So to start things off I'd like to share about...um...hold on a minute...can I get back to you?
Ok. Turns out I didn't come in to this blog thing with any solid ideas or plans so I'm just going to start writing and see where it ends up. I'm more of a make-it-up-as-I-go sort of guy so any planning would have quickly been thrown to the wayside anyway. Actually, making clear plans is usually a precursor to disappointment as things very rarely go according to plan for me. Oh, the sad life of a procrastinating, daydreaming, passive-aggressive Minnesotan.
My obvious lack of planning capacity begs the question of what I hope to accomplish with a blog. Partly I see this as a practice run for a book that I will probably never get around to writing. Partly I feel the online world is lacking in opinions and half-formed thoughts about things that writers have no expertise in. I suppose another part of me thinks that it would cool to have readers from other places thinking they know a lot about me. Everyone likes stalkers right?
An honest answer for what I hope to see happen with a blog would be that I have been encouraged, challenged, goaded, and otherwise cajoled by different folks through the years to try doing some more writing. I've been told that what little humor or intelligence the Lord has bestowed upon me as a dry, emotionally inert Minnesotan works well in writing.
Truth be told I have found that the proliferation of blogs and 24 hours news over the past years has had an inverse relationship to the overall intelligence, honesty, and civility of online and public discussions. There is also my completely unscientific observation that the art of rhetoric and persuasion is nearly dead in public discourse. Finally I have a vague sense that social media, while opening some new communication possibilities, has bludgeoned rich vocabulary, poetic beauty, and soul-searching truth nearly to death.
With this dismal and melancholic view of the online world I felt like maybe I could, at least in my little corner of the world, help create an online place for warmth, intelligence, honesty, and humor. If nothing else, I can expose the world to my random, idiosyncratic, obtuse, and unfiltered perspectives. I can imagine a sociologist or anthropologist centuries from now, or perhaps some alien invaders digging through my thoughts here and walking away from them thinking: "well...that's different".
