Before The Revolution

My sweetheart—well, you’ll get to know her, but maybe not yet, so for now I’ll call her Apollonia. That is, my sweetheart says I shouldn’t be modest. There’s no reason for me to stare at a blank page for two hours trying to write the perfect introduction to a site that doesn’t exist yet. After all, introductions get written after the fact, and usually by someone else, someone scholarly or famous.

I should just dive in, she says. Just start writing. Do what you set out to do.

But then, that’s just it. I don’t know what I’ve set out to do. I was kind of hoping that was going to become clear in the introduction. But there’s not going to be an introduction. Not yet, anyway. Maybe after someone reads this—that is, someone scholarly or famous—they’ll condescend to do a little introduction for me. Nothing too fancy. Maybe it would start with some quote in Latin juxtaposed with some modern soundbite. Then it could go into a description of my milieu, a little bit of my personal story, and then the cultural impact of this journal. Finish it all up with a clever and sincere statement about how important all of this was to some people. That’s it. The first-time visitor is hooked, I’m hot to trot, and some scholar/celebrity gets one more Google hit for themselves.

So, understand that it’s not going to happen for a little while. Here in the beginning, things are going to be a bit nebulous. You know how the Bible starts off with a large canvas: many characters, lands, subplots, prophets, and all that? And then it kind of picks one character and sticks with him, because it found its voice? Things are going to be like that around here.

I completely understand that there are plenty of other web journals for you to choose. I know that, because all the catchy names I thought of were already taken (nevermind that mundane ones like The Innocents Abroad and A Certain Slant of Light already exist as blogs; did you know there’s a site called Morning Napalm?). The hardest thing about creating a web journal is asking yourself who on Earth would be interested in reading what you have to write. But if there’s one thing I know about the web, it’s that it’s a vortex like TV, and a body will sit there and read for hours and hours, with no reason or even fascination involved, simply because they don’t want to get up right now, and, anyway, that download is almost finished or that email is sure to come in a minute.

I can’t tell you what this blog is going to be, but I can say what it might be. It might be about movies. It might be about an American abroad. It might be about France. Or food or music or books or television or family or fantasy. It might be a place to read some great short stories. Or some humorous essays. I don’t know. I know I’m all of those things and I have words to say on any of them.

I don’t know what I’m going to write, only that I have to write. And I have that right. Which makes it tough, because I’m late in the game, and you guys are all writing. But I’ve started now. I’ve even spruced up some of the HTML around here (which I just don’t do). I have the creative impulse, which Freud says is motivated by the “desires to win honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of women.” And that all sounds true to me. So, I’ll do my part here and now, and you folks handle the rest.

Here’s to my debut.