My favorite Mr. Boffo comic of all time featured Mr. Boffo (I assume) in a jail cell talking to his cellmate. He says about himself, “Nineteen arrests. Nineteen convictions. Maybe it’s me.”
I come back to that philosophy often. You can only explain so many times why everyone else is wrong before you have to accept that the problem is on your end. Today I realized it’s me.
The issue is whether I am unclear when I say things. All of my life I have been laboring under the misconception that I am not only clear but notoriously clear. Famously clear. Unambiguously, emphatically and fantastically clear. I thought Clearasil was named after me.
But it turns out that I’m more like whatever you would get if Little Richard had sex with a Rubic’s Cube and produced a baby. And by that I mean unclear, just to be clear.
You can see my problem in the comments here. About half of you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about on any given day. (Speaking of which, for those of you who were confused by my recent post, yes, I did know that Christ had something to do with starting Christianity in the Middle East. I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.) Anyway, it’s time to stop making excuses and acknowledge that the problem is me.
If I only noticed the problem in the context of this blog, I’d assume the phenomenon was nothing more than the normal distribution of morons. But it also happens at home, with friends, and with business associates. Often. They can’t ALL be confused for no reason. For example, I spent this morning explaining why my agreement to sign fifteen books did not assume I would buy them myself and ship them somewhere. Now I worry that I might have inadvertently agreed to clean someone’s rain gutters and repaint the center lines on highway 680. I’m unclear that way.
I have many theories about why I am so unclear. One problem is that all communication requires making assumptions, and apparently my brain is defective in that regard. I figure that people fill in the blanks the same way I would.
Now I realize I have to change. In the old days I would say, for example, “It’s raining.” In the future I will say, “It is raining right now, right here, outside and not inside. Visually it appears to be a liquid substance that I believe without the benefit of controlled studies to be water. I do not intend this statement to be unpatriotic. I am not proposing that you drink it or roll around in it. The rain is neither good nor bad, except in the cases of recently washed cars, picnics and crops. If I have left anything off the list, the omission is not tantamount to an opinion that said omitted activity deserves to be rained on. This message is not intended to be ironic, sarcastic or arrogant.”
If it’s misting, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do.