Out of Context

Politicians and athletes and other folks who give interviews tend to be concerned with context, or, more specifically, the context in which their words will appear and how it will make them appear.

It's rather easy to take almost any speech by people in the public eye and chop it up and twist it and make it sound ridiculous. This is the ultimate in context destruction. Thankfully all we really have to deal with on grand terms in political life here is misrepresentation of facts and outright lying, whereas total context destruction in making opponents appear foolish is not considered appropriate.

Context is also the basis for feminist epistemology, but that's a fruit for another snack.

This morsel is about the history of a line taken out of its context and my own personal censorship and editing philosophy. The line in question is one I wrote for a previous piece.

At first the sentence was not a sentence, rather it was a minor treatise in the middle of a separate discussion. I found myself getting a little out of hand right in the middle. I slowly edited it down to a paragraph.

The sentiment still seemed too heavy handed for the piece it inhabited, as well as bordering on cruel. I've never used this medium to personally attack people, and I wasn't going to start there, especially with persons in my family. I trimmed the paragraph until it got nice and small and succinct.

Still not satisfied, I finally was able to pare it down to the brass kernel. It wasn't even that important...just important enough to be included in the discussion, but not dwelled upon or even elaborated upon.

The post was Quinine and Pine, my discussion of alcohol, learning from your DNA, and personal preferences in reference to alcohol. The sentence, buried near the end and easily skimmed over was:

"I noticed that nobody would drink my gin."

Even in the context of the piece itself the context of who the particular "nobody" is is vague.

Deliberately so. What eventually turned into that sentence started off as a diatribe/treatise on the awkwardness of having roommates after having been living alone for nearly six years and having been married for a third of that time.

Really, the theme of that first rant that got cut into a long paragraph, was the amplification of that awkwardness by the amount of alcohol that was being consumed. Being transported back to an age when you'd write your name on food in the fridge is almost what it felt like, only here the commodity wasn't food.

What's not important or essential to the "Quinine and Pine" piece is the context of the line I've highlighted in this piece: one of the reasons that gin and tonic became an important drink for me in the near recent past is simply because it would be there. The gin would be left alone. Rum, whiskey, tequila, Lone Star, wine...if these were open they were seen as communal and wouldn't last more than a day or two. Being present was enough for Lone Star; I admit I drank my share of Lone Star that I didn't purchase, but I "replaced" plenty as well. Needless to say this caused strife when meager earnings are spent on alcohol that wasn't getting consumed by the original "collector" of that liquor.

As the editing of the context of a rant about alcoholism continued, I realized that I was still angry at aspects of the awkwardness, and that being cruel in the piece was not what the piece was about, and frankly that wasn't an aspect I wanted from this collection of pieces in total.

There was a smattering of unpleasantness involved in the house before we left for an apartment, and I never wanted to torch the ground as we left. I still care for everybody involved.

So, in a strange irony considering the theme of this piece being "context", it's the context of the line from "Quinine and Pine" that itself got excised, and was specifically and deliberately left out after a solid chunk of editing time. It was specifically not important to that piece.

In a different irony--or is it the same?--that context itself is specifically at the heart of this piece.

An entire brief history lived, edited because the context relevancy, and later revisited becasue of the opposite context relevancy.

Only in los Diez Sur?