Every morning I'm greeted by a couple dozen emails from five news sources, four Substack voices, three poetry sites, puzzles, ads, arts, articles, opinions, assorted miscellany, pleas for money, and several hellos from friends.
As the day goes on, they stack up. The puppeteer in the sky
knows us and saturates us reinforcing material.
At least half of them go unopened but a glut is a glut as a
gluttony in the gut. I just spoke to Jung, and he said there is no archetype for
this condition. It’s a maelstrom for the psyche. So, what do we do? We sort.
Back in the day, the Sunday paper had
a classified section, real estate section, and separate sections for
business, comics, sports, entertainment, book reviews and both local and
international news along with ads for everything later gobbled up by
Amazon.
I took a secret pleasure in sorting; code for discarding
most of it with the illusion that I had a grip on things. I also weighed six
pounds less when I put it down.
Life has come down to sorting. If we don’t, we soon
find ourselves out of sorts. I’m aware of no HMO which covers out of
sorts. Given the glut of options at our fingertips we are called upon to
manage our way through the clamor of a cluttered field. A glut of muck.
The Brits love the word sort. When the sleuth assures
us all will be sorted out, it is the pivot of the plot. The suspects are soon
to be assembled in the library. Sorting seems to be a synonym for solving, for
setting things right, don’t you know? Such a bother! The range of sorting runs
from a souffle rising while the soup is bubbling, to a guy double-booking his
mistresses, to an axe murderer on the loose. It loses some teeth as it crosses
the Atlantic.
Life has come down to sorting the glut. I squirm to think of it, but my blogs may be part of it. One man’s essay is another’s man’s glut.
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