Greetings from Vermont! Allow myself to introduce....myself

My name is Andy Loughney and I am a bit intimidated by this whole prospect of having a social media personality.  But, here we go....

This is me in my cast that I decorated this morning.  I tore my Achilles tendon three weeks ago playing basketball and had surgery to reattach it.  At 37, I've now torn both of them!  My Achilles is literally my Achilles...

I never joined facebook and only recently opened twitter and instagram accounts to promote the farm, Tapalou Guilds, that I started this year with my family.  I heard about steemit in my latest issue of Rolling Stone and have spent the last few days researching it and cryptocurrency and have had my mind blown pretty far open.  I still don't really understand it all, but find it incredibly interesting.

But, it definitely seems revolutionary and I support decentralization across the board.  I'm active in my local community, trying to create some resilient systems for when the mammoth governments/corporations fail to provide our basic human needs.  I operate our farm on permaculture and biointensive principles and strive for low inputs to grow nutritious food for my family and my community.

I find the relationship between the hypothetical and the tangible to be compelling - how an idea in the brain can become something in our physical world for others to experience.  Steemit strikes me as some great community art project, where we are plastering the walls of the internet with our personal experiences.  I am excited at the prospect of fresh voices and the democratization of opinions, where thoughts of substance are valued in an open-source discourse.

It's hugely important for me - as a farmer and father and partner - to remain connected and engaged to the immediate world around me.  As I've contemplated joining this community, it has really raised some interesting ideas already, before even signing on.  Am I just this living interface, accumulating information and experiencing emotion?  Why not add another layer to my reality?

While I'm new to social media, I am not new to personal media.  This is a snapshot that I took this morning of the first page of my first diary, at age six.  I distinctly remember my mom buying it for me in the Hallmark store and telling me that it was a safe place to write whatever I wanted to.

I almost crapped my pants when I opened it to take the picture and saw the date of my first entry.  I thought today would be a good day to join steemit, on the eve of an election that promises to challenge our humanity even further, but I couldn't have imagined that it was 31 years ago today that I first took pen to paper in my first journal.  As far as where I am today, I CAN wait until December 25 and I DO think that school mostly stinks, though I now appreciate learning more than ever.

Fortuitous!!!  I look forward to sharing some of my thoughts, music, poetry, and writings and welcome seeing the same from y'all.  The currency of community is a powerful thing.  Thanks for reading.

Andy