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TL;DR?? WTF??!! This Is How It Works, People... [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
I read this item and it reminded me of where I was when I started writing about four years ago.(www.dailykos.com/...)
I was, like many of you, just trying to find my way to the written word, and getting a message out there.
First, understand that my late brother Ron and I did a snail-mail correspondence, back and forth over a 40-year period, not because we didn’t have phones, but because, writing was more important to him than talking. Talking is nice. It is also not how we put our deepest selves into something. He loved his old Remington electric typewriter. I have dreadful penmanship. The advent of word processing made life so much easier for me.
Communication in our species is complicated. DUH!!
We say what we either think or feel and others hear it, but they only process a part of what we offered.
I’m writing, but actually, typing. You are reading, but actually, skimming. You are perusing. You’re just looking for something that lights you up, gets you out of boredom, makes your neurons fire, makes you have thoughts and feelings too!!
Nothing quite like a dopamine rush, right?
But for most of us, communication is a logjam. We either don’t know what to say, have phrases stuck and unable to assemble, have a massive tangle of expression that just won’t come out, and more and more logs are bunching up at the narrows where the mainstream carries the timber to the mill.
I have something to tell you — but you’re annoying me!!
Helluva word picture, right? But that’s where we are. Emoji Central, trying to convey our feelings, and pesky thoughts keep getting in the way.
How do we get our message through to others? What is the story we want to tell?
If you want to cause panic, well, there’s the easy route. Tell everyone that the cats and dogs in Springfield OH are rising up and eating the Haitians! Obviously, that’s nonsense, but someone out there will spin it into a yarn that has nothing to do with the inside joke. You would need to know the original content to understand that no, no one is eating anyone, and cats and dogs in Ohio and elsewhere are doing just fine.
If you want to raise hope, use word pictures that take people to happy places. Everyone is looking for happy. That dopamine rush thing? That’s everyone’s ultimate “Oh, What A Feeling!” Of course that’s where you want to be, and of course, that’s the reason stimulants are popular drugs of choice. But life has lots of drudgery — oh, puh-leeze, don’t remind me!! — sorry, I just did. Get over it. Get after it. Do the grunge, move through it. You can. You must. No one else is going to do it for you. Raising hopefulness when there’s drudgery in front of you and on all sides is especially hard when you are in our political winter. Yep. It is a steady heavy snowfall. It is cold, bitter, leafless misery.
But if I don’t hit a consonant chord with you, well, what was the reason for that failure?
What my reading has taught me is that writers who value their thoughts and feelings don’t put them down on paper just to get readership. Now this is not to discount the value of what Ben Folds called “Shit-some-out” publication. If you’re a writer, artist, musician, performer, you take some jobs that suck and you turn the ideas into almighty Dollah Bills. A person’s gotta eat, after all, and if your literal bread and butter is publication, you have a climb ahead of you.
But our very best authors, playwrights, musicians and performers have always been motivated by the stories they’ve come into contact with or the experiences in life that shaped them. Nothing happened for them in a void. The way they’ve shared is often not a short-hand, easily-swallowed amuse bouche that barely triggers the taste buds. Even Ernest Hemingway’s short stories weren’t short. Every one that I read took me on an adventure that did not fit into a TikTok video offering.
So I know, and I am sharing, the best advice anyone can offer to a budding wordsmith or young and hopeful artist. It is, no matter how much people tell you your stuff sucks, keep after it. Make changes. Shift your theme. Choose a new thesis. But don’t ever quit trying to tell your stories.
TL;DR, WTF??!!
Sure. You’ll lose people along the way. They won’t want to read your piece. So what? is the work heartfelt? Did it come from somewhere in your experience, something in your life that left you with nagging doubts, painful memories, disappointments, or on the other end of the memory scale, something so beautiful and amazing that you carry that image and thought as a survival tool?
Right now I have two books that are drawing my attention, and I read both of them slowly, with intention and imagination. Both Anthony Fauci and Ed Yong have stories they want to tell me, and I’m not so impatient in our meeting through their books that I need to read the last page and get the damned thing on the shelf. I’m giving them time. I’m giving them part of my life, my hours, my attention. I’d like to get to know something about their thoughts, feelings, perspectives. That’s the ultimate human connection. Being present in the moment when giving a story time to interact with you, and not always needing to “get to the point of it.” We’ve been caught up in an electronic info-sphere that gives us a false notion about where that dopamine level really comes from. Our survival as a species demands that we insist on slow everything — slow food, slow music, slow learning, slow movement through this fast-paced nanosecond existence. Books, reading, writing and self-expression are not dying or dead, but we’ve seen messaging that drives us away from taking the time to take our time and spend it carefully on ourselves.
