me what you think about your feelings, the comments are open and waiting for your cantankerousness to flow.
Don’t forget to vote for next month’s theme. Semper Fi.
This lesson could be the penultimate Coot lesson. It isn’t, but it could be. Throughout all of these lessons so far we have been working to promote Cantankerosity. If you have been following closely you have learned to say what you think and not dither. You have learned to use sarcasm and the difference between being an angry old fart and a Cantankerous Old Coot.
If you have taken to heart and studied diligently then you are most definitely on you way to Cantankerousness Grasshopper. This lesson is one way of gauging your final test of Cantankerosity.
Picture if you will the elderly gentleman in a rest home. He is not wearing pants. He is railing against Politicians (see this post, and this one). He is yelling at nurses and doing his best to avoid the orderlies who are trying to cover him. Does he care? No! He continues to run around and yell.
Now you may be saying this man is demented, sick in the head, a victim of Alzheimers disease. I say No! He is a Cantankerous Old Coot. His Cantankerosity has been finely crafted and honed over the course of several years and now, he hides his devilish ways behind insane medical diagnosis’s.
This is our mission, to create a fine figure of Cantankerousness who is not afraid to do exactly what it is they want to. Pants are optional. A test of your cantankerous training will not be to parade around without pants (at least for now) but it will be to cultivate the attitude to be able to do so.
Get over your society imposed embarrassment and do something for yourself. Say what you think. Do what you think needs to be done. Be yourself. Pants are optional.
Let’s face it Coots, we’ve been sold a bill of goods. We grew up in what seemed to be a golden age. The sky’s the limit. Anything goes. You can have anything you want. You deserve it all. Nobody got snookered more than the women. Back in the 70’s feminists announced that women were the superior sex-capable of doing it all and without any help. Men were just chauvinist pigs, easily expendable. It was great news for men and for women. Suddenly the burden of supporting a household was lifted from men while at the same time women were freed from domestic slavery. Everybody wins – or at last that’s how it seemed at the time. We all bought the story because it excused weakness and self indulgence. Nobody ever expected to pay the price because post war babies were raised to believe that all we had to do was ask and it shall be given. And nobody was ever going to have to pay.
But we forgot biology.
All this self indulgence failed to recognize the physical limitation of human existence- our bodies. Women postponed families past the prime reproductive years and then struggled with infertility and miscarriage while they fretted about how it would affect their careers. Men failed to step up and take charge, not willing to earn enough to support the family lifestyle or take a stand and cut back. Nobody understood what was wrong but it wasn’t how we expected life to be. And this is just what my wife and I experienced.
Life was controllable. Not.
There is a lesson here about understanding what is important and finding good models in your life. Listening to popular culture and the latest new idea is always a temptation but it is far more important to observe what works. Human beings have been around for thousands of years. The human body works as it was designed and cannot be messed with particularly the reproductive cycle. Radical changes in living that conflict with tradition and biology are risky strategies. Just because an idea is new and dressed up in modern clothes doesn’t mean that it is better. But it is much easier to believe in fantasies than reality.
I know.
I messed up my life because I was naive and because I listened to the wrong voices. The real problem came from allowing myself to believe that short term thinking was enough to build a life on. Sooner or later even the stupidest and most naive individual begins to sense that it is all going terribly wrong and if he has any sense or responsibility, he changes. .
So what to do?
So the point of this lesson is not that bad principles can take your life off course. Even the best of us goes off course from time to time. The point is what you can do about it and how to create value from those painful life lessons. Now that you know that you can’t have it all and that those short term goals left you far from where you would like to be in life, what can you do?
You choose.
You pick what is important and let that decision guide you. You can’t anymore manage to have everything at the end of your life than at the beginning. You should have learned along the way, what things are really important and which are trivial.
You can’t have it all and only a stupid old coot will be able to hold that belief after years or experience. So pick what’s important and go for it. Maybe you can still make up for being so dumb up until now.
