Wires travelling across the Camino de Santiago, Spain

Welcome

This is my website.

I’m old enough to remember when websites were still a new, unknown phenomenon, mostly filled with the musings of unknowable strangers, bricks of text with only the occasional photo — and never video. Who had the bandwidth for more? This is a site much like that in spirit, my own personal GeoCities come back to life.

This is my website.

The internet is a different place now, and I use it like many modern people do — this site isn’t entirely anachronistic. (Okay, it might be. I yield.) But if you’re looking to connect with me through social media, you will most certainly find me there. If we’ve worked together, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or Stage 32 or IMDb. If we know each other from the past or some chance encounter in the world, feel free to friend me on Facebook. If, like me, you enjoy watching networks expand and contract, endlessly voracious for new information, feel free to follow me on Twitter. And if you like seeing random pictures of my life, there’s Instagram. I’m “circlesoffire” pretty much everywhere, and you can find me on YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Signal, OkCupid, Marco Polo, Skype… Are you exhausted yet? I certainly am.

This is my website.

I think many of us are tired of keeping up with the Jones’ online. For me, that means that I’m tired of giving away my thoughts and art and analysis to platforms that are, at best, ephemeral and, at worst, exploitative. This website is an attempt to take back and reserve some of my emotional and intellectual labor, and hold it all together in one place.

This is my website.

This website is like my home. I am responsible for all the content here, and I stand by every word. I come from a generation that learned quickly that speech on the internet is like words on a highway billboard — that loud, that permanent, and — quite often — that ignored… until you cross a line. Then you find out exactly how fast and forever the internet can be. I endeavor to have my words be worthy of my worst enemy’s screen capture. I have given a lot of thought to most of what I’ve posted to the internet since I first started writing almost thirty years ago, and I’m willing to debate any and all of it. I’m especially willing to concede where I was ignorant, ill-advised, privileged, overwrought and wrong. Just plain wrong. I’m open to persuasion. I’m also a worthy opponent.

This is my website.

This is a work-in-progress. On this WordPress site, like any other, that starts with two kinds of content: pages and posts. The pages here represent labor and ideas that I’ve been working on or thinking about for some time, and expect to continue working on seriously for the foreseeable future. As my interests change, I expect these pages to move around and become more or less visible, depending on how things are going. The posts, on the other hand, are much like social media. They pertain to what I’m thinking about right now. Like conversation at a Dinner Party, these posts are meant to amuse, intrigue, entertain, provoke consideration and then be discarded in favor of the next conversational gambit. They are meant in good faith. If I’ve missed the mark and caused offense, I want to know so that I can make it right.

This is my website, and you are welcome here.

August 2020