We’re hit by countless ideas and images every waking minute of every day, even more if we’re online and googling. But most of that which hits us doesn’t register, both the things and the people in our lives, those things and people that we’ve grown overly accustomed to, and to which and to whom we no longer react. The people we take for granted might even be wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, the uncles and aunts, not to mention the real “others,” those with whom we are not personally acquainted.

And then there are the things and people to which we do react and reflect, those that hit us, surprise us. In my life there are plenty of these, most of them coming, not from the garden and nature, things of great physical beauty that captivate my wife and children, but in my case from words on paper.

I’m a word man, and have known this about myself almost from the time I took a job as tutor at St. Johns College (the great ideas school) in Annapolis, MD. When I’m stripped of words, for whatever reason not at liberty to speak them, as in certain customed family or social situations in which ideas are taboo because we’ve all learned that our different ideas and opinions should be kept under wraps to avoid the shouting matches that inevitably follow otherwise, well then I’m little more than a figure in cardboard, interested only in fleeing the situation.

For me the blog, which I began in the year 2000, has been a life saver. I can say anything, well almost anything, and not be concerned by whatever opposing thoughts my often irreverent words will arouse. My only job is to develop my own thoughts while satisfying my own restrictions on content and style. Now that’s hard enough by itself without being forced to alter my thinking in any way by attempting, in what is probably a vain endeavor anyway, to include whatever effect my words might have on the few others who may read them. The result is that this attitude, so far anyway, has meant that I write for no publication other than my own, my blog  quatrevingtans.net.

Just today there were any number of things, ideas to which I wanted to respond.  First among them was a series of tweets by J K Rowling, in particular her tweet striking back at Donald J Trump in the most appropriate manner possible, tweeting being our president’s favorite if not unique means of communicating his thoughts.  Rowling’s tweet was in response to the video showing Trump’s shoving aside Montenegro’s prime minister at a NATO meeting. Why did he do this? Well clearly in order to be more visible himself to the TV audiences.  Rowling’s tweet  addresses Trump as a “tiny, tiny, tiny, little man.” And that he was and is a tiny man Rowling got it exactly right.

What else happened today, to which I might respond? I have to go now, so will continue this later in another blog.