Celebrating 1,000 posts with a few near incoherent thoughts on the past, present, and future

Benjamin Franklin famously or infamously said that the country was a Republic, if you can keep it.  To liken great things to small, this is a blog if I can keep it up, but isn’t that true of everything in life? 

When I started this blog in November 2020, it wasn’t clear to me how long I would keep it up.  Was it a lark or was I in for the long haul?  Like many things in life, it was just something I decided to do for a variety of reasons, some far easier to explain than others.  On the easy side, I was thinking and reading about politics, culture, and science a lot anyway.  Some might say far too much to be healthy, formulating the skeletons of posts in my head, frequently editing the final contents as they swept through my brain, as though I was preparing them for someone else. (Yes, the voice in my head is that strange.  Not only does it talk back, it corrects and edits in real time.)  Regardless, it was my lovely wife who had to suffer through a daily diatribe, sometimes two or three times, in the morning, when we took our afternoon walk, while we cooked dinner together, as we ate back then as I converted thoughts into speech rather than words.  In that sense, I figured it wouldn’t take too much additional effort to actually write the thing down, or more properly type it out on a computer.  I was also writing quite a bit anyway, working on a fantasy novel that I’ve since paused to complete a science fiction adventure (on track for early next year, I promise), and multiple screenplays that were never likely to be produced in any event.  Whether readers find the quality of my writing, reasoning, or whatever, good, bad, or indifferent the writing itself comes pretty easily to me, what I have likened in my post celebrating five hundred of these things to vomiting words on the screen, then searching it for morsels that might remain edible.  Putting this another way, some struggle with writer’s block, but I face the opposite challenge:  Writing too much about what might not even be meaningful in the first place.  The words just come out from somewhere entirely unclear as fast as I can type them or faster, and to some extent, I spend more time editing than writing, especially when the subject is fictional.  In a weird, almost self-flagellating way, I get a certain perverse pleasure anytime I delete a sizable chunk of text, as though I was popping a nasty zit or cutting out a rapidly spreading infection. 

Much harder to explain was the desire to have some kind of audience – other than my wife, who ironically reads very little of what I post these days, a real-world example of anyone who writes and wonders why it’s so hard to get people to read.  Still, whatever anyone may tell you, people compelled to write generally want others to read their work.  We’re not trees falling in the forest that don’t want to be heard.  There’s a certain exhibitionism that comes with putting your thoughts on a page and with precious few exceptions, real life isn’t Woody Allen’s Vicki Cristina Barcelona, where Javier Bardem’s poet father refuses to share his work with anyone because he hates the world.  When Vicky asks Juan, “So, uh, tell me why, why won’t your father publish his poems?”  He replies, “Well, because, ugh, he hates the world and that’s his way of getting back at them, to create beautiful works and then to deny them to the public.”  When she asks a follow up, “what makes him so angry toward the human race?” He posits, “Because after thousands of years of civilization they still haven’t learned to love.”  While his statement might be true in isolation, most authors probably hold the secret belief that their words have the power to change the world in at least some small way, starting with the minds of their audience, perhaps teaching them something important they didn’t know before, even moving them more deeply somehow.  Personally, I’m not naive or perhaps one would say young enough to want to move anyone, but I do hope that reading these posts has taught them something new, some fact they didn’t know before or new perspective on an old topic.  At the same time, this desire for an audience, which I readily admit, is difficult to reconcile with the less extroverted parts of my personality.  We are all bundles of contradictions in many ways and why I enjoy people in general, meeting new ones and maintaining close relationships with a wide variety of friends, I am a terrible networker and promoter, preferring to be left alone to do my own thing and assuming others want the same.  Most of the time, my wife navigates public situations on my behalf while I remain in the background.  This is in direct contradiction to the reality that I selling cars at 14 years old and when pressed, I can certainly shake a lot of hands, politician-like.  Hence, I wanted an audience of some kind, but didn’t really want to do anything to build it.  Not surprisingly, no one would describe my audience 1,000 posts later as large by any means, but I consider myself lucky to count a handful of reasonably loyal readers and along with a few more sporadic ones, it’s been enough to keep on going.

