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The fact that the arguments on either side of the evolution vs creation debate are so full of holes that neither has any idea of how to fill despite having chewed through more than a few generations of theorists suggests that neither side have any idea. 

Which makes the argument, and the questions begetting it, all the more absurd. 

It is something beyond reason that causes us to continue to fight about answers to unknowable questions. Is it not better to stop arguing over that which cannot be known?

Today Cal Raleigh hit his 42nd home run, giving him the record for most home runs by a switch-hitting catcher.

Some things are broken and can be fixed.

Some things are broken and can't be fixed.

Crucially, some things are broken and can be fixed but shouldn't.

In other words, not only if it ain't broke don't fix it, cuz that much is easy and obvious, but if it is broke, consider first whether, second why and only third how it needs fixing.

Art is the manifested result of a conversation across time and space about beauty and meaning and communication.

Having problems is okay.

Pretending not to isn't.

Two of the few things a person truly owns are their intentions and their words.

A good goal might be to try to keep them aligned. 

some try to extinguish the light they see in others so as to focus attention on their own reflection in the light they intend to end

some try to inspire the light they see in others so as to open the aperture of attention to all that light can reveal

if you've ever wondered why birds fly

it's simply because they're supposed to

I'm trying to disabuse myself of the notion that there are bests of things. 

There is no best pencil. One pencil might be better than another for one person for the purposes of drawing a picture, while a different one is better for a different person, while a third pencil is better for both of them (but perhaps not a third person) for writing a letter.

There can be no best pencil because pencils serve more than one fuction, and no single pencil will perform superiorly for all functions for all people at all times in all places. As always, context is the key; preferred pencils are just that, and only that in a specific context.

Of course, it's a Platonic idea(l) that there can be no best thing (form) because things (forms) serve (perform) more than one function (performance)*.

But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to remember that there are no bests of things. 

Nevertheless, I have spent far too much effort searching for the best pencil, and am happy to report that despite the Platonic impossibility of a perfect pencil, one does in fact exist. It is of course, the Dixon Ticonderoga, yellow #2 HB soft.

I highly recommend putting down the thing you're looking at and finding your nearest purveyor of fine office material (hopefully a locally owned art supply store) and buying a package of Dixon Ticonderoga yellow #2 HB soft pencils and a pack of yellow legal pads and a pencil sharpener and an eraser and sitting down somewhere with good light and writing about the things you know or the things you want to know.

You'll thank me (and Papa who I stole it from) afterwards.

*(m) The linguistic / lexical / semantic relationships between form & function and service & performance are a fun place to wander and wonder.

A good morning habit might be

1.  wake early

2.  exercise and nourish my mind

   1.  read some news to learn about the world as it is, not to make opinions

   2.  read some fiction to learn to understand the world as it is, not to get lost

3.  exercise, clean and nourish my body

4.  use my body to do what must be done today

There is no Rambo Jesus.

Divinity does not requite sublimity.
Divinity contains and is not contained by sublimity.
Sublimity looks and points toward divinity, like a light that grows brighter as it nears.

end of may

appeasing a wandering mind

it is odd how the well
ebbs and overglows
as errors light the way

is it sad when they sell
spells and overthrow
without thought
in the barenakedlight of day?

i am glad when i know
that it does overflow
when left to have its own say

Happy Memorial Day

We are not being asked to run into cannon fire. We just need to speak up.

This morning I took Smurf, my sweet 6 year old puppy on a good long walk around a nearby Cemetery. It was a beautiful morning. There'd been rain early but it was gone and the sky was blue with barely a handful of whispy white clouds lingering their way through the middle of the day.

There had been some sort of memorial service and commemmoration and I was sorry I'd missed it. People were putting away chairs and flags and I saw three different men in the remnants of three different uniforms representing a Union Soldier from the Civil War, and American GI's from WWI and II. 

