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Divorce is just an anti-topic [UPDATED]
Published 10:14am Wednesday, March 7, 2012 Updated 12:16pm Wednesday, March 7, 2012There’s been enough written about divorce that, since it happened to me 14 years ago, there hasn’t seemed anything newly discovered about it that I should even further beat it to death with words here.
There are lots of other issues at the front of yours and my plate that are much easier to beat up on, like computers, or cell phones, or the people who often run the tills at retail places of business and cannot seem to understand that they’re doing something wrong when, after you’ve given them a 20-dollar-bill, and their till insists that you’re owed $37 in change, they’re more than willing to argue with you about it being correct. “That’s what it says,” they’ll insist to you, as they point to the computer which told them so.
You’ve heard that there is some discussion about whether or not we should continue to teach children cursive writing in school, since computers cannot for the most part write like that, as if anyone wanted them to.
Whether or not to teach cursive is, isn’t it, much more relevant to us than more talk about one more divorce? After all, since our children seem to have forgotten how to add, why should they have to know how to write. Oh, sure, you say, they’ll learn how to print, but how long will that last, when computer printers do it better?
Writing cursive is hard. Not too long ago, for the first time in a long time, I wrote a letter. The muscles in my hand didn’t seem to want to make the cursive “s’s” quite right. The “r’s” gave me trouble, too. In fact, I found that I could not at all remember how to make a capital “A.” It’s possible that I never knew, or that I forgot, as busy as I’ve been not writing about my divorce.
The divorce was 14 or so years ago. I learned how to make a capital “A” much longer ago than that. Add to that the fact that, in the technical world, mostly we print, so cursive writing could well have gone to the equivalent place of that garbage can into which we drag stuff on the computer screen that we no longer need, or want, or have room for.
Writing about divorce is kind of like that. The fact of it has been juggled around inside the heads of those folks who’ve gone through it, for long enough that mostly it’s been deleted. Computers have something to teach us about getting rid of stuff that’s just cluttering up our screens. Click it. Highlight it. Delete it.
Even the weather is a more seemly topic than divorce. No one ever looked at a rainstorm and considered ever briefly that it should go down as a failure of some sort for somebody, like a divorce might. Maybe the weather man might be disappointed that he was wrong, but even he’s aware that the weather tomorrow could do one of several things, independently of what he thinks it should do, and especially independently of your going on a picnic and him saying the sun is going to shine.
Now that’s more like divorce, the weather, that is, should one care to write about it even a little. Perhaps should one wish to write about one’s divorce, one could compare it to the weather, and the chances of something happening to either, marriage or the weather, would be about equal.
Maybe it’s going to rain; maybe the sun is going to shine. Maybe you’re going to be together; maybe not. I now pronounce you man and wife, and by the way, it looks like it might rain, just so you know.
Even the new football stadium that is the center of controversy down in The Twin Cities is more interesting than divorce.
Matter of fact, it has all the same problems facing it, for one, huge money issues, but at least they’re hammering out those details before hand, which, should anything be written about divorce, would definitely be one of the things to be written about.
At the rate they’re proceeding with this discussion down there in the Capitol, I could have forgotten completely about my divorce, instead of just mostly having forgotten about it.
Writing about a bunch of politicians, none of whom want their name attached to this political career killer, seems to be a lot more amusing than writing about a divorce, which is what these politicians down there are trying to avoid: Namely, having us divorce them at the next ballot box.
That’s why I haven’t written about divorce. There’s not much to say.
