I read a piece this morning about how our president is dominating as much news time, internationally, as everyone else in the news. In other words, everything has become all Trump, all the time, all over the world. And why? They say it has to do with the shift from print news to social media, which tends to reinforce what's already going viral, making it harder to get a full sense of what is happening.

This got me thinking... editorials these days tend to get sucked towards a similar maelstrom, with bigger issues drawing more interest than the small stuff. Of course, that's also because the closer one gets to local, the more harm gets done when stark opinions get posited. So I'm going to try something new here, at least for a start.

Let me tell you what's got my goat up...

We had some plumbing work done at my home. I forgot to ask for a quote when the owner of the plumbing company came over and said what we were asking for wouldn't be too hard. Yesterday the bill came in: for nearly $2,500. Need I say I choked? Sure, the work was done, but shouldn't there have been a warning, or at least the offer of a payment plan for such an amount? Do businesses think we've all got such funds stashed away? At least the dentist I work with offers options...

I booked a motel near the City last Saturday night; my family was going to join two sisters and their families at my dad's place. I figured it would be cool to get a place with a pool, the better to entertain everyone. I locked in a decent price and on Saturday morning we woke up with my kids in the grips of flu. He and my wife stayed home so I went down alone, after which no one joined us at the hotel. I got caught in a vortex of self-recrimination: should I have forced my kid to go as a lesson, should I have not gone? Making it all worse was that the hotel refused to offer a refund even though there were people begging for rooms when I got there. Talk about a moral quandary!

Last week we slipped into an error in these pages when someone took a proposal before a local planning board saying they were new owners of a local business. We ran with the verbatim facts only to later find that they had been misrepresented. We offered various corrections and yet that term du jour, "fake news," got used... just as it did when others maligned us as being biased for using the term "alleged" in regards to a variety of cases currently in the courts. Needless to say, we're not judge and jury in the press, so we use such terms to protect ourselves, as well as all involved in complex issues. And yet the tenor of the times is to slam us for not being opinionated... as being "biased." No win, eh?

Lastly, and most personally, I've been working with a therapist to change the way I speak and think so that things I say don't seem to cast judgment. I'm tired of accidentally hurting people. And I'm getting better at catching myself when I've erred, usually within seconds of saying something that could be construed as "pointed." And yet it's not fast enough... now I'm being asked to work within thoughts before they become words, let alone actions. A part of me is ready to bolt when I hear such things, and yet I'm doing it for the sake of all I love. Which leads me to another question, as I undertake some of the hardest work I've undertaken in my life: why can't we again work to do the same on a political basis, the better to build community in the same way we strengthen relationships?

In the end, I realized that all the hyper-personal is the same as the global and national, when you boil things down to basics.

By the way, did any of you take that survey being passed around by a certain oft-named personage last week? Was it as biased, in its questions, to you as to me and others?

In the end, all such questions need answering. And deep truthfulness in doing so.