Arrogance Of Place

3WW CCLXIV
Each week, Thom posts three words. You write something using the words. Then you come back and post a link to the contribution with Mr. Linky (but please, link to the exact post, not your blog). As always, there's no hard-and-fast rule that you have to post on Wednesday. Click on the link above to see all the participants and their work. Join us if you like.

Here are the words.
Figment; noun: A thing that someone believes to be real but that exists only in their imagination.
Inclined; verb: Feel willing or favorably disposed toward (an action, belief, or attitude); have a tendency to do something; noun: An inclined surface or plane; a slope, esp. on a road or railway.
Vulnerable; adjective: susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm.

I once went for a three month review in the company where I began my career. This happened after six years away from them working for a major corporation and standing alone as a designer among other things I did to make my career track a bit remarkable.

I had hired back in to the company who gave me my start and received a substantial raise to do it. I was made a team leader. What the guy said to me during my review, his primary criticism, "You're arrogant!" It crushed me. I had no idea.

It never happened again. I don't mean I stopped being arrogant. What I mean, I have been so overt and clear while working on my arrogance that everyone knows I already know all about it and am trying not to be. It's tricky. I am paid to know stuff or at least how to learn, paid to not make mistakes, paid essentially to show off and have real substance firmly placed beneath the flash. My boss wants to not lie when he claims I am the best machine designer he knows. That is not true, but I am better than average, I think.

Arrogance Of Place

Vulnerable you...
So inclined you are to lean
on a figment, you
forget your low place
in the scheme of things, you toad.

You will lose your head
for this infraction
if you are not real careful.

From here on you'll till
my soul first before
your own. If you wed
(you understand this)
I will get first nights for sure
unless I deign not.

Written October 26, 2011 6:51 PM

I am reading historical fiction by Bernard Cornwell at the breakfast table these days so this sort of thing is uppermost in my thinking practice. I wonder how it is to write extended work in that kind of historical discipline. Cornwell writes so convincingly of another time and place. He really journeys far afield while sitting, I presume, at a computer or a typewriter or at pages and pages of penmanship. Maybe he dictates for himself or someone else to write up later. He is so rich, I presume he researches extensively too. Hours, days, weeks spent building another time and place well enough to enthrall some of us.

• Arrogance: It helps when the little people understand you are simply better than they are, for example, Dick Cheney.
• or A strange disease that makes everybody sick except the person actually afflicted with it, for example, Charley Sheen.
• There are people in my work life who prove that it's only arrogance if you're wrong.
• When you're better than others it's best to let them know in no uncertain terms so that they don't embarrass themselves by questioning your plans and designs.
• Those of you who think you know it all annoy those of us who know we do.