Conspectus

With baby Dimitri; August 21, 2013

My name is Mike and this is my blog. Well, it’s one of my blogs, anyway. For almost 20 years, I held a full-time job some significant events in my life required me to take a protracted sabbatical and care for my new baby boy and my elderly father in law. As a professional, I’ve worked as an advocate and a teacher. One of the best moments in my life was when I was publically honored by a local domestic violence advocacy organization in 2006 for my work with victims of stalking and abuse.

I write extensively, focusing on a rather odd combination of topics: political economy and professional wrestling. I’ve written articles for a Farsi-language newspaper, a British journal of economics and some of the biggest wrestling magazines in the world. I write here and there for a lot of different websites and I’ve also worked for many years on a scholarly website that was once hailed by Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman as “the best site for…many economics classics.”

This site serves mainly as a chronicle of my exploits as a stay-at-home dad. My blog at gammacloud.org features my writings on a host of other subjects. 

For more about the story of this blog, read the very first post, “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place.”

— Mike Bessler, November 2013

The name "Society of the Seasons" is inspired by French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) who led a number of organizations aimed at radical social and economic change, including Société des Saisons.

The banner at the top of this page features a portion of Francois Xavier Fabre's early 19th Century painting Oedipus and the Sphinx. According to legend, The Sphinx presented Oedipus with a riddle when they met at Thebes: "What is that which in the morning goeth upon four feet; upon two feet in the afternoon; and in the evening upon three?" The most famous interpretation of this riddle holds that the answer is man; first as a child, then as an adult and finally in old age (with the assistance of a cane).