If you’ve spent any time on this site at all, you know what day it is.
You know what slathered delight used to sit on that paper plate that homesteads the real estate between the keyboard and the monitor.
You know what kind of music is feeding my cerumen repositories while I prompt A.I. for real words that don’t get enough play in the zeitgeist.
You know that the typos, malaprops, and other grammatical assaults appearing on TharpSter.Org come from one of the following events:
- I did it on porpoise.
- I’m careless with my proofreading.
- Tonka, the nine month old Weimaraner with hints of Silver Lab keeps nudging my typing hand in his demands for attention.
There’s contributory negligence among all three of those events.
For those of you who haven’t wasted enough time on the internet ensconced in my continued endeavors to produce verbal brilliance, I’ll bring you up to speed.
There comes a time in all of our lives when we spell out what we’re all about.
The previous post that occupied this space was written a few years ago in the lobby of a hotel. A caravan of geriatric conventioneers who were in the lobby at the time earned a mention or two in an essay that was supposed to go into the “About Me” section of this website.
The conventioneers have moved along and I’m closer to being one of them. As such, it’s time for me to change the “About Me” section to something about me.
TharpSterism is a nearly-sane operating system for navigating modern nonsense with humor, pattern-recognition, and a refusal to be persuaded by trends, tribes, or talking points.
The components of that operating system include:
- A Gen X sensibility fortified by drinking from garden hoses and playing outside until the streetlights came on.
- Running bits about walking the dog, eating Everything bagels, and dissecting those exact instants when hesitation ends and action or decision becomes mandatory.
- An intolerance for groupthink—especially the kind propped up by feelings instead of facts.
- A precise deployment of vernacular, metaphors, and mockery calibrated to puncture nonsense at the molecular level.
Writing is my oldest hobby.
I’ve been producing content for this website since 2009, and in recent years I’ve published a few books.
If you haven’t read my books, please do.
They’re quite good.
Links for obtaining them can be found just to the right of this post.
Out in the real world, I’m a business analyst in the financial services industry. I know SQL, and I have no interest in doing arts and crafts during team meetings. Beyond that, I manage the digital services arm of the empire that is TharpSter.Org. When I’m not planted in front of a computer enforcing the “two spaces after every period” covenant, I’m either at the gym, the range, the dog park, or out in the wild with my wife of thirty‑somethin’ years.
I’ve got a few kids, a daughter-in-law, a grandson, a few nieces, and a mess of nephews. I don’t know that any of them respect two spaces after every period, but they might when the read the will.
That’s TharpSterism.
Not a movement. Not a brand. Not a lifestyle.
Just a guy with a keyboard, a dog, a bagel, and a stubborn belief that clarity and humor still matter.
Nearly sane. Nearly all the time.