Commence words

Greetings and salutations,

Let's begin somewhere, perhaps a justification of the existence of this little thought-logging effort. I'm here for personal, professional and intellectual reasons all.

On the first, a personal level: I'm in dire need of creative outlets at the moment, having been ensconced firmly in the arse-end of the Internet and nowhere else for the last 3 years of my life. I went through a large period of hermitry, left employment, disassociated myself from everything in my life which was non-familial, moved to my mother's home and generally shut out reality. This has resulted in a build-up of noise in my head, which will now sally forth into the outside world for better or worse. And thus blog.

Professionally: Well, I've had a strong interest in the arts and popular culture since I was a wee lad. However, my performance in elementary and secondary education shone through the sciences. As such my chosen professional direction is highly conflicted. I studied Computer Science for a year at Manchester University before dropping-out and jumping straight into a vacuous position in what I'd refer to as an "information refinery" performing data entry. Progressing onwards and sideways, I went to a call centre, proved myself a useful administrative asset and ended up becoming an ANALyst of sorts, then moved slightly diagonally up to a more officious-sounding Finance Analyst before realising I didn't want anything to do with Corporate Accounting or the intricacies of reporting the flow of money through a large commercial organisation and having a nervous breakdown. Now I'm looking towards the arts and humanities for my salvation. I would like to write, investigate, create in the fields of: music; film; fiction; art; politics; philosophy; economics; history (social, local and otherwise); anthropology; psychology; and other -ologies too (hopefully avoiding proctology). You're going to be reading something about each of them, or maybe all of them at once - if we keep our unspoken (and fictional) contract of you reading this and me writing it. So, as I would like to get into writing, academically and journalistically, this is a bit of a literary testing ground.

Finally, somewhat subtextually, the intellectual reasoning behind this project: Everything is interesting once you find the right angle on it, and interest in something provokes some sort of desire to investigate it further. I like learning things, I want other people to do so too. The concept goes like this - I'll write about them, you can read about them, and then perhaps both of us will learn something we find interesting. That would be just perfect.

Disclaimer: This is another wall of date-separated prose in a field of date-separated prose orchids. I'm not going to be so bold as to say this particular blog will be any more unique than the hundreds of thousands of others out there, but then again if a potential reader had such expectations they'd be raising them to a place beyond reach. It tends to be the authors who are plagued by such neuroses, so I guess I've quashed that at least by shifting the blame onto the readers. It's all your fault if this is rubbish - just so you know. Your fault.