Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

When I was young, I’d sometimes come across a distant cousin. An adult before I was born, Mark always scared me and my sisters. Not in a menacing way, but quiet men are generally regarded with discomfort and suspicion; Mark was no exception.

I wouldn’t care to speculate as to the reason that Mark or my grandfather—a slightly more gregarious man—weren’t very talkative at family gatherings, but I’m willing to consider my reasons for the same.

Part of it is just innate. I’m an introvert, and no one who’s known me in the last five years would quibble with that description. More than that, though, I’ve accepted that orientation and embraced it. I hadn’t really done that before my 20th birthday. Back then I’d feel like I owed it to the world to act like I was as extroverted as everyone else seems. I am not.

And I’ve stopped believing that I owe the people I’m talking to an approximately even exchange. Their bit of gossip met with one of mine. Their anecdote about a minor misunderstanding reflected with a  similar trivial annoyance. I no longer play that game. If I feel there is nothing useful I can say in response to your comment, I will not say anything more substantial than “Yep”. I’m responsible for my own satisfaction, and you for whatever hurt you feel in response to my silence.

It’s impossible to say any of this without sounding judgmental, so here’s the big one: most things people talk about most of the time are either meaningless or (potentially) harmful. I’m probably interested in 5% of the conversation that comes my way when I try to converse as others do, so why should I engage with all the filler and the gossip?

By filler, I mean all the inane things we say to each other in pursuit of some illusion of rapport. It’s the chat about the weather, the gentle razzing about each others quirks, much of what is said about politics, the economy, celebrities, and the latest headlines. Very little of this provides value for me (or I’d venture, most modestly informed people), but it’s a large portion of what people say to each other.

By gossip, I mean just about all talk about the status of anyone (present company included). Employed? Promoted? Overweight? Engaged? Divorced? Pregnant? Moved back in with the folks? Has a beautiful loft downtown? Is a very popular city councilman? Is at war with alcohol? Or the neighbors?

Undeniably, some if this talk is interesting, valuable, and necessary. It can absolutely be useful to know people’s statuses. “Oh, you’re back in town and out of work. I’ll forward any job leads I find.” This type of behavior is absolutely laudatory if done with good intention.

But I can never avoid the feeling that the majority of gossip-y conversation has baser motives. So often these discussions have the qualities we more frequently associate with gossip: pernicious, valueless, and covertly damning. People seem, generally, to be concerned about the status of others not to discover how they can make someone’s life better, but to find new information with which they can judge both those discussed and themselves. And that’s something I find hard to abide.

I would add that judgments we make can be both positive and negative, but I see both as pernicious. If she just ended a marriage you all thought was doomed from the start, both your gratification at your correctness and your tut-tutting at her initial foolishness are clearly harmful. But even if you’re impressed to learn of his business success, you’ll still probably end up either resenting him his success or resenting yourself its lack.

The only talk I find consistently valuable is knowledgeable discussion from people with real understanding on topics they care about. That these topics interest me is nice, but not necessary. Knowledgeable and passionate people are usually enough to to keep me rapt. And any talk for which that isn’t true is probably a waste of time.

I hate confrontation and am bad at it. I also hate to see confrontation occur. Other people can see a confrontation and look on with bemusement or eager interest. To my memory, I have always been pained when I see one.

This has given me a sharper awareness than most of its causes and nature. Superficially, there are is a huge range of things that can lead to conflict. Everything from the way we roll the toilet paper to the philosophical underpinnings of shockingly similar economic systems leads people to anger, frustration, argument, violence, and war.

But, I think it doesn’t take too much effort to see that all of these fights come down to essentially one single fight: I think things are/were/should be like this, while you think things are/were/should be like that. Simply put, we have conflicts because we disagree.

But disagreement doesn’t automatically lead to conflict. Conflict instead grows out of our inability to accept that we disagree. It’s a result of our myopia toward the fact that we can have different opinions about what flag should fly over Somaliland, Kashmir, Alsace-Lorraine, or South Ossetia and not go to war. Our myopia to the fact that it’s not meant as a personal slight that he sometimes leaves his socks and shoes in the middle of the floor.

