About six years ago I found myself sitting in a barn in Connecticut, staring at a young woman.

We sat in folding metal chairs, about twelve inches from each other, along with perhaps eight other students, grouped in pairs. The couples had dispersed casually about the space, all sitting in pretty much the same formation: twelve inches apart, face to face. If you’d been there, you’d have been pretty bored. We were working on our Chekhov.

The girl across from me was my scene partner, and the task at hand sounded awfully simple: speak your scene. Just give your lines back and forth. Just get from the beginning, to the middle, to the end.

But there was a catch. (Natch.) No “forcing it”. No moving on to the next line until the last had flowed out of you without any extra push. Like it was just the thing you simply needed to say at that particular moment. Unique to you, and infused with the need to communicate to your partner. Your partner, in turn, had both the authority and the moral imperative to stop you the instant they heard you forcing a line. A little shake of my partner’s head, and I was back to the beginning.

It’s a fascinating exercise; you might want to try it some time. You’ll find yourself getting quieter and quieter, in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid artifice.

Fast forward six years. I’m sitting in an apartment in Baltimore, staring at a PowerBook G4. And from my PowerBook, a shadowy, nebulous audience seems to stare back.

You can see where I’m going with this.

I’ve resisted the blogging geek in me for a long time. The signal to noise ratio of the Internet is already perilously low, and the last thing we need is another blog. But today I find myself in need of a public platform. Not only that, but the blogging geek in me has been keeping a secret stash of possible blog entries. Ideas that started pushing their way out one day, of their own accord.

So I guess it’s time to say my line. I’ll try not to be a chatty character.

Oh, and as much as I my designs elsewhere have been pretty blatant rip-offs of the Kubrik theme, I don’t intend to inflict another default Wordpress installation on the world either. It just turns out that my need for a platform came up before it was convenient to spend time de-defaultifying. You understand.