The Horn of Impatience.

Given your present age and such degree of mental acuity as you at the moment have, there would be no surprise if you were to come upon a red signal light, then stop your forward progress, nor would your judgement or behavior be questioned were you to regard a red flag as some form of warning.

In contrary fashion, you can expect to be honked at and indeed have been honked at for failing to respond to a green light, which pretty much signified permission, encouragement, even a mandate to go forth. The culture of which you are a part speaks the language of red for stop or warning, green for go.

Your time spent on this planet and within the cultures you inhabit have also provided you with enough experience to question beyond colors of flags or traffic lights, turning your focus instead on the explanations you are given and, in the spirit of democratic belief, the explanations you give for the events, individuals, and other phenomena you see about you.

In fact, you experiences to date have taught you to question the explanations you give or at least to hold them to a higher degree of rigor even than those you are offered. Arrival at this state is not your way of speaking to your present stage on the pathway of life, which is to say you do not regard yourself as a conservative, cranky old curmudgeon or even a tortoise fan in the ongoing hare-and-tortoise race metaphor. For every individual or convention honking at you to for chrissake observe the freaking green light in front of you, you have yourself pounded the horn of impatience.

Standing between the alert cynicism of the early philosophers and the dispassionate grounding in the moment of many Buddhist sects, the writer need to embrace the present situation, whatever it may be, all the while embracing the reverence for what experience opts to venture forth in front of you.

In your earlier years, you were given to spending your time amassing information of the sort that would allow you to make informed wagers on the outcomes of such things as the turn of a card in a game of chance, the final score in some athletic contest, and even more to the point which of an entire cadre of horses was the fastest.

In the ensuing years, you've entertained a different approach to outcomes, meaning you are content to endure some outcomes while focusing more on those where you have some possible hand in effecting the result. 

At the moment, you're given to investigating on the outcome of factual and fictional narratives as originated and endured by you.  At the moment you question the outcomes of these narratives as though they have a life and agenda of their own, meaning they have a completion date in mind which they may not yet be willing to share with you.

During a time in your past you now regard as bleak, you come upon one novel you'd read in your teens and took to somewhere in your psyche approximating your heart. In later years, you were moved to read another novel by the same author, relieved as you read its pages to be overcome by a sense of foreboding and distaste to the point where, setting the novel aside, you could say in great sincerity that you not only didn;t finish the novel, you did;t have to finish the novel. Nothing, in fact, could emerge tou to reconsider.

To this date, these two books remain close to the top of what has become for you the pyramid of worst books, awful not so much because of their inherent story but because of the ways in which the author employed devices and techniques in the telling of these stories.  The two books were The Fountainhead and atlas Shrugged.  Whenever you find yourself thinking how your own storytelling or essay technique is improving or, to the absolute polarity of degree, not improving, then you find solace in the fact that whatever it was you were driven to write, you were not driven to write either of those two,