Sorry this article has taken so long to post, but the comments section of this site has been under attack and my army of quick fingered web elves are fighting madly against the machine.

your take on developing new friendships mid-life?

Goose

commented on

Soliloquy 2

Dec-23-2020

11:11 PM UTC

JL: "A lost friend is another wound in our procession into death"

I remember from reading a book on the Plains Indians, one of them quoted as saying "All my friends are gone, it's time for me to die too".

Your attitude is remarkably similar, I'd say. But what's your take on developing new friendships mid-life? In today's congested world the one meets more people... or is there an age beyond which a new branch can not be grafted?

My dear Uncle Fred, a man who had many scores of business and football associates across the nation, long ago told me, "Jimmy, you keep close with your boyhood friends. Finding a real friend later in life is very rare."

Genius of the American system, which comes directly out of the mercantile economics of Plantation America, as proclaimed by Thomas White in 1630, is atomization, accelerated by industrialization.

The idea, taken from Genesis by White, advocates the nuclear family that forever forsakes the clan, the tribe, the father and the brother, for a new location, for 40 more acres to clear to build a cabin and deny the heathen a tree to hide behind wen the trainbands muster for war out of the garrisons and plantations of New England.

This was an efficient way to turn the largest forest in the world into farms and gardens and cities. It is also an excellent way of generating perpetual debt cycles and maintaining a system of financial control over even those who prize freedom. This genius system causes people seeking freedom to spread tyranny by physically moving in rapid sequence and opening the way for colonizing government functionaries and corporations, with even the Mountain Man and the Cowboy of old remaining chained to the debt system he was trying to escape, by his need for a market and tools.

Despite Uncle Fred's warning, which I saw was true as I failed to make a single real friend from age 16 to 40, I have stumbled into the luck of friendships made fast and true in the autumn and winter of my life, something that never happened in the summer of my prime.

These friendships come of two sources:

-1. Combat arts training

-2. Writing online, mostly, with ten times the friends made late in life as the handful made and the one [Rick] I kept from my youth.

That is why the system has basically outlawed gyms and martial arts schools this year, with nearly all of these gone. It is also why this site has been under attack since 2018 and specifically this comment section under attack for these past two months. The System fears nothing more than you and I meeting and speaking and thinking outside of its approved framework for interaction. I see this as an instinctual systemic hunger for survival and growth—for food, an increasingly finicky preference for ever more tender food to feed its aging and dull-toothed maw, food which is us.

Every friend made—especially friends made across ideological and religious and political lines—is a dart cast into the evil eye atop the Pyramid of Got, whose all-seeking shadow we live within.