I take back everything that I’ve written.

My time at the Pipe Dream has come to an end. Finishing up the experience, I have to say that coming up with an opinion to write about every other week has been a considerably more difficult task than I expected. In everyday conversation, I probably come off as one of the more opinionated people you’re bound to meet. However, everyday conversation is a context that doesn’t necessitate my opinions remaining fixed. The opinions that I have written about for the Pipe Dream have now been codified and immortalized forever on the Internet, and this has made me somewhat uncomfortable.

I am now forced to admit that my opinions and ideas about the universe are constantly in flux. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, but it does compel me to offer up the small caveat (a little late in the game, admittedly).

This year, I’ve written about how I feel television is unfairly maligned and that Black Friday is embarrassing and awful. These articles were not written with ease, because the more thought I put into formulating the opinion, the more difficult it became to see only one side of the argument. While television has its artistic merit, it also undeniably contributes to this country’s already sloth-like children continuing their descent into sloth-ness. Black Friday does reveal to us that we can be easily and shamefully shepherded, but one can’t discount how genuinely great it is to save money with some really sweet deals.

While I tried to give these counterarguments at least a little room in my articles, I chose to slant the articles to the side I felt held more weight. And while I haven’t fully turned my back on those opinions, or any that I’ve written about, I retract everything regardless. Because it now must be asserted that one is on shaky ground when trying to calibrate the measurement of those weights.

This is the Opinion section, not the “facts that people, for whatever stupid reason, arbitrarily dispute” section. By virtue of that distinction, every opinion expressed within its pages must be taken with a grain of salt. You can look at some generic rock and think about it in a very different way every single day for the rest of your life without ever being wrong. You can think about almost anything in the same vein.

Balance is about as important a concept as there is, because it’s in everything. A person may have his or her faults, but those very faults may be seen by some to be strengths. Or the self-awareness required to realize those faults may be considered a strength that ends up balancing the scale anyway. Our best science tells us that our brains are not perfect instruments for understanding the objective universe. The universe is viewed through lenses, which are unbelievably fluid. If your thoughts don’t end up canceling each other out, then you’re not stepping back far enough, or reaching out with enough gusto to brush your fingers against objectivity to see that there’s no object there at all. Contradictions are inevitable.

I even retract this article in advance. Obviously, opinions and the illusion of objectivity are important safeguards against inaction. And because, obviously, Moe’s Southwest Grill is unquestionably excellent. There is just no yin to that yang.