Our teacher divided up the class and made us debate the points, but we found it pretty pointless. Duh, numbers are just math, but words are the medium of all communication: of course words are more important.
Well. The older I get, the more the pendulum seems to swing toward Bernie LaPlante's unified theory of bullshit:
People are always talking ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin', and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that's your bullshit, so to speak.(The movie Hero gets better every year, too. But back to the point.)
The foundation of language continues to shudder and shake and crumble, meanwhile the value of the numbers holds steady. The rhythm of a song (all math, even if the singer can't count to ten) matters more than the words, because at some point you realize you just don't know what the hell Ben Folds is talking about.
And the readers trust a magazine's arbitrary numbers more than its arbitrary opinions because they like the odds that way.
And people trust the #1 hit on Google more than they trust the cover of a magazine. The proverbial mouth writes checks, that the proverbial ass can't cash.
All a loooong segue toward the admission that I (like Silva, apparently) got me some writers' block, and that I am frustrated to have written about 8 sentences in as many hours today.
It is not a way of saying that, thanks to my baldness, the "hat head" I get after wearing a baseball cap--which I wear when 'writing'--is no longer a reference to my hair. It's a reference to the actual indentation in my skin. Because I don't have hair. Just lots of head.