Conflict is rooted in a failure of understanding. War breaks out because Country A can’t understand how it can get wants from Country B without resorting to violent force. Arguments break out because Person A doesn’t know how to explain their problem with Person B without attacking Person B in some, sometimes subtle, way.

When involved in conflict, we are usually blind to some aspect of the situation in which we find ourselves. Frequently we can’t understand the motive of our opponent in the conflict. Sometimes we make mistakes in evaluating the situation or the state of conflict. And almost always we miss that the best way to come to a satisfactory resolution to the situation is unlikely to be either a verbal or physical confrontation.

A domestic partner’s failings are almost always better solved with a friendly request than a passive-aggressive sneak-attack or an active screaming match. The disposition of contested land is almost always better solved by talking extensively than going to war. Mistakes about matters of fact are best corrected gently and subtly, not overtly and aggressively.

Minds are almost never changed when directly confronted. Few people will yield to even the most flawless argument if it forces them to lose face. (And in public confrontation, someone usually does.) Many people would rather escalate a conflict than admit a mistake. This is how we get deadly shootings over silly things like video game systems, romantic entanglements, and minor religious differences.

I’d like to end this in a nice place where we can put all conflict to rest forever. But I don’t know that place, and it may not even exist. But I do know that if we stop and think and look at conflicts, the majority of them can be seen for their foolishness. That, I suppose, is where we must start.

I claim no expertise on anything that this piece talks about. Almost anything I say on this topic could be laughably wrong or foolish. I decided to do it anyway.

Some people think cars in the future will look massively different—three-wheeled, pod-shaped, etc—I do not. I think predictions like that are generally a mistake. Before I explain that though, let me tell you why the cars of the future are probably going to electric.

The question of what will make cars move in the future was a pretty hot topic five years ago, when everyone seemed convinced that hydrogen was the solution. I think all that fervor died down because hydrogen is a gas at room temperature and thus hard to contain (and when contained, prone to explosions). It took a while, but we now realize we won’t solve that problem soon.

Two fuels still enjoy some place is the public imagination: biodiesel and ethanol. They both have a huge drawback: neither is ready to be the primary thing propelling cars forward. While I think both have the potential to move some cars in the future, I expect they’ll stay pretty firmly in liquefied natural gas territory. (LNG fuels many small municipal fleets,  it never has and probably never will be the primary fuel used by the public at large.) Here’s why.

Biodiesel’s fun. Who doesn’t want their car exhaust to smell like french fries? The big issue is, excess cooking grease could, at best, fuel 1% of the cars currently in existence. We’re promised algae-based diesel, but no one has yet produced it at commercial scale. This is, in short, the hydrogen problem. (That is: we’ll be ready within five ten twenty etc years.)

Ethanol, dispensing with the particular issues of the corn-based stuff, has the primary issue of competing directly with our food and libation supply. All corn, sugarcane, potatoes, and whatever else we might make into alcohol to run our cars takes away from our ability to eat or drink those agriculture products. Simply, there is no way we can today grow enough of edible crops to feed the world and run our auto fleet. “Cellulosic ethanol” promises to take the parts of plants we currently consider waste and turn that into alcohol. But it, like algae-derived biodiesel and safely stored hydrogen, is currently vaporware.

And so we’re left with the one thing we know we could make with today’s technology: the electrified car fleet. Unlike the other technologies discussed, electricity is currently created from diversified sources at huge volumes. And while the gripe that much of that production is from dirty, finite resources shouldn’t be ignored, our electricity generation has gotten cleaner and more renewable through the century we’ve been doing it. And as the diversity and renewability our energy production increased, we’d automatically make our existing car fleet cleaner and more reliable. This is not true any other technology under consideration.

The real question, then, is how will we fuel up our cars with this electricity? And I think the solution is so painfully obvious that I’m astounded I’ve been hearing so much recently about all manner of businesses trying different design and distribution plans for vehicle recharging stations. Swappable batteries (a compliment, not replacement for home-charging stations) are the future. They have to be.

If I have a Tesla today and I want to drive across America today with any speed, I need to get another car. While the Tesla does have impressive aerodynamics and top speed, the four hour stops to charge up would slow the trip to a crawl.

