A Pocket Full of Why

I’m not sure what to write about, so I’ll just start writing in the hopes that something comes to me, even though my past experiments with this form of writing all ended abysmally. 

Fortunately, I’m not one to learn from my mistakes. 

What is the fun in that?  If we take every failure to heart and swear to never do that particular thing again, we will eventually run out of things to do and then where will we be?  We would all find ourselves just staring at each other with our hands in our pockets and saying endlessly, “Well, now what?”

I am pretty sure that is why pockets were invented in the first place.  Many people think that pockets were invented so that we could carry things around with us, like money or a pocket knife or a live ermine. 

But those people are wrong.

Pockets were invented to give us somewhere to put our hands when we are in the awkward position of having to make small talk.  This is important, because if we did not have pockets to put our hands in, we would all be making random hand gestures and flailing our arms apropos of nothing as our social panic and our blather increased exponentially.  Eventually our hand and arm motions become so out of control that we actually begin to lift off the floor and we fly erratically towards a window like a moth that has half of one wing singed off by an incandescent bulb he got too close to.

Whenever I am forced to make small talk, I immediately begin plotting my escape.  My mouth may be talking about how the GATT rate affects honey production by bees north of the 37th parallel in years evenly divisible by seven, but my brain is thinking, “If I were to jump out that window right there, I wonder what the odds are that I would land on a passing dump truck full of unginned cotton?”

But the real take-away from that story is that my idea of small talk involves GATT rates.  And I don’t even know what that is.  Apparently, it is something that grownups in office buildings talk about in between bouts of considering jumping out a window.

But the real takeaway from this blog post, even more important than the one involving scanning the roadways down below for trucks laden with unginned cotton, is that my original assertion was correct:

It is a bad idea for me to just start writing when I have nothing to write about.

I think we can all agree on THAT!

And you can put that in your pocket.

 

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And speaking of a view from above, here’s “A View From Above”, by John Jarvis.  One of my favorite pieces ever.