Welcome! (... and so what's here?)

Writing is the easy part.

I've always liked to write. I think this was probably a result of my avoidant personality organization. I wasn't good at thinking quickly, because during conversations or debates my mind's first priority was the sensing of self-esteem issues and the deployment of ego defenses. Since it was so easy for others to get the best of me in those situations, I developed the habit of keeping my mouth shut. I became known as a quiet person - a man of few words.

(This is just conversation. If you don't care to
read all this, the table of contents is on the right.)
Of course, I wasn't quiet at all. I had a lot to say, but chose to write it, rather than utter it. I was big on letters and memos, which often consisted of several pages.

The nice thing about writing is that you get to take as much time as you wish to think about what you want to say. As long as there's nobody looking over your shoulder, there's nothing threatening about it, so your mind can concentrate on the subject at hand. That usually prevents your jumping to conclusions or talking out your [expletive deleted], as it were. But even when not, you avoid the embarrassment of having that brought to your attention, since there's nobody there to challenge what you're saying. And usually the better side of you will see to it that those passages get fixed or expunged prior to publication.

That brings up another nice thing; you don't have to worry about saying stupid things that you can't take back. What goes out of your mouth stays out there forever. You can't ever really take it back or eat your words. But you can always highlight something you've written and touch the Delete key; then those words magically vanish as if they'd never been written, never to be seen or heard by anyone.

Because of all this, I had lots of experience writing things. Eventually, people began to tell me I was a pretty good writer; even one of my best friends, who has a Ph.D. in English Literature and teaches writing at USC in Los Angeles. He once told me that he admired the way I so often and so successfully married profundity and profanity, or virtuosity and vulgarity, in the same short sentence. I took that as a compliment.

Enjoy the blog.

[-=glw=-]