All of the white stones in the Memorial Cemetery were each adorned by a single American flag, and as we walked along, I saw markers bearing names of Battles like The Bulge and The Somme to show that the men there laying had once fought and slain, and had seen their own slain and had come home, alive, to build families and businesses and to sometimes lie and to sometimes cheat and to usually feel guilty about it, and to always try harder. And here they lay, all of them together, like they fought, together with the names of the places where their brothers who never returned still lie.

We followed Smurf's nose along the road past where most of the people were, and left behind the white stones where once soldiers lay at ease and in formation. We came across sections that appeared to be grouped by various ethnicities, first gravestones marked with characters from alphabets I can only say are Asian (whether Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or some other, my ignorance cannot answer), then a collection that was apparently Greek, or at least used a Greek-looking alphabet, and finally one that was clearly Hebrew, and I enjoyed looking at the mysterious alphabets and pretending that one day I would learn how to read them. But in between these categorized collections of decedents there was a section marked Veterans Families. So we walked among the veterans and their families until we came across one that was cordoned off, and I wondered why, so we wandered toward it and I learned that there lay one Orville Emil Bloch, Medal of Honor Recipient. His story is fascinating, and I hope to remembet to write more about him.

But for now, let's spend somt time thinking about the German word for monument. It's Denkmal (capitalized because Germans capitalize their nouns), which is, naturlich, a compound word. Denk meaning think, and mal meaning time*, cometogether to form Denkmal for Monument, literally Thinktime. I find this an absolutely perfect way to think about monuments. 

They are structures built to stop time. For example, the Doughboy monument at the Evergreen Washelli cemetery in Seattle, Washington was made in 1932, nearly one hundred years ago, by people who long ago shuffled off this mortal coil, to commerorate the sacrifices soldiers had made in order to bring some semblance of stability to the world by helping put down a Teutonic malfeasance (winning WWI for those of you who are less erudite, or perhaps just not as entranced with the winsome ways one would weave words would one wallow in their wordsmithing, as I am often wont to do... ugh... lemme start over...

They are structures built to stop time. The Doughboy monument at Evergreen Washelli cemetary was made in 1932, nearly one hundred years ago, by people who long ago shuffled off this mortal coil, to commerorate the sacrifices soldiers (and by extension all of us who love them) had made in order to bring some semblance of stability to the World by winning World War I. 

Also in 1932, Adolf Hitler was running for President in Germany. When he became Chancellor of Germany the next year, the time to think about that particular monument was still in its infancy.

That said, monuments do stop time. People who go to a monument to give it some thinking time are transported to the place and the mind and the idea of the monument's maker and all the reasons and people he made it for. They are taken to meet the multitude of people for whom the monument stands, for no monument ever made stands for a single person. All are symbols of an idea or a time or a way of being or an understanding their experience of our everchanging world.

The Washington Monument does not stand for stand for a well-born, aristocratic slave-holding man with bad teeth called George, despite the fact that all of those things are true about the man for whom the monument is named. It's a monument to what he stood for, not who he was. It's a monument to his ideals, which are our shared American ideals of freedom, justice, and liberty. Our ideals of self-government and the rule of law. And our ideals of not just the orderly transfer of power, but the eager transfer of power away from one's self as soon as one has completed the duty required by the responsibility of power while renouncing all personal benefit conferred by that power. 

The Doughboy at Washelli is for every soldier in every war who came home and who died in battle and who died of their wounds in a field hospital on every side of every conflict that we humans will ever shed blood in. He contextualizes that sacrifice into something for us: an idea, an ideal, a hope, a moment and a place in time where a particular thought was in the air. 

It was the War to End all Wars, and We Won.

The titular Doughboy at Washelli is 'Bringing home the Bacon'. He is successful. He symbolizes hope and coming prosperity. Bacon had likely not been eaten by many very frequently during WWI due to rationing, and now that our soldiers had come home, it was time to live high on the hog. That's part of what that statue means. That's part of what I thought about during today's visit to the Denkmals in Evergreen Washelli Cemetery.

America's genius is its willful celebration of its own ignorance.

