So I write books about fish and papers about the Bible and columns about the Mavericks.  To me, this represents a perfect circle, but that probably bears explaining.

There’s nothing unnatural about doing the things you like doing. You can’t be unnatural to yourself. Your interests are related because you’re interested in all of them, and you don’t need more than that. A 3rd party looking for explanations probably won’t come up with a good one.  I don’t think it matters whetehr you’re explicable, I think in the past people didn’t worry about it as much, I think now they do because we all have our blogs or twitters or facebooks or what have you, and now we CAN explain, or try. I think that’s a little bit Uncertainty Principley. I think when you are forced to put into words why you do the things you do and are the thing you are, you alter it so it becomes explicable.

I think this is actually a problem, frankly. It’s what makes even the tiniest soap-box stander capable of cloaking racism, sexism, or whatever whatever whatever, in language that sounds more like patriotism. They know they are expected to be able to explain themselves to a culture which, thankfully, does not find overt racism a worthy explanation. The price you pay is that lots of people now sell covert racism and sexism pretty easily and nobody has to feel bad about it because race and sex are never mentioned once, explicitly.

But anyway, I think, for me, I don’t worry about being explicable and I just enjoy what I think of as the Power of the Feedback Loop. I don’t need basketball to be about religion, and it isn’t. But I do know that I wish to have a jumpshot that is 1) consistently capable of going in the basket 2) capable of doing so against defense 3) capable of doing so whilst on the move. No other jumpshot will satisfy me.

My papers then, need also to be capable for situations. Yes, I have to fight against qualifying and overqualifying every point I make, so that I address every obvious refutation I can think of. But when you believe in process somewhere, you believe in process elsewhere. When you’re not that athletically talented and have to use desire to make your way on a sports field, and you have some success doing so against almost decent competition, you feel that process elsewhere.

There was a silly fantasy book I read some years ago about a girl learning to be a wizardess or some such, and the crazy old man who turned out to be her teacher had her build a real wall for no particular reason. Then he bothered her brain, with magics, but eventually she realized she could stop him by imagining her wall, because she knew she’d built it. That’s the USE of real experience, I think, self-knowledge. And it works both ways. Once, for example, you’ve learned to survive a horrible, advanced foreign language class without any of  the necessary language qualifications, you are unlikely to be daunted say, calling tech support for a broken computer. Once you’ve swung a pickaxe from 5 am to 1 pm in the desert, in Israel, you’re unlikely to be bothered having to drag your luggage around the city of Chicago, or whatever.

We are the streetfighters of life. We will hit you with anything we have, and we are unashamed.