Dead Sea Scrolls

This blog has been around a long time --just shy of 10 years.

It was started as a response to my first blog with the newspaper getting canceled. It deserved to be canceled. The blog was never what my editor wanted and by the time I figured out my voice, I didn't really want to be part of that blog, anyway.

Ten years, but there's a lot missing. If you go all the way back to the beginning of this thing, you won't find a lot of the material from when I first started: the puzzle piece posts about living with and trying to understand someone with autism. The stuff from when I worked at the book store is gone, too --as well as practically everything written about my first ex-wife.

These were part of two great purges. One was legally mandated and the other was more about falling on my sword after I realized I'd written a great number of things that, while honest, were tasteless and not considerate toward the feelings of someone I was involved with.

A lot of material was destroyed --some of it deserved to be. Other parts, not as much.

To a point, this blog is autobiographical. It's more in the recent than in the past, but it feels like past is something I should maybe explore a little.

I have now been in Charleston 10 years. I got here in the early Spring of 2003 and I was wide-eyed and sort of taken a-back by living in an actual city. Before 2003, I'd lived for years on the edge of Princeton, to the south in grubby, old Mercer County. Most of that had been spent in the town of Athens, the same town where I'd graduated college, the same town where I'd gotten married.

Part of the reason I'd stayed was inertia. I didn't know what to do or where to go. I had a bad job at a radio broadcasting company that sounded cooler than it was and paid worse than anyone would have believed.

Radio pays shit. Even when it's decent, it pays shit.

My life in Athens was desperate and monastic. At one point, I was working three jobs --I had the job at the radio station writing commercials, I was managing (poorly) a set of apartments and I was delivering newspapers.

And this was the great period of my life before everything began to change, before I came to Charleston, became a coffee snob, lucked into a job writing for a living and eventually and somewhat unexpectedly became a homeowner with a pair of dogs and a cat.

Like I said, a lot got lost from the early days and part of me thinks that now might be a good time to remember some of where I've been and maybe tell a few of the stories of who I used to be. There might be some life lessons in here, but that seems fairly unlikely.