Action requires consciousness as consciousness requires action.

Perhaps they are one in the same.

This morning as I was making coffee, I checked the level of the water reservoir in the machine and it was full. It's almost always full. I almost always never fill it. 

a quick word on the coffee machine - it's one of those small home espresso makers with a wand for steaming milk and i have no idea how many homemade lattes or cappuccinos are assumed to lay waiting in the reservoir, but i'd guess it's something like five or six. maybe eight. i have no idea.

There is only one possibility, and that is that my partner habitually fills the water reservoir. Both of us habitually empty it, but only one of us habitually fills it. Why is that? Perhaps the reason I don't fill it is because I get up earlier and when I'm done with my coffee, there is still plenty of water in the reservoir. There's no need to fill a reservoir that's already seven eighths full. But we don't drink five or six cups of coffee combined per day - not usually. Usually we'll take two or three combined daily cups, maybe a shot of espresso here or there, but one of those barely makes a dent in the water level. 

So it seems likely that the filler of the reservoir is in the habit of filling the reservoir regardless of the reservoir's state of fulfillment. And I, the primary benefactor of this habitual (and frankly selfless refilling), am in the habit of taking the Miracle of the Abundant Reservoir for granted. I have, more than once, twice, or thrice, noticed the miracle and marveled at the ease with which every morning shot was pulled without thought or regard from me as to whether any water might be ready for a quick cycle of heat and pressurization before being allowed to release itself and return to equilibrium through a gritty filter of grounds resulting in a deep, dark, bitter-rich watery liquid topped with a some-how sweet caramel-golden foam creme. There is nothing like the smell of coffee in the morning. It is a singular, therefore, universal experience. We all know it, and we all know there's nothing else quite like it. 

So perhaps the intoxication caused by the liquor we call coffee is the reason for my laxity with regard to the filling of reservoir. But that notion fails the first sniff, as the intoxicating aroma would certainly have no more delerious an effect on me than on my partner, who apparently never fails to fill the reservoir in question.

So it seems, wanderer, that the reason for my ritually repeated, caffeine induced, morning elation is simply the habit of a loved one. 

One of us is in the habit of performing a small act, one that is barely worth a second thought, one that I suspect is done most frequently with barely a first thought. The thoughtful part of the performer (my partner) is often actively engaged in some other more taxing interlocution. The person I spend my time with experiences naturally occurring hearing loss remedied by tiny devices inserted into the ear canal to assist in clarifying what I and we might say. These self-same devices provide a blue-tooth (TM)? connection to a vast array of conversations on a mind-bogglingly massive number of topics that find themselves flowing out of those tiny devices and into Wernicke's Area in my partners temporal lobe. It is those conversations - had days, weeks or months ago by people we'll never meet - that seem to most often occupy my partner's mind during the habitual ritual of filling the water reservoir.

This is not an attempt at casting aspersions on either those who record their conversations or those who listen. Many of these conversations are not just worth listening to, but are far more informative than any conversation I've ever been party to.

As I contemplate the action of habitual refilling of the reservoir, I marvel at the action. It is a miracle more beautiful than the Miracle of the Abundant Reservoir. It is the Miracle of Habitual Service, done without thought, done with no expectation of reward, done only because the work was required... of someone.

As I thought about it this morning while making my coffee, I promised myself first that I would thank my partner for this habitually selfless act of love. I made that promise because I know how important it is for everybody - by my partner in particular - to be thanked for their work. Shortly thereafter, I promised myself that I would try to get in the habit of thanking people for their work. And then there was and immediate third promise, which involved sitting down to write this little contemplation about thankfulness and the importance of thankfulness. But, as you and I now know, I haven't done that at all. Rather, I've somehow continued this extended meditation on habit.

Oh habit, you fickle thing.

broken habits
and broken promises
break each other
(16 06 25)

Well, it appears that I've already failed at least one of my earliest intentions in the way back olden times of nine days ago when I wrote what were then the first words of this collection of words. In the collection gathered here on that day was included the following 'apolog[y] for the direct and rather brutal destruction of the fourth wall here. I don't plan on doing too much more of that.'

