"Your trying to tell me something, aren't you?"

...I heard myself say the words and chuckled to (at?) myself as the I heard the intro to Say It Ain't So begin to play over my radio. I'm not sure who exactly I was talking to... I'm not a religious person so I don't often find myself talking to God. In that moment, however, I found the synchronicity to be overwhelming and I begin to wonder if maybe there was some sort of grand design. What else could hope to explain how I got to be here...now?

Somehow I knew even as the moment passed and I carefully guided my car down my street and into the garage that "divine message" or not, I would make use of what it was I felt on this particularly dark and dreary evening. It didn't matter whether this intense desire I felt came from somewhere far outside myself, or deep within. I couldn't just let it go. I would make it real.

It would be an exercise in futility trying to convey all of the information necessary to explain my moment of revelation tonight in a single post. If you stick with me long enough you might just make sense of it.

I created this little piece of virtual real estate to help facilitate the much needed change in my life. A place to tell my story, share my thoughts and musings and just maybe entertain and perhaps help the community as whole by learning from the vast array of bad choices and mistakes that make up the 'cautionary tale' that is my life. A humble beginning, no doubt, but my hope is that this place becomes an important resource (for myself and others) and a source of comfort. We shall see.

-Wintermute-

"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."
-- Iain Banks, Excession