
There is reason to believe I have to reroute some of the back roads on the road map of my thinking parts. I have been spending a lot of time in Elizabethan England lately due to my obsession with who I think Shakespeare really was. There are a lot of dark alleys to be plumbed on that section of the map. I really admire the Roland Emmerich film Anonymous about Edward deVere, the Earl of Oxford being the real writer behind the works of Shakespeare, but I do recognize that it is a work a fiction, and an altered-history work of fantasy fiction at that. So I find myself not yet ready to tackle that particular essay in the Shakespeare series as yet. More think time and creative-mixing time is needed. I need to stop at one of the quaint little mental inns on that particular Elizabethan back road and get some much needed rest for my Elizabethan conspiracy muscles.
Meanwhile back in the real world, Trumpzilla has been busy wrecking the world I live in with a bleak inauguration speech written by Steve Bannon that works its fire-breathing magic to blacken the hearts and perceptions of people I love and care about who also happen to be staunch conservatives. My Facebook feed is up in arms about how many people actually attended the inauguration ceremony and how unfair the media is for trying to make it seem like Trump’s celebration parade was a deserted wasteland when in reality it was… well… what’s a synonym for deserted wasteland that won’t offend conservatives who will bend or break any truth to defend Trumpzilla’s turkey-tweets?

But then, as I was going to QT for my morning caffeine-addict’s fix of Diet Coke, I heard Lionel Richie’s song “Say You, Say Me” playing on the radio. Ah, the perfect metaphor. It is a song used as the theme song from the 1986 movie White Nights about a Russian ballet star who has defected to the US during the Cold War and then was in a plane accident-incident that put him back in the Russians’ clutches. The movie stars Mikhail Baryshnikov, an actual Russian ballet star turned defector, and Gregory Hines, the American tap dancer. It is a beautiful movie that features amazing dance sequences, Russian conflict of interests because the dancer wants to be free and yet misses his homeland and culture, and a resolution involving intrigue and escape. In many ways, the plot, centered around a Russian threat and dark days in a place where the sun doesn’t set, is exactly what we are going through with Trumpzilla. But the song is about two people communicating and eventually “coming together, naturally”.
It started me thinking about the purpose of this blog. I mean, you obviously know that this blog is really about me talking to myself about myself, if you are one of those crazy few who actually read this far through a goopy blog post like this. I use this blog to think about myself, the world around me, and even sometimes, like now, to think about thinking. Yet, I have a duty to the reader to reach that point where our thinking comes together, naturally. If not, then why bother to post and publish at all?
So here’s what I think about the Shakespeare question, written in the tavern room at the inn on parchment… with a quill pen. The real Shakespeare was a writer just like me, writing for himself. And he discovered through the play-writing process that he had to share that writing for himself with the great wide world, because the Prospero’s magic of it could change the world for everybody. That is the real purpose of Shakespeare’s existence, no matter who he really was. And that is the real purpose of my existence as well, even if I turn out to be nothing more than one of the top hundred best writers that no one ever actually read.



































Ponderously Pondering the Imponderable
Now that I have retired as a school teacher, I have so many spare thinks to think which I do not have to use to guide the future of school children, that I begin to wonder what I am really going to do with all those closets and suitcases full of spare thinks beyond allowing them to simply pile up.
A lot of those spare thinks lately have been taken up by the imponderable primate that has taken over the government of our little country. I am keenly aware that, in the arc of history, nations and countries and even peoples reach the eventual end of the road and simply are no more. Our country could very well be headed the way of the Roman Empire, the Maurya Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the Abbasid Caliphate. They all ended with a mixture of violence and upheaval and suffering. And did you even know that they existed? Did you know that the Roman Empire was the smallest one on my list?
The imponderable primate has also moved the Doomsday Clock thirty seconds closer to midnight. The threats posed by nuclear war and global warming are made greater now because the hand on the ship’s wheel of the most powerful ship of state in the modern world is a tiny, unsteady hand controlled by a “really good brain”. That’s why my Stardusters novel is a comedy about the end of the world and uses parodies of conservative politicians from our world to play the roles of lizard men intent on destroying their own planet.
I had intended to write a piece today about naked people, a light and breezy essay in more ways than one. But I don’t want to let that turn into soft core porn or anything. It needs to be more carefully planned and carried out. Naked people really aren’t the danger that conservative and born-again Christians fear that they are, but you have to be careful of people’s sensibilities anyway. Especially when you are mentally writing stuff with no metaphorical clothes on. So I put that aside for the moment and spent some time this morning pondering the nature of pondering, what I think about thinking. And so, while sorting through baskets and suitcases and a packed garage full of spare thinks, I wrote this essay instead, to write about nothing in a way that might actually mean something. And if you believe that, it is no wonder the orange fellow was able to fool us all.
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Tagged as Metacognition, pondering, worry, writing and planning writing