Who the hell are you?!

The question I always ask when presented with another blog demanding attention, another voice from the void, is simply: "Just who the hell are you?"

So, just who the hell am I?

I could try to answer this by giving a personalized version of my resume:

I have spent as much time accumulating as much experience as possible, on as meager a budget as possible. I have traveled and worked what I think is a pretty wide range of gigs. I have been a box slinger for twelve-hour shifts in a warehouse, a reporter in Iowa, an organizer in Louisiana, a bum and a music teacher/ luthier in California. I am currently a journalist, traveling all over-- in Barcelona, in Virginia, in DC, in South Sudan, in NY. I'm also the media attache for a consulting firm focused on Africa, and a board member of a secondary school operating in Rumbek, South Sudan.

But that's a little dry, no?

Alternatively, I could answer by telling you who I imagine myself to be. For instance, I imagine that much of that travel comes down to an insatiable desire to Don Draper my life. Every time I settle for a bit I can feel the creeping dissatisfaction and I desire to pick up and leave. My heart beats a gypsy rhythm.

But more than that, I think I have begun to pull myself together. Though the process has felt like being drawn and quartered, its effect has been the opposite. I have investigated my own mind, and find that some of it is monstrous and some of it is angelheaded. (Apropos: sunt lacrimea rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt)

I have also traded a lot of my life to sit in libraries and dimly lit rooms to investigate culture. And I think the thing I am most obsessed with, aside from a well-turned phrase, is projecting a nuanced (and true) understanding of the world as it is. That requires, to borrow George Orwell's fantastic phrase, a power of facing unpleasant things.

Still, that doesn't feel satisfactory. Does describing a few desires I have sum my parts? There are other, less destructive tendencies. Would it be better to tell you that I was born in raised in a religious atmosphere and that I have become acclimated to the religious air of my youth, though I am not religious at all? I could tell you about the rugged and poor California that I grew up in.

Perhaps I could give you a sense of my influences or beliefs, hoping that'll suggest an answer.

Or, I suppose I could answer by demurring to a better writer. Let's try that.

Vladimir Nabokov writes about viewing a homemade movie, made in the weeks before his birth, of his mother, smiling and waving, contentedly, from a house that looked unchanged from when he would later live in it. He did not exist and nobody mourned his absence. The familiar gestures gave off a strangely menacing feeling. Most frighteningly, on the porch of that same house he'd known with those same people, was a brand-new baby carriage with all "the smug, encroaching air of a coffin." The cradle rocks above an abyss...

I have my own picture. I'm young: unruly dark curls and what appears to be a permanent smile plastered on my face. It looks and feels like a poor imitation. I look and feel like a cheap knockoff. The name is the same. But I can't quite read all the future thoughts or see the future faces in that younger self. He doesn't really exist anymore. But not even I mourn his absence.

In the vastness of the internet, I am an ant among spiders. Among the writers to clog up and litter the interwebs with excogitated verbal vomit, I am just another voice. So, read or don't!

Despite all this verbal vomit, I'm not sure I can give you a glimpse of the whole. And this will have to sustain you for awhile because I detest memoirs from anyone relatively young (with precious few exceptions). So, most of the stuff here won't be as self-revealing as this (and certainly not as narcissistic). Sorry. But perhaps this will offer some insight on what is to follow.