WELCOME!

Hey there. I'm glad you could stop by! I hope all is well with you as you read this, and I encourage you to enter in and wander for a good long time.

What is this, you ask? Well, perhaps the easiest path to explaining all that is to cite its chief inspriation: Eric Abando's Musings, a gorgeous artistic effort that collects a series of daily meditations from my friend Eric on his life and times into a flowing, engaging package. As I navigated my way back through the past few weeks of Eric's life after recently discovering the page, I thought that this type of format might be an appealing way for me to keep the creative juices flowing myself, without any pressure to conform to length, deadlines, or even a focused topic. Also, maybe pieces of what I'd come up with in forcing myself to write every day could find their way into other aspects of my creative ventures.

SO, in The Latest, you'll find a semi-regular tract from myself to myself and whoever else happens to read it. It may be stream of consciousness, it may make no sense to anyone but me, it may offend, it may move and entertain. Anything goes, baby. I'll collect these tracts in The Past for you history buffs. In The Vault, you'll find various and sundry writings from my previous assignments, including columns from my high-school days and columns written for the Northwestern Chronicle. A brief biography of myself can be found in the About Me section, for those who want gory details, and some of my favorite spots on the Web (as well as some clues about my creative inspirations, muses, and heroes) are collected in the inevitable Links section.

That's all well and good, but why make this creative masturbation public? Two reasons. First, it forces me to update my "journal" on a semi-regular basis, and doing that forces me to discipline myself into writing every day. Second, I find it hard to write for just my own eyes, so I thought I may as well just write for an audience (if you can call the scant readership of this page an "audience"). Plus, making personal web pages is SUCH a fun effort, and I thought I'd try to do something a bit different with mine.

Speaking of other creative ventures, much of my energy is devoted to Pop-Culture-Corn, an entertainment webzine founded by myself and my good buddy Brian Bender. It sprang from the ashes of a dorm zine published by Brian since 1995, and has been steadily growing ever since. Though you'll find much of my past work archived here as well as my daily rants, I save all the good stuff for PCC. If all goes as planned, ideas planted here will find their ultimate fruition in the pages of Pop-Culture-Corn, so that my web presence will be one big daisy chain of creativity. Holy hell. Be sure to visit PCC often, as we have a staff of fantastic writers and an amazing web designer putting together what may be one of the most professional webzines on the Internet.

OH, and don't be frightened or intimidated by my yellow-on-black stylistic choices. I'm not a goth fan, or a master of the black arts. I just think it looks cool.

So here we are. I suppose you'll either get the hell outta here now, or read a bit. I hope it's the latter, but if it's the former, then I'll catch you on the other side.

Questions? Comments? Great thoughts?