When I first started my own consulting business over 10 years ago, I fielded calls from all over the place. Mostly from the US, but also the UK, Europe, Japan, India, South Korea, South America and even China. My personal experience is that US clients were always the most difficult. American entrepreneurs, in particular, were most likely to want something for nothing, lie freely or simply ignore every invoice (I kept a deadbeat list). Conversely, if someone took the time to contact me from abroad, they usually had a clearer idea of what they wanted, when they wanted it and why they identified me as the person who could help them. AND THEY ALWAYS PAID ME ACCORDING TO THE TERMS OF OUR AGREEMENT.

Simple professionalism used to be something I took for granted. “Sign the contract, do the thing, pay the bill.” Not so much anymore and it just keeps getting worse. Our country is being led by the same kind of trolls that refuse to honor agreements, deny responsibility for anything and rely on obfuscation and the miasma of the legal system to avoid accountability indefinitely. The result is entirely predictable: no progress is made. On anything. Ever. But it now seems to be on a much, much broader scale. They simply squeeze the juice from whatever fruit falls from the tree as they cut it down and call it accretive.

I’m not the greatest research mind. Not even in my own field. But, I do believe my life’s work has value and I was willing to continue making whatever contribution I could for what remained of my mortal lucidity. But it’s just not fucking worth it. From my perspective, we have entered the Dark Ages. There are no more adults in the room and I am aghast at the rapidity and alacrity of capitulation to these obvious losers.

The list goes on, of course. We just started a new war in the Middle East allied with the Israelis and there’s no end in sight and even fewer ways to rein-in this fascist oligarchy. To use the analogy of a wildfire, this conflagration is less than 10% contained…and the wind is blowing…and it’s tinder-dry…and we’re all downwind.

I have watched things in the US grow progressively bleaker. I’ve watched the carefully constructed triumvirate government laid out in the US Constitution become a theoretical concept. Referred to academically. Ignored in practice. And yet, I resist succumbing to the (perhaps inevitable) conclusion that all is lost even though I am thoroughly convinced that the path back to a country that operates according to established rules of law that apply to everyone is decades long (and I do not expect I’ll be here to see it.) This is not how I expected the remainder of my life to play out.

Today is my father’s birthday and I miss him terribly. But I’m glad he died before my idiot compatriots re-elected this fucking shit show. My dad was a profoundly miserable individual, but in a sympathetic way. He was lost in this world without my mother and he was already a ghost in his last few years without her. He knew he would never have achieved anything without her support and he told me more than once that he’d lived too long. I am not like my father, but I understood him. I saw the fatigue. The attrition. The frustration of despair (“I’m just so goddamned sad!”). And at last…the relief when he knew he could finally disappear in peace. But he was also grateful that we loved him enough to spend our lives with him for as long as he lasted—unconditionally. That’s the only memory that really matters.

What does this have to do with my consulting business? Well, taking care of my mother until her death, my father through COVID and ultimately, his death and my subsequent car accident pretty much killed my interest in fostering a business.