Sometimes I think folks are more interested in eloquently and uniquely defining themselves as opposed to us all agreeing on what works and just getting on with it.
Saw this post more than a month ago and said hmm but held off replying until now.
Years ago when I was a younger man, I lived in Oklahoma and had an amazing lover. She's was 5' tall and maybe weighed 100 lb sopping wet and holding a bag of groceries. She had long, curly, red hair, big brown eyes, a splash of freckles across her nose, snaggle teeth and a big, loud mouth with the countriest accent you ever heard. She had been born in raised in south Ohio along the Kentucky border and she was so improbably and imperfectly not-beautiful that she was mesmerizingly cute.
We got along like mashed taters and butter, and we enjoyed one another immensely but we just weren't destined to be soul mates forever because the good Lord just wired us differently.
I remember we went to see a movie with Lawrence (he was Larry then) Fishburne and Jeff Goldbloom called "Deep Cover." Afterwards we went up to this little Italian food restaurant in an old Taco Bell building on North May in OKC and got hot squares of tasty lasagne.
As we were eating, we discussed the movie. I asked her how she liked it and she said she liked it fine. She asked me how I liked it and I gushed something like this:
"I loved it. It reminded me of the old film noir classics of the late 1940s, but what I really liked was the scriptwriters thoughtful attention to detail. Not only was there character development and even character change in the primary character but there was also character development and even character change in the secondary and even tertiary characters."
She paused snarfing her lasagne and looked at me like I was a shark who had washed up on the shore and started speaking in tongues.
Then she said, "Why you got to overanalyze things? Why can't you just say you liked it?"
I felt like she had just poked my intellect in the snout. I looked at her and like the Apostle Paul in Acts 9:18 the scales fell away from my eyes. She was still a cute little desirable thing who felt nice and smelled good but I realized her brain just didn't work like mine and mine just didn't work like hers. And it was a sobering moment too because when you're young and naive and in love or at least that heady mix of fondness, lust and amusement, you project yourself onto and into the object of your affection and assume your soul mate is just like you. It's troubling to discover you're a dog from Mars and they're a cat from Venus.
And so a month ago I read EastAthen's concisely written, thoughtful and insightful description of his ideological values and nodded. Then I read Brown County's flippant dismissal and relived my lasagne movie critique revelation.
I guess some of us like to study every aspect of things that interest us and think it through until we have nailed down a very nuanced impression. Once you finally get there after years of soul searching, it's nice to be able to share it because it's unique. It's not a cookie-cutter opinion somebody handed you. It's like nobody else's opinion on that particular subject and it's precious because you worked on it for years and can explain how you arrived at every conclusion.
For others, I guess it's just an instinctive unquestioned self-awareness that tells them "I'm this, not that, I like this, not that, I believe this, not that."
Seems kind of ignorant to a thirsty, researching questioner like myself but I suppose it takes all kinds to make a world and maybe God even loves idgits like that too.
