The New Crusade

I used to have a LiveJournal and a Wordpress and a something else I can’t remember—oh wait, I do remember. A Blogger. A Xanga. (@.@) And, actually, I had, like, six LiveJournals.

I’m glad I deleted them. I’d be embarrassed by them today, even with all my growing up, my accepting of former selves. I’d still cringe. I am cringing. I’m also glad that you don’t know at what I’m cringing.

This is a far more sophisticated attempt at recreating the only imitable outcome of my youthful endeavors: an almost-daily practice of publishing largely unfiltered yet impressively vulnerable journal entries. In that time, I wrote to connect—to myself, to others, to the creative ether that seems so out of reach these days. Remember in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dr. Schneider reaching, grasping, fingertips brushing briefly against the Grail cup before she plunges to her death? “I can reach it,” she says. “I can reach it,” straining further. I love that line. Anyway, sometimes entering the creative space that allows me to write is like that scene. “I can reach it,” except I really can’t.

The hope with this “blog” is to not have to “reach it.” The hope is to unconstrain the “Act of Writing™,” to simply give words space, time, and a substrate, and to stop judging them so damn much for existing in base form, for not realizing themselves in immediate genius.

For the billboard, I’m here because: I am allowed to write.

I’m sure somewhere there is an incredibly intelligent person who has achieved substantial and well-deserved success as a writer, who denounces flouncing around in nostalgic eddies as the effort of fools, poseurs, havers-not.

I’m sure.

I’m also sure that I don’t care, and I don’t mean that to be disrespectful or diminishing to the human-that-maybe-exists. I mean only to say that I understand I have made a choice, and I don’t care if it reads as anything else beyond the folly of a fool/poseur/haver-not.

Reader, what is important is to write and to connect.