This Thanksgiving I’m pretty thankful. I’m thankful that people like you are reading this. I’m even more thankful when you click on the Google ads, the donate button in the upper right, or click through and buy something on Amazon, but there’s reward in just knowing that after people read the tripe I serve up, they actually come back for more. I’m thankful for all the friends that I’m lucky to have, I’m thankful for the fact that even during the tough financial times many of us have had recently, I for one have never once worried that I would actually go hungry, because I live in such an insanely prosperous country. Which reminds me that I’m thankful that people seem to be keeping a level head in the face of relatively bad times; although I think we could actually use a little civil unrest, there’s no need to get in a tizzy over a few endless wars and some relative poverty now, is there? Both things seem to be a part of the human condition. For the record, I think I’ve already had my *worst Thanksgivings. My worst was probably the year I got burglarized on Thanksgiving eve, and lost almost $10,000 worth of uninsured musical equipment. I called it “Thankstaking” for a couple of years after that. The second worst was when a former friend of mine in LA swore up and down that she knew that somewhere in LA, a decent place to eat would be open on Thanksgiving. I trusted her, and a rather testosterone-driven male friend of mine flew in from Las Vegas to join us for what we thought would be a sort of spontaneous and casual holiday dinner. Well, my friend was waaaaaaay wrong. After 3 or 4 hours of phone calls and driving around, we ended up waiting 45 minutes for a table at Denny’s. If I was thankful for anything that year, I was just thankful my guy friend didn’t eat *us before we found actual food. This year I’m having rack of lamb with a new friend, and chilling a little bit. I have no complaints. How about you? What was your best or worst Thanksgiving?

They say that amongst the basic offences that one might commit when managing a blog, referencing your own blog borders on felonious. The words you’re reading are not a violation of this principle; for one thing, this site is a magazine-style link aggregator with commentary, not a blog. And for another thing, this content is being placed in the Editorial & Opinion section, which in a way actually requires that it be self-referential. The fact is, for the first time since June 11, 2008, I didn’t have anything I felt like writing about today. This reminded me of the last time this happened, which was back in 2005. At the time, I was thankful for The Nonist’s What Everyone Should Know About Blog Depression. Which I’m sharing as a public service today, since if anyone is in fact reading this, they almost certainly have a blog or web site or as many as 137 Twitter followers, and may find some solace themselves. It has great advice like “IF THE SIMPLE ACT OF READING A MAGAZINE FILLS YOU WITH A DEEP SENSE OF DISQUIET, IF YOU BREAK OUT IN HIVES, OR FIND YOURSELF INEXPLICABLY WEEPING, IT MAY BE CONTENT ANXIETY, IN WHICH YOU SUBCONSCIOUSLY EQUATE EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION AS A POTENTIAL PIECE OF BLOG CONTENT“. And who hasn’t experienced that? I especially like that I put that whole excerpt in caps. It gave it a lot more oomph, don’t you think? Another powerful insight: “Meta-bloggers may experience particularly severe blog depression when they realize everyone is continually posting the same crap, on every other meta-blog, over and over and over. The realization that meta-content is never ‘owned’ can be painful“. Indeed. (more…)

It’s interesting that there’s an Editorial & Opinion section on Dissociated Press; there certainly has never been an editor around here, and the content of the site itself is rife with opinion. The fact is, the site’s creator and only contributor wanted a place to engage in uncategorized ranting, and creating this section seemed like a lot more fun than commenting on the Huffington Post. Did you notice the lack of link in those two words? That’s because the Huffington Post sucks. There’s an opinion for you.

The Original Plan
I originally created Dissociated Press with the intention of building blog-like content for six months, and then slowly evolving the site into more of a magazine-style format, still with daily bite-size content, but also featuring longer, in-depth articles. At the six month point I had intended to redesign the site (it’s currently still running on a sloppily-created front-end for WordPress), and begin aggressively promoting it, as well as optimizing for search engines. The current design is VERY search-engine unfriendly for the standard reasons that WordPress, by default, sucks for SEO. Although I’ve managed to update the site daily since June 11, 2008 and build a following of a few thousand very regular visitors (Thank you by the way! Most of you I only know by your IP address, but I appreciate your interest!), those are hardly the kinds of numbers that make a site profitable, which was almost exactly 50% of my interest in creating a site like this.

If You Want To Make God Laugh…
….as they say, tell him your plans. As luck would have it, at exactly the six-month point arrived, so did a heap of new work, and shortly after, a considerably reduced heap of work. This has been a volatile economy for everyone, but especially self-employed people like myself. It’s one thing to lose a steady job, and another thing altogether to secure or lose several at a time, which is what can happen when the employers are jumpy, anxious clients in troubled economic times. The net result of all of this is that I find myself at the one-year point in a bit of a quandary, the point that Seth Godin would call The Dip. Is it time to push ahead, or quit while the quitting’s good? For me, the answer is simple. I don’t give up. I just don’t. But I could use some help.

