I’m Matt.  Thanks for visiting my personal blog!  If you read the following and still want to know more about me or my blog, check out my profile as well as my first and second post.

After years of writing for school and the U.S. Army I’m finally ready to unlimber my keyboard to take aim at a wider audience and range of topics.  It’s a titillating proposition to spread a bit of me around the world, to inseminate a million minds with my cerebral ejaculate.  I may never be a father, I may not live to see the singularity and upload my consciousness into some ultimate computer network, but I can splash about in the waters content in knowing that my little ripples are a brand of immortality.  It’s better than nothing.

Here you can expect to read about my travels in the U.S., Korea, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, the Philippines and others as I frolic about.  You’ll see my social commentary, descriptions of situations I find myself in, share in my shock and confusion when confronted with the bizarre, and possibly work yourself into a serious hankering for old friends Jack and Jay.  There will be science, technology, philosophy, much musing, and things that make me embarrassingly chortle in public.

This is also a place for me to practice my writing.  One reason for writing publicly is to feel some external pressure to perform with a semblance of timely quality.  Another is to glean feedback.  If you’ve taken the time to read something I’ve written and comment on it, I promise I will take the time to read it and take it under advisement.  Any well thought-out feedback —even negative— is greatly appreciated.  Hopefully I will connect with people through this blog that may further enrich my writing, my knowledge, and my life.

You can expect to see different styles and tones used throughout this blog.  I might write a complete work of comedic fiction one day rife with profanity and have a serious intellectual discussion the next.  If I write something that is fictional, I will let you know first.  My fictional writing is often a device to allow me to safely tell other people’s stories or to mesh a hyperbolic-telling of several temporally unrelated events in order to make a point or at least be entertaining.

Here I am forced to focus.  I know that I actually have a product that I’m after now; I have an audience —small though it may be. The size is immaterial, the important part is that blogging gives thoughts context.  Sometimes we need some guidance or boundaries to help direct thought in a meaningful direction.  Sometimes you need a target.  The trick to putting ideas from my mind into a language others can understand is to have a kind of fluency with them, to fully grasp them in order to knead them into forms that are digestible to others.  Often I discover something new when I have to repackage my thoughts for export.

This is why I say this blog is written to its audience but for its author.  I doubt that anyone will benefit as much from reading this blog as I will in writing it.  I do hope you take something away from this though.  If nothing else, I want to entertain, inform, and provoke thought.