The obvious solution is that all cars in the future should run on massive swappable rechargeables made to a commodity standard—think rechargeable AAs, but a lot bigger—that are sold charged at every single one of those places we today call “gas stations.” Your car would house somewhere between 6 and 60 of these rechargeable under it’s hood (remember, electric cars have small motors at the wheels, not huge engines under the hood), depending on it’s weight, size, and desired travel distance. When you needed more power without the time to recharge, you’d pull up to a “gas station” and swap them out. (They would then charge those that came out of your car, and pass them on to the next person in need.)

Convenience and accessibility in refueling aren’t the only reasons cars would look much the same as they do now. There’s also the practical argument that the basic shape used industry-wide today has pretty excellent safety and creature comfort advantages over anything different anyone has dreamed up. Lacking a good reason for something to change, a futurecaster is sure to go wrong by predicting that it will.

While I’m sure I could go on with more details that the future is likely to prove incorrect, I’ll stop. I gave you a pretty good blueprint for getting rich (or poor) in the next 40 years, and that’s enough for today.

There are few things I really dislike. There are plenty of things I could do without: summer heat leaps to mind. But things that really get under my skin, there are probably under five that I encounter regularly. One of those things that I regularly find myself recoiling from is “coolness.”

Pay attention the the scare quotes, I mean them. I’m not against things that are cool; cool things are some of the best things there are. I’m against people trying to be “cool.” Where cool is innovative or new or awesome or obsessive, “cool” is disinterested and better than and status-obsessed and constantly on guard.

I spent a number of years striving for “coolness.” Middle school is where most people learn it, and they primarily do so as a defense mechanism. Nothing marks you as a pariah in middle school quite so much as caring about your grades, or your lessons, or your teachers, or, really, anything at all. The obviously eccentric is the first thing ostracized.

There are things that “cool” people profess to like, but they usually fit into a narrow range a pre-sanctioned topics and choices within those. When I was in school it was a reasonably safe thing to profess to like “any music but country” but if you liked a band that had recently “sold out,” you had a problem. “Coolness” is replete with such idiocies.

My specific example of “coolness” is certainly specific to my milieu and experiences in a mostly white, solidly middle class, uniformly suburban town in the middle of the United States. But I have little doubt that while the specific of “coolness” vary widely, it’s a plague that exists under some name nearly everywhere.

My primary problem with “coolness” is it’s affectation, it’s demand for looking askance at anything other than the ten things that excite us right now. While it’s totally cool for hipsters to be into a band you’ve probably never heard of, let them cop to liking Beyoncé and their “coolness” in the eyes of fellow hipsters melts away. This engenders a perverse narrowness of interest and curiosity that I find utterly grating. People aspiring to “coolness” are unable to like anything until a contingent of equally “cool” people sanction it. Until sanctioned, interests are always presented in a frame of “have you heard of  [rendered judgment upon] this thing?”

“Coolness” has a great deal in common with cynicism, of which Oscar Wilde famously quipped, it “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” “Coolness,” alternately, values everything only by it’s price on the special market of a clique’s taste. “Coolness” thus asserts knowledge that it neither possesses nor desires. It insists, at 13, that it is aware of the entire oeuvre of country music and has judged it all utterly contemptible. The fact that it could, at 23, come to have great respect for the genre is unfathomable.

“Coolness” rolls its eyes. “Coolness” tells you how much everything sucks. How “lame” and “played out” and “boring” everything is that its not sure it can safely like. “Coolness” fails to meet new situation in a healthy way because it asserts so much certainty about its preferences. For fear of being “uncool” its disposition toward  everything unknown is to approach with extreme caution and an eye roll at the ready. This is an incredibly negative way to move through the world.

There’s a reason so many MeFites, answering a question about what they’ve enjoyed more as they got older, make mention of the satisfaction they found upon getting over their “coolness” obsession. To choose just one person making my point perfectly: “Embracing the things that interest me, rather than dismissing something because it’s ‘uncool’. I cut myself off from far too many things because of that stupid attitude.”

