Why do I want to write so badly?  For as long as I can remember I have wanted to write.  I used to take sheets of blank paper, fold them in half, bind them with stapling, then scrawl symbols and crude drawings across the pages before I knew how to write.  I would use my mother as a scribe telling her stories about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for her to write down in the books which I would later illustrate.

I’ve always had a strange penchant for new school and office supplies.  I remember my dad giving me an old worn briefcase that I stocked with a stapler, paper, writing utensils, and probably random objects —like rocks— that were of interest.  Blank paper is especially appealing.  It’s almost as if the paper is tangible potential.  Any thought, idea, or work of art might one day fill that space.

When I was in third or fourth grade, after my parents’ divorce, my dad got me some educational creative writing software for kids.  There was a Mad-Lib style idea generator and many similar tools to spark the imagination.  I was enthralled and decided that my elementary school —the fourth one I had attended up until that point— needed a school newspaper.  I really had no idea what went into a newspaper, but it seemed unimportant at the time.  I wrote up a pilot issue that featured the first in a planned series of 101 Ways to Cook a Cat, packed it into my briefcase, and appeared the next day in school very proud to be so businesslike as the only kid with his own briefcase and newspaper.  Clearly I was going places.  I arranged a meeting with the school principal who I now imagine was curious and relieved to finally see me for something not related to my “behavioral issues”.

Unfortunately she didn’t share my pallete or humor, but she was kind, I’m sure.

My writing has continued sporadically since.  I have kept journals and diaries with high irregularity, written some short stories and poems, and dished out many a diatribe in forums across the Interwebs.  I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve taken a part in online text-only roleplaying games.  I was even a public affairs writer for the U.S. Army during four of my seven plus years of service to my country.

In the last few years though, I’ve become increasingly unsettled.  I have a hunger, an itch to write, seemingly for writing’s own sake!  Looking back at my life as a now 30-year-old man, I wonder why this is.  I feel a need to get what’s inside out as if I’m relieving the pressure of the thoughts bouncing erratically within.  Are my thoughts up to snuff?  Are they worthy of sharing?  Am I brave enough to expose my tender mind, my thoughts, my innermost creations to the world?  To bare myself to strangers?

What good could possibly come of this?

I cannot write for you.  I can write to you.  I can write with the intent of making you understand, or perhaps sometimes even to agree, but I cannot write this for anyone other than myself.  This is a selfish blog that I genuinely hope you enjoy and are able to take something from, but I must do this for myself.  I must see where this leads for its own sake.  For my sake.

This is thinking and wondering out loud.  This is a slice of mind, a snap shot of the current, a doughy sampling of rising thoughts.

This is socooley.