Dear Occupant

The meaning of life; that seems like a good place to begin--and don't tell me it's "42," either. Not that I know, but I'm interested. In a world increasingly filled with twaddle, do we really need yet another web log? Well, you know my answer already. I view this in the same way I would slipping a message into a bottle and casting it into the ocean. I have no idea whether anyone will read it or respond, and while it's not exactly true that I don't care, perhaps it's enough for me just to do it. Isn't it ironic that as bookstores go extinct like Mastadons and the printed word itself seems in jeopardy that we have ever-greater numbers of writers offering ever more creative projects? I can't cite statistical evidence (too lazy to do the research), but the need to express our feelings and thoughts appears in inverse proportion to traditional opportunities to do so. Our response seems to be working harder at the craft of writing so that in the welter of public discourse our views may stand out to the discerning reader. I refer to actual people I know here, writers who invest the simple act of keyboarding (or God forbid using a pen) with all their passion and wit and deeply-held feelings to create something original, something new that has the power to move us. I proudly take my place among them and, with this little cyber soapbox, add my notions in the form of brief essays, rants, observations, ruminations, and exhortations. I believe in active verbs and simple declarative sentences, and that all individual talents stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before them (as T.S. Eliot says, more or less, in his famous essay). This blog will be a grab-bag; you'll never know what's coming next, and it will be worth exactly what you paid for it. But I've had fun writing this one and to me that pretty much answers the question I started with.