Riprap for Friday afternoon
Here’s some riprap and detritus, while I have the energy in my fingers, and attention span longer than a housefly’s. When a big long wave hits and recedes from shore, only the heaviest rocks (riprap) stay behind. “Twiddler” has wrecked my comprehension. This is only the fourth post I’ve made over here. Back on my dead Blogger in 2014, I made over 500 posts, so it’s nothing new for me to post, but Substack is new to me. Silence is really familiar to me. Being warned by my bosses, my director of HR, and my own union attorney to be quiet or face further discipline up to and including termination, is icy. It freezes the tongue. It’s taken me years to come back.
Today seems as good a day as any to unstick my tongue and say what I want. Dwell on the news or newsy, or go to the heart of matters? The news is more firings, cancellations, and sting operations. Today’s left loves a good hanging. They just do. They only care about identity membership. They’re not interested in civil rights or speech; they want to police thought.
The more proper concern is, where in ourselves do we find distinction and commonality? Are we concerned about extensions of rights so far that they impinge on other citizens’? Or do we stamp our feet and say, “I’m not acknowledging any of these grievances because they’re all X”?
Well, until there is a method to gauge the exponential power of clicks and shares, the real magnitude of who’s influencing us, say, whereas Father Coughlin owned 30% of the country listenership 100 years ago, and Tucker Carlson has 10% of it today, we’ll just argue about it.
See? There I go: I on’t care bout topical stuff. Leave that to the 400 friggin news-pimps I follow. They bout to get one less follow.
Gimme fiction. I’ve got 75 shorts in the can: Tales Told Out Of School. I’m going back to making up wack stories. These people crossing the street on the Don’t Walk, shuffling their feet, yelling at me at Walgreen’s, crying in their cars in a parking ramp, people looking at people who are looking at other people, that’s the spirit I love. Relationships and manners. Drawing room stuff. Family scandals and secrets about who owns what, and what lengths they go to to cover up their emotional crimes.
That’s it for now. Turning it back over to my notebook.