Lies! Upon reflection I had every intention of addressing readers here. Or at least one reader. Likely one reader. But a reader, nonetheless. And yes, that reader is me. It's not enough that I talk to myself, I have come here to write to myself too. And you, whoever you are out there. I'm writing to you too. 

You should know what I wonder about you and I hope that I wander about you. That would be nice. I suppose, in a way, that I do wander about you. You see, my imagined audience includes the everpresent me, myself and I, as well as all of you too. In short, the whole sum of us (whoever we are... maybe we'll get to that later....) 

Because somewhere in the deepest corner of my mind is the dark hidden secret notion that strangers will read this - and that they'll respond to it with at least as much interest as whatever's happening on the everpresent television. And if it were ever the case that such a notion should ever peek out of its hiding place and assert itself as an actual entity in the apparent world, then it is of you, the first stranger that comes across this particular line that I am right now writing and wondering about. But since it is impossible for me to know who you are, dear wandering stranger-reader (I am curious as to how you've arrived here, but let's keep it a secret, telling would just spoil it, don't you think?) then it is quite possible that I am in fact wandering about you, as you wander about me, and we wander about each and all of the others in our shared space wherever that may be. 

Which is currently somewhere north and west of a small body of water called Green Lake in the northern part of the city of Seattle in late May 2025, but should and if and when these words ever make themselves available to you, dear first, second, third, and every subsequent stranger-reader and your wandering eyes, it is impossible to know whether my place on that day will still be this place where I am on the day that I write. 

Here, by the way is a secret of both time travel and teleportation: when and where ever you are, dear reader (stranger or friend or self) as you read these words, you open a window to the moment of what we've decided to call 6:07 pm (PDT) on a Tuesday in May a quarter of the way through the 21st century AD in my backyard  under an awning in the rain listening to a baseball game imagining the possible moments and places where you are, and you are imagining mine. 

It's lovely. Thanks for sharing.

The history of humanity is the constantly repeated discovery that we're wrong.

Now that habit and truth have appeared as primary concerns of this ongoing exercise in word, thought, and deed manipulation, it may be useful to consider a third. The question was

rhetorically raised yesterday?... or would raised rhetorically yesterday' be better?... or might raised yesterday, rhetorically' be better yet?... (no, that one, I think not.) perhaps perfectly presented... 

yesterday raised rhetorically: what's the harm? None was found, and considerations of harm were discontinued. I suspect that even the dullest among us - that is, those of us with the thickest of skins - have felt the sharp slice of thoughtless habitual truth. It's most common among chidren who have no sense of the pain their honesty inflicts. It's not a child's fault for staring at a person who looks or acts or speaks differently. Perhaps that's what junior high is for, the realization, through shared embarrassment, awkwardness, and shame for thoughts and actions and physical changes that until they began happening were utterly unimaginable (though frequently and falsely imaginatively uttered in hushed and furtive 'secret' conservations. Perhaps it's in junior high that we start to understand the pain that habitual truth telling can inflict on others because of the pain that habitual truth telling might have inflicted on us.

Regardless, it is self-evident that habitual truth-telling is not a harmless pursuit. But as the author and prime progenitor of this particular foray into a moral morass found previously (see yesterday... many wondrous words have been written and spoken in pursuits, both imagined and ersatzly real, of achieving such an endeavor, yet, here in this disalignment of time and space that we call 'reading and writing on the internet' it is so easy to see yesterday  that we rather take it for granted, don't we?) habitual dishonesty is no more desirable than habitual truth-telling. But if habit is sacred, and truth is sacred, and harm avoidance is sacred, then what are to do? It's absurd, of course. There is no conundrum despite the sophist's (ever notice that sophist and sophisticated mean the same thing and also the totally opposite thing?) intent on inserting one. Of course one should not tell the truth all the time to everybody. And of course, habitual lying leads nowhere good in the long run.

