Running out of Material

June 10, 2013

In 1997, when I started writing Rat’s Eye Rants, I was 49 and pissed off. I couldn’t have imagined ever running out of material to write about. For some reason, I thought there might be others as pissed off as me who’d want to hear my thoughts and who might add their own to make the Rat’s Eye into a discussion site. Never happened, which mostly gave me some painful insight into how unwanted, unneeded, and dysfunctional my view on modern life was. Weirdly, my same outlook on motorcycling turned into a well-read column in a magazine, Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, and a million-plus-hits blog, Geezerwithagrudge.com.

Early in the first decade of this century, my Rat’s Eye output dwindled. When I first started writing the Rat’s Eye, I was working for one of the worst managed companies I’d ever experienced (and I’ve experienced some seriously terrible management). I had the thought that there was almost as much to learn from bad management as good. The first few years of the Rat’s Eye were all about mismanagement because I had a bit of misplaced faith that capitalism and business were something less than pure evil. After five years with Telectronics and five years with Guidant, my faith in capitalism, industry, business, and humanity took a turn for the worse. Since then, when I hear children and other uneducated people babble about the terrors of  “overregulation” and big government, I assume I’m listening to the jabbering of an idiot and tune out. Shit and cream both rise to the top and shit is, apparently, far lighter than cream in a corporate environment. Worse, the structure of most corporations quickly turns cream to shit.

Could be I’m wrong. Maybe toward the end of 2016 I might still be pissed off and full of ideas. I doubt it.