The Slow Blade

In Dune, there are personal force fields that will stop bullets but not something inserted slowly. “The slow blade penetrates the shield” is the fortune-cookie mantra young Paul receives from his gruff trainer. I recently experienced something similar (without the erotic overtones) in Vietnam, where the method of crossing the street requires a sort of suicidal Zen calm. With hundreds of motorbikes whizzing by, the only successful technique is to banish all fear and slowly and steadily walk across the street as if the traffic weren’t there at all. The bikers, with plenty of time to notice your slow-moving shape, swerve like a school of fish around you. If you tried to cross the same street quickly, letting your instincts take over, you’d be dead within seconds.

I flatter myself that I have a similar approach to things like posting on here. I don’t do it quickly or often, but I do it eventually. The last week or two, however, I seem to have been standing on the curb. I think it’s partly because I’m starting to get preoccupied by our upcoming move to Bangkok. We don’t have a lot of preparations to make and it should be an easy move, but it’s still messing with my head. I’ve started to worry about things like whether or not my books are going to get (even more) moldy while they sit in the shipping warehouse, which is an idiotic thing to worry about but disturbing nonetheless.

Another part of my not posting for the last few days, however, is because my homie Beez over at Intrepid Flame kindly honored me with a Thinking Blog award. This is one of those chain-letter deals where you are supposed to turn right around and nominate five other people. Or else... bad luck? Shunning by the blogging community? A Japanese girl crawls out of a well and starts haunting your VCR? I’m not sure what happens if you drop the hot potato, and I don’t want to clumsily betray the responsibility the Beezinator has placed upon me.

Problem is, aside from friends and family I hardly read any personal blogs regularly, and the ones I do read are more for humor than thought-provoking content. As I’ve mentioned before I like this guy’s archive of smart, unbelievably bile-filled writing, but I’m not sure that what he’s got going there counts as a blog. For one thing he usually only links to other things he’s written, an interesting choice that also strikes me as a remarkable hypertext simulation of painful introversion. So I waited a couple days to see if I could scrounge up five nominees. Then a few more days. Then a few more days. I think I’m going to have to give up for now. But at least I’m posting something! That’s a start! I’m halfway across the Vietnamese street, or something. If you have a suggestion for a “Thinking Blog”, let me know.