LE MOTIEF

Blog number 492******* 21 February 2011


I've written several blog entries from one of my stringers stationed in Getawayfromme, Montana about this guy - let's call him Tom, who pesters women at the same coffee houses my stringer hangs out in. So today I get a letter from my stringer, which follows;

"Tom was checking out women to me, 'she's got a nice ass,' etc. One girl came in and he said, 'Oh, she's nice.' Then he said, 'damn, she's gay.'


Then later we were talking about Michael Vick and Tom said, 'people can change.'


I said, 'not without a lot of therapy and will power.'


He said he had changed.  I asked from what to what (!)


He said, 'from being an uncaring person.'


I asked, 'into what?'


His mind clamped down at that point and he changed the subject.


Truly the wizard of Oz was a parable of the mind and its sneakiness. Tom, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or to my last question."


I think it was Robert Burns that said something to the effect, "Oh, to know ourselves as others know us."


What causes this ignorance of ourselves is that we don't look carefully at our motives any more than we look carefully at our thoughts. We think we do know why we are doing something - "I want to help the guy", so we look no further than that self-serving excuse. After all, it's good enough for me so it should be good enough for everybody.


I'd like to pontificate further, but I want to be kind to you, so I won't. I'm always thinking of others first. That's just the way I roll.