Beginning of the End of the End of the Beginning

Of all the self-professed writers you will ever encounter, very few will achieve literary success, and I will not be one of them. That distinction will belong to superiorly talented friends and friends-of-friends who will see -- or have already seen -- themselves published in newspapers, magazines, and silky-paged, prettily-covered books showcased in bright, sprawling big-box booksellers, the kind with built-in coffee shops and continuous underscores of vaguely obscure but still NPR-friendly indie rock soundtracking customers' browsing odysseys. If my words ever meet commercial shelves, they will likely do so as part of a disgustingly abstruse volume of dramatic criticism yellowing in a remote corner of a subterranean used bookstore plagued by ten-year-old dust bunnies and interminable ceiling leaks. Still, as an obsessively overanalytical, neurotically self-involved English major just over a year removed from college, hundreds of miles removed from nearly all of my closest friends (the usual unfortunate victims of these onslaughts of verbosity), and plagued by a sudden exponential increase in spare time, I feel compelled to mold my churning thoughts into sentences before they start leaking from my ears. And so I have designated as their receptacle this tiny corner of cyberspace, and you are free to read, skim, or ignore them as you see fit.

Leaving a deliriously enjoyable East Coast life behind for a forced return to the Michigan farm of my youth has certainly sparked a particularly prickly existential crisis, but if the ache of a prematurely-abandoned past and suspended future permeates every entry here, than I will have failed. While attempts to reconcile professional aspirations with personal circumstances will surely appear on occasion, they will hopefully mingle with literary analyses, cultural appraisals, sociological musings, random acts of performance theory, and perhaps even the odd outburst of creativity (do I dare re-attempt poetry or fiction after all these years?). I consider this endeavor part sorely-needed intellectual exercise and part self-indulgent psychological experiment, but mostly an attempt to communicate with friends across wires and waves and the dim blue-white glow of the screens standing between us. I would be humbled if they chose to join me on the journey.