Genuine and positive interaction with the world can easily look “uncool” and “nerdy.” It must be open to the possibility that everything it encounters can be awesome. It must be ready to see what’s good about things everyone else is trashing. It requires a sense of wonder, a willingness to just stand back from the world and say, “WOW!”

To blow with the breeze of public opinion is to neuter the only sense of taste that matters for you: your own.  There’s nothing more stultifying to your development as a complete and satisfied human being than caring intensely what others think of you. “Coolness” consists, primarily in an affectatious indifference to the opinions of others. True coolness begins from a place of indifference about the opinions of the “cool.”

I have today two different pieces  essentially covering the same ground from slightly different angles. I was too attached to each to delete it and unable to figure out a way and to combine them, so you’re getting two for the price of one this 15th. The companion to this is “’The Wire’ and the Future of Reporting”. I won’t be offended if you don’t read both.

Like no time in recent memory, the empire that has provided a comfortable existence to most writers seems near collapse. While (permitting for heretofore unprecedented agility) it may still be spared, the cracks and craters in the empire’s once grand facades are unmistakable. Like Rome before it, this is not an empire done in by another. It is rather a mix of seemingly minor causes that over time have left the empire’s negligent rulers unable to even dream of a means of saving that which crumbles.

As in the declining Rome, the barbarians on the periphery strike constant small but damaging blows to the empire. It started when Vinny the Jets fan (Oblique Elton John reference? Check!)  made a few of his fellow Jets fans a little less dependent on the local newspaper, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated for their football fix. Then the computing press was slowly marginalized by a chorus of amateurs who found each other more interesting than brands like PC Magazine and EGM. Today, some of the best magazine-length feature stories are published outside of the conventional magazine; Maciej Ceglowski’s excellent essay about how the cure to scurvy was known and lost (on Link Banana) leaps immediately to mind.

In another historical parallel, the barbarians on the periphery have led to hesitancy and poor decision-making in the seat of power. Unsure how to keep their power, they leap at every possible solution, while not exerting the effort or having the power to really execute any of them. They seek, rather than their continued relevance, their continued existence. Sacrificing what value they used to provide for the sake of getting the most out of what they have. And so once revered newsmagazines cow to base desires of reader, the purveyors of cheap and accurate information lock it away in the hopes that they can live off the small flow of people willing to pay for access.

This rough outline I’ve just embellished is unlikely to be new to anyone reading a thing I’m writing on this obscure outpost of the internet. In fact, few things more clearly demonstrate the problems of the once-great publishing empire than that anyone is reading this at all.

There was a  time not long ago, that all (beyond personal correspondence) that was read was sanctioned under the auspices of some part of the publishing empire. Now, as Clay Shirky most potently points out, we live in an age where everybody can easily write for everyone else. An age in which quite possibly the most-read thing in the world has been made exclusively by the people reading it. An independent self-sustaining enclave has no need for support from a distant empire.

And so we’ve entered the age of the doomsday prophets, who tell us these are the end times of objectivity and truth and sound reason. Many of these prophets work for the empire itself, hoping to make us see the value for the decrepit empire they control, whose passing would go unnoticed but for their regularly reminding how much we’ll miss them.

The crumbling of the publishing empire is a questionable blessing. Without any similar monolith rising to supplant it, it’s pieces will likely live for some time in a weakened state before being lost entirely. The real question is, does the passing of the print publishing empire mean the sun setting on what was good in it? Are we, to finish the historical analogy, entering the Dark Ages? Or as historians would correct us, a Medieval period, which isn’t nearly so dark as we were led to believe?

Surely, the recognizable superstructure is leaving. But the serfs (they’re meant to be writers in this thin and troubled analogy) toil on, their task little changed from the days of empire. What is to be the fate of these functionaries of the empire? Are writers to have a increasingly comfortable and independent life, or will they be crushed under the capricious will of the local knights?

It will likely be harder, in the coming age, for one to live a nice life only on the transforming of ideas into words. With so many people willing and able to be seen doing that thing, it’s unlikely to be as lucrative as it previously had the potential to be. But there’s probably still an opening for the really great ones to rise and become wealthy. And those who transform themselves into tradesmen, specializing and honing a specific ability, will probably make out OK.

