Firing Up

Starting up another blog.

The inspiration for this one is one part Virginia Woolf and one part Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, and it’s about celebrating love, goopy, filial love, for those moments when my misanthropic impulses and deeply critical cynicism give way to kindness, empathy, and joy. My intention is to write about other folks, their work and courage and humor and goodness. I hope to be intelligent about it, and so don’t expect saccharine.

I like the idea of a train, a shared route if not a shared destination, where it’s not quite like being herded into an airplane. There’s that rough-hewn Whitman mix of folks, and in their individuality and their sorrow and their troubles, there’s something loveable we can see, something on the surface. All the while we go on with our anonymity, our small piece of privacy, vaguely annoyed or maybe openly hostile to someone we think is a punk, or an arrogant money-grubber, or a self-indulgent fashionista, or an oblivious and common twit. I suppose we operate on those lower, mean frequencies because that’s how we are wired to survive, to read situations quickly, reactively.

But a train is a momentary contract, where we agree to get close, an obligation or diversion that takes us to school or business or entertainment or shopping, and for a few minutes, we are together, fated, in some in-between place of not-yet-arrival. Wow, and to love everyone on this train, well, that’s practically an impossibility, which makes it all the more necessary to regard, to reflect, and to write about. It’s about telling, after all.