Okay, not the devil. Not even a bad guy.  A good friend.  I had no intention of blogging or doing serious writing.  Other than torturing friends with emails that make War and Peace look like a fortune cookie, and perhaps continuing my own nerdly history research. History is easy.  When you write about dead people, no one complains.  Then maybe after I checked in with the dead people to make sure I got the details of their stories right, I’d throw in a few short essays mocking things that annoy me, mostly for my own personal satisfaction.  That way, if The New York Times ever called me for an Op Ed, I’d be ready to go.

I used to write when I was much, much younger.  Lucky for me, I never throw anything out, a condition I’ve worked hard at trying to reverse, but at which I have apparently not succeeded. So, the written record survives.

As I poured through the archives to confirm whether I was, in fact, a person whose writings could be noteworthy and laudable, I experienced a twenty-year history of dribble and nonsense that reduced my IQ more drastically than had I sniffed a year of glue while watching FOX News.  Because when we are younger, we are the self-proclaimed centers of the universe.  It is only if you have saved every scrap of genius ever created from age puberty on that you can truly appreciate how stupid you really were.  And only then, can you grow.

I had no intention of starting this blog, and it hasn’t been the easiest process.  I figured I’d sign up for the site and start writing.  It’s not that easy to do it right.  First, I had to make a commitment to someone who wouldn’t let me back out, which I did, albeit begrudgingly.  Then, I had to set everything up and choose a name.  This was far easier said than done—all the cool names are already taken. I’ll have an entire separate post on that.

Next was the small matter of deciding what to write about, which is essentially a soul search in and of itself.  Designing the format to look like a real blog and not like I hired a kindergarten graphics consultant–also not as simple as it seems.

Only after all this happened, each step compounding the great lie of “this should be a cinch,” could I then press the button and make this go live, thereby giving my literary critics–who may have missed out on their golden opportunity to throw pie at my face twenty years ago–one more chance to hit the target.

And so, on behalf of all the apple pies soon to be fired in my direction, I’d like to thank my projected five loyal readers as well as my good friend for pushing me to write, among other risks, by saying, “Leap and the net will appear.”

You can be sure I will save a slice of pie for you.