Last week I decided that I needed to post something about a Current Event, that I needed to participate in The Discourse. But in the end I didn’t do it. One of my disciplines had failed, but another one held.
The discipline that failed: I read some online news. That’s bad. One of my most important rules is: Don’t Read the News — except when The Economist shows up in my mailbox, which usually happens on Monday. But I had just submitted my next book to my publisher and was enjoying a bit of free time. I ignored my rule, got het up, decided that I simply must intervene, and sat down at the keyboard to pound something out. I had just finished a book, I was relaxing at the beautiful Laity Lodge — see photo above — but my stupid ol' brain was whirring and fizzing with indignation.
The discipline that held: I never post anything immediately after writing it. It goes into a queue, which gives me time to edit, to add nuance or complication, to entertain second thoughts, or to decide that I don’t want to post the damned thing at all. In this case I started a draft, paused, decided that I would revisit later … and then the next day I deleted the whole thing with a whew of relief and took a long walk through the canyon.
It's important to have redundancy in one's stupidity-prevention system (SPS).
I wrote recently about the death of my dear friend Dan Treier, and one of the last email exchanges I had with Dan was about my online writing, and especially the weekly digest of my posts. At this point Dan was already ill, though I did not know that. (And he had not yet been diagnosed; he was in a good deal of unexplained pain.) And he told me that he and his wife Amy and his daughter Anna enjoyed my newsletter because it marked a kind of respite from angst and anger and sneering and ironic posing and, in general, bad news. It gave them a glimpse of the interesting, the curious, the beautiful, and sometimes even the profound, and he was grateful for that. Also, there was Angus. What I didn’t know was how much he needed all that, and would continue to need it in the tragically short time remaining to him.
You know that old line: Be kind, because everyone you know is fighting a great battle. Well, maybe not everyone — few of us are at any given time fighting the kind of battle that Dan was fighting — but we who write rarely know what struggles our readers have, what afflicts them, what small note or idea or image might be to them cool water in a desert.
Cool water in the desert is what people need, not another hot take. It’s sad how easily I can forget that. I re-read the post I wrote explaining why I call my blog The Homebound Symphony. Right, I thought. That's what I'm all about. How odd that for a moment I forgot it.