November 15, 2007
bigmouth strikes again
I stayed up till three this morning playing Scrabulous with Roy (we were separated by only ten points at the end, so I guess we’re well matched) and occasionally spraying gasoline on the Austin Improv thread about the UCB show, which provided me with an instructive moment.
Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to get nasty in chatrooms. (That’s nasty in the sense of rude and vituperative, not in the sense of asking if there are any teenage girls on the thread.) I’ve gotten a lot better, which is not saying much, but at least I no longer write things that I know will be hurtful.
So there I was, tapping out my little self-satisified sermons about What the Real Problem Is, proud of how I was shedding light on the subject without attacking anyone. I was covered, ethically speaking. Possibly even helping others. Just another concerned netizen, dousing an overheated discussion with a bracing pail of the cold water of logic.
Well . . . horseshit. Calming influences have even less effect on the net than they do in real life — having spent many years as the asshole who refuses to drop it, I know whereof I speak — and furthermore, it’s just plain arrogant for me to assume that I’m above the fray. My intentions are good, but so are everyone else’s, which doesn’t prevent them (and me) from expressing ourselves in ways that are practically designed to get people’s backs up.
Which happened again at the end of the night, when someone took something I’d written and described it in comically exaggerated (and therefore inaccurate) terms.
I guess my petard needed hoisting. Making fun of something someone said by comically exaggerating (and therefore misrepresenting) it is a favorite technique of mine, and no matter how much I try to expunge it, it creeps back in when I’m writing — it’s entertaining, dammit! — so it was appropriate that I got hit with it just as I was trying to disengage.
The irony is that yesterday I’d been studying the Five Precepts of Buddhism and realized that whereas the deal-killer for me used to be Number Five, refraining from intoxicants, nowadays my biggest problems are with Number Four, refraining from incorrect speech. (It’s not that I didn’t have a problem with incorrect speech previously; I was just drinking too much to notice.) Incorrect speech can be defined as that which is untrue, abusive, divisive, or idle.
It’s that last one that gets me. Because while my online chatter (generally) falls short of ill will, it’s not really necessary either. I’m sure that at some point something I’ve posted to an online forum has been useful or entertaining to someone. My writing is not completely without value.
And yet as a percentage of my total contributions, that subset is minuscule. And I have to ask myself: Is this the best use of my time?
That’s what a lot of my moral life comes down to these days, as I shuck off years of behavior based on shame and guilt and misperception and embrace my remaining days with increasing urgency: Is this the best use of my time?
More often than it used to be, the answer is yes. Because no is really starting to scare me.