(photo: William Purcell)

At first the only thing that really caught my attention, one concerning this medium, was the fact that the word “blog” sounds like, not even a word, but rather yet another failed lazy uttered invention someone didn’t spend adequate time, hope, or creativity on. The word seems like the sound only a sheepherder hears on a desolate star spent night. What other incentives might I have? Well, after writing for coming near on fifty odd years now, roomed in teardrop trailers, scribbling narrative poetry or songs on bar napkins, in bat infested wine vats, VW vans in dirt parking lots, on the virgin back of jury summons, and in every assorted late hour bar crowd coffee shop.  After all of this, 99% of my work is quietly rejected, then residing in shoe box delegation, footwear long worn out and thrown out, like a forgotten sawdust time capsule. So what better way to just give up and in than to write even more and kindle a blog, or maybe bury the old with the new. That’ll show um’.

Just like golf or the fiddle is not for the person that is already over humbled, so the blog is to be taken with a grain of saltpeter, two fingers of tequila and rainwater on the rocks. I haven’t researched this, mind you, but I can almost guarantee that someone once said that, “If anyone had anything to say, they wouldn’t have time to write a blog”

That said, let me tell you firstly who I’m not. I’m most likely your friend, or hope at least the work might parade on that bent. So now we’ve established in print that I’ m not not your friend. Although I’m not all that interested in myself, most times, but like most mortals, that’s all I’ve got.

Mostly I like to write about things around me, about people and a circumference of feeling, about plants as if they had feelings, and whatever, in wing tipped sorrow, might envelope what is left of us when the day is done.

 I thought it just might be telling to maybe share some of my rejected liner note work, biographical portraits, dusty short stories, photography on the lamb, and maybe even toy with some lyrical analysis, before it’s too late. I hope to prove that it is not ever us, but expectation that is ludicrous in the end.

As I always seem to end up saying, my influences tell a much richer and broader story than my own. Some of my friends of whom I write about are famous, or at least they have somehow chosen the greatest surreal distraction for themselves they could. I often find myself to be a fly on the wall. The rest, as stragglers, appear in other varying degrees of struggle, always seeming to miraculously canoe through life, each a regal part of the fabric of what some like to call, ‘those totally unawares of class struggle’. I have always believed in looking local first, and then eventually gravitating toward that which tentacles out to a larger world from the viewpoint of the smaller, specifically not the reverse order. If someone were to attempt to excavate a deeper understanding, pray tell meaning, of my lyrical work, they would have to be privy to a few items of fact. Most importantly perhaps being the Fontana steeltown theme that I shamelessly drag skeletally through the most of it.

Just as an upfront aside, none of this, or anything, would be possible without my magnolia southern muse, Hollace Brayer.