Hello, friends.
This past week was overall good. Busy, as usual. I feel like my depression/anxiety has been having a field day because I feel pretty burned out at work. It’s strange to say it was a good week but then go on to say I’m feeling burned-out as a teacher. The two can co-exist. Working with the students has been pretty good but the behind-the-scenes is taking its toll. Me and everyone else in education.
Anyway, let’s get into this week’s newsletter and have a talk, you and me.
Welcome to the 151st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and how men’s tantrums are ruining everything. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
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I added about 2,400 words to Project: Moons this week and think I rounded the corner toward the climax. There’s still plenty of story left but I feel like it’s heading in a certain direction. This is good.
I managed to do a little bit of work on Project: Amusement Park, too, though I seem to be working on this mostly on weekends for the time being.
I had Friday off this week and worked on some new ads because of some news I got.
Publishers Weekly gave The Monster in the Closet a pretty good review! I’m excited by this. About two or three weeks ago, one of the publishers reached out and told me that PW was “considering” doing a review, which was kinda big for me since they’d rejected Echoes on the Pond straightaway. Now it’s out and it’s good!
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I have my share of moments when I behave badly. I don’t mean to but sometimes my natural holiness (as in ass-) supersedes my own instincts to not be an asshole. And, yes, I have had my share of tantrums as an adult, but I don’t feel as though it’s a regular occurrence for me. I feel like my weaknesses tend to fall in other directions. I’m sure anyone who knows me who reads this will let me know if I’m wrong, but I feel like that’s an honest, fair self-assessment. I can be high-maintenance, impatient, messy, obsessive, and angry. I swear a lot. I’m outing myself on this because I’m about to throw stones and I’m trying to fortify my house so it’s not all glass. I am sick of mantrums ruining things.
Mantrums are tantrums from grown men. I thought I cleverly coined the term last night but a Google search this morning rectified that delusion. Add a little narcissistic to my faults list. I’m okay with not having actually coined the term and likely having read it in my wanderings online because I’m not that fond of cutesy words like that, but it’s the best thing I can use to describe what’s been happening for the last decade or so.
Man having tantrums because things didn’t go their way is nothing new. The American Revolution, one could argue, is a result of that. The thing is, in the last ten or so years, the access to the outside world had gone up about 1,000,000,000% (add lack of math skills to my faults list) and we see so much of this behavior and it’s fucking things up for everyone.
Right now you’re probably thinking that I’m talking about the current political situation in the United States (add assuming I know what others are thinking to my Faults List) and I am, in part. How could I not be? When the 🍊💩🤡 has to be given a pretend “Peace Prize” because the turd can’t win what he really wants, one from the Nobel Committee like a true President has. He takes his naps at cabinet meetings, poops his pants, and had tantrums on the daily for everything that doesn’t match his view. He’s also like those old people in the 1970s who put labels on everything, you know the ones. Plastic labels (red, blue, or black) with the raised white letters. For this manbaby, he puts his name on everything. His staff is also filled with men who tantrum over everything. It’s weakened the United States in the eyes of the world and has made the country a much more dangerous place.
On a more personal level, I have to work with some men who have tantrums on the reg. It’s annoying because so much good could happen if they stopped throwing tantrums every time something didn’t go their way. There’s this feeling of entitlement they have that makes everyone around them wrong. When they don’t like what they hear, they either go quiet and act like a wise man, or they go full toddler and have a hissy-fit. It makes working uncomfortable.
In both these cases, like the toddler who freaks the fuck out at the store when Mom or Dad say, “No, you can’t have that toy today,” these people always land on their feet. They become presidents, leaders, and popular to higher-ups and the outside. Well, of course they do! They end up with their faces mugging up in every picture of anything good that happens. They have nothing else in their lives except fighting these battles against anyone who doesn’t think like them due to their heightened sense of selves.
Look, friends, I have an ego. I’m a guy who writes books, stories, and newsletters and expect that others may want to read them. I draw and am creative because I think my point-of-view and what I have to say are worth being seen and heard. I have a Patreon, fer chrissakes, but even I know there’s a limit. Things won’t—and can’t—always go my way. I don’t think I’d want things to always go my way because I am sometimes wrong.
I’m tired—so, so bloody tired—of being held hostage due to grown men who can’t allow that there are other ways of doing things than theirs, that there are other beliefs than theirs, that there are other people who know shit and can contribute that aren’t them. The men who don’t/won’t/can’t understand tend to ruin everything they touch, intentionally or not. And then, all too often, are allowed to do it again.
I guess history is rarely kind to the memory of those people. There’s some solace in that, I suppose, unfortunately no one they hurt gets to really see it.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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