But perhaps, as never existed among feudal serfs (because really, this analogy is more than a little broken), a network of reader-supported media can grow. Writers doing work better than a publisher ever got because they’re supported directly by people who want them to pursue their particular vision. Freed from what middlemen think the market will support, greater truth and beauty could prevail. And if there’s one future I get to choose, I’ll make it this one.

I have today two different pieces  essentially covering the same ground from slightly different angles. I was too attached to each to delete it and unable to figure out a way and to combine them, so you’re getting two for the price of one this 15th. The companion to this is “An Overwrought Historical Analogy about the Future of Writing”. I won’t be offended if you don’t read both.

Having just finished the fifth season of the The Wire, in which the show’s creator’s dissatisfaction with the present state of newspapers shines through, their future has been on my mind. And while David Simon appears to think that the medium’s primary problem is soulless corporations strangling their ability to chase a story while they desperately try to be profitable, his case if hardly convincing.

His Baltimore Sun newsroom has an ever-present crowd of people who don’t appear to be doing, well, much of anything. The fact that all these people are drawing a paycheck without pounding the pavement in any capacity seems as good an argument against the medium as it could be for it. One of the greatest contribution that this crowd of non-reporters seems to make is when they memorably inform a young reporter that unless 500 people have just emptied their bowels, they can’t really be said to have been evacuated. A funny bit, perhaps, but a meaningful contribution to Baltimore’s understanding of itself? Not so much.

The primary sin of former newspaperman like Simon is to know the way news and opinion have been gathered for the last 150 years and confuse that with the best way to gather it. Surely there are virtues of the method he shows; one of the men sitting in the Sun’s newsroom not reporting much of anything notices a reporter’s blatant and harmful dishonesty. There is undeniably a sort of rigorous peer-review that grows out of close working and competition in a newsroom. But, in Simon’s telling, the lying reporter is never publicly revealed. He wins a Pulitzer instead.

Do you remember pamphlets? The primary method of political debate and reporting for the 150 years before newspapers took over that role? Just the same, we shouldn’t be shocked if people in 150 years no newspapers as nothing more than a historical curiosity.

To protest the fall of newspapers (and magazines) as a hazard for comprehension of the world and its foibles is to conflate the medium with the message and the method with the result. The fact that we’ve grown used to the medium of newspapers (or magazines, or books) doesn’t mean that those media were the best for delivering the content they contain. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all their odd characteristic are integral to their job.

Consider Wikileaks, which has, by publishing bare documents leaked to it by dissidents around the world, broken nearly as many stories per year as a newspaper staffed with 30 times the people. Previously it may have been the case that such dissidents had to hunt down a newspaper reporter and hand off their controversial evidence; today, with a scanner and an email the whole world can see what you wanted to make public.

I’m not saying that Wikileaks is purely commendable or the future of reporting, but it is a distinct model that has a real potential to be different, and in certain ways better, than the media that people are so loudly worrying about the decline of. One of it’s biggest advantages is efficiency: Wikileaks only “publishes” when it has new news, and then only in the quantity of copies requested. Compared to massive inefficiency inherent in the newspaper model, this is definitely a more future-friendly way of working.

One can easily imagine newspapers being replaced by reporting collectives. Rather than existing in a framework of publishers and editors and subscription servicers, reporters wanting to discover and share the reality of their city could simply get together, uncover the details, and their publish peer-reviewed articles on the internet. I’m not the first person to envision such a thing (I think I got it from Jesse Darland), but I don’t think that means anything about it’s potential transformative power.

Lone-wolf self-publishing, essentially what I do here, is equivalent, only a reporter/writer need only worry about covering their own costs. Surly some would worry about the lack of someone looking over the writer’s shoulder, but the internet’s shown itself to be  the best medium ever invented for calling people on bullshit.

Surely there are problems with each of the three models I’ve suggested. And surely someone at some newspaper has already come up with laundry list of issues they foresee. But their model has never been perfect, and in an era of constantly falling advertising revenues and a wealth of new available publishing paradigms, the inefficiencies that have always been a part of their model are simply unsustainable.

