I have created this site as a repository for my collected essays, writings, musings and photographs. I’ve come to WordPress after having outgrown Tumblr. Soon after the party conventions in July 2016, I felt compelled to create a space to jot down some of my growing concerns about the coming election, in large part to prevent my twitter timeline from being overwhelmed by political tweets. To that end, the original blog was a spectacular failure. As concern for the looming disaster grew and grew, I began to feel obligated to do what little I could with my little sub-1000 follower twitter account to sound the alarm about the looming threat to our nation’s democratic form of government.

I originally joined twitter for the humor and laughs. In it for the jokes, as it were. I was in ‘lurker mode’ only for the first few months, but eventually started writing my own original tweets to gain a better appreciation for the incredible talents on daily display. Having a funny or amusing idea is challenging enough. Doing so with any frequency approximating what you can witness from the funny people is another order of difficulty. Finally, crafting a notion into a tweet, distilling to 140 characters, is an even greater challenge. Trying to do so, to write amusing tweets, has only helped me better understand how accomplished others are and continue to be. When I was first on twitter I ran across a tweet – I don’t recall the author, so I can’t properly attribute – that offered a subtitle for twitter, namely ‘sentence contest.’ And that tweet is twitter in a nutshell. Twitter is the ultimate short story contest.

Over time I grew to learn that twitter is much more than that; I’ve been inspired by inspirational tweeters (the good ones), informed by the best professional news people in the nation, and motivated this year by those who realize twitter is a tool of political and social awareness and change. Other countries (think Arab Spring) discovered this much sooner than most of us in the US, in part because only this year have circumstances become so dire as to necessitate. I’ve witnessed the slow transformation from original protests about political tweets to a steady decline in joke-only tweets. All of the funniest people – creative people at heart – ultimately came to recognize the stakes.

I think all of us would love to return to a time when Twitter was not so overwhelmed by political content – I think we’re all pretty much sick of it. Me no less, and I’m one of the worst offenders in that regard. But the peril is so immediate and present, and the stakes are so high, that I fear for any of us to take our eye off the ball for a second, except to perhaps recharge one’s batteries to better return to the battle renewed and refreshed.

So in any event, I started blogging on Tumblr to get the thoughts out of my head. Things I began to notice were absent from the public discourse – certainly absent from the vacuous or dangerously dishonest sources of television news.

I have now created this space so as to sort my writings into categories. I draw significant pleasure from writing in a variety of forms and topics: travel, essays, politics, philosophy and logic, and fiction. It made little sense to me to dash off a rant about #Cinnamon Hitler immediately following or prior to a reflection of my travels across France or attending a riotous Sicilian wedding in Siracusa, or one of my short stories.

So here we are. Please enjoy, despise or shrug as is your preference. Comments welcome. I have published an email address where I may be contacted. My DMs are open on Twitter, and there are opportunities to reply publicly here on these pages as well. Haters are ultimately tiresome, trolling for sport doubly so. So for those of you so inclined, I will suggest you move along to greener pastures where you might get the kind of reactions your button-pushing is intended to provoke. On the other hand, I am a litigator by education and training in real life, so if troll you must, I suggest you bring your A game.

Bonjour!

December 2016