Dear Governor Ducey,
As you might have noticed by now, if you were reading my
letters, you would see that I tend to make a lot of metaphors, such as: garbage
is to governor as collect garbage is to recall governor. This habit of metaphor
is a gift and a curse. Sometimes I make connections that are hard to justify.
But instead of giving up, I just see it as a problem in need of a solution. I
was thinking about this as I was fishing (beware: more fishing is writing
metaphor making ahead) and how fishing is problem solving—the current turns
this way, you adjust your rod that way. Your fly gets stuck under a rock. You
wade into the water even though you don’t own waders because you’re not sure
you’re really going to get into this fishing thing. You try to avoid getting
soaked as you dig the fly out from under. You tangle your hook in the tree
across the stream. Same plan. Walk across the water, try to pull your pant legs
high, be grateful for your tall snow boots. You pull the tree down with one
hand while holding the rod with your other. You manage to bring a ten foot
branch down to your (well, mine, in this case) five foot two inch height. You
unwrap the hook and the line without breaking your rod or falling in the water.
When they say fishing is full of success, I’m sure this is what they mean. You
are proud that when your line becomes wrapped around your boots that you
untangle yourself before you cast. You’re proud that this time, you didn’t hook
the tree behind you. You don’t really catch any fish but still, by the end of
the day, your pants are only kind of wet and although the water went up and
over your boots, your feet aren’t frostbitten. You have survived and that’s a
kind of win.
Writing is like this. There’s a sentence as knotted as a
fishing line. You untangle and untangle. You hope you smooth it out. You change
something on page 75 which means you have to backtrack through all the rest of
the pages to reflect the page 75 change. Remember to look behind you when you
cast! Why would you use the word “reverie” to talk about the way a real live
person stares into the distance? The same, reason, I guess, that you’d flick
your entire fishing rod into the stream. It’s OK. You can get it out of the
water. You can hit delete.
I always think that governing is like this: Little problems
that you solve one at a time. Hey, we have no money. Well, maybe we should get
some. Or, man, those universities are making us a lot of money? What should we
do? Let’s invest in them to bring more business into the state? Or, hey look,
this Affordable Healthcare Act helps us help provide health care to our
citizens, at a much lower rate than before. Maybe we can add people to the
rolls. But instead of taking one problem (or, good bit of news, depends on how
you look at it) at a time, you chose the ideological approach that assumes
anything that helps people should be cut and anything that makes their lives
harder should be instated. To make another metaphor (another problem with the
metaphor making, I can’t stop), you took a wide ideological brush to paint over
a host of tiny “problems” that really, if you had painted them more carefully,
might be solutions themselves.
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