This would have been a good rant

Well, at least I thought it would be.

I've been mulling a small incident that happened at the World Series of Poker about ten days ago--one that had received very little public attention. I had known instantly that I wanted to write about it here, but had trouble figuring out how to get a handle on it. The discussion would have necessarily encountered some, uh, problems.

I thought that I had worked out a way to do it, and proudly mentioned my plan to Cardgrrl the other day. She had what might kindly be called "reservations."

Over the course of about an hour, she gently but firmly argued that:

1) No matter how I phrased my point, I would inevitably anger a group of people with whom I have actually been trying to curry some favor for reasons of opening future opportunities in poker writing.

2) No matter how I phrased my point, I would inevitably come off sounding cruel and mean-spirited.

3) Nobody's opinions or actions would be changed as a result of addressing what happened.

4) I was probably dead wrong in my understanding of what was said. In fact, it would never even occur to normal people (a class to which I certainly do not belong) to see the incident in the way that I thought at first was the only plausible way. As a result, explaining my point of view to readers (most of whom are, in fact, fairly normal people) in a way that would make them understand how I saw it would be difficult, perhaps impossible.

5) Although the specific incident triggering the would-be rant was new and unique, my comments on it would have been largely duplicative of other things I've written at length in the past.

6) When it comes to grasping the basic human emotions that normal people have, of the sort that lay behind the incident in question, I was basically as clueless as Commander Data.

(N.B. None of the above are her words, so don't hold her responsible. This is my interpretation and impossibly brief summation of what was said in a long conversation.)

I have continued to consider the matter for the subsequent three days, and I find that that's a pretty daunting list of hurdles to overcome.

So what I had thought was going to be a first-class rant has been reduced to this--basically a grave marker for an idea that probably wasn't as good as I had spent days thinking it was.

Why mention it at all, then? After all, on some level this post is kind of like the annoying kid that says, "I know a secret but I can't tell you what it is." Well, you see, I think that some of my best posts have been ones in which I presented an unconventional opinion on a controversial subject--and this certainly would have qualified on both counts. I have lots of fleeting, transient thoughts about posts, and when they don't mature into actual posts, it's no big deal. But it is rare, possibly even unprecedented, for me to spend as much time planning one I as had this, then abandon it right when it was (I thought) finally ripe in my brain and ready for the blog. This non-post, then, is sort of my way of (1) marking the occasion and mourning the passage of what I had hoped would be something good, and (2) letting my readers know that my brain is still at work on stuff, even though the keyboard has been rather quiet of late.

Sorry.