Move Along, Little Doggie: New Site

If you truly loved me, you'd follow me wherever I went, but where I've gone, none can follow.

Except North Dakotans, maybe.

Instead, go buy books my friend Daniel, who helped me put my ideas on the computer.

http://www.thegoodweird.com

Somewhere at the End is Not the Beginning

At the end of a long hall filled with treacherous traps, a man finds that he has returned to where he started, and before him is stretched out a long hall that is filled with treacherous traps.

He has risked his life to travel in a circle. His heart sinks.

Wait. No.

It is a mirror he gazes into, showing him the path he has traversed, the obstacles he's overcome. What had defeated him briefly was only the image of where he'd been.

Some might say that stories are circles: if the end doesn't bring you back to the beginning, it has failed perfection.

But a story, by its very structure within the confines of time and narrative, can only contain an image at the end which reflects back upon the journey, giving the illusion of circularity.

The story, every story, is a line. At its end, you may look back on what has come before, perhaps in a way that is so evocative, that for a moment, you can believe in a nostalgia-proof circle.

The Heroic Human

If you were going to condense every random tracer streak that flies through my rotted head and stony heart at any given moment, to tie Snorri Sturluson to Klaus Nomi, the Aeneid to Fear of Girls, King Uzziah to Andrew Koenig, Borges and Eco to Lovecraft and Barker and E.E. Knight, James Cagney to Tom Lommel, Flannery O'Connor to Felicia Day, Muhammed Ali, Floyd Patterson and Jack Vance, Cicero and Dracula, Ramses and the Baldwin Brothers, King Saul and Steve Wozniak, Frodo and Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, and LazyTown, machine language and Anglo-Saxon...to bind them all into one, pre-apocalyptic gainland of the strange and it would be this:

The heroic human is the one who knows his smallness all too well, yet stands in the way of the strange, spreading roots of evil.

As a troll on the sidelines of the human story, I look on those precious few among your race who turn bravely to be swallowed by the dark. What madness compels you, what joy inspires?

Who made you a hero?