I Don’t Want Your Money….
Although I’ve decided I need help to make the site profitable, there’s not a great business model here for seeking investors. The simple way to guarantee revenue from a site like this is to generate enough traffic and place enough ads that when all is said and done, you’ve simply replicated an annoying site like the Huffington Post, with 75% of the screen real estate devoted to ads, excruciating page load times, and content that ultimately feels like you’re watching the bleeding-heart liberal version of Fox News.

….But I Wouldn’t Mind Some Of It
That all being said, I don’t mind donations, especially birthday fund donations. Your money will be well-spent on either hosting or the main fuel required to run the site, a carefully balanced diet of chocolate, coffee, and actual food. In lean times, the site seems to run just fine on coffee alone. So consider a donation:

So What Do I Really Want?
I want help. If you’re a writer or business-minded person who enjoys the web and social networking, lets talk. I’d be especially happy to hook up with someone who likes to write about film & television or politics, or someone who would like to develop the business and marketing side of things so I could focus more on design and content. Or someone who can work on design and share the content load so I could exclusively focus on marketing and revenue generation. So let me reiterate in bulleted form what I’m looking for:

Are You….

• A writer who’d like to write about movies or politics?
• A business person who’d like to help develop a web site?
• A WordPress specialist who’d like to collaborate?
• An kind, attractive, female lawyer who wants to have kids and a work at home househusband?

Drop a line if you have some interest.

Hey Rabid Atheist!

I’m glad that in the infinite wisdom possessed by your otherwise rather finite, rational mind, you’ve managed to establish - in a universe that’s estimated to be 13.7 billion years old and 550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across - the absolute non-existence of a grand awareness that one might try to give a name, if even a simple one, like “god”. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I am however, a little unsettled by your unerring certainty, given the fact that you’re probably attempting to stake your claim on scientific grounds, and given that since just a few decades before man’s first powered flight about a hundred years ago, science has gone through at least two profound paradigm shifts, literally inverting many aspects of scientific understanding. But keep at it. Man’s reasoning has always served us well, hasn’t it? Okay. I confess I think you’re a numb-nut for being so unaware of what your little human mind is incapable of comprehending, but more power to you. It is indeed a little scary to try and think about things that exist beyond thought.

Hey Religious Zealot!

I’m glad you attend your place of worship as often as possible. Every day that you’re there is one less day that you’re out in the world fomenting hate while proclaiming your compassionate nature and generally telling the rest of us how to live based on your bizarre interpretation of the 2,000 year old documents you use to justify your behavior. By the way, if you’re one of those inflamed nutcases that thinks they have the inside scoop on the official date for the end of the world, I’d recommend you take a moment to talk to the Atheist mentioned above. They probably have some solid reference materials to bring you up to speed. I mean, you’re not exactly breaking new ground on that one; in fact you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a list of your predecessors. Ah hell. I’ll even help you. Here’s a list of 63 of them, spanning almost 2,000 years.

And What About Me?

Clearly, I embrace the fruits of science, technology, and rational thought; without them, I wouldn’t be able to type these little thoughts into a computer and transmit them over the Internet so that your computer can reassemble the electrons into text that is at least as coherent as I was able to make it at the time that I typed it. However, it’s this very fascination with the knowledge that science has opened our eyes to that helps me conclude that there may be something more than what we understand through this very system of perception. In fact, it’s my awareness of the amazing balance of chaos and apparent order revealed by science, combined with many personal synchronistic and numinous events that leaves me with a profound feeling that there is a greater awareness surrounding me, something that my limited tactile, visual, olfactory and auditory perception and limited neural activity and reasoning may never be able to process into something that can be expressed as a scientific concept, or oddly - for the same reason - a spiritual belief that I will try to foist off on someone else as the definitive answer to the meaning and purpose of life. I can sense it though, this awareness. I can feel it in moments of connectedness with nature, people, or even technology. Without it, my life would have almost no meaning, and I feel badly for those who find no mystery in existence, regardless of whether they got there through closed-minded rationality, or closed-minded faith.

I’d love to hear the point of view of anyone who proclaims complete confidence in either their faith, or their rationality. Both extremes leave me befuddled.

I ran across the opinion piece Is Rand Relevant? yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, expecting something like an exploration of the question. Instead I got an Ayn Rand Institute marketing piece written by their shill, Yaron Brook (who’s also president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute). At the end of the Journal piece, there’s an invitation to “Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum”. They then offer the opportunity to comment, letting you know that your comment will be reviewed by WSJ editors. Frankly, one may as well send a physical letter, given such an option. Combined with last week’s lambasting of Jim Kramer on the Daily Show, I got a fresh reminder of why corporate media is dying a slow death right now; more than ever it has become a marketing tool for special interests, and at a time when we have more access than ever to diverse sources of information.  A year or two ago, I would’ve wanted to rant; now it just seems par for the course…