Dispatches from the Culture War
The holidays are nearly through. I have enjoyed a sufficiency of great food, good cheer, spiked nog, family, wrapping paper, tinsel, and close quarters. And I got the new John Cleese memoir, a most perfect gift.
I have also endured a scarcity of time alone to think, to walk, to sit, to stare aimlessly. In short, the time to do the things necessary to write something that doesn’t suck.
Writing this on Thanksgiving morning in a random Starbucks, stealing a few quiet minutes of solitude before a packed weekend of familial familiarity. I’m thankful for much – and aggravated by much, too, but today’s not the day to enumerate – but I’m especially grateful for the great response to my first week of posts here at the i2b oasis. Thanks for reading and sharing and tweeting and commenting. Good to know I’m not simply howling at the moon. Please comment and share to wretched excess so that I become more popular than Paris Kardashian.
I’ve always been a Storyteller, hidden. We are all Storytellers. It’s how we make sense of things and impose order on a chaotic flood of information and sensation and emotion. At best, stories aid understanding, provide a framework for appropriate response, and offer an accurate map of where we’ve been/are going. At worst, our stories spin manic spider webs of fantasy that keep us trapped in narratives that undermine our lives with confusion, poor judgement, and unintelligible mapping. Even when you put together a story that works well on all levels, is more or less verifiable…even then we know that someone else can arrange the same facts Roshomon-like into a narrative that bears scant resemblance to the order that works so well for you, but that somehow also withstands the understanding/response/mapping evaluations that you have to apply if any of you have any intention of being honest about our stories. 1Which proposition opens a whole other can of pintos, no doubt. And by you, of course, I mean me.
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