The Prototypes

I was cleaning my closet over the Christmas break when I came across one of those accordion folders stuffed full of papers.  Now, one fringe benefit that comes from doing something as mundane as cleaning out your closet is the unexpected joy of discovery you experience when finding some long-forgotten item like this folder.  Not quite as good a feeling as finding a forgotten $20 bill in your pocket, mind you, but not bad.

     Okay, that’s never happened to me, but you get the idea.

     In any event, I was puzzled as to what this folder might contain, so I took a peek inside its numbered slots.  There, secluded for several years in the dark, rested printed copies of a series of essays I had written, oh, probably 12-15 years ago.  Each in its own slot, double-spaced with my name and an old address neatly typed on the cover pages, these pearls of wisdom covered a wide variety of subjects -- some profound, some silly, some profoundly silly – and were all dressed up, ready to be submitted to magazines that might be interested in publishing.

     Which leads me to the other discovery tucked inside the folder: a rather impressive stack of rejection letters from dozens of magazines that I had submitted these essays to.  For some reason that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, I had masochistically held onto every one of them.

See, back in those days before the Internet was as ubiquitous as air, I had developed a fairly extensive system of researching potential outlets for my writing, methodically printing out my pieces and sending them individually through the mail to their potential targets.  This process, suspended in time and frozen at the point at which I had rediscovered it, was obviously inefficient, time consuming and, most importantly, utterly ineffective, although it no doubt helped close the U.S. Postal Service’s chronic budget deficit.

     “How quaint,” I thought to myself once the sneezing from the folder’s dust cloud had passed.  Then I had a revelation.  I was holding a blog.  Not literally, of course, but the essays on these dusty sheaves of paper were exactly the types of pieces I’d post on a blog…if only I had one.

     Well now I do, and I’m privileged to have you reading the very first entry in “Electric Blue.”  So what can readers expect in subsequent postings and how often can you expect them?  Beats me.  But what I do know is that whatever pours forth from my fingertips in future entries will bear a startling similarity to those earlier prototypes in that I will cover a wide variety of topics.  Politics, sports, movies, current events, space exploration, music, and probably a bunch of other stuff I DON’T know anything about but am eager to learn will find their way into musings to come.

     Will those original essays pop up?  Well, some of them have since been published through various online outlets, which just proves how much easier it is to earn an audience, if not exactly a fortune, in this wired world in which we live.  But yeah, I’ll probably post them periodically, when I’m feeling lazy or they seem to be topical even after all of these years.

     So, welcome to “Electric Blue.”  Thanks for sparing a few minutes from your busy life to read these postings.  I hope you come away entertained, inspired, enraged, enthralled…anything but bored.  Because when you’re bored, you have to resort to things like cleaning out your closet…and see what that can lead to?