It’s a gloamy day in Saint Paul, with the threat of more liquid life hanging over us as if Spring doesn’t exactly want to come yet. This is my mail day, when I answer my letters. I love doing this, because your cheery letters make blogging worthwhile for me!

Kudos on staying on this a year! You’ve kept up a monster pace of four really significant posts a week. How do you find time for it?

Thanks. It doesn’t take me long, really. I spend time thinking about things all day, and about 20 minutes to write them down on average. There are many mistakes in my old posts because I don’t give them more than a cursory edit. If I was really going to edit them, I’d print them out and take them to a different place – usually a bar of coffee house full of noise and life. For some reason, that’s what it takes to do it right. I don’t give these posts that much consideration, but I’m proud of them all the same.

You’ve tackled a lot of subjects in your blog so I can’t say exactly what it’s about. Politics? Literature? If I was going to tell someone what you’re all about, what should I tell them?

Ah, that. I don’t believe in categories, I believe in life. My blog is about culture, the instinct that we upright chimps have to get along and find fulfillment together. That covers just about everything, so I’m not tied down. The one thing I really don’t get into is my own personal life, on its own, which isn’t really that exciting.

Thanks for telling other people about my humble blog, too. I do appreciate the recommendations and links.

You’re really good at reducing complicated things to an easy way of talking about them, but sometimes you go too far. When you say that “banking should be boring” I didn’t really understand you at first.

When I get petulant like that, it’s out of frustration. I do think that banking, like so many things, has gotten far more complicated than it needs to be. I can’t think of anything else to say on the topic. I could go into specific details of the whole problem, but I don’t see why. It’s all just terribly over-done, like an elaborate meal that doesn’t quite come together and isn’t worth waiting all night for – why not just get a burger instead? Sadly, I’m a burger and beer kind of guy at heart, and while I love to cook fairly elaborate things they really are quite simple at heart. Give me about 5 ingredients and I’ll make you something good. It may look elaborate when I’m stir-frying like a madman, but it’s still just those 5 ingredients all the same.

When I say that “Banking should be boring”, I don’t mean that you can’t come up with something interesting and fun. I’m saying that, like good cooking, it should reflect the skill of the chef more than his or her cunning. You don’t need fancy ingredients when you know just what you are doing and what the customers want.

You’re right though, it’s a bit too simple of a concept most of the time. I’ll work on it.

That’s my mail for the day. Please send me your thoughts and hopes as wabbitoid47 at yahoo.com and I promise to respond!