Today is the 16th of May, but I'm writing here in the space that I reserved for the 14th of May. The truth is that since finishing what I wrote on the 13th, I've continued thinking about habit, but failed to consecrate the habit of writing here in this log for a couple of days. I have many excuses. They're all so very compelling.

But I, like nature, abhor a vacuum (cleaner), (and I suspect we're equally suspicious of dishonesty) so I am compelled both to write something here in the space that I've reserved for 05/14/25 while admitting that these thoughts, such as they are, were not conceived during the period of time we've all agreed to call last Wednesday. So how's about a short discourse on the ethics of writing a log entry on May 16th and telling folks that you wrote it on May 14th? I think it's worth a go. 

So I guess the first rhetorical question might be "what's the harm?". By which you probably mean "who got hurt?" and the answer is nobody, so there's no harm, nothing to see here, please move along please. Let's perhaps turn out minds to habit, anything to end this ado about a little white lie.

Aye, but there's the rub, don't you see? It's not just a little white lie. It's a symptom of habitual dishonesty. It's a habit (d'oh!) wherein we train ourselves to regard truth as something malleable, something convenient that can be modified at a whim for no apparent reason. This makes it so much easier to justify the modification of truth when one happens to find some personal gain as a result of mistruth. 

Habitually returning to the topic of habit, I was once again, this morning, as I partook in a series of developing morning habits, reflecting on the nature of habit (this itself becoming apparently habitual), when I remembered a long forgotten reflection of the nature and relationship between the personal tendency toward repetition and routine that we call habit and the clerical dress most often associated with the nunnery that we also call habit. The connection is so obvious, so self-evident once pondered, that one feels a bit upset with one's self for not arriving at the conclusion far earlier. 

The question, though, about which came first, the habit or the dress, was until moments ago, beyond my knowledge. And it turns out, to my delighted surprise, that the habit was the dress! And so much more...
But let's start with the dress. Our word 'habit' comes to us most recently from Middle English when the word meant 'dress' or 'attire'. So back in the day, each of us, upon clothing ourselves in the morning, donned a habit. The habit worn by a workman would of course be other than one worn by a baker, which would, in turn, be other than one worn by a nun. And since we each daily clothe ourselves in our various habits, the conceptual leap to the habitual clothing of ourselves is as unavoidable as the redefinition of the word.

So my first happy discovery of the morning was that my habitual ruminations on the nature, substance and power of habit should count among its ancestry the clothing we all once as part of the work that we had to do as well as the clothing of the clergy simply because they seem to be the only among us that still take advantage of the original meaning of the word. And I like to think of habit as being something sacred. Which means, I'm sad to admit to myself, that this required a digression into the meaning of the word sacred. It's simply too important a word that can be and often is elusive in nature not for me spend a few extra words on it. I think some people tend to have a fairly narrow range of things they consider sacred, and these things tend to be very closely associated with specifics of their religious tradition. That is the meaning I'm appealing to. All religious traditions have ritual components that occur habitually, it is part of the definition of religion. And since all religious traditions call their adherents to habitual thoughts and habitual actions, it follows that their is something sacred in habit itself. If not, why would it be so rhetorically central to all religion? 

I can hear the skeptics among myself saying that it's clearly not possible that habit is sacred since some habits are clearly not good, maybe even bad, and sometimes there's habitual evil. And we and me might be right about that, but the digression into what is meant by good, bad, and evil is beyond the scope of this morning's habitual ritual, so I'll just respond to those skeptics in there that the outcome of habitual action required by religious tradition does not appear to be important to religious tradition, or if it is important, its importance pales in comparison to the habitual obedience to the habitual rituals of the particular tradition. So defining habit abstractly, as the routine itself - rather than the activities that compose, define, and effect the habit - allows us to see the activities in their own right and we can each define them as good, bad or evil based on what we understand those words to mean, leaving the shining routine of habit in the background into which we now have the opportunity to insert the actions we prefer to see repeated in the world. Those who choose to insert bad or evil actions in the routine of habit do not sully the sacred nature of habit, they sully themselves and the world, but habit itself simply continues.

