Saturday, December 24, 2016

Various freewritten thoughts

I'm just going to write, I don't know what will come out... read at your own risk.


I don't write this blog for you. None of this is for you. I write for myself, I write to keep myself writing and I write to collect links to remind me of things that have happened. I share it because I can, not because I need fame or attention, although I enjoy those in moderation like any normal person.

It's Christmas Eve. I haven't really enjoyed Christmas in years. I don't have any reason to be upset about it, I just never feel like celebrating it. This year is particularly grim for me, as I'm barely recovering from a very nasty and entirely too long and consuming bout of depression.

I don't know what I want to say. I'm not sure there is anything to say. Sometimes I think everything has already been said.

I learned the other day about a teenage stupidity that had serious consequences. As I don't have permission to tell the story, I won't go into details except to say it was a minor offense - a joke, in fact - that a decade ago would not have been a big deal. When I was a kid no one would have even ever heard of it. It was only due to social media that the tiny mistake turned into, literally, front page news. Teenagers today can't afford to be children. It's depressing to me to see good kids punished for things my generation did routinely - and got away with because it a) wasn't a big deal in the first place and b) no one knew about it. There weren't twenty cameras snapping photos of every move and posting them (out of context) to Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. In the rare cases when something like that got around, people weren't able to take a photo and make infinite copies of it, spreading it around to everyone in town without the original person's permission or explanation.

Every generation faces its own challenges. The current generation has to face the knowledge that they have no privacy whatsoever, and every mistake they have made is online for everyone to see. I do not envy them. It's a difficult challenge. In this particular case, if the family and the teen had answered every question about the incident and explained the joke, it might have died a quick death. But they attempted to preserve what little privacy and dignity they had - and they may have been right to do it, who knows if the explanation would have been accepted by people looking for blood.

Still having trouble figuring out what to write. I suppose I can fall back on the antics of Inkwell, who was so disgusted at the lack of food an hour before his feeding time that he knocked down my Christmas tree. Admittedly, it's a fake tree and didn't have any ornaments on it at the time, but I was still a bit annoyed at him for doing it. Especially since he kept eyeing me as he "played" with the tree, making sure I was watching.

We've had some snow this month, but today it's freezing fog. It's not supposed to get above freezing for the next few days, so the snow left on the ground will be our white Christmas.

Hey, we need to share the Constitution. Here's the preamble, which I can recite by heart thanks to Schoolhouse Rock.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Ok, that's enough for now. Maybe I'll write again tonight or tomorrow.

2 comments:

Eric TF Bat said...

The glorious thing about your blog is that, even though it's not written for us, we still get joy out of it. Think of this: in clear and blatant contravention of the law of Conservation of Energy, you are creating joy and spreading it to the world. I'm sitting in a farmhouse in rural southern Tasmania, with the sun already threatening another unpleasantly warm and muggy day. In the Huon Valley it's not unheard-of for it to snow in December, in the middle of an Australian summer. I suspect our climate has become sentient, and schizophrenic. And quite possibly anglophile. But this year the early promise of a dusting of snow on the Hartz mountains two weeks ago has given way to the same heat and potential bushfires as the rest of the nation. But despite that, I'm reading of your white Christmas and sharing a moment of connection. You did that! So please: don't think of what you're doing as writing practice; you are making a thing that did not previously exist, a connection between people across impossible distances. This is quite marvellous. May you live long and prosper. Happy Merry to you!

Dwight Williams said...

A science-fiction writer of long-standing friendly acquaintance was of the opinion that eventually we may - as a collection of human societies - return (if that's the right verb here?) to some kind of equilibrium about such shenanigans as you indirectly refer to. They may be right about that, although it sometimes seems a long ways off.

As for your purposes in writing your weblog? You're right: it is for yourself first and foremost. And yet as Eric notes, others may still benefit, however accidentally or indirectly. In my case, I get the benefit of perspective. It's not the same as joy, true. But it's still useful. In these times, particularly so.