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Ayn Rand is Your Friend But She Won’t Kiss You No Matter How Much You Beg

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Fundamentally, I agree with Ayn Rand. I take care of me, and you take care of you, and we can come together as equals. I’m not a caretaker kind of guy. No, seriously. My wife was sick this one time, and she had passed out trying to get to the hospital, and I stepped over her inert body to get to work. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but almost.

I had breakfast with an Ayn Rand fan, and he had a VERY interesting take on our girl, Ayn. Yes, she believes in selfishness, but it’s a selfishness that allows us to exist in the world. I take care of me, you take care of you, and we come together as equals. Yeah, I already said that. Feel like your reading Atlas Shrugged? It’s all in the archetypes and the repetition.

The Ayn Rand Fan, or ARF from here on out, made it clear that charity, like taking care of the mentally ill or those who simply can’t take care of themselves is common sense. What is the wickedest form of evil, according to the ARF, is when you coerce a capable human being into charity and take away their right to struggle and achieve. When you give charity to people who don’t need it for the sake of power. It’s like parenting.

If my daughter can make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I make it for her, I’m robbing her of her independence. And as my children get older, I need to let them work things out for themselves because Lord knows I am not going to be around forever, and this whole boomerang thing? Boomerang generation, as in your children go away, and then come back to live with the parents. Let me tell you, once my kids are in college, I’ll be somewhere in the Micronesia Archipelago, and if they can afford the plane tickets, they can visit. If not, good luck.

I loved Atlas Shrugged because it was a critique of mediocrity, and you know, most people want everyone to be mediocre. If we’re all mediocre and dull, then we won’t feel bad about ourselves. Like with eating. If you eat well around people who aren’t, it makes them feel bad. Ayn Rand is all about eating fruits and vegetables, to be the best, to give our best with passion.

I won’t get into the whole free market capitalism, less government, blah, blah, blah stuff. I don’t understand enough to have an opinion. But I will say this. Americans do better with less government. We really are by nature anti-government. Get out of our way and let us pursue our happiness, dammit. And those evil corporations have fed us for a century. If you love to farm, well, let’s get rid of the evil corporations. Better yet, create your own evil corporation and make millions and be that wicked 1 percent. Mwa, ha, ha.

Bottom line is this. After talking to the ARF, I felt hopeful, I felt impassioned, I felt good. I felt like the world was good and we can make a difference and things will work out. I felt empowered. And that is why I think people are drawn to Ayn Rand, because there is an optimism and an energy in the work. That we can make millions and fly planes and create new ideas and be powerful in the world.

Okay, this is my last blog post on Ayn Rand. You know why? Because I’ll be too busy starting up my own business selling my books and making millions of dollars and touching the lives of billions. And flying my own plane. Because in the end, I wanna be Dagny Taggert.

Kisses.

Hope for Us Losers – Tim Tebow, Advent, and Bitches, Man, Bitches

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At the heart of Christianity is not our souls, hell, heaven, the odd theology about when exactly the bread and wine become the body and blood. And Christianity has nothing to do with cannibalism. You haters.

At the heart of Christianity is the resurrection, a rebirth, life from death. I was dead, and I am reborn. I was blind, but now I see. That is the bottom line, but we humans have to muddy the water with questions like, “Did Jesus really come back to life?” We have been trained to seek scientific proof in realms where science is not the tool to use.

Oh, you bitches, I’m gonna kill you all with blogging about this stuff. You’ll be praying for me to go back to Ayn Rand. Which I have one more post to do. I won’t go into my full Karen Armstrong, A Case For God now, but all of this ties into that wonderful, life-changing book.

Remember in Dead Poet’s Society, where the textbook gives instructions on how to graph a poem? Using science on religion is exactly that. Stupid. So, did Jesus come back to life? It doesn’t matter. What matters is in the truth behind the facts. There is always hope, always good, always God in the world.

