Middle-aged, burned out and bored. It’s time to try something different. I have always loved writing, and have been told at various times that I’m not bad at it—though I wasn’t a big reader until my 30s. I had a memorable college professor in design school that used to say: “if you can’t write, you can’t think.” I must write about her one day—she was quite a character who led what I would call a “designed life.” The kind of writing that attracts me is crafted writing. I love a good sentence, regardless of the quality or interest of the story in which it resides. There are wonderful popular story tellers out there like Dan Brown and Stephen King (thank God for Stanley Kubrick) who are terrible craftsmen. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t read much fiction since my “summer of classics” back in Eugene where there was little else to do. In high school I would read mostly quite boring books like Rabbit Run for the amazing way John Updike painted scenery with words, though I couldn’t care less about his characters. Sentences like this one have stuck in my memory since I first read it at 16:

“She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it.”

Or just last evening while watching a documentary about Westminster on PBS I caught this wonderful old Scott deliver this stunning sentence in reference to Parliament: “A shiver ran along the benches looking for a spine to run up.” I had to reach for the iPad to “write” it down.

I’ll write here about what I know, me and my experiences, with a dash of history and a smidge of trivia. I’ll try to elicit at least one laugh and one tear with each post because that is how my memory works. I may turn out to be my only audience, but I’m OK with that. A blog is virtually free so there’s little to lose, but I do want to share these stories. You will find no celebrity gossip, recycled news or recipes for either casseroles or life, that’s what the other 99% of the blogosphere seems to be for.

Growing up gay in the 60s and 70s I didn’t find my stories out there in popular literature and culture and always felt like an outsider in daily life, I think that’s why I and others make our own realities, create our own space. For 25 years I’ve focused on creating spaces for others—and myself too—now I think it’s time to tell some stories.