I overheard what I think was a three-person writing group in a coffee shop the other day. There was a woman talking about all of the interesting things that had happened to her in her past, and how whenever she tried to write them down, the “voice” was wrong; it came out all wrong and it wasn’t any good. I thought, why didn’t she just write that down instead of saying it to her friends: that was, the way she told the story, just then, was surely as good as the story was ever going to be, so why not write it down, or record herself telling it and transcribe it later, and look at it to see if it’s a good story, or nearly as good as it would have been if, when you’d written it down, the voice had been right and it had been good.

Even Ben, apparently, has a violent streak.

I’m sick of recycling, aren’t you? It’s annoying. I hate separating all those paper product packages and folding them up or rinsing out plastic lids and sticking them in little green bins. I miss the old days when you could drive down the highway and lob out your empty pizza box and watch it travel like a Frisbee into the nearby woods. Back in those days people were still pretty much free to behave badly, but not today. Now we have to act “responsibly” and dump all our trash on the floorboard of the car. There are stiff penalties if we don’t.

I had this same issue when I was a kid. I would draw maybe three lines, decide I didn’t like where it was going, and then push the drawing aside. I didn’t erase. I didn’t flip the page over. As far as I was concerned, the drawing was dead to me, and I laid it to rest with the corpses of its underused fellows.

Napoleon Complex. A lot of people like to throw that term around. It’s also commonly known as “Short Man Syndrome.” You know the gist: smaller guys feel an urge to compensate for their size, usually via excessive aggression. But did you know that the origin of the term Napoleon Complex is historically inaccurate? If not, read on!