Life by a thousand cuts

Papa Hemingway did not like long sentences. He disliked long paragraphs too. So I'll be brief. Cats should set an example for humans and police the way the latter behave. Cats turn up on your doorstep when they feel like it, are hungry or just lonely. Would you begrudge a cat for infrequent appearances? If you do, the cat will walk away and look for a friendlier face. They are always hedging their bets. Jordan Peterson makes it Rule number 12 for life: pet a cat when you encounter one. QED.

It happens again and again. We call a friend or a relative. We are in neutral mode and do not anticipate a wave of bad mood swirling its way towards us. In the past we engaged and ended up heavily bruised. Now we think we know better and breathe in before we try to move on the conversation. It doesn't work. We bail out, cowardly. The only source of relief is found after scurrying towards some Stoic quotes.   Epitectus has an answer for the pressing question: who or what is pulling my strings? Anything that we set out our heart on or want to avoid has the controls of our inner peace. Bit pathetic, really. Expectations are our masters.   If every encounter involves as much mental preparation as going into a war zone, no wonder some prefer infrequent human contact and even give it up completely. Stoics advise against isolation though. Resilience needs scars and battles won, so that it is a badge of honour rather than a genetic gift. No wonder human interact

I have recently discovered a Reddit corner that presents would-be writers, as well as established ones, presumably, with a 'wordy bait', a paragraph to fire up their imagination and get them down to writing. Having lived most of my life among words and through words, I thought I should do it too. Then I changed my mind. We no longer live in the traditional story-telling set-up. The world comes to us (and at us) mostly through the eyes, although ears are still important. The art of podcasting is now being taught, in exchange for a fee, and audio books are a good companion during hours of chores or lonely driving. Both audiobooks and podcasts are demanding mistresses, they require exclusivity and no competing sources of interest, like other noises or images. Sharing headphones is such a brief teenage act. Anyone above the age of 16 would not be seen dead pushing an earbud that carries someone else's genetic traces... and earwax. An image, on the other hand, is ins

Back in blogosphere.

I can't believe so much time has passed since the last post. Is it laziness, lack of interest, an all-encompassing fear of failure? I think it's just a manifestation of the low-energy syndrome that permeates certain stages of life, the attraction of futility, giving in to an Oblomovian attitude that makes an otherwise strong character liquefy in bed instead of chasing outdoor dreams.

I have eventually linked up my so-called blog and my twitter persona. Two lazy homunculi (or mulieres... God, so long since my Latin class) will try and goad each other in a lingua incognita...well, not quite, but it's still a challenge. I may even get some tweets from fellow writers/aspiring writers.

So here I am, posting a most innocuous question on Twitter, trying to find fellow journeymen(women) on the way to writing in English despite not having it as the first language. I don't get any reaction, any tweet back, nothing at all. Quite disappointing...