The Puddle

It is practice amongst bloggers to woefully lament their lack of productivity. To apologize profusely to their meagre readership at any and every perceived interruption in output. This of course is a projection, a most transparent portrait of the gritty truth of all such writing: that nobody cares as much about the food as the chef. Far be it for me, however, to stand in opposition to hallowed custom.

If you are reading this, chances are you are owed a hearty pat on the back. In all likelihood you are one of the few, the tenacious, the hopeful, who have returned to this site day after day, like sea-faring turtles, finding nothing new, nought but the same old posts for months on end. I know. I know how you have courted the call of abandon, pondered forsaking this little diversion once and for all as a mere instant of wider irrelevance. In your perserverence, biblical as it was, you have come to see the value of patience, the power of introspection wrought by silence. And now the word has returned, and the word is good, and it shall be good unto perpetuity, or at least until the next time I get a bit too busy and lazy and distracted.

To be fair, a very real obstacle to my posting sooner has been the fact that I am running dangerously low on stock photos to accompany my posts. I had gone so far as to plan a few pretentious hipster photography outings in the past months but always had to postpone them due to weather or pressing deadlines. The result is just one more excuse to put things off to another day.

We should recognize, of course, that procrastination is essential to any process worth discussing. It is only through not writing that one can generate the ready energy to spew forth all manner of drivel, unfiltered and unbound.

Much of my morning commute has been occupied listening to old episodes of "The Great Eastern," a fantastic satirical CBC radio production from the 90's. If you haven't heard it or heard of it, I would recommend that you google nothing else. If nothing else it is truly a testament to just how quickly the decline in public media has taken place. Where once there was witticism, now there is there is the facile drone of "The Debaters."

I mention "The Great Eastern" because I am particularly struck by one of my favourite parts of the show, when the alleged host, Paul Moth, enters into reflective monologue. His earnest effort to make sense of the human experience is tempered by the listener's knowledge that it's all a joke, a fiction. To what degree is the very effort some sort of sly dig? I like this part of the show because in many ways it nicely encapsulates much of what The Puddle is all about. It's a wholesome sort of irony that is seemingly ill-suited for the world of text messages and tweets. Some things are lost in translation, more are lost in abbreviation.