Familiarity Finally Stops Breeding

Recently, while cleaning out the last remnants of my wife’s stuff in the dark recesses of her mother’s house, I ran across Winston Churchill’s four volume roller coaster through British history titled A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Needless to say, something (or more precisely four somethings) that moments earlier I didn’t know we owned I suddenly couldn’t imagine my life without. Books have this amazing power over me that I’m trying to overcome for the sake of my friends the next time we move. The funny thing about the books I own is that I rarely read them. They are kind of like Mt. Tabor Park, which is right up the street. Why would I go there? What’s the point? I could go there anytime. I wouldn’t want to get bored of the place, after all. So books languish on my shelves and in boxes, condemned to a life of lonely immobility because the interesting title or famous author’s name printed on the spine casts a spell on me, rendering me unable to send it along to someone who might read it.

The good news is that I’m beginning to struggle upstream against this pernicious tendency. I realized as I stood there, stroking one of the majestic volumes, that all that was necessary to break its spell on me was that I read it. So I strapped on my tennis shoes and headed up to Tabor for some exercise...metaphorically of course.

Midlife Crisis

I’ve blogged before, but this blog could be a matter of life and death.

No, I’m not the victim of some bizarre extortion plot dreamt up by an eccentric European art dealer. But I am the victim of my own laziness. I am coming to the realization that if I don’t write out my thoughts regularly, carefully, and systematically, my ability to think and communicate may atrophy beyond the point of no return.

Let me explain. Like most people I have a number of eclectic and seemingly unrelated interests: world history, science, sports, music, current events, etc. I spend a lot of time exposing myself to a wide range of information. But, I’m not very good at putting it all together usefully so that I can be a better citizen, husband, father, teacher, and conversationalist. For example, if I’m with friends talking about how Barack Obama is doing as president I can point to a few pieces of major legislation, his war policy, and the uber-significant Obama pirate graph, but when I mention that I approve of the job he’s doing more and more as the country grows more distrustful I can’t explain why very cogently, I guess because I haven’t really thought about it that much. Meanwhile some other bozo takes over the conversation and starts parroting back what they “learned” on Fox News or MSNBC. While I sulk away into the other room to get more chips and spicy guacamole I try to comfort myself with the thought that at least I’m approaching the topic honestly, and trying to form my own opinions. But the sad truth is that my opinions are too grossly under-developed to be unveiled in polite society.

This blog is my attempt to clean up the inchoate jumble of detritus suspended in my brain and turn it into something useful, pretty, or artistic, kind of like the giant fish sculpture I saw at Nye Beach last week made from hundreds of pieces of plastic that had washed ashore. In other words, I hope to extract myself occasionally from the muddy ooze of information inundating me and THINK about it. Ideally this thinking/writing process will cause me to pull together several bits of information to form a new way of verbalizing something important.