Prologue

I want to first start off by saying that I never ever expected to have a blog. What important things do I have to say that I can’t say in front of a crowd of people at one of my slide shows? And when people are coming to my slide shows, they have what I hope are beautiful pictures to look at, pictures that help move along the story. I have always thought of writing—even though I do it a fair amount—as pain and suffering, much in the same way as I experience reading. My older brother, now he is a great writer, but I lack the elegance with words, the creativity about how to put them together, the sense of when to stop because I’ve said enough, or said too much.

Yet here I am endeavoring to put something out there, something that will likely be read by others, and I want to be very sure that I’m doing it not for them (or should I say “you”), but instead as a tool to crystallize my thoughts that I will certainly otherwise forget over time. I see myself as a storyteller, and I believe that ultimately the only thing that I’m collecting in my life is stories. There was a time when I thought that I had some really good stories in my life, and that if I could only string 10-20 of them together, I’d have something, and I could often keep a group of people rapt in attention going from one to the next. But I’ve started to forget these stories, or at least the details of the stories, and the specifics of how I felt at the time, and that process of forgetting makes the stories feel cheaper to me and makes me think that I’m not quite as interesting as I once was. So if I’m being most authentic through this process, I hope that the result will be to prove to myself that I can be interesting/reflective/relevant, that writing can be a tool for remembering, and that I can still have a slide show where people will show up to see my work and I won’t have told all the interesting stories beforehand.