I read something I wrote aloud to someone yesterday, and I forgot how much I didn’t like reading aloud, particularly about something that was hard enough to express in writing.

The beauty of writing in one way is that you don’t have to be there when someone else is reading; you’re free of guarding your facial expressions and body language, of trying to avoid reading too fast or too slow or worse, being over-dramatic. Writing is not a performance art, reading is.

Reality is this vast ocean I’m surrounded by, grasping at words as they float by sometimes like a drowning man trying to build a raft to get somewhere else. Most people seem to stay on their rafts once built, a collection of words and phrases that they are comfortable with. They re-use things like most do in object-oriented programming, copying and pasting from here to there with the wild abandon of someone plagiarizing code from the Internet.

You can’t just copy and paste in life. This has not stopped people from trying to do so and even being rewarded for it. We even trained large language models we call “AI” to do that, but in the end the expression is often easily seen as contrived and annoying. Corporate buzz-words come to mind immediately. Formulaic and easily used to convey nothing but the emptiness of excuses washing onto a beach of accountability like so much flotsam.

The many writers I have enjoyed so far in my life don’t seem to build rafts of words, but rather walk on the water and showing people the world around them while maintaining enough of a connection to those with rafts of words to tie ropes to.