For anyone who appreciates how ideas change and evolve, here is a short history of the blog you’re now reading – or will soon read. 

My idea way back in 2022 was to make a blog dedicated to “microdosing” history, specifically the history of the American Civil War. I called this site a digital zine and even started a real-life zine: a small booklet made of paper and ink that I wrote, drew maps for, formatted and printed, and even stapled together. I did exactly two issues and handed them to two people — and that was that.

That was that, but not because I was bored or tired of civil war history – quite the contrary, I find the topic evergreen – but because I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. Anyone who has spent time with me (especially my wife, best friends, and current boss) knows that I’ve never been interested in just one topic. Ever. If I was, well, maybe I would be a better blogger. And if I was, maybe my life would be a little easier. 

But, it is what it is. While some people are called to write extensively about one thing, I am called to write about many things. I cannot just write about the history of a single conflict on the North American continent, but instead I feel compelled to write about anything that I find remotely of interest: desert flora and the American Southwest; religion, mysticism, the esoteric and weird, and philosophy; a book I’ve just finished reading, be it fiction or nonfiction; baseball and other sports; the role of technology in our lives; a particular soldier or general; that walk I just took, etc, and etc, and etc.

This blog exists not because I am uniquely gifted or talented, or because I necessarily have something new to say about a topic of interest. Instead, I’m writing for, more or less, two reasons: I want to explain to myself why I think what I think about such-and-such a topic, and I want other people to know it’s okay to have a plethora of interests and that it’s okay to share them. 

The style of this blog and newsletter will be informal – probably terribly so. It will be informal, circuitous, and will cover a wide range of interests. Some posts will come hot and heavy, one after another. Other times it’ll be like rain in the desert, infrequent and sporadic. Some posts will be long, some short. The editing will be minimal; rather, there will be editing but I will not be overly concerned with making it fit a certain rule, or kept under a certain word count, or look a certain way. 

Consider it, really, as marginalia. Like the chicken-scratch notes you see in the margins of a page; a sentence or two underlined with an asterisk by it; the notecard you find wedged in a used book, scribbled with the reader’s thoughts and feelings. Marginalia in its purest sense.

What I want is to write, to write clearly, and to make an idea easily understood. Maybe you won’t love a topic that I love, or I’ll write about a topic (as you see it) wrong. But, I am writing. And you are reading. This is a conversation, or, if you prefer the technical philosophical term: a dialectic.

I want to know things, to understand them, and if you’re here, right now, reading this? Well, you probably feel the same way, too. 

Happy reading.

[This post first appeared on Desert Dispatch on 12/20/2023.]