Rationally, we’re able to understand nothing we can see or touch is permanent. We’ve all loved pets or grandparents, or worked at jobs and lived in homes we knew weren’t intended to last forever. I know some day I won’t have to rise before dawn to pack a school lunch and usher a son out the door. (That day will come, right?)

Yet ever since the eighth grade, I’ve been somewhere between challenged and enthralled with living in the midst of a denouement. Back then (1993, if you’re keeping score at home) it was because two things were ending simultaneously — junior high and “Cheers,” the latter of which I enjoyed significantly more than the former. But if nothing else, eighth grade was a devil I knew intimately. I mean, I didn’t hate it or anything, but it was no “Cheers.”

I like to traffic in honesty, so let’s start with a full disclosure: This post exists almost entirely to help me learn how the blog function of the site works and also so there’s something here to see once things go public.

It’s not yet clear how I’ll use this particular blog. I’ve started and more or less discontinued two other blogs over the last 11 years, but they taught me a lot and haven’t really gone away either. As always I’m open to suggestions, but suffice it to say I’m trying to carve out a new home for pieces that don’t fit the framework of my current creative output options.