This morning, at 9:15, under a maple tree, across the street from an elecrtical ubstation, while walking the dog and listening to the Grateful Dead's performance of Sugaree from May 12th, 1974, I realized I was the buddha, and it made me giggle. It is so hilarious an idea. And of course, it means nothing, but the thought was, at that moment, hilarious. 

My mind had wandered to this particular enlightenment while pondering the likely plausibility of a multi-faceted God that appears to each in the way that each must receive and that the notion of a being with whom we can commune on this plane of existence that is not of the same creative force as ourselves is fundamentally atheist.

Happy Mother's Day

Seems appropriate to continue pulling the habit thread, habitually. I was walking the dog this afternoon when I found my mind winding its way toward habitual behavior. Dogs are wonderful subjects for the subject. I have, upon reaching middle age, found myself to be an early riser. This is, in part, due to a desire to start a good habit upon losing my contractual employment some months ago. I was, at the time of my most recent contractual employment, in the habit of waking up at the last possible moment before I would be late to whatever it was that I was being paid to do that day. I suspect this is fairly common. If I'm right, it would appear that the less agency people have over the outcome of the work they do, the less excited they are to do it. (h/t km)

Anyway, upon finding myself with no reason to rise in the morning, I thought I should take the opportunity to build a positive habit and start getting out of bed every morning at 5:30 am. I was, at first, and still am, quite lenient with myself. I have no need to rise that early, but when I do, I find the mornings pleasant. The quietness and silence and darkness in the winter are comforting. I sit in the dark in the blanket after opening the shades that cover a large window and I wait for the light to arrive. I track time by light in the morning. I know now that in late winter in Seattle, the light first appears at about 7 o'clock in the morning. It is usually diffuse white light, scattered by a hundred thousand billion aspirated water particles collected at various concentrations depending on their altitude. But sometimes it is clear and the sky is cold and blue and Mt. Ranier appears between the massive cedar and the power lines and the storage unit building that partially obscure her eastern half from the view of our large window.

I've watched the light appear earlier and earlier all spring, until recently when I realized I needed to start rising at five o'clock to see it. So now I do that. And I've also noticed that the dog rises with the sun. In the winter, he would come and greet me at about seven o'clock in the morning, and we would partake in our morning habit of some number of minutes (determined by his vicissitudes) of ear scratching and head rubbing and nuzzling and muzzling during which time he takes the opportunity to squeak and squeal a little bit, testing out his vocal chords after their night's rest. Then, when it is decided that we've enjoyed the appropriate amount of mutual affection, he sits up, puffs out his chest and looks in the direction of the exit of the room. The first portal through which he must travel to reach the destination of his most important morning habit is usually the wide open doorway that leads from our front room to our living room. The big south-facing window where I watch the light come in is in the front room. And when the morning light is somewhere between bright and dull (sadly, the time when the light leaves gets to be called gloaming, but for unkown reasons our collective lexical locutions give the morning moment words like dawn which more closely reciprocate dusk, or daybreak which finds its more appropriate opposite in nightfall) my favorite non-human creature wakes awaiting a tail wagging day.

I've been thinking about habits a lot lately, so it seemed appropriate to talk about habits here on the second day of this particular experiment. Let me start by saying I've not read "Atomic Habits" yet, but I did start reading a book about habits back in 2013, but frankly, I never got past the first third of the book. Just saying that so that if'n it should so happen that things I'm saying here are things someone else has written elsewhere that it's likely a coincidence, or some misforgotten memory rearing its ragged head and wagging at me. Then again, I could be lying. Who's to say. And who cares, because it's unlikely anyone will ever read this drivel anyway. heh heh 

So, what, you might ask, stiltedly, are my thoughts on habits?

