A BEGINNING...

These are my first ever “published” words. The first that I can recall ever having written for a general audience, placed in a public way to allow access for whatever purpose that motivates the reader. While I might subconsciously harbor hopes for the literary equivalent of Susan Boyle sweeping millions of unsuspecting audience members off their feet, I am a reasonable man with reasonable expectations motivated by reasonable rewards. Like Susan Boyle, I have lived long enough to have experienced half (I hope!) a lifetime, seen and heard millions or trillions of bits of information observed from a particular perspective, and developed opinions that I can now send back out to the world to be integrated in varying degrees into the experiences, observations, and opinions of others who journey through life. That is an exhilarating thought! The technological development of the internet as a delivery system provides everyone with a potential to be heard on a worldwide scale. Unlike Susan Boyle, I expect a soft start and a modest response. Frankly, I’m very cool with that. Unlike Susan Boyle, I will be spending some time searching around for my voice. But I am confident that it will, over time, resound clearly and on key, the experiences, observations, and opinions that I can share with others. I do hope to eventually surprise and, perhaps, delight a few folks along the way and to do my part to show the world that we frumpy, middle aged crooners of life’s sensibilities have existed all along. That the delight and shock accompanying the revelation of our existence is just the dawning of awareness in the masses of the uninitiated that, perhaps, they (we) all should have been listening a little better to the gifts of “ordinary” human beings all along…

So, to those who survived my first paragraph, I thank you. I especially want to thank those who have told me over the years “you should write” and, particularly those who have delivered the same unsolicited encouragement over the past few months on Facebook.com. There were enough people from unrelated threads providing unsolicited encouragement to do so that I finally realized that their assessments of my “stuff” was not related to just one small group interacting nor to just one particular piece that I wrote. At 48, it finally occurred to me that writing stuff is not just something that I can do but something that I should do. So, here, I’m writing. And I, to be honest, like it. I hope you will, too. I won’t go on and on thanking people because I know that I will forget to mention someone and every kind word has been so important to me that I don’t want to even risk not getting it right. Thank you. You know who you are.

Be sure to sign up for the RSS. I’m not sure how that works exactly, but it is similar to getting an automatic email when there is a new post. I promise, you won’t be getting covered up from my posts they way you do from some of the others.

Now, I’m off to Covington, VA for a short project (called a shutdown) at a paper mill. The day job requires it and, besides, I like to go places. I’m looking forward to going to the tops of the bleach towers and, maybe riding a bosun’s chair up a 100’ tube. That’ll help me get acclimated to heights again. Something I’ll need this summer when I launch off Look Out Mountain for the first time on a hang glider. And then there’s finally getting around to climbing El Capitan…