New Year, Same Road

We are 8 days into the new year of 2010 and it was beginning to get very clear just how long it has been since I posted on Bros. One might say a writer gets burnt out from time to time when you write from your heart and then have to defend your stance from those that wish to twist, manipulate, and degrade your thoughts rather than have confidence go toe-to-toe and say simply, "I disagree."

I'm excited to see the directions Regular Bros might take as it continues down its road. These are important times we're living in. It is imperative that we never stop trying to be better people and that we never stop trying to protect this great country that gives us so much.

In that vein, I was struck recently by a passage in American Pastoral by Philip Roth. I'd like to leave that passage with you now. A little something to chew on as we continue down this road together.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance...; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people...? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance everyday? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.