My wife says I should try to solve the problems in education. I should write letters, she says. Start the letter-writing campaign that was once my greatest fear, but turn it into an asset, an attack, a strategy to achieve change.

Okay. That’s probably a good idea.

I know I need to write. I should be working on the final volume of Damnation Kane, and in the last week or so I’ve started to feel some tinges of excitement about telling that story again, finishing it for real; so I know I will want to get to that, soon. That makes me not want to promise myself — and you, my friendly anonymous reader, who has put up with so much shit and so many broken promises from me about how I’m going to start writing more often, more regularly, more generously — that I will take up this blogging pen again, because then I would have to stop to write the book, and both together might be too much time and too much pressure when I’m trying to keep up with school work, and also house work, and also working on myself — because I’ve gained weight, sort of since the pandemic, but really ever since I quit smoking twelve years ago, and I’ve gotten serious about taking the weight off and getting in better physical shape, and I don’t want to give up on that.

But I know I need to write. I’ve been feeling despondent about it because I’m 48 and I’ve been writing for, what, 25 years now? Writing seriously? And yet I’ve never gotten a book or essay or even a short story accepted for publication. Mainly, of course, because I don’t submit my work; because I got tired of nothing but nameless, faceless rejection — but the point is that all of my writing has gotten me nowhere, and that makes me think that I shouldn’t spend the time on it when I have so many other things I want and need to do.

But that’s simply not an option. I’ve been telling myself that I’ve been a bad writer because I haven’t been writing, but actually, I have been: I’ve written something around 50,000 words in the last month, a respectable pace when most of my time is spent teaching; it’s just that most of it is garbage that nobody will ever see but me.

There is nothing wrong with writing badly: it’s only when you could write better that the bad writing is a problem. I can write better than I have been, so I should. But still, writing anything is better than writing nothing; and I have been writing.

Because I’m a writer. There’s no way around it. It’s who I am. That’s why, even with everything else I’ve been doing, I’ve been writing the garbage: because I have to write. Have to. It makes me feel better. It makes me feel more — me.

I know I have to write because I got in a Twitter argument today that went on far too long: and when I said I was going to stop debating, and the jackass I was debating said “We weren’t having a debate. You were trying, via various circumlocutions, to attack school choice and haven’t bothered to answer any of the points I’ve brought”, I went on a 26-tweet rampage answering every one of his so-called “points,” and explaining in great detail why I was not in fact attacking school choice, but rather his bullshit anti-education arguments which he was masking as school choice. Which was a complete waste of time, because nobody will ever read all that garbage, including the jackass who will surely smugly say that I have lost my temper and therefore am not worth debating, possibly before either blocking me or screencapping one of the tweets to share on his shithead school choice Facebook page. Twitter is not a good place for debates, nor for rants.

What I should have done is come here, and written out a reasonable explanation of the argument. Because I want things like that to be said, which is why I say them even when the person on the other side of the argument will either not read or not understand them. But I have to be better about picking my medium and my venue for actual discussion of actual points.

All of which is to say: I should be writing. About things that matter to me. In a way that will actually have some impact, at least potentially. To an audience that will understand and appreciate my words, thus making me feel like I’m using my time and my gifts well, and maybe even expanding my reach and the possibility of selling my books. Which I also need to write.

So. I should probably write about education.

I think I will.

Let’s begin.