…but lapsed is how i see myself these days. i’m less active than i used to be, frequently less motivated than i used to be, and always more inclined to second-guess than i should be. there are good reasons for these feelings, but it’s not where i want to be. so i thought: “fuggit! I’ll blog my way out of it!” and here i am.

lapsed. it’s how i see the world, too, with prices rising, jobs diminishing, oil supplies dwindling, presidential candidates lying their lies, a recession that none will name, a war started on lies that no one wants any more, and entrenched ideologies deafening whole swaths of the populace — lapses in civility, lapses in ethics, lapses in caring for others. when i think of the word “lapsed,” play with it, say it to myself, i think of the line from yeats’s “the second coming”: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” it’s a poem that mourns the aftermath of the horrors of WWI and its legacy (seems kind of quaint, now). except that, in my reverie, i replace the “slouches” with “lapses,” conjuring an image not of purposeful evil (”rough beast”) but of accident: we’re lapsing, slipping, falling into a declining age, and good intentions may not matter.

but then i put these words into text and they look pretentious, all doom-and-gloomy, and i want to puncture their inflation with a healthy monty-pythonesque raspberry (you filthy english k-nig-ght!”). stay tuned as i walk the tightrope.