Hey everyone!

An awful lot of people have been nice to me. I am inherently a complaining sort; a lot of people have shown me sympathy anyway. I’ve needed a lot of friendship and have always had a lot of friends. Ditto advice. Ditto helping me move every time I changed houses, for that matter. So in a very trite and hackneyed way I sort of owe a lot more than I’ve ever paid into the “goodwill towards humanity” pool.

This is just an experiment to see if I can pay some of that back. If you have something you want to talk about (or just want to talk!), post a comment here and I’ll respond. If you need some advice, I’ll try to give some. Fair warning: I’m religious, so some of the advice might derive from there even if it’s not explicitly religious. If you don’t feel like posting here, residentcontrarian@substack.com is always available to you as well.

Since this is a public kind of thing, this also calls for some rules:

1. The assumption here is that people making a post here are trying to talk to me, unless they say otherwise. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to reply to someone if you have something to add, but if they aren’t under any obligation to respond. If they explicitly state they don’t want non-me replies, that’s totally cool - respect that.

2. Understand there’s some advice I can’t give - if you are asking for a great way to get away with adultery or something, I’m not going to be able to help you a lot besides to say “don’t adultery, please”.

3. Nothing in here should ever really be linked to from anywhere else. While that’s a rule, understand this isn’t inherently that secure of an environment; if it’s something that absolutely must be kept under wraps, you should opt for emailing me.

These rules are subject to change suddenly and wildly at any given time, but I’ll announce it if they do.

I understand this part of my site might be a permanent ghost town. If that’s the case, no problem. But if you need me, I’m around.

-RC