I believe it's important to own our errors alongside things we do right. It's only the latter that makes us feel good and so we often gloss over the former. Last week I made a mistake sizable enough that it couldn't be ignored. Yet the column I wrote about it seems to have left some readers without the needed clarification. To my e-readers I added the following:

"This essay and the emails that prompted it are in the spirit of self-disclosure. If we believe in the concept, we'll own up to our foibles a swell as our triumphs, such as they are.

"My editor composed a clever headline for this, out of my own material. The concluding "Resistance is futile" actually pertains to Gov. Mead and his stance toward his fossil-fuel fast friends (this may not be evident from the content, though some of you caught on earlier) but Reed applied it to my own misstep, making it a double entendre."

I have written about the concept of self-disclosure before. I've mentioned its devoted disciple, Sidney Jourard. However, that's a name not many people recognize. Jourard died young and so, his publications volume is not what it might be, had he lived.

The big constraint with writing for a newspaper invariably is word count. My editor is convinced people do not have the attention span to read anything beyond 900 words or so.