What is this?

Anton Chekhov

    "Any idiot can survive a crisis," Anton Chekhov supposedly once said, though I'll be damned if I can find the original source. "It's this day-to-day living that grinds you down."     
     That's absolutely true. Life is wonderful, in general, but it is not always wonderful in specific, not always wonderful today, and the person hoping to wring from it as much meaning and fun as possible needs to scan each morning anew, like a just-opened present, to see exactly what it is we've got here.
     Sometimes assembly is required. A bit of puzzling over the instructions.
     That's the purpose of this blog — to comment intelligently on the news of the day, to pass along cool stuff, to fan fascination and outrage, to offer a helpful tip, make your life and mine both more interesting and enjoyable. To help put it all together.
     Okay, there's a little more to it than that.
     I once asked Dizzy Gillespie, the great jazz trumpeter, if he still practiced every day.
     He look at me strangely.
     "If I don't play my horn for even one day," he said. "I know it. And if I miss two days, my friends know it. And if I miss three days, the whole world knows it."
     Writing is like that. As with any instrument, if you let it sit too long, you fall out of practice. Like any tool, it rusts. So I created this blog for a dual purpose. To benefit you, certainly, but also to help me, so I would have a reason to write something every day. Every goddamn day, in recognition of the struggle that just getting through the day can be, and because this is supposed to be something with an edge, and not just smarm. (If the word "goddamn" offends you, please see "For the offended" before registering your displeasure).
     So religious fanatics notwithstanding, feel free to jump in, to observe, to complain, to examine. I'm listening. This blog is a one-man-show, without any editor other than myself, so mistakes are inevitable, and I hope you will point them out, with a minimum of self-congratulation please, so I can fix them (if they are indeed mistakes — I've noticed that many people remarking upon what they consider errors are themselves wrong. For instance, many words have more than one definition). 
     I hope this site will be what naturalists call a "symbiosis"—a mutually beneficial arrangement between two organisms. You recall symbiosis from high school biology, right? The clown fish clean the sea anemone, and the sea anemone protect the clown fish. So I write this, and I benefit, and you read it and — my fervent hope — you benefit too. As to which of us is the colorful clown fish, and which the poisonous sea anemone, well, we can argue about that.
     I guess that's a wordy way of saying "thank you for reading."