Starting Mid-Thought

Congratulations: you found your way here. That means you either know me, know someone else who knows me, or one of the web crawlers finally discovered this site somehow and you ran some interesting searches.

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 (and writing).

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 two or three thousand words. The observation that’s interesting for about ninety seconds and then isn’t.

This is where those go now.

A few of these thoughts just need to get out of my head so they’ll quit circling. Others I don’t understand until I’ve written them down; I find out what I think somewhere around the third paragraph. Call it catharsis. It’s the plain, unglamorous kind, but it works.

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 fixed position.

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