Which brings us to our newest messiah, Tim Tebow. Tebow changed the story of the Broncos this year, changed the narrative. We started the season with Kyle Orton, and it was just re-runs of last year. Yeah, this is the Happy Days where Richie nearly gets beaten up, but the Fonz saves him. Yeah, we’ve seen this before. Only as far as the Broncos went, this was where the bullies beat the hell out of Richie. Richie Cunnnigham. Of the Milwaukee Cunningham’s.

Our season was dead. We couldn’t win a game. We were cold with death. Death was everywhere. There were flies on the windscreen.

But lo, a voice is crying in the wilderness. Let despair not into your heart. There is hope. There is life. Roll away the stone. And Tim Tebow changed the story, and the Broncos started to win. And the narrative played itself out in game after game. We were losing. No way we could win. Down by ten points with two minutes to go? It’s impossible. We are dead. Turn off the T.V.

And yet, Tebow played out the resurrection and we won. In prol’ly ten years, we’ll have a T.V. movie about Tebow. Hope On Grass: The Tim Tebow Story. Um, prol’ly not that title, but you get my point.

In this season of Advent, in the Roman Catholic Church, it is a dark time, days are short, it’s cold, and yet, we celebrate the coming of the light, the hope of a new life, change when change seems impossible. In the darkness, in the cold, listen, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.

Which is just another way of saying, we don’t have to be scumbag losers forever. Even normal, troubled people like us can come from behind and win the big game. God bless you Tim Tebow, where ever you are.

Aaron Explodes Onto the World’s Stage – BOOM!

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On Tuesday, I had my very first speaking engagement as a published, well, pre-published author. Yeah, I spoke at Pikes Peak last year, but I didn’t really have a product. I was a writer. But this past Tuesday, I went as an author. Big whoop. The more I live, the more I see, most of life is very very, very undramatic, and very, very plain. Even if you are Paris frakkin’ Hilton, you still wake up, pee, eat, feel the wind on your face, simple, plain, unromantic. The trick is to enjoy the unromantic and relish the plain. The irony is, God made it all very fair. We all have the same challenge, to enjoy the plain.

So, my debut was plain, unromantic, and I am victorious. I loved every second of it. Even the awkward and uncomfortable seconds. But I think next time, I’m going Michael Scott it up. Bring in a boombox, pick an old song (I got the power!), and do some sort of stupid intro and babble a lot more. Make it shiny and sparkly and dramatic as hell.

But first, thanks to Terry Kroenung for giving me the chance. And I didn’t curse. I didn’t talk too much about God, and it went well in his classroom. Yeah, I had about three people listening to me, and I had to fight for stage time with the local toughs. Niwot toughs, yo. Ghetto. But the bad kid said I didn’t suck. So I have that going for me. I tried to get a big, huge, philosophical conversation going, but it didn’t quite work. I think I’m rusty, being back in the classroom. Back in the day, well, they’d still be blowin’ the debris off their quaking minds.

What really saved the day were the five girls who were in the Creative Writing club. They were so full of zip and wit and fire. One had self-published a book already, Infected. Another jammed out 51,000 words for NaNoWriMo. And they loved my opening sentence, but then, yeah, duh, because my opening page rocks.

In the end, what really struck me, is that I’m not so completely old and out of touch. I somtimes feel that the kids are of another generation, and I am an alien visitor writing stories for a people I don’t know. But people are people and kids are kids and teens are teens and it’s all about the same. Completely different, but inside, at the soul level, the same. Hard. Dramatic. Full of longing and wonder and despair and love and lust and hate. And that’s why I write Young Adult novels. Because in my novels, things are never simple, plain or unromantic. And next time, I’m gonna bring watermelon and props and drugs, lots of drugs. Kidding. No drugs. Just pop, pop music.

Okay maybe a few drugs. A little V. For Valkyr. Max Payne reference. Nevermind. Out of touch. That’s me.