The Inability to Talk

Posted September 23rd, 2005 by Sean Williams

I have not wanted a blog about pedophilia to remain up for several days. That blog was essentially a joke, a challenge that I gave myself and stepped up to in some sort of juvenile dick measuring contest against the world, one which I find myself in all the time and which I have absolutely no respect for.

There is an inherent flaw in my writing, one I’m not sure how to address. I write what I mean, and then it is misunderstood on some level, and I go back and clarify, and it makes things worse, and I give up. I’ve grown up with one foot on either side of the digital age, so I think I kinda understand what the problem is. The more one writes, the more one gives space and breath to a point of view or an argument, two things happen; you make your point of view more refined and more specific, but you also give more tiny tributaries of thought a chance to be argued with.

I noticed early in the digital revolution that the best way to communicate via email was with lots of short emails. You were guaranteed to get more in return, you would be able to clarify as you go, and you could be assured that someone was gonna actually read everything you write.

There is a problem with bullet-point arguments. Internet trollers will certainly have noticed by now that message boards and blogs are littered with comments where a person’s larger thought is picked apart by focusing on each of the smaller details. It’s very effective and important, definitely. Our lives are littered with false syllogisms, one shouldn’t be able to get away with saying “because of A,B,C,D,E and F, this is thus” without someone walking through each example and showing it to be wrong.

The problem is semantics. When someone says “The Ramones were the backbone of the punk scene” someone can tear that argument apart. But, if someone is saying “there was a sort of punk rebirth in my high school in 1995. It was ridiculous and it only lasted for six months, but there were guys with mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks, and it was all because three or four guys read the same book about CBGBs. We went and bought all of the music we could get our hands on. The Ramones were the backbone of the punk scene…” then you can see how picking this apart doesn’t mean anything.

This may seem to be a polemic directed at Nate Williams, a gorgeous and brilliant young man who’s only relation to me is that I am also a gorgeous and brilliant young man, but it isn’t. His writing is important and he’s one of the best thinkers I know. But he does make a biblical argument about Christ, trying to make sure I understand that it has nothing to do with the fairy tale Christ I seem to love. He does this despite my introduction, explaining that I was inventing the Christ of my choosing, the same way that everyone else does.

This blog isn’t something I use to change minds or to take on issues. This blog gives me a chance to keep my intellectual claws sharp is all, I get to think things out in an organized way, something that is really good for my massively ADHD brain. I don’t really ask you, the reader, any kind of questions usually, I’m interested in engaging with y’all in person or over email or, really over drinks would be the best way.

I have this mess of ideas that shoot around my utterly average mind, and this blog gives me a chance to wrestle them down and sit on them long enough to look at them and figure out if I like them. I might, in two or three days, write a blog entitled “I Am Not A Christian” and it will have as much meaning as the earlier post.

Honestly, I wrote a blog several days ago where I talked about how excited I am about our upcoming play, and how much of the thrill of that comes from the fact that our last play got away from me, but the production company asked me to take it down. So I did. A blog for me is a chance to hone the public aspect of my diary. My actual diary would contain dreams and frustrations and techniques for dealing with the people in my life, but I would hate if anyone ever read it. This is, at least, meant to be digested in public, but if I don’t ever really engage in debate on this blog, I hope that it’s apparent why. Almost everything I write is only partly true, in that I believe that almost everything *everyone* writes is only partly true, and real debate and exchange of ideas is only possible face-to-face and aided by alcohol.