A New World Re-Order

How it was that I managed to catch this episode of The West Wing when it first aired eludes me now. I didn't follow the show, so it might have been based on all the buzz that the show itself was generating at the time that I decided to tune in to see what the hoopla was about.

Based on what I saw of The West Wing that evening, the hoopla was well deserved. As you can see from the clip, the writers weren't exactly shying away from intellectually stimulating (or challenging) subject matter. A brief, but well scripted discussion on the Peter's projection map during a popular television drama took guts. I still think it's amazing that they did it.

I had read about, debated and embraced the use of the Peter's projection a few years before seeing it discussed on The West Wing. At the time, I even had a black and white computer print of it hanging on the wall next to my desk. It would be cliché now to say that what I learned altered the way that I see the world, but there's no avoiding the cliché. The Peter's map altered the way that I view the world -- by projecting the world as it really is.

The reason I mention this now is two-fold: One, I kinda' needed something new to blog about. And, two, I am working on a new writing project, and trying to reorient a ton of information that's drifting around in my head.

Actually, the piece that I'm writing isn't even new. I was having difficulty with it last fall and decided to try a complete reboot. The reboot (which uses a small portion of this still-difficult-work-in-progress) wound up being published in GR64.

Part of the problem I'm having now is the same as I was having before. But one good thing that came from my struggles last fall was the decision to simply start over. Another was the decision to break a mass of information into smaller sections.

Ultimately, I'm still trying to do the same as before, but it's very much like chiseling a statue from a large marble block. But I'm not quite sure that I'm going to get the desired result.

Maybe I should just flip the block and chisel it upside down.