No Comment
I have to be honest. Sometimes it's because there's a cat asleep on my arm. I can click and I can scroll, but words of any substance require both hands.
The cats have me trained.
Sometimes I'm befuddled. I read something and I'm thinking, "What the ever loving fuck?" There's a kind of triage of the pileup in my brain. If I take the time to sort through it all, is there anything viable left to say? If I measure the effort against the impact, does it matter?
Sometimes it gets lost in there. Inside my head can be a twisty-tangly place. There are more corners than walls, and a lot of them are inhabited. So as I'm composing, I walk into a fifty-year-old cobweb in the dark and drop my candle.
It can take a while to crawl back out.
Sometimes I'm afraid. I might think of something relevant, then remember that time I got jumped on for being a Nazi lover because I mentioned that punching a guy for wearing a symbol is assault, the same way him punching me for wearing mine would be. Because the Constitution is for everyone, even if they're assholes, and that's the thing that matters. Because when you infringe on the rights of one person, you infringe on the rights of all people.
But people want to be pissed, and if you try to be rational in a group of pissed-off people, you'll end up bloody.
Or, you know, reticent to say anything.
Sometimes I just don't have anything. I mean, a "hug" or a smiley or a less-than-number-three. And I might go there, but really sometimes it just seems silly. Plus, if it's Facebook the computer dings all night when everyone else on the planet does the same. I don't need to know when fifteen other people type "hugs." I really don't.
It's like the LJ version of the "Like" button. Maybe the Russians disabled it, but there for a while I'd get these taunting little emails, "Someone Liked one of your posts."
Really? Who liked my post? Which post did they like? What did they like about it? Those things made me crazy. Er.
Sometimes I have too much to say. I saw this quote from George Wills that really rang for me. He was asked about something the not-yet President tweeted about him: “He (Trump) has an advantage on me because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can’t.”
And see, that's the thing. The bigger an issue becomes, the more there is to know about it. And big, complicated things, need more paragraphs. They need pages.
And a healthy approach requires input from people with differing perspectives. We've lost our taste for that. We're impatient, and we knee-jerk.
And we're just so tired and angry and tired of being angry.
And we really don't want to disturb the cat.
---
This has been my entry for Week 8 of therealljidol. The topic was "No Comment." Thanks for reading. I completely understand if you don't comment on this entry. But please don't click a "like" button if there's still one out there. Thanks. :)
The cats have me trained.
Sometimes I'm befuddled. I read something and I'm thinking, "What the ever loving fuck?" There's a kind of triage of the pileup in my brain. If I take the time to sort through it all, is there anything viable left to say? If I measure the effort against the impact, does it matter?
Sometimes it gets lost in there. Inside my head can be a twisty-tangly place. There are more corners than walls, and a lot of them are inhabited. So as I'm composing, I walk into a fifty-year-old cobweb in the dark and drop my candle.
It can take a while to crawl back out.
Sometimes I'm afraid. I might think of something relevant, then remember that time I got jumped on for being a Nazi lover because I mentioned that punching a guy for wearing a symbol is assault, the same way him punching me for wearing mine would be. Because the Constitution is for everyone, even if they're assholes, and that's the thing that matters. Because when you infringe on the rights of one person, you infringe on the rights of all people.
But people want to be pissed, and if you try to be rational in a group of pissed-off people, you'll end up bloody.
Or, you know, reticent to say anything.
Sometimes I just don't have anything. I mean, a "hug" or a smiley or a less-than-number-three. And I might go there, but really sometimes it just seems silly. Plus, if it's Facebook the computer dings all night when everyone else on the planet does the same. I don't need to know when fifteen other people type "hugs." I really don't.
It's like the LJ version of the "Like" button. Maybe the Russians disabled it, but there for a while I'd get these taunting little emails, "Someone Liked one of your posts."
Really? Who liked my post? Which post did they like? What did they like about it? Those things made me crazy. Er.
Sometimes I have too much to say. I saw this quote from George Wills that really rang for me. He was asked about something the not-yet President tweeted about him: “He (Trump) has an advantage on me because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can’t.”
And see, that's the thing. The bigger an issue becomes, the more there is to know about it. And big, complicated things, need more paragraphs. They need pages.
And a healthy approach requires input from people with differing perspectives. We've lost our taste for that. We're impatient, and we knee-jerk.
And we're just so tired and angry and tired of being angry.
And we really don't want to disturb the cat.
---
This has been my entry for Week 8 of therealljidol. The topic was "No Comment." Thanks for reading. I completely understand if you don't comment on this entry. But please don't click a "like" button if there's still one out there. Thanks. :)