You probably think I’m dead. I posted a lot from 2012 to 2018. Less since 2019 and almost nothing since 2022. Yeah, there’s been a lot going on: a pandemic, an attempted coup, vandals in government, spreading fascism, unaccountable billionaires wrecking the place, changing climate, corporate rebranding of intelligence as a thing that can simulated, souped up and sold to make us all more .. productive?

I used to write with the belief that I needed share only what I felt I understood. When I stopped understanding, I stopped writing. That’s exactly backwards.

I’m sick inside my soul. Not because I stopped understanding. Because I stopped writing or I slowed down in attempt to be careful to say only things I knew for certain to be true. Problem: I know nothing for certain to be true.

We don’t write from places of perfect understanding. We write our way toward understanding.

We don’t write because our thoughts are all well-made and perfectly formed. We form our thoughts from our words. We put words on a screen or a page and say: is that what I think?

Sometimes we surprise ourselves in finding succinctly stated containers of direct thought. More often we iterate, we draft, we make paragraphs and let them cool so we can taste them in different lights at different times of day. Sometimes our thoughts are jumbled and chaotic. They don’t make sense to us. So many broken, misfit pieces. But that’s a puzzle and the only way to work a puzzle is to see the pieces, take inventory, place them into some kind of order so you can start the work of locking them together in a coherent picture.

The picture isn’t always coherent, of course. We don’t always understand what our thoughts mean. So we need to send them into the world. Let other people find them and try to connect those thoughts to their own thoughts. Sometimes they connect and someone helps us understand what we meant by what we said or what we meant to say.

All of this is to tell you, I am tired of waiting. I am tired of broken nonsense.

I understand nothing, and I am ready to tell you about it.