The earth is bipolar

I stole the headline from a Steven Wright performance we saw last weekend. He must have done 250 one-liners in 90 minutes. Another good one: “I blame the ending of the cold war for global warming.”

It is a polar world: black/white, ying/yang, Beatles/Stones, Warren/Niles, Pepsi/Coke. Choices have to be made, and I’m finding that this is also true with writing. For the past 18 months the Daily Blank has focused primarily on politics. That was easy during the elections because we had the horse race and the personalities, on top of policy and performance, to discuss.

But now that we’re deep into fixing the world, I find that my heart really isn’t in it so much anymore. I still read the papers every day, but writing about it is depressing. Pretty much everyone is either a crook, an influence peddler, a political pimp, or a thief. And they are all liars. Every story is, at its heart, the story of how people with money and power use it to accumulate more money and power, at the expense of the weak and stupid. Writing about it just brings out my inner grumpy old man – and frankly, I don’t need any encouragement in that department.

I want to keep writing, but I want to write about other things. The question is, “what?” They always say, “write about what you know about” but who’d want to read about putting together a sales presentation and pricing model. I think I’d bore myself to death before I proof-read it. I was considering writing a post called “Eight great places to get a martini in Manhattan,” and I still may write that one. I think the drinks would be tax-deductible.

My stated reason for starting this blog in the first place was that, “I have more opinions than opportunities to express them,” and the nice thing about politics is you can state your opinions and, especially in an election year, receive plenty of feedback. But a steady flow of personal opinions on movies, books, or anything else, begins to sound like a lot of self-indulgent horse hockey pretty quickly to me, and my own wouldn’t be any exception to that rule.

I need to think about this for a while, so this will be my last post until I come up with a new plan. Feel free to respond with suggestions, as I value your opinions. This is the 220th post on the Daily Blank. Thanks to all of you for showing up and contributing to the conversation.

Hasta luego amigos.