They're like grooves in the day. They're like avalanche chutes and slot canyons. They, like wine, can be wonderful friends and terrible masters. If used well, they can make our lives so much easier and more productive and healthy and on and on superfluously. But I think that many of us - or at least just me, but I'd bet that I'm one of the nameless horde in a majority caucus on this one, rather than the lone sufferer - do not use habits well. Rather, we let ourselves be used by habits of our own unintentional creation that tend to make our lives to much more difficult and negative and maladious and on and on suppressingly.

And, friends, readers (selves), countrymen it gets worse! Many of us have given much of the power of habit over to other people who wield that power over us and use it for their profit and our poverty! If it wasn't so commonplace, it would be scandalous! (But I guess that's the definition of the thing, huh?)

So the question, it seems, is how we climb out of these slot canyons that once seemed so beautiful but have suddenly become dangerous as we realize that there's likely a storm coming and we're stuck in a maze of slot canyons. What a terrible movie. People make terrible movies all the time. Maybe someone will make this one. I don't know if you've ever been in a slot canyon... I haven't but I did watch 27 hours on an airplane once, and I can tell you that it's virtually impossible to climb out of a slot canyon. And I can tell you that its virtually impossilbe to climb out of a bad habit too. (Are both literally possible? Yes! But virtually possible? No! Weird, huh?) So if we can't just climb out of our bad habits (and if you're wondering why that is, by the way, it's simply because like water rushing through a slot canyon, it's just always gonna go that way every time it finds the canyon because water will always take the path of least resistance and nothing will ever change that. You can't stop a habit any more than you can hold water out of a slot canyon. You might delay it a little, but eventually your bulwark will break and water will roll through your canyon cutting the grooves in your habit deeper yet.

Well, maybe you can, but I can't. So what I've been trying to do is to create new grooves upstream of the ones I'm trying to avoid. The idea is if I can divert a little of that time that I spend on my 'bad habits' on something else that I enjoy more than the 'bad thing', then I'll slowly start to build a new groove that will start to grow over time. And if I can do that again and again, slowly, intentionally and positively then eventually there won't be any time left for those bad habits. Or, I might find that they weren't so bad after all, it was just that I was spending more time than I should have.

Good afternoon, wanderer, thanks for stopping by. If you're reading this, then you've stumbled across my corner of the internet. I have no idea what brought you here, or where you might go next, but I hope you find something interesting while you're here.

You've also somehow managed to find the first words that I've published in this log. I only mention that for my own record keeping and gratification in the vain hopes that I continue this little experiment and can return to this place at some point in the future and be either pleased or perturbed with whatever happens to have gone on between now (1:56 pm on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Seattle) and whenever it will be when I read this again. 

Anyway, apologies for the direct and rather brutal destruction of the fourth wall here. I don't plan on doing too much more of that, but for the purposes of an introduction it seemed appropriate (or lazy, probably lazy since I've just decided not to even try to rewrite any of this stuff. So I suppose what we're looking at here is a blog from some guy on the internet. Finally. It's about time somebody had that idea.

Here's a thing you should know, dear readers... what I'm doing right now is not really writing. Yes, what you're currently reading is something I've written, but I think of this as more of an exercise, like a warm-up for musicians or singers. Just spend a little creative energy and just write. Write free and write fun, meaning write whatever comes to mind, and write it as fast as possible. Never edit (other than spelling and grammar of course, we're not savages) and let thoughts and ideas roll and morph and combine into each as they will.

It is our goal to publish work that we do writing. By that I mean writing that has been worked on. Because the fact of the matter is that writing is work. Anybody who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. And like any work worth doing, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I don't know how good of a writer I am. I think I'm probably pretty good. But I think I'm probably pretty good at a lot of things, and just because I think a thing doesn't make it true. What is true is that the only way way to get any better - and nothing is guaranteed - is to work at it. So this represents part of an attempt to work at it. And perhaps as I go along I really will get better. 

Or not.

Impossible to say.