Mission statement

This is a blog. In reading other blogs, I have found them to be almost anything from truly important commentary outside the mainstream media by people with something genuinely interesting and intelligent to say to a publicly posted diary by inane 12-year-old's and the older morons they will grow up to become. Hey, the children are our future.

This blog will attempt to discuss things I find interesting in a somewhat intelligent manner. It will undoubtedly contain elements of autobiography, but is not intended to be a blow-by-blow description of what I do and consider on a regular basis. If past experience is any indication, I will either update this blog very regularly or almost never. I hope to lean toward the former.

I must briefly acknowledge some recent books and writers that have sparked my interest in returning to blogging, most prominently being Chuck Klosterman. I am not a fan of hero worship, but I find Klosterman to be the only writer covering pop culture that I can even begin to imagine as a real peer, if only because he is only about six months older than I am and he actively embraces elements of pop culture that more serious critics crap on. Reading Klosterman makes me want to write; more importantly, it makes me want to write intelligently.

Second is David Foster Wallace, even though his intellect genuinely intimidates me. His book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is worth the purchase price for the title essay alone, which is almost verbatim what the guy on NPR said. I've also really enjoyed the essays of David Sedaris, despite having almost nothing in common with him, from sexual orientation to upbringing. I've also enjoyed reading Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy. Although some of his material seems to be getting dusty, he is still the only writer I think pulls off being a fan and still has the kind of discussions about sports that people had in bars before his own employer, ESPN, broadcast those same conversations ad nauseum, only without the conversation becoming an argument and the argument becoming a fist fight.

Despite the tendencies of the writers listed above, I mostly read fiction and aspire to write it professionally. Currently, however, I work in marketing and promotions for a beer, wine and liquor distributor. My credentials as a writer are rooted in 12 years of journalism. My credentials in pop culture criticism are that I live in the age of pop culture and I can write better than at least 95 percent of humanity (leaving as many as 300 million writers in front of me technically and intellectually, so I'm not a god or anything).

If you have stumbled on this blog by accident and you have a reaction (love, hate, nostalgia, staunch disagreement, orgasm) to the material herein, please leave a comment. If you stopped reading this somewhere in the third paragraph, I don't even really have to finish this sent