More whiny excuses for not writing. You'd think I'd get tired of writing these things.

I should write more often, I suppose; I have plenty of time, in a sideways sort of fashion, and no real excuse not to write, so I should do it more than I do.  I can’t even use Dorothy Parker’s excuse for not writing: the pencil was broken. I have boxes of pencils in my desk and a new pencil sharpener (a manual) that I like very much, so the breaking of a pencil is a non-issue for me.  And I am sure that you’ve read some of my paeans to sloth and writer’s block and procrastination, none of which is really applicable in this particular case. So why am I not writing more? I don’t know. I don’t have too many ideas at the moment, but that’s never stopped me before, which is not really true but it does make me sound like the little red engine that could, a story I loved when I was a kid, With an election going on, one would think that there would be veritable scads of things to write about, given that the citizenry of this our Great Republic can choose this year between an unqualified carnival barker and a felonious oligarch whose main qualification for the highest office in the land appear to be her reproductive organs. In any normal society, the only job for which possession of reproductive organs are an absolute requirement is that of porn star, but we do not appear to be living in a normal society at the moment. Frankly, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with reality anymore.

No, I’d say that the reason that I haven’t written anything in a while is that I just don’t want to write anything.  As an excuse, this smacks of a certain willfulness—it’s the sort of excuse that a child gives for not wanting to eat her Brussels sprouts and is usually the first stop on the way to a first class temper tantrum. But why should she eat her Brussels sprouts? Brussels sprouts are revolting; not as disgusting as Lima beans or asparagus or calf’s liver, mind you, but still pretty disgusting in their own right, and the parental pretext that Brussels sprouts are good for a growing child hardly seems an adequate reason to eat the damn things. Many things are good for you, like root canal work and colonoscopies, but no one recommends that children endure them on a regular basis. So let’s stop with the Brussels sprouts already, okay? As the prominent American social philosopher J. H. Marx once pointed out, the world would be a better place if the parents had to eat the broccoli.

And why should I write? A Sumerian tax collector invented writing so that he could remember how much he was gouging honest, hardworking Sumerian and Akkadian entrepreneurs. The abomination of taxation that began then has continued unto this very day. As I sit here in this dingy watering hole contemplating the unfairness of a world where that smug creep drinking whiskey sours down at the end of the bar has a chance with the hot blonde who just came in and I don’t, the tax code in this country is now just over seventy thousand pages long. Think about that for a minute: you could probably fit every book worth reading in the English language and throw in ten years’ worth of the Manhattan White Pages and maybe a copy of the Talmud as well inside of seventy thousand pages, and all of that stuff put together would have a more interesting plot than the United States Internal Revenue Code of 1986. So why write? After seventy thousand pages, what more is there to say, assuming there was anything from the IRS worth saying in the first place? O, will this too too solid flesh melt and resolve itself into a dew, preferably the diet kind: the Dew with the sugar is too sweet for me, even if there’s enough caffeine in it to keep me awake for most of the day.

All right, I am drifting here; I know that when I am purposefully quoting Shakespeare. Quoting Shakespeare will let you get away with a lot of things, especially when you are whining and want to make the whine sound vaguely distinguished. This doesn’t really work, but I like to think that it does, so I keep doing it. This is better than beating up old people in the street, I think, or writing cookbooks for tarantulas, so I will keep at it.  And I won’t eat my Brussels sprouts or write until I feel like it. So there, take that.

Letting it all hang out, sideways sort of

We live today in a tell—all—let—everything—hang—out society, a society that believes that keeping certain things to oneself is psychologically unsound for the individual and for society as well, and therefore the best thing to do when confronted with personal matters you would rather not discuss with anyone is, counterintuitively enough, to discuss then with damn near everyone you can think of. I should blame Sigmund Freud for this, but I don’t, not really. He merely theorized that discussing your innermost thoughts and emotions with a medical professional would help his patients understand why they were so miserable; he never promised anyone that spilling their guts to him would make them permanently happy—it would only relieve the misery of existence for a short time, in much the same way as a priest granting absolution after a sinner’s confession understands that the sinner will need to come back and get relief for the sins he will commit during the following week. It may not make you happy, but you will know why you’re not happy. 

No, I blame Phil Donahue and his principal acolyte, Oprah Winfrey, for the current obsession with knowing more about people that we really care to know, and, of course, I blame Philo Farnsworth for inventing television in the first place, which gave Donahue and Winfrey the platform they needed to display their emotional basket cases to an unsuspecting world. I suppose, given the popularity of the format that Donahue and Winfrey pioneered, that I am in a minority about this, but I would just as soon not know who is copulating with whom or to discuss reproductive biology, my own or someone else’s, with complete strangers. I do not inflict unwanted confidences on other people and I should like some reciprocation from them, but I know better than to expect it. I realize that this reluctance is an anachronism in this day and age, a cultural artifact of an Irish Catholic childhood that has no place in the modern world, but there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. I am what I am, said Popeye the Sailor Man, and if it’s good enough for Popeye, it’s good enough for me.

I wonder when we here in this our Great Republic began treating the most intimate aspects of our private lives as fodder for mass entertainment and the stuff of everyday conversation. You may not credit this, but once upon a time here in this our Great Republic the only people who would talk about such things in public were the mentally ill. But the mentally ill have a reason for their tell-all mania: they are, in fact, maniacal. They are nuts, clinically, psychologically, one hundred percent by a doctor who went to medical school and everything certified bonkers. The rest of us, however, don’t have that excuse. So why do we keep displaying our psychic quirks in public?  The question remains a Rosicrucian mystery to me and all the evidence points to the question staying that way. I suppose people keep doing this sort of thing because emotional caterwauling makes them happy and it makes other people happy to watch them roll around in their psychic traumas. There is something more than a little gruesome about all of this, I think, but as I appear to be the only one who thinks so, I must endure what I cannot stop. It all seems horribly unfair to me, but I don’t think anyone cares what I think of all this one way or the other. Ah well, what can you do?