Today, for a change, we are serious!

You’re accustomed to light hearted, trivial musings about life here at Cantankerous Old Coots but today brace yourself for some deeper thinking. If you thought that checking out the Coots would be mindless diversion, today, the Coots are asking for more.  Change is in the air.  Lick your finger and check which way the wind is blowing.  When you feel secure then read on.

One of the original ideas for the Cantankerous Old Coots was to provide a framework for people to shed their Casper Milquetoast personas and develop an unique brand of what we like to call cantankerousity- letting the chips fall where they may and standing up for yourself in a world that glorifies sheep. (We never said that we weren’t suckers for cliches).

We tried inspiration.

So began the series of Coots Lessons, intended to help people foster an independent frame of mind.  We formulated 16 Coots lessons covering a wide range of life experiences. These lessons were intended to provide the basis for an E-Book and eventually a body of instruction in the Cantankerous Old Coots University.

And then?

Well, life happens, and it seems that Cantankerous Old Coots have just as many problems reading the public as anybody else. We published that E-Book- a beautifully designed primer for getting started on the road to Cantankerosity. The only price for this valuable product was to join our community by signing up for our list. We anticipated that every reader would want to have this helpful document on their very own personal computers for easy reference and encouragement.

We were wrong.

At every step along the road, we sought evidence that somewhere out in cyberspace, there is an audience yearning to break out of the mindless ordinariness of daily life; the dreary monotony of not making waves. Alas, it seems that independent thought is dead in modern society. Instead of an eager audience of cantankerous people or even cantankerous wannabees, it seems that our vast and growing audience of readers is nothing but lookiloos- folks that love the idea of independent thinking but  are too afraid of their shadows (or what other people might think) to actually be independent.

Not Coots but Sheep

At the next Coot’s Convergence (that’s a business meeting for the uninitiated) I’m going to propose that we change the blog’s mission statement to better fit our audience. I’m going to propose that Cantankerous Old Coots be changed to Sanctimonious Old Sheep. Under the new motto we will revise our lessons to help our audience fulfill their destiny to make no waves, get lost in the background and make absolutely no difference in the world for anybody in their life.

The New Agenda

These are the tentative changes to the first five Coots, I mean Sheep, lessons.

Coot Lesson #1 – Let your feeling out!

Sheep Lesson #1 – Embrace the Uniformity!

Coot Lesson #2 – We don’t care what you think.

Sheep Lesson #2 It’s all about them

Coot Lesson #3 – Polite is over rated!

Sheep Lesson #3 – Mind your manners!

Coot Lesson 4- Say It When You Feel It!

Sheep Lesson #4 – Not so Fast

Coot Lesson 5- Let your face show what you think.

Sheep Lesson #5 – Show your happy face.

Give ’em what they want! That’s our new motto.

I’m convinced that this change will bring this blog into convergence with our audience, leaving them safely in their comfort zones and sleeping peacfully each night. I think that mindlessly reinforcing the conformity and bland acceptance that is modern life will grow our audience even faster in the future and provide safe cover for all the sheep out their to join our community and leave their own conventional wisdom in the comment area.

Cantankerous Old Coots is so out of date and 20th century. Long live the Sanctimonious Old Sheep!  Go ahead now sheep, it’s safe to comment!