“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear…Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism.”

-H.P. Lovecraft, on the literary status of the “weirdly horrible tale”

Increasingly as a fiction writer, as I read extensively in nonfiction and observe critically the world woven of lies around us I have fallen into writing horror tales, having had no such motive. This has happened with other writers I know of. And significantly horror TV and movies have become more popular with the masses, particularly with the younger generation who have not been brainwashed as thoroughly along the lines Lovecraft suggested as the American literary template as had their parents and grandparents. Interestingly enough horror literature is no longer slotted in book stores, unless it is an established classic, and is only available online.

I recently reviewed an essay by Ernst Junger in which he decries the artifices and artificial conclusions of novels as unrealistic. I take it as significant that one must write with a practical unreality of purpose with the implied ending a cozy ever after domesticity in order to be regarded as commercially viable by publishers. What is the significance of this: domesticity, compliance, complaisance, submission, emasculation—or so I suspect.

If you similarly suspect, and regard the crumbling of this vast soul eating machine in which we as ascendant men live increasingly criticized, regulated and vilified lives, as the only possibility of masculine resurgence, I have a few items I would like to present for your consideration.

First is the obvious cyclic nature of man’s emasculation as observed in Chapter 7. I do not know how much deeper yawns the feminized pit into which society has plunged so blissfully. But wherever we find its bottom we begin the cyclic rebound toward a masculine model. It seems by our own recent history that scant time for balance will be enjoyed by those worshippers of maternal cradle to grave domesticity when the pendulum swings the other way. Expect chaos.

My hunch is that the fascination with end time zombie literature by neutered and whole males alike is a direct reflection of a gut level rejection of our unnatural order. I doubt if men are as willing to accept oblivion as are women, and as crackpots like myself often claim. Based on the technological nature of this stifling construct, and the superior facility males seem to have manipulating and navigating it, I suspect there will be a hundred million tiny revolts and insurgencies to come.

I could not even manage my settings on FaceBook and withdrew from what I call ‘Planet Photo Album’ bristling with a disgust I have rarely felt. So I am certainly not the person to guess at what social networking chinks in the machine might be used to rip it apart or simply hide. I do have a few notes from my retail food experience that suggest that the vast communication and observation network that seems to be finalizing our emasculation might, in the end, serve as a Trojan Horse for men.

As you know supermarket transactions are computerized, as supposedly are wholesale purchasing and inventory control. Theoretically the entire retail food business is computerized—but it is not. That point at which such systems fail tends to be when they interact with the human element, and in retail food the human element is of low quality.

Cadbury Fruit & Nut Bar was the number 5 bestselling top shelf chocolate item in center store candy sections in the Mid Atlantic. Their milk chocolate bar was the worst seller. When some meathead at the Richfood facility in Richmond Virginia parked a 270 case pallet of these milk chocolate bars in the fruit and nut slot what happened?

Within 3 days every candy clerk and grocery manager and night captain in 1400 stores knew that if they ordered fruit and nut they would get milk chocolate, so they stopped ordering it. My boss, my boss’ boss and my boss’ boss’ boss tried to contact a human at the warehouse with the authority to move the miss-slotted pallet, all to no avail. Our yuppie customers must go elsewhere to the Lindt truffle shop. We thought that eventually the milk chocolate would be erroneously shipped out, and then a fruit and nut pallet would be correctly slotted and we could carry it again. No, after orders from outlets dried up, the fruit and nut bar was discontinued for posting poor sales!

Sliced Pickled Beets have been a standard item on food market shelves for decades. The young college grads who were tapped to streamline the product selection, and had seemingly grown up eating nothing but fast food, and had never worked in a supermarket, were tasked with getting rid of redundant items. I agree. Why do we need to clog our warehouse with 3 brands of sliced pickled beets, canned in the same jar, packed in the same facility and wrapped with a different label?

The bestselling sliced pickled beet was retained and the others cut. Unfortunately the best seller was the Greenwood glazed pickled beet, which 40% of beet eaters will not touch as it is submerged in a thick pasty glaze. For 3 years I worked at that company in which all of the zoot suited thugs that managed the outlets were unable to find a human down in Richmond who could be impressed upon to reinstate an actual food category in their warehouse—and we were not authorized to buy from another supplier because the warehouse owned us. Finally, fed up that he could not buy pickled beets at his store, one of the grocery managers made up a recipe card, and displayed bottled vinegar, sugar, and canned beets together encouraging people to make their own.

I had 11 product stories in mind but chose these two as illustrations that information systems fail extensively on contact with the idiot human element. I thought though, that if I were at the top of one of these companies I could fix such things through initiative, through a much better version of that grocery manager’s recipe card and display. Keep in mind that every time a retailer does not carry that item a customer wants there is a guaranteed money bleed that will be licked up by the competitor. And if it gets to two or three items per a customer the customer does not return.

On becoming the General Manager at Ghetto Grocer Inc., working for a lesbian sister and a gay older brother, Andy, the CEO who wanted to blow me so badly that his mouth dropped open into an O every time he looked at me, I decided that such slotting issues for which no person or person-to-person network is in place to address at retail or wholesaler level would be my priority. After setting up a cross-docking purchasing arrangement with our primary wholesaler something went wrong [my order of paper towels sitting on a dock in Jersey for 2 weeks] and I called the president of the wholesaler and got it fixed.

Andy, fighting the impulse to drop to his knees before his desk and beg me, instead crossed his legs and simpered as he sulkily reprimanded me for having direct contact with outsiders above my level, at his CEO level. I reasoned with him that since he could not roll out of bed in time to take care of such things it made sense for me to do it. Then I saw it, the feminized abandonment issue in his eyes, the fear that another CEO with more to offer would offer me a job, and I would go.

Speaking to people in other lines of work, and particularly in corporate and government and military jobs you, as have I, will come across countless examples of human gate keepers doing everything they can to keep all other humans below them out of the information loop that would enable more efficient operation. I suspect that in the future, the evil Andy’s of the world [a dude who used to masturbate at his desk after firing employees] will devolve to ever lower levels of adaptability and efficiency as they lean on information systems. And further, that the youngest of adults will be by definition more able to navigate the web of lies that binds us then the undead creatures these webs were woven to serve.

1500 years ago the last boxers of the ancient world gathered to fight in secret, and consecrated a plaque to memorialize their blasphemous actions as athletes in opposition to the androphobic strictures of the Universal Christian Church. They were heretics hunted by the killers of the state religion, who found a way, even in secret, to be men in a militantly emasculating world and leave a record of it for us. To the north though there remained unbent men, already kicking in the doors of this rotting empire; barbarian tribesmen who could not yet conceive of placing their balls on the altar of some trinket-bought god.

There is always a chance to rise, so long as men are men.