The Begats

My brother called me just now because he’s totally stoked about the Bible miniseries on the History Channel. He’s like “They say they’re going to cover everything from the beginning to Peter!” Then he pauses and says, “So, I guess that sucks for Paul. Well, at least we probably won’t have to sit through Revelations, right?”

And then he says, “God, I wonder how they’re going to do all that boring shit in the Old Testament, where it’s just lists of people having kids…” then he stops. As if he’s just considering right then how one might dramatize generations of begetting. “Wait,” he says. “No, that would be the greatest episode of the series. Just generations of men fucking their wives. Give each couple like fifteen seconds of screen time and fill the whole show it it.”

“Could they do that on The History Channel?” I ask.

“Well, they should try!”

Just Some Stuff I Want to Say

This has been the roughest couple of days I’ve had blogging in a long, long time. I can’t sleep. I’m having trouble making sure I’m eating enough at the right times so that I don’t get sick. I feel like shit. Every time I see there’s another comment here, I hide from it for as long as I can before I come to look at it.

I don’t say any of this because I want your sympathy. What I want is just to give you some context for the apology I’m about to offer. In the old days, I used to love these long discussions, because I was an idiot and I thought you really could just hash this shit out in public and some good would come of it. Some minds would be changed.

But the truth is that I don’t believe that’s true and I haven’t for a while. I don’t believe big messes like the one we had here actually change minds. I think they’re just cathartic and terrible in equal measure. Often just terrible and hurtful.

In part, in order to be effective, the person moderating the comments has to have a generosity of spirit and a level of kindness and understanding that is completely outside of my ability. From where I’m sitting, it seems like you’d have to have an inhuman generosity of spirit. So, if you got in that comment thread and it sucked, yes, I knew and I am sorry. It’s just not something I can do–guide a conversation like that in ways that keep everyone on track and everyone, including myself, from feeling like they’re being attacked. I also don’t have the ability to not take shit personally. If it hurts me, it hurts me and I’m going to react.

So, that fucking sucks.

But I also want to say this–tempers were running very high, mine especially. And I know there were a lot of people just watching the shit storm from the sidelines and then forming opinions of the people involved. Or feeling like this incident solidified feeling they already had. That it “proved” something about someone, whoever the someone was to you.

One fight one time in one place is not the whole of who a person is. It doesn’t settle or prove anything about a person. We change. (Though, as I said, I doubt because of shitstorms like this). Or we hold one opinion that seems stupid or out of character but otherwise we’re fine and wonderful people. Or whatever.

God, this post is making me just want to burn this blog to the ground.

But I guess what I’m saying is that, if you want to use the internet to decide who the bad guys or good guys here in town are, don’t solely use moments like these to decide. People aren’t just their fuck-ups.