Monday, April 17, 2006

Blah-ging

Months have gone by since my last blog posting. Gone, too, are the days when I might have felt guilty about that. It’s silly to feel remorse over a failure to do something that no one else cares a whit about. (What is a whit, anyway? Just a typo?)

In any case, I’m telling myself that the reason I haven’t written isn’t laziness, procrastination, or distraction. Rather, it’s that I’ve not had anything to say.

The blah-gosphere depends on people blah-blah-blah-ging. And far be it from me to stop them. But for the time being, my own blah-ging has just seemed like so much noise.

In the “real world,” I tend to spend more time listening than I do flapping my gums. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say; it’s just that I already know (for the most part) what I think. When I talk, I don’t usually learn anything new. When I let other people say their parts, though, I’m introduced to thoughts and perspectives that hadn’t occurred to me before. Even if I disagree, at least I’m getting something novel.

I spend enough time listening to myself—why just this morning, for instance, I lay awake for two hours while my brain ran around in circles trying to kill me.

Of course, this piece is entirely paradoxical: here I am ranting about ranting; I’m like that crazy person in the movie theater shouting “Shut Up! Shut Up!” when no one is talking but him.

Even so, I do think that by and large, we all would do well to open our ears more and exercise our voices less. I see those pitiful people with the cell phones clipped to their faces and I think how sad it is to always have to be available to voice an opinion or give advice.

I’m just posting this to let everyone know I have nothing to say right now. But you already knew that, of course.