Okay, we're going to have to establish some epistemological, methodological, and ontological standards for DB posts. Sorry, O'Dog, but you're going to have to stay awake for this one.
If someone says, "Hey SP -- I lost track of the thread, how did it come to be that...?" it seems to me that the polite thing to do would be to repeat the story.
If someone doesn't "get" the point of a particular post, moreover, it strikes me that attempting to restate for clarity would be the logical response, rather than have the interlocutor, and the thread, veer off on a tangent unrelated to any foregoing content.
I not sure that the methodological approach of simply counting the number of instances in which a particular story is told has any real substance, but if that is to be the standard by which these things are judged -- though it enumerates but doesn't illuminate -- I'm happy to go along.
You ought to spend a little more time dealing with yourself and a less time worrying about what your ex-wife does
Here we have to add discussion about rules of evidence -- specifically, assuming away facts in evidence.
See, I'm not "worried" about what she does. Nowhere does it say, "I'm worried about WAW's having sex with someone."
I'm "irritated" at what she expects me to do.
Let me draw an only mildly counterfactual thought experiment: Would it be correct to infer that, based upon your approving reference to the Rule of Sheen, that if the former Mrs. O'dog, whom you have recently learned has another dog in the kennel -- a dog with a key to the kennel, no less -- began hectoring you to go bowling with said dog, and if you demurred from availing yourself of that splendid opportunity began attacking you and calling you names, that you would forebear vexation -- and spleen-ventilation -- hereabouts simply because doing so would constitute "worrying" about what she did?
With respect to how much time ought to be spent in "worrying" about myself, we are fortunate here to have data.
Two posts (in this now-71-page-long thread), "Confessions" and "Confessions, pt. II," both of which are largely negative self-evaluations of my performance qua DB'er -- self-worry, mind you -- total some 7,150 words.
By way of contrast, those two posts alone -- from only 1 of 10 threads -- are longer than every State of the Union address, save one: Lincoln's first SOTU, in 1861, in which he called out the Confederacy as "disloyal... insurgents... defectors... insurrectionists...despots" who were undermining America by seeking "aid and comfort" from America's enemies abroad.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if the only Constitutionally mandated presidential report to the Congress that is longer than Mr. SP's musings was that of Abraham Lincoln in the first year of the Civil War, then SP's pretty dang self-centered. So I don't think we need to worry about Smiley's Person worrying about himself.
However, if we wish to declare as a methodological maxim that The Story may only be related once, I'm all for that.
And if we wish to declare as an epistemological proposition that none may make queries about The Story, as the answering of same would require the apparently Much-Dreaded Repeating, then I'm all for that as well.
But let's do so clearly and not selectively, shall we?
And what of the cheer-leading posts? They clearly fail the Sheen "Worry About Yourself" test, and they also do not pass the epistemological smell test in that they provide no information or knowledge -- they are the sugar frosting on the cereal of self-awareness, empty calories, decoration. So ought we to declare a moratorium on them as well since, far from promoting self-worry they actually promote a kind of self-congratulation?
If we wanted to avoid having to police cheer-leading, which I think we all can agree is a nice thing to see and do, we could propose instead an Impeccability Maxim under which no one, except in the one post dedicated to The Story, would be permitted to post ANYTHING about her/his Wayward or Former Spouse. This would have the nice effect not only of eliminating potentially biased representations of someone who is, after all, a second-order Total Stranger, it would also compel each poster to be exclusively focused on him/herself -- save for the permissible cheer-leading referenced above.
But what we can't do is have it both ways. We can't say, "Come to the boards to vent," and then say, "You know, you really shouldn't vent -- you're not worrying about yourself;" we can't say, "Hey, I didn't see what is the status of your story?" and then say, "Whoa, dude -- stop repeating your story."
We need a bit o' consistency here, Sports Fans, lest we break the glass walls of our houses....
