Mike Mountain

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ― John Milton, Paradise Lost I am going to direct this at a hypothetical disenchanted suburbanite in the first-person, so try not to take it personally if it does not describe you, and even if it does, learn from it. Or bitch in the comments and I will be happy to laugh at or ignore you until I find it necessary to block you. No, your suburban home is not a dystopia. You are a lazy crybaby attempting to make excuses for your personal failings. You are not oppressed by pleasant and clean neighborhoods with large houses lined with seasonally blooming flowers, or modern conveniences like plumbing and central air. You are not held back by urban development, zoning, or so-called "food deserts." There is no such thing as a food desert. You are just a whinging loser who doesn't have the capacity to understand how good you actually have it from the constant pampering you have experienced since...

The SSH (Social Sexual Hierarchy) does a great job of describing oft overlooked classes of sexual man, but so much nuance is lost in its widely generalized categories. Here I have drilled down to do justice to the in-betweens.   Deltoid Male: Very muscular V-shaped Delta Ligma Male: A gay Sigma Mecha Gamma: ChatGPT when you ask it to say a racial slur against anyone but white people Glamma: A gay Gamma Stigma: A Sigma with Tourette Syndrome Ortega: A Mexican Omega Alfalpha: Natural leader of The Little Rascals Smelta: A Delta engaged in smelt conservation on the Mississippi delta

I share and play a fair amount of music, and for that reason it bears repeating that a beauteous harmony is neither a substitution for due diligence and thorough investigation, nor an excuse to forgo one's defensive spiritual alertness. I wish not to be party to some of the deviousness that many talented musicians, who I admire for narrowly defined skills, engage in. A melody should never be confused for an irreproachable beacon guiding toward safe harbor and, in our day of so much cruelty and deceit, be met wisely with suspicion. Music is an emotionally manipulative tool often used to sow confusion and carry lies past the reasonable mind and directly to the naive heart. In the hands of the aberrant, it is a sweet and intoxicating wine washing the astringent tinge of hemlock past the guarded lips of the innocent and into the soft pregnable belly. Odysseus tied to the galley's mast to resist the siren's ungodly sweet song - Original AI art using MidJourney Music is a gift fr...