It’s often bandied about that optimism — no, pessimism — no, optimism is the key to being happy. I don’t think either, in the way we commonly understand them, has the potential to be the answer. Both require a unique flavor of delusion to do full time, and all delusion is detrimental.

“Detached openness” is a phrase I invented (or encountered, one can never be certain about such things) a few years ago. It is a shorthand of the disposition I thought (and think) ideal for moving through the world and being happy doing so.

While that alone may be enough for your understanding, let me clarify my understanding of these two words, as the standard definition of each is unlikely to illuminate what I think I mean.

Detachment, Buddhists caution, should not be mistaken for the ideal of non-attachment. While there’s certainly wisdom in that distinction, my understanding of detachment isn’t so narrow. The quickest way to differentiate the cautioned against detachment and what I mean by detachment seems to be these quotes from the Wikipedia pages for emotional detachment and detachment respectively.

[Emotional detachment] refers to an “inability to connect” with others emotionally, as well as a means of dealing with anxiety by preventing certain situations that trigger it; it is often described as “emotional numbing” or dissociation, depersonalization or in its chronic form depersonalization disorder.

Detachment, also expressed as non-attachment, is a state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world and thus attains a heightened perspective.

This proper understanding of detachment means knowing that not getting that promotion will not be the end of you. Exercised more strongly, it means knowing that the success or failure in this promotion process should in no way affect your self-worth or career objectives. At best, it means never even entertaining any of those thoughts. In this situation, one should understand the lower form of detachment as refusing to even try to get the promotion for fear of all the mentioned turmoil.

Openness here is understood as not dissimilar from optimism. It is being open to the possibility contained in every minute and seeing the good that can come out of seemingly bad things. It consists in being able to see the beauty in a piece of trash, the possibility in everything. I reach here for a quotation from Henry Miller:

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

I fail to see much with which I can supplement that.

The combination of these may be clear to you, but some illumination: detached openness recognizes the beauty in a sunset without striving to make it last in any way. It recognizes that the uncapturable ephemeral should not be held onto jealously or regretted when gone. Neither of those actions it helpful to your current mental health, nor do they enhance what was.

Ideally, we do this with all thing. We strive to see what good is unfolding without seeking to shape or change what we cannot. When something changes over which we have no control, we recognize it and seek to find good in the new order of thing. When something doesn’t change that we want to, we reassess and accept the unchanged situation without getting emotional. (Yes, I did basically steal this from the Serenity Prayer.)

I would make clear that I am no master of this disposition. I am prone to practicing the inferior form of detachment. I regularly find things ugly or infuriating or just plain bad. And I’m not always able to practice detached openness when attempting to correct these flaws.

Nor is this the only thing one needs. Other things certainly matter in life beyond your basic disposition to the world. Staying present for what is happening, to choose just one example, can get you at least as far.

But I feel rather certain that this disposition is the most healthy and useful one I’ve encountered in my life. Beyond pessimism or optimism, I believe detached openness is the secret to what mental balance I have and what happiness I find.

If there was one obstacle, beyond laziness, that made me hesitate to get back to writing in more than the few-sentence bursts I regularly produce for Link Banana it was my uncertainty about what of value I could say.

It’s not that I don’t think people need to hear things I think that I know — while there may be merit in possessing that type of modesty, I do not — it’s that they’ve already heard those things I think they most need to hear.

Things about how money doesn’t buy happiness. That understanding is rooted in attention. That the greatest obstacle to your happiness is your waiting to be happy. That happiness is not the same as pleasure, or a lack of sadness. That ignoring the present situation is the worst way to change it. That you can always find something to be thankful for. That anger is never the best way to solve a problem. That an act of kindness is never squandered.

These statements — and many others I didn’t list — are all, at least to my ears, the most obvious of truths. There are hundreds of famous quotations that attest to all of them. Anyone unacquainted with those quotations probably wouldn’t be reading anything I said anyway.

