Tag: half-penny thoughts

  • Half-penny thought — 14may25

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I sometimes ask myself not if I should write, but if I should share what I write.

    Writing is my lifeblood. I have occasionally “given up the bad habit of writing” only to find myself slinking back with a scrawled bit of doggerel like a junky needing his morning fix. If I go more than about a day without writing something, somewhere — I get that janky tremor that we used to call “jonesing” back in the day.

    I cannot stop. That much has been decided. And, for the most part, I like to think of it as a victimless habit. Mostly harmless… Besides, like decent person with any filthy habit, I wash my hands afterwards.

    But should I share what I write? That gets trickier.

    I still believe it is “mostly harmless”. But I know, regardless of the perception of “quality” (in quotes for my buddy, Ted), what I write often seems to not be (for whatever reason, perhaps due to “quality”) the kind of stuff that people particularly “get” or maybe even like. And I am not entirely blind to the qualities of the writings that are well-received, but the well-received style of writing is plainly not me.

    So I often find myself asking, when I write, should I share it? Or should I hermit myself off in the woods and eventually be found as a dead and desiccated body, with stacks of scrawled within notebooks scattered around my cave that some cold hiker will burn for fuel against the cold autumn air?

    Wait… don’t answer those… those were rhetorical questions. Allow me at least the illusion that someone reads and maybe slightly likes what I write, please.

    Channeling non-oblique, non-obtuse writer to see if I can make something of something…

  • Half-penny thoughts — 07may25

    Photo by Cornelia Munteanu on Unsplash

    Eyes chase the dust motes playing in the sun framed in shadows cast by the window frame. I wonder that they might be alive, even if we think of dust as the slag of our skin, cast off in a neverending shedding season, our constant state of ephemera we purposefully cast a blind eye toward — afraid of our own mortality. Unable to accept we are a season of dust, we focus our gaze on the verdant, the thriving as we sweep the parts of our dying under the rug for someone else to discover after we have passed on.

    Consider this: Could the “dead” cells of ourselves still be alive? By what measure have we to decide when they are finally and truly dead things? They never had a heartbeat and we cannot confirm they ever had mind — although I will argue that there is more mind than we are inclined to recognize in the world around us — much less this have an active mind.

    And yet, be it the vagaries of air eddies and their imagined whims, or dust motes at play, one has to wonder if any of this must be as it seems. Who is to say that if we look beyond the scrim before our eyes and truly see, if we might not see more than what everything seems.

  • Another Half-Penny Thought

    I sometimes wonder what prompts people to answer questions which were never asked.

    I think back to myself, “Did I ask anyone about their preferences when it comes to pie? No. I only mentioned I had a slice of apple pie with my lunch.”

    And yet, someone tells me: “I am totally not an apple pie person, I can’t understand how anyone could ever eat apple pie because apple pie is gross.”

    I scratch my head and say the only thing that seems sensible to say:

    “Cool story, bro’.”

    I sometimes have to fight the urge to flash two thumbs up.

    Is it just me? Or do you encounter these kinds of random responses when you make otherwise neutral statements?

    It’s not as if I said, “Everyone must love apple pie! Apple pie is the best pie of all pies ever made! Fight me if you think otherwise!”