Year of the Horse (Day One)

Image courtesy of www.bridgemanart.com

Hello readers, writers, friends, family, former students, strangers ... 

Welcome to my blog.

Let me say right off the bat that I have resisted to a large extent doing a personal blog (I've contributed to blogs as a graduate student and I've used them as a teacher in class myself).  At times, it seems like the world is saturated with blogs and perhaps the sarcastic New England writer side of me bought too much into the attitude expressed in the snappy line uttered by a character in the movie Contagion that "blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  

Naturally, other bloggers have already chewed over that  piece of dialogue.

But of course, I understand that it's more than that.  It's like anything else, really ... if done well, it's an art form all its own, and I've seen enough outstanding blogs over the years.

So why am I blogging now? Well, for one, I believe that I have some interesting observations and viewpoints as a traveler of the world (a New Englander who counts as his home base Thailand), and I predict that I'll be moving about a lot in "my" year (following the last few months of this, my winter of flux), and ultimately it's nice to have another space that's not Facebook,  isn't twitter, and also isn't part of the bigger writing that is my short fiction, my non-fiction, and everything else.  It's somewhere "in between," a place where I can engage with the universe as a digital storyteller, and offer up these observations.

Let me be clear, this blog will be bound by the dictates of time, specifically the Chinese Year of the Horse, which begins today and ends on Feb. 18th, 2015.  I'm a horse, and my year only comes around only once every 12 years.  More than a few places (here's one) has stated that it's a good year for "self-reflection" for horse people, so this can be a space where I do that.

That place (and others) have also noted that my year is supposed to be a turbulent year ("May you live in interesting times?") but I intend to blog through the ups and downs, and come the year of the Goat (Feb. 19th, 2015), I will shut down this particular blog, for better or for worse, wherever I am in the world (the short list at this point of "where" includes Thailand, South Korea, and/or New York City).  I am a wanderer, but I am not lost.  Trust me on this.

I'd like to lay out what this blog will be, but I think that will evolve over time, and it might be easier just to detail out it won't be.  

It won't be a diary of mundane daily events, or a political rant about this or that, although I suppose those aspects could sneak in there, and it most assuredly won't be a daily thing.  I'll be lucky to post something at least once a week, and hopefully I can stick to that time frame as the Year of the Horse gallops along, but no promises.  It's a time commitment, and life gets busy.

But I'm pretty confident that, in the end, I'll be able to offer up more than graffiti with punctation. 

After all, it's my year (Anno Equus to use the Latin), a turbulent, self-reflective year that has just begun.

Image courtesy of 2014hd.com