“Too long; didn’t read” says only one thing — you don’t have time for yourself, and that’s really unfortunate. It must really suck to be you.
Yup. I just poked the bear in the nose. There it is.
If you do not have time to read with intention and with an open mind, if your innate insatiable curiosity has been extinguished, this is your poke in the nose as well.
More than any one thing, or any pile of money, or any collection of business endeavors, real wealth is knowing that you came into this world with gifts and an empty slate. Here’s what Rene Descartes said about it in the 17th century ( en.wikipedia.org/...):
All that seems to me to explain itself very clearly if we compare children's imagination to a tabula rasa on which our ideas, which resemble portraits of each object taken from nature, should depict themselves. The senses, the inclinations, our masters and our intelligence, are the various painters who have the power to execute this work; and amongst them, those who are least adapted to succeed in it, i.e., the imperfect senses, blind instinct, and foolish nurses, are the first to mingle themselves with it. There finally comes the best of all, intelligence, and yet it is still requisite for it to have an apprenticeship of several years, and to follow the example of its masters for long, before daring to rectify a single one of their errors. In my opinion this is one of the principal causes of the difficulty we experience in attaining to true knowledge. For our senses really perceive that alone which is most coarse and common; our natural instinct is entirely corrupted; and as to our masters, although there may no doubt be very perfect ones found amongst them, they yet cannot force our minds to accept their reasoning before our understanding has examined it, for the accomplishment of this end pertains to it alone. But it is like a clever painter who might have been called upon to put the last touches on a bad picture sketched out by prentice hands, and who would probably have to employ all the rules of his art in correcting little by little first a trait here, then a trait there, and finally be required to add to it from his own hand all that was lacking, and who yet could not prevent great faults from remaining in it, because from the beginning the picture would have been badly conceived, the figures badly placed, and the proportions badly observed.
TL?
If so, I get it. your slate is too full. Time to erase that chalkboard and get back to reinvention. But if you are going to reinvent, you need to begin with something real, nourishing and valuable. You also need to build on factual, evidence-based critical thinking.
DR?
If you have gotten this far, then you DID read it, but you don’t know what you were reading. Join the club. There are many things that I have read where I felt lost, frustrated, confused, disappointed and bewildered. I’ve had far too many moments of TL;DR in my seven decades. There wasn’t the time, I told myself. But in fact, there was plenty of time. I just made lots of choices about what I would rather be doing besides reading and writing.
pussycat version of DILLIGAF
That was then; this is now. Can we make an acronym for that one (TWT;TIN)?
If you choose to remain self sovereign- a term coined by Jennifer Berger that means you believe you have all the knowledge you’ll ever need and you’re all done learning, growing, changing and becoming- boy, have I got a news flash for you! Don’t blame AI or ChatGPT or DeepSeek or any other bot-natured recall/analytic cybertool. You are still capable of making the choice to read that book that you’ll never finish, write that set of short stories that you’ll never publish or whatever your genre for self-expression might be, put it out there and see if anyone else values it.
Consider the ridiculous people, places and things we’ve endured in the past month — the stupidity is glaring, overwhelming and self-evident. But it was gobbled up by people who had little patience for exploratory and introspective efforts. The TL;DR crowd is alarmingly large. All they want is a little bit of pudendal tickling, just some fluffing to create arousal. They don’t want commitment, they’re just hanging out in cyberspace, bored out of their gourds, looking for that dopamine rush that helps them get off a little bit. Does it matter if you never reach those people? Not to me. I’ve learned how to evade, avoid and generally, not deal with them. I lump them into Berger’s self-sovereign mindset mud cake, and I expect I’ll have to wash that off my boot at some point.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep expressing myself in TL;DR fashion.
I’ll keep using AI to seek out those references I could not keep in my own head or aren’t on my bookshelf.
I’ll keep making references to moments in a life that experienced interesting times, painful times, nostalgic times, frustrating times.
I’ll keep trying to challenge myself and my readers, whether it is just myself or one or two or 22 or 22,000. Numbers only matter if someone wants me to write a regular piece, and is willing to pay me for that. I’ve had my time of writing a regular column for a professional publication, and I am glad I did it. I am also glad I handed off that job to a young and talented protege, and I’m delighted to see the great things done to build up a group of like-minded, free-thinking, inventive contributors.
