"I'm glad I've started a conversation. But why are the people on the other side of the conversation so boring?"

"All they say is that I'm 'stupid' or my comment is 'nonsense.' What I said is apparently interesting enough to respond to, but you don't say anything interesting in response. Say something about art! Say something new and unusual about why I'm so wrong! Dammit! I can see people are talking about me, and I go over to hear what they are saying, and it's a thuddingly dull remark."

That's something I said back in '05, and I'm reading it this morning as a result of this morning's first post — about Will Butler and Bob Dylan — which brought up my old aphorism — "To be a great artist is inherently right wing" — which was the topic of that '05 post.

That made me think of something I heard in the middle of the night on the audiobook I had playing through my under-pillow speaker, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" by J. Maarten Troost:

Happy hour had long ago lost its frisson. Christopher Hitchens once said that he drinks “because it makes other people less boring.” I’d read a lot of Hitchens when I was trying to justify my drinking. If he could write like that, I reckoned, while getting blotto every day, well then, everything must be just peachy with me. Of course, when I finally did stop drinking I discovered the other side of that equation: When you’re sober, drinkers are curiously boring. For a long while I could only walk by a bar at dusk with finger-gnawing longing. I’d hear the laughter and the clink of glasses— or even catch a waft of stale beer and Lysol— and I’d have to quicken my pace. I’ll never have fun again, I’d think, as I hurried home to my steaming cup of herbal tea. But after a few months, when I finally felt confident that I was unlikely to start pounding shots of Jägermeister, I’d occasionally meet friends at a pub. As I sipped a club soda, I’d immediately scope out those who belonged to my tribe— the solitary drinkers hunched over their phones, the anxious woman with the shaky hands waiting for her pinot grigio, the two college students on their third pitcher, the bartender sneaking shots— and I’d feel a special camaraderie. It’s like gaydar for alcoholics. And then, as the alcohol started to take its toll and people began repeating the same stories and their eyes got glassy and their coordination started to wither, and there in the corner, the woman who just slipped off her barstool, I’d think, no, I don’t really miss this and I’d think of myself as cured. Done. Finished. No worries.

I'll just observe that writing is another method of keeping other people from boring you, and it's much more efficient (and healthy) than reducing yourself into a stupor (though I'm amused by the cockiness of Hitchens's contention that he needs to dilute his brilliance with drink so he can relate to the lesser humans of the walking-around world (It reminds me of Rush Limbaugh's oft-repeated "with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair")).

Blogging, you can pick what you want to respond to and ignore whomever you want. You can take quick shots and make short work of the boring people and leave them to steam and spurt on their own time.

Texting is similar. I think texting is displacing phone calls because you get the immediacy and the conversational energy without the languors of real-time speech and the need to feign continual engagement.