12-21-16

This series of slipshod efforts, thoughts of a moment, tied together with various thematic strands, not diagnosed or carefully drawn in overarching purpose, delighting in tangents, asides, boasting incessantly of a grand design - not showing it - and setting the most modest of tasks as the court from which it seeks to judge the world, not according to intrinsic worth or material wealth so much as clarity of vision, a review of weights and measurements, from a view at least as balanced as the things in themselves, one of a fitting, although not typically one of surpassing excellence in thought and speech, have been my obsession for an embarrassingly told number of years, the telling a necessity, the time mere happenstance and blamed on a rhetorical flourish, a creature born of my own sick brain, unyielding, self-important, unliked, easily outmaneuvered while crude (and sometimes cruel) in retaliation, a thing beneath praise or censure, not worthy of the airs imputed to it, which inhere in it because of the imputation, a villain accused, most essentially, of existence, the experience of which inspires men to master it and overcome it, setting themselves and one another on a course of self-improvement,  knowing that this common enemy can never be grasped, without it conquering the foolhardy fellow that ventures to equal it.

Follow my good example and learn from my bad; don't hesitate to correct me; don't be angry if I accuse you: you stood your ground, but the ground stood you up.