Perhaps needless to say, having an audience also comes with the reality that you’re never going to please everyone.  The greatest authors and creators who ever lived have their detractors, and some might argue that the greater they are, the greater their detractors.  There are those who don’t like William Shakespeare.  Mark Twain savaged Leonardo da Vinci and the other Italian masters.  If they were subject to withering criticism, what hope does a mere mortal like me have sharing their work?  Oddly, this never really concerned me.  For obvious reasons, I want people to like what I create as my masochism is limited to savaging my own work, but for me at least, I learned long ago that the audience you have to please the most is yourself and you just have to hope that by pleasing yourself, you are enough like others to do the same.  In that sense, writing is a game, a puzzle, what word, thought our sentence can I come up with next that will hold my attention and entertain me the most? To be sure, this is approach can be fraught with its own problems as well, especially if like me, you have a wide variety of somewhat off beat and out of synch tastes and opinions, or putting this another way, your tastes and opinions on matters large and small aren’t exactly compatible with the average person, far from it.  For example, my wife is sometimes fond of wondering how many people worship Phish and Ronnie James Dio with equal fervor.  Alas, Ronnie has been dead for more than a decade, but sometimes when we go to two seemingly disparate concerts in a short period, she’ll ask if anyone else was at both except us.   In October, I dragged her to see Geoff Tate perform Queensryche’s seminal Operation: Mindcrime in its entirety for the last time, a band many have never heard of, where we were surrounded by metal heads who worship at the altar of hard rock.  Over Thanksgiving weekend, I dragged her to see Trey Anastasio for the third time in barely six months, another many have never heard of, where we were surrounded by Phish-heads who worship at the altar of, well, Phish.  Based on the observable crowd, which is admittedly a limited sample, it seems unlikely anyone else would’ve been almost equally excited about both, but there we were.

Beyond the world of music, where Bruce Springsteen reigns supreme in my opinion, I count among my celebrity heroes Tom Cruise and Sir Kenneth Branagh, not exactly compatible actors with similar films and careers, my favorite directors Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, though I probably spend more time watching cheesy action movies – basically anything with Gerard Butler, Liam Neeson, or Jason Statham – and low budget slasher films than anything else.  When I read, it tends to either be non-fiction, history or science, or epic fantasy with nothing much in between save for Shakespeare himself. Who am I supposed to appeal to that occupies that particular Venn diagram?  Is anyone ready for an art-house Die Hard performed on stage with elves as the main characters?  Probably not, but that wouldn’t prevent me from dreaming it up.  Politically and culturally speaking I am also something of an orphan.  I’ve been a conservative Republican since at least Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton in 1996, when my best friend and I would smoke a lot of pot at Lehigh University and watch the debates, but I’ve been an atheist even longer.  In a narrow sense, I have next to nothing in common intellectually – I can’t even use the word spiritually – with my side of the political aisle.  When they speak of living a life of faith and putting their trust in God, the words and the sentiment are completely foreign to me to that point that – when I was much younger and less experienced with the world – I wasn’t even sure how anyone could possibly believe any of it.  I thought they were just going through the motions because of tradition or something. I can’t say why, but I’ve never looked at the world around me and saw some divine order in it.  Do others really look out at the stars and believe God is there, everywhere?  Perhaps no one put my thoughts into (somewhat offensive words) better than George Carlin.  “Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day.  And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ‘til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money!”  I don’t reprint this to insult religious people.  My own wife is one of them, and over the years I’ve grown to accept that the vast majority of people believe things and feel things I don’t, and I respect them for it.  Life is more interesting when people think differently and act differently based on their beliefs.

In some ways, that can be seen as the strength and resilience of our shared political conviction.  Though the  vast majority of that minority who are atheists are almost certainly on the political left (according to Pew, 84% of atheists, 78% of agnostics, 62% of people who describe themselves as “nothing in particular are Democrats), I am not and almost certainly never will be.  In that regard, I’m frequently reminded of Albert Einstein, who called himself an agnostic, but especially in his later years developed a real dislike for militant atheists.  As he put it, “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’—cannot hear the music of the spheres.”  While I can’t claim to hear the music of the spheres myself, belief itself can be a funny thing.  Philosophers have pondered for centuries why people can so easily believe something that isn’t true, or even if it happens to be true, be completely unable to explain any of the details concerning why it’s true.  When someone tells you they’re an atheist, what does that really mean beyond a statement that they don’t believe in God?  Presumably, they believe in evolution instead, but if you were to ask every atheist in the country to clearly define evolution and provide a few pieces of data as to why they think the theory is true, could they, or would they just mutter something about Charles Darwin, natural selection, and changes over time?  They’d probably call the religious person ignorant as well, but as it is, we’ve entered an era where physicists regularly assert the existence of an infinite number of universes, the presence of tremendous amounts of mass and energy that we cannot by definition observe, and deny the existence of something as fundamental of time.  Because they have some impossible to follow equations that are completely divorced from actual evidence and are more computer models than theories, we are supposed to believe their fantasies over what their proponents would claim are religious fantasies?  For me at least, the answer is no and while I might remain a spiritual orphan in some ways, in the ways that really count to me – the form of government I want to have, the faith in the greatness of America I surely have, the desire to honor those that brought this magnificent country into existence and to view this country as the most positive force for good the universe has ever known – you can consider me religious in my faith and devotion to the American Experiment. 

Despite the naysayers on both sides, that experiment remains alive and well.  Benjamin Franklin famously or infamously said that the country was a Republic, if you can keep it.  To liken great things to small, this is a blog if I can keep it up, but isn’t that true of everything in life?  It goes on until it doesn’t?  Thanks for reading in any event.