Not with a bang…

This will be the final post for Positively Unemployed.

For professional reasons, I feel that maintaining this blog, with its focus on the Elderly Menace and the University of Chicago alumni association (among other topics), will be at odds with my career and current outlook.

A little bit of history for those joining us late:

The year was 2005, and I was a new transplant to the “state” of Minnesota. I was recently engaged to my now-wife, and I was looking for a job because my company was undergoing budget cuts. I called up the Minneapolis representative of the University of Chicago alumni association in the hope of getting some job leads or advice. Instead, I was told, and I quote:

“Good luck.”

Maybe it was surprisingly cold that night, or the newspaper’s comic strips were particularly lame that day. But I got angry. And this blog was born. To add to the topics at which I was going to aim my righteous fury, I started pointing out news stories in which old people did bad things. I was tired of the Greatest Generation narrative surrounding anybody over the age of 65. So, the Elderly Menace came into my crosshairs.

So it went for a while, occasionally veering off-topic and picking up new pet peeves. But mainly, Positively Unemployed was a voice in the wilderness, a point of view Tom Brokaw wasn’t going to listen to, and one that wouldn’t get printed in the letters to the editor section of your local fishwrapper.

But, like Bob Dylan says, things have changed.

For one thing, I am now a full time employee with a steady job and a career track. I am no longer Positively Unemployed. I have an MBA, and as Mrs. Machine tells me, I kept my soul.

Second, I feel this blog has served its purpose. In looking back, we can take pride in some achievements that occurred here.

1. This blog helped defeat Fred Thompson and John McCain, two old people who would have done the republic great harm.
2. We were featured in Minnesota Monthly magazine for our petition asking that Minnesota have its statehood revoked. In fact, Senator Al Franken is more of a statement on Minnesota’s zaniness than anything I could ever imagine.
3. We drove Giant Van Lines out of business, and Gabriel Suissa has not been heard of for a long, long time.

Most importantly, I think that the country has changed for the better these past three years. This country is still in economic turmoil, but for those of us who weren’t born into trust funds, our economy has always looked bleak. For us, the fact that we have a President who can speak to us as adults and who does not come from the moneyed aristocracy is enough. It means that this country hasn’t been totally bought and paid for yet. And we can still fight. Yes, we can.

So, I bid this part of my internet life farewell. It’s been fun, and I’ve had a good time interacting with this site’s four regular readers. Some of my favorite comments from you are listed below:

"to sum it up all i can say is you have the mentality of a democrat and it's people like you that have no morals - good luck buying a gun to defend yourself against the middle easters."

"Let me guess - you are certainly less than 30 and may well be less than 20. Believe me it shows."

"I like watching the FAA and NATCA fight. They're like a fat, old, drunk, homeless married couple."

"As to the prom for seniors, it's my only chance to finally get to go to the prom. Nobody asked me the first time around. Now that I'm older and wiser and no longer dependent on an allowance, I'm going to hire myself a dude-licious escort. "

And my personal favorite:

I congratulate all Soon Christmas
Here some sites about the Christmases, a lot of interesting here

And so it ends. But know that I have not quite laid down my sword. To borrow the words of Tom Joad:

Wherever there's a fight so young people can get a decent job, I'll be there. Wherever there's an elderly person beatin' up a child with a cane, I'll be there. I'll be in the way Minnesotans get laughed at - I'll be in the way a smart young punk ridicules how bad comic strips have been. An' when the comic strips are actually funny, and my friends are actually are proud to be graduates of the University of Chicago - I'll be there, too.

Have a good day.

Frankie Machine

Twitter Update

I changed my Twitter location to Tehran, Iran, to confound the Iranian authorities searching for bloggers. Details here.

Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.

It's the least I can do. Power to the people.

Reminisce-ing.

Ah, Reminisce Magazine, where have you been all these years?

I gave my old skates to my brother. He promptly got a wooden apple crate from the grocer, nailed a few pieces of wood to it and made a scooter using the old skates for the wheels. As a finishing touch, he nailed two tin cans to the front of the scooter for “headlights” and went rattling down the street on this noisy vehicle.

Although the scooter was supposed to be off-limits to me, I’d sneak it out of the backyard when my brother wasn’t home and join the other kids, mostly boys, in the fleet of apple-crate scooters racing up and down the neighborhood streets.

The Elderly Menace tells stories like this, then expects us to listen. Apple-crate scooters....zzzzz. The most telling part of this story is that the scooter was supposed to be "off-limits" to her. Most normal children would take a look at a contraption like that, with its tin can headlights, and soil themselves from laughing too much. Not the author. She had to be parentally forbidden from pushing it up and down the street. And these were what are now known as "the good old days." Do those sound like good times to you?