Robespierre
I’ve thought proudly of myself for not having any pictures of Roby on social media. For some reason now as I look at that picture of Roby I feel a little uncomfortable with it being even here. I think I know everybody reading this blog, but I’ve been surprised by a few people who tell me they read it regularly. It’s not like they’re strangers, just not folks I’d expect to take an interest in my life and in my writing about my life. But those aren’t the people I’m nervous about seeing this or any picture from my life, it’s the creepie crawlies of the google-net. The unthinking automaton that scan and combobulate and speed about everything connected to everything else by tubes filled with electricity.
I use the internet every day for work and pleasure, and I hate it.
I moved out to the country in hopes that Roby would have more to do that was not powered by electricity, yet almost everything I do is.
At the same time much of the point of this blog is the sharing of my joy with the people in my life who care enough to read it, my Mom, Sarah, Abby, Jack, Elena, Ryan, but maybe that can best be done with words and not personal images, I don’t know.
A friend of mine explained that they went a bit harder in the bars than they had intended this past weekend; it was making them reconsider sobriety. I explained that humans have a way of convincing themselves about addiction, about twisting the internal shape of their mind to allow for things they are know are bad for them. By the time we actually admit to ourselves that there’s a problem, I don’t think we should doubt it. Our minds and our hearts have already done a lot of work to traverse the propagandized interior of ourselves to find some crooked vista from which we can glimpse truth.
C.S. Lewis wrote beautifully of our ability to recognize truth. We know what is right to do, and we know what is wrong. The hard bit is following through again and again, every day. My friend should probably quit drinking, and I should probably not use the internet so much.