The name of this blog is not a bit. Pessimism is my resting state, it’s the thing I have to talk myself out of most mornings, and after about forty years of it I’ve concluded that leaving it unexamined is worse than admitting it in the masthead.

So this is where I work on it. Mostly essays. Sometimes about organized religion and what it’s like to leave it, sometimes about family, sometimes about software, which is what I’ve done for a living for sixteen years and which actually turns out to be a decent training ground for noticing when an argument is doing something other than what it says it’s doing.

One rule I hold to: I don’t write about anything until it’s a healed scar. If it’s still a seeping wound, whatever I produce is just going to be a complaint, and a complaint asks the reader to carry something without offering them anything back. The wait is usually years. It’s the main reason there isn’t more here.

I’d rather be clear than impressive, and I’d rather be wrong in public than careful in private. If a piece I write lands, it’s probably because I let myself come off badly in it somewhere.