This is a notebook, a tabula rasa, a place for me to gather the thoughts and observations that roil in my mind everyday, and an opportunity for you to peer into the unseemly corners of my troubled subconscious.
Okay, it's an online column. You know, like in the newspaper, but you won't get inkstains on your hands. Here I will offer for your edification and, I am hopeful, amusement, select commentary, random musings, broad social satire, and the occasional enlightened abstraction.
I hope you will find it, if not elegantly pithy, at least tolerably readable.
Precisely.
I've always wanted to do this, or something like this. When I was but a wee lad, my own father was a columnist for our local newspaper. I grew up reading Herb Caen and Ray Orrock. While other kids were outside perfecting their physical skills so they could beat the snot out of me after school, I was hunched in small, dark places committing my deepest thoughts to paper and working on my bronze-like tan.
As a young man, when the time came for me to leave behind the kind and simple people of my native land and seek my own fame and fortune in the larger world, I moved to that wondrous megalopolis the Spanish-speaking people call El Pueblo Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula and the rest of us know as "the Greater L.A. Metro Area".
Ah, those Hollywood nights. Home of the famous, the beautiful, and the drug-addicted hookers. The walk of fame, the streets of stars, the boulevard of broken dreams...
Who's telling this story, you or I?
Okay, the short version. Hollywood chewed me up and spit me out faster than a stick of Nicorette® at a tobacco-chewing contest. I landed face first in the teeming conurbation that Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano named Manhattan -- after the Algonquian term for “island of hills” -- but which the rest of us know as New York, New York.
Because if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere.
Yes I am, but I get your point. My point is this: everywhere I went, all of my pursuits in life, revolved around the idea of my becoming a writer. I immersed myself in the various cultures. I lived in L.A. and worked in "the business" and hung out with screenwriters and filmmakers. I moved to New York to work in publishing and ended up managing a funky little bookstore in Greenwich Village. And I wrote. I wrote entire pages of screenplays and short stories and nasty anonymous Post-It Notes® that I would affix to people who had offended me...
I don't know. I always ran away.
No. I suffer from a common writers malady known as "short attention span".
I couldn't really say. I don't remember.
An online column?!! Gads, man, what a brilliant idea! I could make millions...!
Yes, because I have pluck. I'm also more mature and more focused than I was as a youth.
I really don't know. But I do know this. I work much better under a deadline. And I respond well to feedback. So here's the deal I'll make with you. If you subscribe to my weekly column via email -- or come visit my website regularly -- and tell your friends, I'll do my best to provide you with an entertaining and thoughtful read that will make you richer for the experience. That's my money back guarantee.
By sending a self-addressed, stamped email to subscribe@semitrue.com.
All my columns are guaranteed to be semi true.
Because I am in love with the English language, and because I recently discovered how to use a thesaurus.
Please...
tab·u·la ra·sa: a blank slate. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=tabula%20rasa [return]
roil: to be in a state of turbulence or agitation. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=roil [return]
ed·i·fi·ca·tion: intellectual, moral, or spiritual improvement; enlightenment. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=edification [return]
hope·ful·ly: I don't say "hopefully" because I am a snob. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=hopefully snob n : a person regarded as arrogant and annoying. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=snob [return]
pith·y: precisely meaningful; forceful and brief. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=pithy Actually, I just like saying "pithy" -- pithy pithy pithy... [return]
meg·a·lop·o·lis: a region made up of several large cities and their surrounding areas in sufficient proximity to be considered a single urban complex. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=megalopolis [return]
con·ur·ba·tion: an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=conurbation [return]
o·blique: indirect or evasive; not direct in descent. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=oblique [return]
hi·fa·lu·tin: pompous or pretentious. see http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=highfalutin [return][copyright.htm]