Stuck Trying to Say Something Again

Trying to keep up the habit of scraping words together to post to an online journal and play at what some people make a more noticed matter of, I haven’t settled on a single, apparently innocuous subject but on a handful. There are many other topics all around, but to me they seem to need more articulateness than I can manage. Still, in the present roiling crisis of protests over police racism and violence, I’m bumping up against the warning that to say nothing is still to say something, which had nudged me to a struggling attempt to say something about “wouldn’t it be better to be pleasant?” during another crisis of intolerance three years ago.

“Talk is cheap,” as the saying goes, which then bumps me against my timidity and also-current fear of infection, stretching from the presence of others to just touching something others have touched. I’ve worried before that about “accepting in the abstract but not seeking out the specific,” and worry now that articulating my own weaknesses could also be a ploy for a pat of reassurance on the back. Nor can a single effort like this obviously make things better; the most I seem able to say is that “we’re all doomed now” lamentations have been flying around for quite a while.