The Downside of Writing in an Echo Chamber
The proverbial “preaching to the choir”
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet in my ongoing Mayberry Chronicles is the change a move to rural East Texas has caused to my writing schedule. Actually, it’s not the new location as much as my new roommate. My stepdad is 87 years old and has followed the same schedule for 25 years now; there is no hope of me altering his daily routine, so I’ve had to adjust mine.
Part of that adjustment means that instead of writing nonstop until around 2:00 pm each day, I have to break from 9:30 to 11:00 every morning to drink coffee with his buddies at the gas station and get the mail from the post office. I’m getting used to the interruption in part because I have no choice (his vision is such that he should not drive) and in part because listening to four men with a combined age of 900 years is surprisingly fun.
It’s something else as well: a total echo chamber. They may disagree on how long to wait after fertilizing a field before harvesting hay or the best backroads to take for a drive between Paris and Athens (the ones in Texas, not Europe), but when it comes to political and social issues, they march in lockstep. I initially chalked this up to the influences of age, region, faith tradition, etc. I would simply shake my head and foolishly congratulate myself on how…
