Hello, everyone, and welcome to my personal corner of the World Wide Web! There isn’t much to my little fiefdom at the moment, only this blog and a photo gallery which can be found here. (FYI, there is a permanent link to the photos at the bottom of this page, as well as links to some other sites that I frequent.) In the future, I hope to add many more photos, my resume’, and some samples of my writing work. For now, however, the emphasis will be on the blog.

So, you may be asking, what is this blog going to be about? Well, my plans for this space are still a little vague, but generally speaking, Simple Tricks is going to be an extension of my off-line journal.

I’ve kept a journal for about fifteen years now, ever since my sophomore year of college when I scribbled a few lines of really terrible verse into a cheap composition book and dedicated them to a girl who had broken my heart. This experiment in recording my life through poetry was thankfully short-lived, but I found the essential act of writing about my frustrations to be so cathartic that I have continued to pour my soul onto paper more or less constantly since 1991. In that time, I have filled over twenty green-and-white comp books like the one I used in college. I’ve always imagined that those books were granting me a kind of immortality, that they were recording such a perfect image of who I was at a specific point in time that any anonymous Future Reader could claim to have known me simply by paging through them.

Recently, however, I started thinking that maybe my journals don’t really capture an accurate reflection of me at all. I suspect that they are, in fact, badly skewed toward the darker side of my personality. I know that I’ve written about a lot of different subjects in my journals, but I’m willing to bet that the objective “Big Picture” types of entries are far outnumbered by the ones that focus on angst, hurt, disappointment and heartache. My imaginary Future Reader, looking at the record as it now stands, will probably wonder what the hell was wrong with me that I so miserable all the time. But I’m really not miserable all the time, and there is a lot more to my personality than angst and self-pity. At least, I hope there is. My goal is to prove that using Simple Tricks and Nonsense. Maybe if I know that I’m writing for an audience, I won’t be so tempted to wallow in the bad stuff.

Getting down to specifics, I intend to write in this space about my hobbies and interests, my philosophies, and my place in this crazy ol’ world of ours. I imagine that much of this will take the form of book reviews, film reviews, High Fidelity-style Top Ten lists, and essays about the stuff that really matters to me. Of course, there will be news about the events in my life. Finally, even though I want to try and avoid the despair that so often taints my off-line journals, I do plan to voice the occasional gripe about this heartless era that we live in. When I go into one of these “old-man-throwing-rocks-at-the-kids moments,” just think of me as the Andy Rooney for all us mid-thirtysomethings who fall into the pop-cultural divide between the all-powerful Boomers and those annoying Gen-X’ers.

I’m going to try to update Simple Tricks once a week or so, but knowing myself as well as I do, it will probably end up more like once a month. If you’d like to receive an email notification when a fresh entry is posted, let me know and I’ll set it up.

Also, please be aware that this site is written by a grown-up who isn’t afraid to talk like a grown-up. That means there may be occasional cussing or off-color discussions. I don’t think of myself as foul-mouthed but there are times when I use “language” in my everyday speech, and there will likely be times when I use it here. Consider yourself warned.

So, dreary disclaimers aside, I hope the verbiage to come will be at least mildly entertaining for you folks out there in Internet-Land. For my friends, maybe this blog will provide you with a little better insight into what makes me tick, as well as a means of keeping in touch with me and my activities. For everyone else… well, anything that allows you to ignore work for a few minutes, right?