20141114.0658

It makes sense that I seem to do my better writing--I find that I have more to say and an easier time of saying it--when I am writing about the things I read and have read. Multiple degrees in English ought to be good for something after all, even if they do not make me immune to the occasional typographical error. (Those who read this blog know that it makes use of its own earlier entries from time to time. Poring over the blogroll for them reveals points of authorial inattention to details of usage. They doubtlessly indicate laziness or too much haste, and those who will engage in the fallacy fallacy--among whom are many pedants I know directly or by report--will perhaps be better served to read otherwise.) And it seems to be the case that I have more readers when I do make such comments than when I do not, if the readership statistics this platform offers me constitute anything like a reliable indicator.

There are times, though, when what I read chokes my throat with anger and knots my hands into claws that an old and angry part of me wants to wrap around throats and squeeze. I feel my chest tighten and a grimace creep across my face, and I know that my pupils open further the blackness within my eyes. And it is not at fictional exploits that this happens; I get annoyed, of course, and voice that annoyance with keyboard and tongue, and I am extravagant in my annoyance. But I do not react to that the way I do to reports of the all-too-real stupidity of the world, stupidity that, once permitted (and almost certainly permitted because we have to think of the children--and I am a father who rails against it), often spreads until it threatens to choke out what little intelligence finds purchase in the thin and rocky soil offered to it anymore. (Yes, I know I near falling down the slippery slope into something like an appeal to tradition. Note the qualifiers. There is some small hope, even yet.)

I do not do well to address the issues that provoke such reactions while amidst such reactions. I am not doing so now. I am, instead, attempting to distract myself from them for a bit so that my unconscious or subconscious mind can work to find some redress to the problems presented. (I follow the Good Doctor's "The Eureka Phenomenon" for this idea.) Perhaps, in time, I will return to them with a clearer mind and find a way to speak against them that does not make of me the kind of ravening idiot that I believe many of those who perpetuate such stupidities to be. But it is more likely that other concerns will shove them aside, new indignities piled upon them, and they will be pressed down into the substrata from which, in time, distilled bitterness may be pumped or hardened, cutting bits of it mined out and polished to a brilliant sheen.