I have a bad habit of starting articles and never finishing them. I may intend to finish some of them, and some of them I keep around so that I may one day scavenge them for useful material. Most of them are just taking up space.
Looking through my google account, I find that I have accumulated more than a few of these orphans of late. I posted an article called Mental Cleaning Day on 11-8-12 which followed me through the process of trash-or-save that I find it necessary to go through from time to time. Well, it's time again. (Also, I can't think of anything I really want to write about tonight but I've got nothing else to do.)
Some of this stuff is just research material left over from previous projects. This often includes web sites I wanted to cite in other articles; sometimes I've copied entire pages into Blogger to reference them in articles. Of the later, one such is a page simply titled with a web address. I actually wrote the intended piece (Look, there's this guy... , 11-11-12), a piece on Eric Dondero, a Libertarian Republican who advocated that Conservatives should sever all ties (personal, professional, and familial) with anyone who dared to vote Democratic. He also advocated generally being a douche to Liberals and the merchants who sell to them. (I wonder how he's doing with that campaign?) Because I intended to quote extensively from Dondero's own blog post, I copied that entire page into Blogger just to have it at hand. But I don't need it now. Shit-canned.
I have a habit of starting an article, making a few notes, saving a few web sites for reference, maybe even coming up with a catchy title...then forgetting about the article entirely. Back when Romney was making post-election dumb statements he said something about Obama winning through giving gifts to minorities and young voters. I started a blog post on that, calling it The World According to Mitt (well, barely started) that I never got back to. The entirety of that article is repeated here:
al sharpton
nytimes
20 min conf call
blamed loss on Obama wooing specific interest groups
gifts? clueless
Just a few notes...and that's all I wrote, and I have no idea what I was getting at. I have no memory of this post, but I have the bare bones of the article itself to prove that I had been thinking something. Obviously, I had been watching Al Sharpton's show on MSNBC and had gotten a good idea for an article (at least, what I thought was a good idea) but I have no idea what I meant by "nytimes." This cryptic ghost of an article has now been shit-canned.
Once I copied a quote from a friend's Facebook page because I intended to quote him in n article (The Last ride of Twinkie the Kid? 11-16-12) I did quote my friend, with his permission, but I can find no reason to hang onto this quote. So I am hanging on to this quote. No reason...
Which brings us to an article that I wrote (well, about half an article) but decided to neither finish nor publish. I never even game up with a title for it, so Blogger just saved it under its first sentence: How do I respond to what appears to be a rumor that...? (Those three dots represent text that might tell you why I didn't bother to publish; words which I edited out because if I wanted anyone to read that information I'd have published the damn article.) This was one of those articles that I wrote to clarify something in my mind and having achieved that clarity I felt no need to publish it, and I feel no need to hang onto it. Shit-canned.
(So if this stuff was so private that I didn't want to talk about it, why the hell was I talking about it just now? That's a very good question...and you've had as much of an answer as you're going to get. I'm funny that way.)
Sometimes, in creating these stray fragments of articles, I write something that I rather like and can't bring myself to merely delete. One such was a piece I was writing under the working title of health care; an article that, like many others, I abandoned and do not recall why I did so. It was obviously about health care; I included URLs for ten on-line articles I wanted to use as reference and even included a few with contrasting opinions, which I may or may not have directly referenced in the final article. But this fragmentary article consisted of one complete paragraph:
"I've heard it over and over again, for years now. It was stated perhaps most clearly by Chris Christie, in the days when he was Mitt Romney's most faithful surrogate (before Hurricane Sandy forced him to rediscover bipartisanship), when he said that the U.S. has '...the world's greatest health care system.' John Boehner said much the same thing when he said that Obamacare would '...ruin the best health care delivery system in the world.'"
Obviously, I was going to refute that allegation. I do not know why I didn't. But I like that paragraph. The incomplete article was worth hanging on to just to save that one paragraph. But now I have included that paragraph in this article, and the original can be deleted with a clear conscience. Shit-canned.
I have always found it difficult to finish what I start; more difficult even than actually starting something. These articles represent both a successful start and a failure to finish. Sadly, my life is full of such. An article like this one gives me a chance to come to some kind of closure over a few of the unresolved questions in my life.
It used up an otherwise dull evening, too.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
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