a New Year’s Resolution: less discipline

What often happens is someone somewhere says something, and I offer a simple response on twitter or perhaps in a blog comment.

I then set to writing a full explanation, and find myself in an investigation that may go far beyond or far afield from the initial inspiration. Quite often, I find this investigation more interesting than the original argument, but the “occasional justification,” the attachment to known “intents and purposes” has by that time all but completely receded from view.

I don’t think that all of this intentless and purposeless unjustified thinking is completely worthless. So, I’m going to experiment with some alternative formats and methods of organization of posts that allow me to use this material, to expose it to view at least half way, maybe while distinguishing thought-through-thinking from the still-being-thought-through. This post, for instance, is an example of the latter, though not of the alternative formats and methods.

May mean some repetition and confusion in presentation, and – Saints Preserve Us! – also the airing of some thoughts that really should have been thought through more. May be more in the Spirit of Blogging rather than the Spirit of Belles-Lettres, and I’ll state clearly for the eternal record that I’m not at all convinced that the former is preferable to the latter.

May mean more stupid mistakes – more typos, more misspellings, more embarrassments. Or it may turn out that my judgment of what deserves to be published has been faulty all along, or needs to improve. Goes without saying that the quality of one’s thinking and writing whatever the mode can always stand improvement. May be that publishing more will make eventually for less frequent mistake-making and for general improving. If not, can’t see how it’ll matter much anyway – even if the whole universe really is watching, hanging on my every word. If that’s what’s been going on, then presumably it’s been or will eventually get around to reading my unpublished drafts, too, so I’m safe/screwed either way.

Or it may of course turn out to have been wasted effort all along, and here, too – a thought that might also go without saying… as well as with saying.

So, anyway maybe we or anyway I, whatever that is, will see about erring on the side of the with-saying, for a change, for a while, God or gods or fates or nothing willing or allowing.