One of the most frusatrating things about being me is that I think too much, and I think that I think too quickly. I can't really tell because in the whole of my life I haven't had the good fortune to have a close circle of friends with whom I shared intellectual curiosity and interests. Instead, I grew up as a writer in the form that the Internet provides having written on compelling subjects for years and years and years in various obscure contexts.
What happens is that when I get around people I am very content to hear them say what they like, uninterrupted, while my mind dances circles and tangents around the subject and I make inside jokes with myself. Online, however, I am augmented by the memories I have stored in 11 years of blogging and all the other crap I filter through my head; it makes me positively aggravating. I keep it to myself 90% of the time. The other 8% I write up long form on the blog in a Socratic way, but always with the passion of asserting conviction. Ideas are always blowing and I'm not one to luff my sails. Sometimes that's tacky. The other 2% I just talk crap in three or four sentences.
I'm talking about Facebook and why I feel I must withdraw from it. Facebook brings me into confrontation with ideas which never get fully expressed. It's like radio and television. It encourages brevity, and I have been seduced into saying curt and quippy things that don't bear scrutiny and merely provoke. So today I'll quit.
The incident prompting this needn't be discussed. I percieve that one or two people may be aware of it. I apologized and I am retreating back to the blog.
I hate the short form and without the subtleties of the feedback I used to get here on the blog, there's no point in saying what I have been saying the way I have been saying it. I have been, to use the exact colloqualism, "I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying". The only proper way to express that would be Lagerfelds "I'm not saying anything, I'm just answering questions". But the problem is that I'm not writing, I'm just saying. Talk is cheap.
And so I will write and give up the conceit of being quippy. I have no use for throwing rhetorical bombs and barbs. Such mendicancy is unworthy of even the most ordinary purposes. So I'm done with it. I cannot argue for argument's sake and that's what I believe the form has been bringing me to. I must write with a clear mind, expositorily. I'll do that here on the blog.
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