Gadfly?
We all need to find our place in society – maybe not the most comfortable place, the most popular, but a place where we can live and breathe. That place for me is as a gadfly.
I’m told I’d be happier if I just left things alone, if I just lived in peace and harmony with others.
I really do try but I find no peace and happiness in a status quo comprised of untruths, nonsensical arbitrary societal rules, injustices. So, I challenge the status quo, sometimes by poking fun, sometimes by poking in a more serious and determined way. During my years of full-time employment engaging in this pursuit pissed off my coworkers and my chain of command. I had enough cheese on my cracker to know that you can’t deliver too many doses of irritating truth and logic with impunity to people committed to amassing maximum amounts of power and money. Not willing to risk landing on my ass at an age and in a market that would make it next to impossible to find a new job and thus living hand to mouth, I decided to divert mouth to hand – in other words, to write down at least some of the words that, finding egress from my mouth, would wreak just way too much havoc. And thus, Gadfly Journal was born.
Now that I’m self-employed, poking at unpalatable goings-on occasionally loses me a client but it doesn’t get me off-boarded, let go, eliminated, severed, terminated, downsized, reorganized, thinned (I wish). Oh wait – don’t all those mean FIRED? See what I mean? That kind of purposeful, bullying, dishonest newspeak is one example of what I fight against. Don’t get me wrong – real niceness is real nice but I have an unshakable commitment to pick away at fake niceness, fake peace and love, and expose the clandestine dirty dealings that inevitably lurk beneath.
I don’t delude myself that gadfly pursuits endear me to a large number of my co-inhabitants of this little Earthly marble or that I can make a dent in the pervasive love affair with sweeping truth, justice, and logic under the nearest rug. But you see I have no choice. The gadfly path is my destiny. Since I’m puny I’ll hide behind someone not at all puny. Elie Wiesel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” – Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, the Accident.
This is a rant site and everything is fair game, even work, even though I love my work. More professional treatment of professional topics can be found at https://tagracadabra.com. And if you’re interested in the safe and competent use of firearms and of other methods to maximize personal safety, check out https://sharpshooterinstitute.com.
That being said, I did add a gadfly-free page devoted to ramblings about life in our new home in the forest amid the footprints and feathers of the beings that inhabit this clearing in the woods. How gadfly-free it remains remains to be seen but its purpose is to tell stories about forest life that may not be as fascinating as whining but are hopefully not painfully banal.
Comment DOs and DONTs
If you consider yourself too nice to continue affiliation with this blog, we’ll miss you, but please consider that you may be blinded by the misunderstanding under which the pathologically nice seem to labor ~ that truth is inherently nasty and negative. Truth is not negative or positive or good or bad it’s just, well, the truth. Personally I find it not depressing but refreshing, renewing. And sometimes unintelligent efforts to mask the truth are just downright funny.
That being said, if you want to dump nasty stuff targeted at a particular person or product or business, or you’re in search of funky socializing, move along, nothing to see here. (A more robust and even more boring legal sermonette can be viewed on the Terms of Use page. It’s not my fault – my lawyer makes me post it.)
Accessibility
I designed this website to be fully accessible. Aside from behind the scenes accessibility features there are 2 accessibility options located in the black area to the far right of the right sidebar: toggle high contrast, toggle font size. Mouseover reveals their labels. If you have low vision I encourage you to use a proper screen magnifier such as ZoomText or Magic, or on a MAC its built-in magnifier. On a MAC you can also press Command + to increase font size. I bailed from the Windows environment years ago so I don’t remember its accessibility shortcuts and the last time I checked its built-in accessibility options were decidedly anemic. If you’re a screenreader user and find accessibility issues here, please let me know so I can fix them forthwith (which means I call the hosting company and whine about my inadequate web development skills, a technique that sometimes nets me more substantive tech support than is otherwise available). I’m not a guru of VoiceOver and WindowEyes but I’m pretty adept at using Jaws.
Whew, finally the end of this post – almost
(Other too-long posts can be viewed on other pages.)
So whether you’re a nice gadfly or a disgruntled one or not a gadfly at all, drop in, stay awhile, contribute, or just read – come as you are and have some fun with me.
Gadfly
…like on a large and well-bred horse, by its size and laziness both needing arousing by the sting of a gadfly…Socrates