I will try to not misquote. If I do, then I will accept correction and acknowledge the error. Screw-ups happen.
I will do my best to use evidence-based argument. I will also do my best to offer generally regarded as true concepts, such as, we live on a spheroid object, orbiting a star, in a vast universe that contains other solar systems. It is not a flat plate. That argument was resolved, and that ship has sailed.
I’ll point any readers at other articles that I touch on that contain more good ideas and ways to get started putting fingers to keyboard. Or, if you prefer, pencil to notepad by your nightstand. That, by the way, is a technique found to be very useful in emptying one’s brain before going to sleep at night.
Even with those guardrails up, and a sincere expression of my thoughts, I will still find ways to piss people off and incur a “TL;DR” rating. And that, my reading, writing, expressive companions is the price of admission paid for making an attempt at writing something worthwhile. The very word “essay” is an homage to the French for “to try.”
Over my seven decades of consciousness, and about 60 years of being asked to elevate my abilities and not be a schmoe, I’ve learned a “thing or two about a thing or two” (shout out to JK Simmons and the Farmers’ Insurance ad). And, without you even noticing, I stuck in a shameless plug for the idea of simple, good messaging that motivates a purchase, but more importantly, notes a colloquialism that will forever more be part of our really, awfully complicated language. Language — ah, yes, there it is, what is language but the assemblage of sounds, sights, other sensory notions, brought together in the human mind to represent a moment, to offer a feeling, to stimulate thinking!
This is where the TL;DR cargo van gets two flat tires!
It has no desire to acquire any feeling, and it doesn’t want to be tasked with thinking! All TL;DR wants is to keep its own self sovereign limitation and never, ever be swayed or told to steer left or right or step on the brakes.
Courtesy: AP/Briscoe Center for American History
TL;DR is the antithesis of socialization. It is the hopeless, drained, impatient and overtasked scream, like the painting by Edvard Munch. It is Picasso’s Guernica. It is Eddie Adams’ photo of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head ( www.nytimes.com/...). TL;DR is an expression of rage, contempt, disgust, frustration and the inability to absorb anything more.
TL;DR is another way to state, “I am unaliving you.”
Nothing is more final than finality. Ending things — that is, killing things off because they frighten, disgust, disagree, disappoint or distract — is simply, ending the conversation. It isn’t telling a story, it isn’t communicating, it isn’t clarifying, it isn’t anything. It is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It is existence in the silent aftermath.
TL;DR is a bullet fired, from an invisible gun, by an unknown assailant, at an unsuspecting target. It is pointless, meaningless, speaks about as completely as a burp, belch, fart or other bodily emanation.
It is the point where an evening’s companionship, lively conversation, good food, good wine, pleasant entertainment hits the floor with an alarming thud. It is an utterance meant for only one purpose — to state the level of brokenness the sender of that message is living with, every moment, every second, every heartbeat and every breath.
If you are wondering when I might tie this in to our current predicament, the answer is right here, right now. Every political move we’ve endured in the past month was a “TL;DR” message. More shout-outs of pain. More dystopian angst. More hatred of self, others, society-at-large, life itself, the eternal march of time. More of the increasingly self-evident “less-and-less” that life puts on the table before us. More of the diminishing returns, while greedy, scavenging raptors and desperate, failed once-viable causes fight for supremacy over something, anything because the Lost Cause could never be properly resurrected, no matter how much money, power or control was gained.
The shared contempt for living, the lack of remorse, the inability to demonstrate regret, the unwillingness to know when after that gunshot to the head, after the horrors of warfare on home soil, after the last bullet from the last gun is fired on the last victim, all that is left behind is —
-dead silence-
And that, my readers, friends and anyone who cares at all about anything at all, is why I write, how it all works, and what we are truly fighting for. Keep your voice raised. Keep speaking your stories. Keep opening your hearts, minds and keep learning. Break through the barrier of “us versus them.”
Force these wounded creatures to accept that the only place they are taking us is into oblivion. Use your words, because, you have them. Make your efforts Too Long. Make your colloquium so loud that it causes permanent, infernal headache. Create a new acronym: Not Long Enough, Please Read (NLE,PR). Shake the bars of the thought cage others are trying to put you in because it suits them and their convenient, self-sovereign way of handling the passage of life.
Because, friends, that is how it works. Nobody said it was easy, though...
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