Today I was going to offer you a colorful and illustrative anecdote, one that struck me as symptomatic of a) the way humans behave, b) the way businesses behave, and c) the way my life is trending, but over the course of showering and dressing and securing coffee for the morning, the gears got gummed up. One of the reasons I chose the anecdote was because at first blush it seemed utterly innocuous. Although the effect of the incident itself on me was significant (a sudden surge in blood pressure coupled with wintry dryness yielded a relatively comedic if gory Bill-Wandless-as-Andrew-W.K. photo opportunity), it took me all of thirty seconds to recognize it for what it was: a memorable yet ultimately trivial index of The Way Things Are. A bit of thoughtlessness was magnified by predictable corporate imperatives, leaving me short of a reward that I was definitely due but do not particularly need.
Vague enough for you? That’s mostly the point.
These days I find myself paralyzed in an expressive sense, which rather defeats the purpose of most kinds of writing. Habits of self-censorship developed over a lifetime, amplified and abetted by new administrative habits that prompt me to err on the side of the politic, tend to interfere with candid expression. The fact that the composition of this very sentence has involved more than a half dozen false starts–beginnings deleted that I might avoid hurting the feelings of some imagined reader or revealing more or less than I would wish about my own states of thought, feeling, or belief–tells me (and may tell you) how things stand.
The beauty and peril of language is that it affords the wielder infinite options for working around such problems. I have never been unable to write, only unwilling. These days, that unwillingness arises from a reluctance to do the dance, to circle around what it is I actually wish to say for the sake of temperate, measured expression. I’d rather just keep my mouth shut.
So I will.