These short and obvious cliches are exactly what conventional wisdom says a writer should avoid.  But anything that takes more than a sentence to express seems overstated to me. While a sentence can’t explain the political climate of Somalia, or what spin means with relation to the bonding of atoms, or how the crash of the US stock market in 1929 was influenced by Germany, none of those things hit you where you live. Between your insides and your outsides none of those things matter.

The only things that really affect your quality of life exist within a radius about the length of your arms from your body. Everything outside of that radius is not acting on you in any direct way, and is thus irrelevant to your true quality of life.

I think that if there’s a single reason that the facts I consider most essential are simple, it’s this: not that much exists between your mind and fingertips. And even the most teeming of minds doesn’t contain much more than twenty thoughts at a time. And chatter among twenty idea’s can only get so complex.

People searching the edges of human knowledge are unlikely find anything there that will, or should, fundamentally affect their life as it’s lived daily. The confirmation of string theory says absolutely nothing to that longing you feel lying alone in your bed for the first time in years. A better understanding of the relationship between modern man and neanderthals, or market demand and labor supply, will not correct your dysfunctional relationship with everyone in your family. The existence or nonexistence of God changes nothing about your difficulty controlling your drinking.

But a single new idea, if it’s strong, simple, and powerful enough, added to the constant mental chatter can fundamentally change the timbre of the conversation in your mind. And that constant chattering is the very substance of your disposition, your life, and your reality. It is you, more than anything else anyone thinks they know about you. And you’re the one I’m interested in.

Though I like to write things like this less and less, I have to take a moment to say something about this blog itself. And it’s this: While I don’t have the time or will I once did when I was publishing nearly every day of the work week, I intend to start taking this blog seriously again. To regularly publish on it things I’m proud of, and hope will be worth taking seriously.

For now, my plan is modest. Having not written anything here (and much anywhere else) in over a year, I intend to merely publish one thing a month on the 15th (regardless of the day of the week).

And though I like some component post-types that used to make up this blog, I see many of them as methods I used more to fill space than say important things. I intend to do my best to avoid reviews of all but the most interesting or misunderstood cultural products. I intend to avoid writing direct responses to editorials and articles I see elsewhere. I intend to, at least on a once-a-month schedule, stop posting things other people said with nothing more than my statement of agreement. And finally, I intend to start citing facts and figures I mention (because damn it’s annoying when I go back and can’t tell how I came up with them).

My goal is to write with as little filler as possible things I think are interesting, largely unsaid, and worthy of saying. I doubt that I can do all those things every month, but it’s unquestionably what I’ll be striving for.

I harbor few illusions of what this thing will do for me, or what I can do with it. But I know that I like to have written things and that there are things I wish I saw talked about more. For those two reasons, I intend to revive this site. I hope you’ll join me.

Technically it’s just weeks right now, but before — when I first drafted this — it really was months. It was, and remains, that a strange confluence of inconvenient facts keep me from regularly flexing my muscle in this space.

I could go into the details, but I would rather say simply that they are far more prosaic than profound, and that to the extent I find myself different in the interim, it is having gained a certain weariness with the machinations of modern living and certain lessening of my certainty that all will turn out well.

But there remains fantastic potential in each keystroke. A never-relenting possibility that though this sentence bores me in it’s writing, and likely you in it’s reading, I may soon stumble upon something that leaves the two of us astounded.

My greatest aspiration as a writer, a thinker, a seeker, and a person, is to find myself amazed at the clarity that can be produced in a single well-structured essay. It’s a rarity, and looking back a little on all I’ve produced here, even more of a rarity than I remember.

But it’s the reason that I find myself returning this screen from time to time, looking at this empty box, and hoping hard to be able to get back to it in earnest. I never tire of the potential that from my keystrokes, someday, my world may be altered forever.

We see language as a mere tool at our peril. Being literate is not merely about having a functional ability to make sense of things recorded in a different time or place. It’s about having the ability, by merely moving your eyes, to enter another world. It’s about being able to, with mere movement of your fingers create new worlds, or new visions of this world, for others.

There’s magic in the act of writing. A magic the endless drag of 9-to-5 can easily sap from your awareness. But it is real. And it’s real, even if your skills, like mine, are rather feeble.

This is something I need to remember. To keep with me. To bring me here more.