Loud

Me and my sister were playful kids. We had to be, the stakes were high: The loser of our games had to sit in the front during granddad’s drives and listen to the history of indoor plumbing in Reykjavík.

His knowledge of the subject was encyclopaedic, he’d memorised all of the relevant entries in the Icelandic encyclopaedia, with a complementary helping of hearsay, gossip, persistent misconceptions and embellishments that rivalled Andy Warhol’s Empire State movie in pace, length and narrative detail. It’s not that he didn’t have any good stories to tell, we’d listen gladly to the story of when he owned a seal, or of the tragic death of his mother, or of the tragic death of his brother, or of the tragic death of his other brother, or of the death of yet another brother and or of his uncle. Dickensian stuff right there. It’s just that whenever he drove he saw something in Reykjavík that reminded him of the city council, which in turn always reminded him of that historical political event in Iceland: indoor plumbing in Reykjavík. The minds that our family suffer from have never made any consistent sense, but they’ve always been insensible in consistent ways. Makes you almost glad that granddad is too old to drive.

I’ve just spent the last three weeks being idle, wasteful, stupid (more so than usual), lazy and spitefully antisocial. Vacation really is bliss. I’ve been writing a lot, all of it in a nice, posh, middle-class bohemian poseur moleskine that makes me look like the pretentious slow-witted but well read prat that I am, and I was vaguely writing with intent, with the idea of writing for somebody, delivering knowledge, edumacation!. Most of it was intended, pretended for the Humane Economics blog. I felt really productive, which in turn made me feel really happy in that sort of smug, “I’m so smart” kind of way you always hate seeing in others.

The problem didn’t become clear until I sat down to type the damned things up: It was all really, really boring. No, really. It was boring in a way that only somebody who has been forced to sit and listen to my grandfather’s extensive retelling of the marathon city council meeting that decided the form and charter of the Reykjavík waterworks can even hope to understand.¹ Tedious, in a word. Preachy, even. Definitely grouchy as well. And, of course, the clincher: BORING.

Those Humane Economics entries are going to stay, grow old, wither and die in those journals and, with any luck, no human will ever come to harm from them. Unless I decide to use the journal as a impromptu cudgel in a fight with a violent intruder, but since my copy of Anna Karenina is more likely to be at hand and be more effective in a violent fist-fighty brawl thing, that risk remains slim².

The question I don’t know the answer to (and am asking myself, so the lack of an answer is due to the dullard piece of mechanical gobby thingy that is my brain, not because I feel no pressure to answer it, which I don’t, but that’s a different matter entirely) is what to do about the Humane Economics blog, or this one.³ I don’t really know what to do.

Well, I do know what to do: write stuff that is not boring, but I’m now not so sure that can be done with a subject like economics and I’m not smart enough to have the kind of self-awareness that gives you that magical, wonderful, fancy-smancy knowledge of what it is that I can tell you that you would find interesting.

You wouldn’t fancy telling me, would you? (By the way: How do you like the new weblog design?)