“Coincidentally its Mother’s Day” and leaving well enough alone.

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I was about to write a post in the next post space called The Myth of Atticus Finch. Then I thought better of it and decided to name it, Ah heck, I forgot…..Something like the Attractive or Compelling …Myth of Atticus Finch. Maybe I’ll think of it while writing this post. This post begins as a commentary about writing and the last post “Coincidentally…” Its meant to segue into the post with Atticus Finch in the title.

I conclude the previous, coincidental post with words explaining I’ve got to go to church and I don’t feel like editing the post. Looking at it now I can tell its long. So I copied it to count the number of words. Counting the nonsense HTML words which show up as links to two stories in the post they total 1213 words. That is a little longer than the columns I try to write weekly in the tabloid the Duluth Reader. I cranked Coincidental out in an hour and a half tops. The column I just sent into the Reader the Friday before was a last minute creation. Its elements including an AI generated photo of Donald Trump as a Pope in golden and white Papal raiment was one I’d been fussing with for a couple days. Originally I enlarged it traced its contours and began looking at the poop emoji with a view to turning it into an image of Trump wearing a high church turd top. The notion of smearing our President with his own smirking Chimpanzee poop throwing crap was pretty irresistible.

By Friday the Americanness of Cardinal Robert Prevost had sunk in and I had enough for an 800-1000 word post. That said after cranking 1600ish words with ideas that did not fit together well into a coherent narrative I had my night’s work cut out for me. I spent an easy six hours after first coming up with a very rough draft putting it together a little like one of my Christmas Jigsaw puzzles where I put similar colored pieces together for further sorting as the 1000 pieces come together….only the puzzle is a column for reading.

I have a life to live and I don’t have that kind of time. Blog posts are more like an artist’s sketch hastily put together. If its a very small piece on a very small anecdote that’s not a problem. I have about 40,000 blog posts since I started this blog in 2006. If they were one hundred words each it would total for million words. A good book might have 1 or 2 hundred thousand words. I’m sure my wordy output is easily triple to octuple that amount. And yet I always know that any damn unedited passage can become a source of criticism. Even well proof read passages might come under fire and the more pointed the proof reading perhaps even more so.

I’ve never needed AI to crank out written stuff. long before AI I loved the spell checking functions of computers. But just as important I’ve loved the cut and paste function that early authors had to do manually. Some original examples of hand written and corrected manuscripts exist of many great authors. My authorship, if not my output, is very modest by comparison.

Every year I write some version of this mea culpa or whatever it is. And as is usually the case:

I will not be coming back to edit this for commas, spelling, spacing, improved phrasing, fact checking etc.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:
https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty