Starting Mid-Thought

Everywhere else I write has a job to do. There’s a subject, a reader, a standard to clear, and a shape the piece has to arrive in before it counts as finished. That’s fine. It’s most of the reason any of it is worth reading.

But it means a particular kind of thought has nowhere to go. The one that turns up on a walk and doesn’t belong to any subject. The argument I can’t finish. The opinion I hold without being willing to defend it in public for a thousand words. The observation that’s interesting for about ninety seconds and then isn’t.

This is where those go now.

There’s no schedule and no plan. Some of what lands here will be four sentences. Some of it I’ll disagree with by the time you read it, which isn’t a defect — a thought you can’t revise isn’t a thought, it’s a position, and positions are what the other writing is for.

They used to die in a notes app. Now they die in public, which at least gives them a witness.