On a hot August morning, the kind when the heat lies hazy and blue, a countryman sat on his front porch and gazed across his yard toward the road. A neighbor came walking along the road, and, so the story goes, seeing his friend, stopped and said, "What are you doing?" "Thinking," the man on the porch answered slowly. "What about?" asked the neighbor. "Don't know, just started," the man replied. The story ends here and for me is wonderfully satisfying. If I spent all my time getting started thinking, life would be much easier. My problems begin after I start. Ideas invigorate me, and before I know it, I am off the porch and across the yard. Soon, though, I am entangled in a thicket of thought. Like false analogies, briars snag my arguments while buts, neverthelesses, and on the other hands cling to my assumptions like cockleburs. Thorny questions block my path, and pressing forward to a conclusion is impossible; still, when I turn back toward the porch, green associations wrap around me, and the more I struggle to escape the worse entrapped I become, until finally I collapse exhausted in a heap of confusion.