To break the habit of an internet lifetime, I’ll make no apology for my absence from the blogosphere. To do so after such an absurdly long time away would would render all previous apologies laughable. The blog is back, with a new face, a new format and a new purpose.
First of all, I have to thank Ryan Sanford, for giving me the boost needed to drag this blog back from the dead space. Truth to tell, I’d been toying with the idea for a while, but now that adventures are underway and I have recovered some of my faculty for writing after a long period of malaise (of which more later), I’d more or less committed myself to it without, up until this point, actually doing anything about it.
As I said, I need to thank Ryan Sanford, whoever the hell he happens to be. He recently swooped out of the interblag’s upper reaches to reprimand me for taking ‘a really good domain name’ (it’s a doozy though, ain’t it?) and ‘never doing anything with it’, thus ‘preventing anyone else from using it’. Aside from issuing a well-intentioned and comprehensive ‘Fuck You’ to Ryan Sanford and anyone else who thinks a sarcastic ‘Well done’ is any way to round off a comment on a blog by someone you’ve never met, it gave me exactly the catalyst I needed to revive the blog – in doing so, I could not only document my forthcoming adventures in travel, food, film and the rich experience of life, but also add my own small signature to the undoubtedly great mass of irritations and niggles in the life of some asshat in Portland, OR. Two birds with one stone, as they say.
As regards the previous posts on this blog, entertaining and fulsome in their wit as they undoubtedly were, they don’t fit with the new and shiny ways of what this new blog will be. They were unfocused, they rambled. Some verged on ranting. They covered disparate topics. In short, everything this new blog will be, but at least two years out of date and oh, so very student-y. So, since WordPress lacks a function to ‘cast into the outer darkness’, I’ve had to leave them where they are – to delete them would defeat the point and show no progression in my style, opinions or management of wild moodswings – but as a compromise I have password locked them.
If you really want to read them, be my guest – with my customary modesty, I’ll admit that there’s the odd gem in there, and indeed the odd germ, as I wrote at first. The password, like the tag and the category, is ‘ArchivePost’. Knock yourself out.
In any case, the themes and subjects of the new blog. A spot of background first: On approximately October 18th 2011, I’m going to Bolivia to work for three months at a clinic for people who need prosthetic limbs, but who can’t afford medical care. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America (which is saying something) and, while as far as I’m aware has had no major wars or minefield-related incidents in the past few decades, certainly has enough citizens short a limb or two to warrant the excellent work of the Centro de Miembros Artificiales in Obrajes District, La Paz. (If you want to send a telegram, letter, cash donation, plastic donation, spare limb or other missive, try the French Embassy and I’ll pop across the calle and pick it up from their post room.)
After that and a brief sojourn back to the mother country, with any luck I’ll be off to South Korea for a year to teach English to some poor unfortunates who have so far lived a blameless life and certainly don’t deserve to have a blighter like me inflicting his society upon them. With the rich life experiences, soul’s awakening and, more prosaically, flipping great wodges of Korean Won I will find there, I will return to England a happier, more rounded, more settled human being. For about six months. After which (with any luck – progression in life seems to depend on luck and application forms in equal measure) I will be moving to Vancouver, Canada to pursue a Masters Degree in Journalism. I might even pop over the border to deliver that ‘Fuck You’ to Ryan Sanford in person.
That’s a broad and ambitious plan for the next few years. Experience has taught me that rarely does any plan survive first contact intact, but any plan is better than no plan at all. This blog will, hopefully, chronicle the places I go, the people I meet, the food I eat and cook, and the strange and profound mysteries I contemplate along the way. In all probability, there will be political commentary, movie reviews, thoughts-for-the-day and cock jokes too.
I will of course continue my long-standing tradition of titling each post for whatever song I’m listening to (or is in my head) as I begin the post, but this time round I’ll also add a little addendum, such as the ‘A Resurrected Blog’ above, to remove the ‘lucky dip’ element trying to find anything specific I’d written on the pre-hiatus blog.
(By the way, if you’re a first time reader or have never met me and know little of my character, speech patterns or mannerisms, fair warning: I worked long and hard to sound this pompous. Get used to it.)
Enough for now, I’m cresting dangerously close to the 1k word mark. More soon.
M
Jenny said:
Well done