“Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.”
—Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Apocalypse Now
It looks like I’ve come to the point in my life where I feel it has become necessary to start a blog. Perhaps this is an illusion of mine, and perhaps I’m not even doing this “blogging” thing right, but regardless, I’ve started one anyway. If you are reading this, then it seems as if you have at least a passing interest in what I have to say, and I sincerely hope that you will continue to follow my writings, musings, rantings, etc. While I believe most of this content will be cathartic, I am of course hoping that someone will find something interesting or unique. However, if you do decide that you are intent on following me on this journey “up river,” there are some things that you should know.
- As one might guess from this blog, I am a big fan of Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, and the Francis Ford Coppola film it inspired, Apocalypse Now. When I picked up the novella in high school, I was utterly engrossed by the story of man’s descent into savagery, self-realization, and madness. Over the years, I developed the opinion that life (such as I have come to see it) can be likened to a journey up a long and terrifying river—like the ones traveled by the characters in both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. During the journey, human beings all struggle with their inner turmoils; what is wrong, what is right, and how those moral conceptions can even be defined in a society seemingly devoid of meaning or morality. Along the way, some see the mission through and are left not with answers to impossible questions, but instead with a new, radical, and perhaps darker view of our manufactured “human nature.” Others, like Kurtz, “get off the boat,” and plunge with abandon into the wild jungle, eschewing the constraints of modern civilization. They embrace the brutality of life, worship it, become a part of it. In a world gone insane, they at times can seem models of sanity. As Willard says in Apocalypse Now: “Charging a man with murder out here was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”
- Such is a rather vague gesture to my worldview. I’m not a dark person, nor am I a person filled with uncontrollable and cynical rage. As is typical for people, my opinions have been formed through the combination of all kinds of factors. I am optimistic and hopeful for my future, but I tend not to agree with those believe that the world—and our lives—will get better. Nevertheless, if this outlook on life disagrees with you or makes you uncomfortable, I understand.
- I hope to keep updating this blog on a fairly regular basis, but as of now I cannot make any promises. As I mentioned, I am completely uneducated in this form of social media, and as such I cannot tell you that all of my posts will be “well-written,” or “meaningful,” or even coherent. It is my goal, however, to fill this blog with my train of thought, and examples of my creative writings, in the hopes of developing not only my web content-building skills, but also a viable portfolio dedicated to my favorite craft: the written word.
I guess that’s all I have to say at this early stage in the life of my fledgling blog. I can’t say that I’m 100% confident in its success at accomplishing anything, but time will tell. I do hope that something will come of this reluctant blog, and that’s all I can do. Write, and hope.
Anyway, here goes nothing.
Going Up River 