I almost decided to “microblog” this post off my phone, thinking that using a smaller device than my laptop would justify the micro- prefix.
No.
That’s not what does it. It’s that the post is a short burst, like a sneeze with words. And it’s done on a “microblog.” Which I don’t know how to differentiate from a blog, because unless your first name is Arianna and your last name is Huffington, almost any blog is micro. Besides, I didn’t want to microblog it, because I can’t riff on my phone.
What I’m talking about is that writing with my thumbs can’t do that special riff that my hands can on a keyboard. I certainly can’t do it by dictating into my phone. Because that’s not even writing. It’s talking. Writing, for me, is the process of having too many thoughts and feelings swirling around the gray brain coils as if they are all being smashed together in a tangled Hadron collider, and occasionally at the intersection of coils, a coherent idea forms, and that’s what goes on paper. Then this same brain looks over the “coherent” thoughts when I edit–do you see the problem?–and decides what thoughts were indeed coherent and what were actually just two or more thoughts or feelings that failed to yield at the stop sign and something ugly happened there in the cerebral cortex. There was intellectual roadkill.
I’m at Pint & Plow Brewing Co. (for coffee, dear 12-Step friends) as I work, and a gentleman singer came over their Pandora station (or whatever) and was singing and yodeling. There’s something about yodeling–and cowboys and the German influence in nearby Fredericksburg–that makes me smile. There’s something incongruous about a tough man on a saddle yodeling. But it makes me smile still.
Biscuit Aisle 