The cigar box

Subject: The cigar box.

Put him in front of a cigar box, ideas would flow and an essay appear. It was not a question of knowledge but of ..... alertness, a transcription of what could be thought about something once it swam into the stream of your attention. Susan Sontag 
This is a description of why I continue to write my vastly inferior pieces, compared to the pen of Sontag, It's the temptation of having an opinion on something (nearly everything) that instigates me to write. My field of vision is not as wide as it should be and not at all fuelled by the contact of other people as hers was. Imagine being immersed in conversation that tapped into your very soul (a literary concept not a metaphysical one) and left you wondering. But never the less I feel strongly about some of the things and get immense pleasure from exercising those little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot was fond of saying. 
Everything which comes into our vision, physically or metaphorically has a place in our lives otherwise it wouldn't have happened. If I had grown up on a desert island I wouldn't have imagined the sight of the wild flowers bursting through the dry stony  soil in Namaqualand when Spring arrives, or the steamy vibrancy of down town Barranquilla in tropical Columbia. These images and many others are the structural sense on what makes of my perhaps flawed understanding of people. The Protestant surety which pervades our thinking in the West is blown apart by the necessities required to exist in other parts of the world and forms much of my dislike of the need to package our lives in the conformity of others. So much is missing in our health and safety culture, we lack the ability to understand the importance of taking the knocks of life with the understanding that our knocks are common in humanity at large and we insulate ourselves from them at our peril.
What can we say about the cigar box. 
It's use, the people who use it, what it contains and the history of the tobacco plant and the effects on people who worked the tobacco plantations, the climate and the corruption, the marketing and the wilful avoidance or acknowledgement of the damage tobacco has had on millions of lives. One could go on, the pleasure of smoking a cigar the mystic of smoking cigarettes for the teenager, the psychological prop for someone in stress to have this repetitive, almost Pavlovian reflex. The memories of jazz music playing in smoke filled cellars, and the almost pathological need to find a place which was a rebellion against the all encompassing  Protestant ethic.
Thoughts which flow and connect and then disconnect make us what we are. Not the title over the door, not the assumption of others who think they know you. It's the excitement of having an opinion, a view which is your own, not gleaned from some Columnists writing for the Daily Mail.
The beauty of the blog is it's individuality and the chance to be reckless without directly hurting someone. It's a fishing pool of ideas which when considered turn into thoughts and identify you to the reader. It's this desire to be identified with something and to pin ones identity to a cause or a school of thought which marks us out from the herd, and it's only after sampling so much else do we define what we like best.