It's been a good weekend so far. I took my eldest son (12) to the doctor's office for a physical yesterday at 4:15, and we had to wait only five minutes for the doctor.
This is the same doctor's office that has kept me waiting as long as 90 minutes and never less than 15 minutes. When I've asked doctors why they're always late, they say that emergencies and “walk-ins” push their schedules behind. It's in the nature of medicine to get behind. Yet yesterday, on a late Friday afternoon, the entire office was running on time. Heck, when we left at 4:55, everyone in the office was ready to close the doors to meet the 5:00 close time. They were running ahead of time. Yet the rest of the week, they simply can't run on time. Pretty amazing, huh?Â
After the physical, I came home, did some writing while drinking a beer, then had cocktail hour with Marie. We talked, drank beer, and exhorted the kids to stop coming into the living room so we could spend some time together. That worked real well, until the Wee Sing Train video ended (we don't like using the TV babysitter, but we resort to it occasionally). After that, Max (2) came in about 14 times, Meg (4) 11 times, Michael (7) 11 times, and Jack (9) 7 times. We finished up with Johnny Cash's “When the Man Comes Around,” then cleaned up for the night, watched an episode of Sopranos, then went to bed (well, I went to bed, leaving Marie with mop-up duty).Â
I woke up this morning with those final words from Financial Times writer going through my head. I posted them yesterday, but if you've forgotten (or don't feel like scrolling down):Â
[Y]oked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.Â
Although he has a point, it dawned on me this morning that the same criticism can be applied to a freelancer who makes a living from writing. Belloc referred to his books as drudge (or some such thing), but said he needed to provide for his family. A similar thing goes for the wood-chipper production of Chesterton, not to mention, Mencken. But their writing still has artistic merit. In fact, critics have argued that their pieces deserve even more acclamation because these writers produced under pressure, as opposed to cranking out prose in a soft beach house, the morning after a few martinis on the beach cranked up the creative juices.Â
I find the whole thing highly interesting. I just received The Ong Reader in the mail. A disciple of Marshall McLuhan, I'm hoping the good Jesuit Ong will shed some more light on this whole blogging (and Internet and text messaging) thing. I'll keep you posted with any intellectual developments, such as they are.Â
Until next week, may the ashes fall gently and your Lent start harshly yet blessedly. Â
