Bon Voyage!

I don’t quite know where to begin here.

I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing– After all, they say the only way to conquer the blank page is to fill it up with words, regardless of whether those words have any direction or not, but I also don’t want to waste your time with lines of brainless, stream-of-consciousness mumbo jumbo slapped into a text box for no reason other than to kill time while my lazy millennial brain attempts to deduce why exactly I decided to sit down here and type this thing out in the first place. But then again, as I’m writing this, you– my lovely audience, my loyal, devoted readership– don’t yet exist, so I guess I couldn’t waste your time anymore than its already being wasted by your sitting idly by not existing. So, if you don’t mind, for the time being I’ll just keep filling this page with words. (Isn’t that the fun of writing anyway? The journey?)

(The answer is no. The journey is terrible. I’d much prefer my brain just shut up and get me where I needed to go without asking stupid questions like “what if, instead of setting the story in Oklahoma, you set it in New Mexico instead?” But doing that would require aid from substances I am too religious to try and too poor to afford. Plus, William S. Burroughs already wrote that book.)

I suppose I’ll begin with a brief explanation of why I’ve started this blog– what void in my soul and the soul of the internet has so compelled me to invest $160/year in a WordPress “premium” account so that I may attempt to fill it with my thoughts. The answer is– as with everything else– I don’t know. What I do know is that I really like “The Scottyssey” as a title for a blog and the tagline “Let’s see where this takes us…” and I have always had this romanitc vision of being able to pay my bills with my writing and figured that, if I had anything to say (which I like to think I do, although this liking to think so is always crowded out by the knowledge that everyone– especially everyone who invests $160/year in a WordPress premium account– likes to think that they have something to say, but a simple scroll through the endless muck of the worldwide web will reveal that many of these people are hopelessly deluded and would probably be better off going back to their job as a Lyft driver or pizza delivery boy or President of the United States.)

Anyway, if I did have anything to say, I figured that a blog would be the best way to say it.

So that’s what the purpose of this website is. It’s my last desperate attempt to prove to myself that my thoughts and ideas are valuable and meaningful and perhaps– dare I say– enlightening, before I give up on writing, cut my losses, and devote my life to politics.

As far as what to expect content-wise… As far as the theme of the site, the main idea, the sun to this galaxy of the blogosphere… well, I couldn’t tell you that either. I’m not documenting any kind of arbitrary personal challenge like “everyday I review a new Oreo flavor so you don’t have to” (that’s already been written, and I don’t mean to bash “Bloreog,” I believe they serve a very noble purpose in the world, I’m only saying that I myself am not at a place in life where I am prepared to devote that much energy to such a niche topic.)

I’m also not some hot young bandana’d couple who has somehow managed to acquire the financial means to spend the rest of their hot young bandana’d lives hiking every mountain in South America.

I have a quirky, dysfunctional, offbeat life but… well you probably do too and my guess is that if you’re anything like me you’d rather be writing about it yourself than reading about some crazy thing that happened to me at the laundromat the other day or how much I love Cheetos just like everyone else.

Deep down, it’s possible I’m just a narcissist with too much time on my hands who didn’t try hard enough in school to get a real job because he was so thoroughly convinced that he was going to get a high profile contract with HBO or Netflix right out of college and is now just trying to prolong his adolescence as long as possible so that he doesn’t have to contend with the real world. (That’s probably what it is, but if I tell myself that I’ll just get mopey and blue and go back to spending my days whining in private about the endless complexity of life and how nice it would be if Marxism wasn’t totally bogus and my survival didn’t depend on my being a productive and useful member of society.)

Right now, I’m just writing this blog to write. I’ve been telling myself since I was seven years old that I wanted to write for a living and all the writing manuals say that the only thing you need to do to be a writer is write write write and that’s the one thing I’m not doing. I’ve read Strunk and White. I’ve read Stephen King. I’ve read Steven Pinker, and Francine Prose and Anne Lamott and they all say the same thing, and yet in spite of all this, I continue to convince myself that the only thing I really need to be a writer is the right writing manual. However, finding this has been a fruitless endeavor, so I figured I’d take a different approach and try actually writing something for a change. Just to shake things up a bit.

My hope is that eventually, I won’t just be writing this blog to write, that maybe this thing will lead me to get some kind of a grip on what it is that I’m after here, whether that’s something you, my non-existent audience, care about or not.

So there we are. And here I am. And there you aren’t, because you don’t exist yet. But,  maybe, just maybe, if I keep at this thing for long enough, eventually you will.

So, without further ado, welcome aboard.

-S.P.