Diary: Snatches of Blue

[degringolade]

 
Pinkish

Spent a while this morning thinking about writing and talking and your thoughts and how they are policed within your psyche or consciousness or mind or soul or whatever nomenclature you want to use at any specific time in a conversation or self-reflection.  

What goes on in your brain is a dicey thing.  There is no such thing as completely accurate communication of your thoughts.  That just isn't possible.  I think that one of the parts that I enjoy/giggle about is the "mood" drop-down box in the little "post an entry". Is that the only thing going on in my mind:  Well, NO.  But adjectives are important and incomplete.  All I can ever do is poorly describe what is going on inside my brain.  You know, I am content with that.

I suppose that I see the means of communication as a form of distillation.  As a fairly accomplished moonshiner, I am quite comfortable with the idea that most of what you think has no real strength and is quite simply incorrect.  To start getting some strength, you have to run it through the still of language and start pulling out the parts that aren't conducive to the strength of the transfer of concepts.  In moon-shining, the first distillation is conducted by throwing away the 30 milliliters coming off the column, because that is the nasty shit that can blind you.  Then you collect the remainder of the run and prepare for the next step.  This step lets you throw away about 75% of the original solution (which unfortunately includes a much reduced level of good stuff, but as in all things human, nothing is perfect.  Conversation is like this first step, it lets your free wheel and figure out where you are full of shit and where your thoughts are useless.

Then you have writing.  This is like the second distillation.  This is the one where you take the results of the first distillation an run it through the same process.  You only throw out the first 15mL because there is probably not anything bad there, but it just doesn't hurt to be careful and you aren't losing that much.  Out of this step, the 25% of the original that goes into the still yields around 15% of the volume of the original material which means you lose 85% of what you started the entire process with.  But this is good stuff, but it is still pretty raw.  This is the stuff of letters and e-mail.  

Then comes the hard part.  You stick the 15% into a jug with some charred wood and maybe a touch of honey and a smidgen of some spice and close up the bottle and wait for a couple of years.  After some time, you decant some of it, dilute it to a strength that doesn't knock your brains in all at once, and then sip it slowly and think about it.  Then figure out what you need to change and start again.

Both are great hobbies.