How to be in two places at once

This is my very first blog.  Uh, shouldn't there be a full symphonic exclamation here, or at least a banjo riff?  No?  Just the hum of the computer and the click of the keys?   Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, an amazing group of musicians that I heard for the first time last weekend, could surely do something eerily beautiful and totally original with it.   My imaginings of how such music would sound will have to serve as the accompaniment to my entry into the world of online blogging.  Actually, it sounds pretty good.  Check out www.abigailwashburn.com if you would like to share in my imaginings, or just listen to some amazing music.

I've been a writer all my life and have blathered about just about everything to earn my daily salad and ice cream:  positron emission tomography was one of my early favorites.  I'll have to tell you about that some time.  Manure management was perhaps the most surprising, as in "I'm not sure I believe that I'm writing about this but believe it or not there are people out there who find this fascinating enough to pay me good money to do it".  (Did you know that pigs clean up after themselves if given the chance?) More recently, my keyboard has clattered on about logging practices, homelessness, the ferocious politics of garbage collection, relocation of post offices and high schools, and other topics known to mobilize small towns in somewhat remote areas where war, subprime loans, failed banks and so forth seem far away and really someone else's problem.

I write public relations stuff for corporations that can afford to pay me big bucks, for a little upstart local news website that can't afford to pay me very much, for various organizations I believe in that can't afford to pay me anything at all, in my garden with my friends who also love the written word, and all by myself late at night in my vintage west-coast post-and-beam house, cobbled together from bits and pieces of leftover lumber by a former, now late, immigrant mill worker for his family.  Or during the day when I can look out my window at the 180 degree view of the snow-capped mountain peaks of Vancouver Island.

So my first job is to choose a channel and a topic, my second to learn how to use tags, and my third, to figure out how to use Creative Common. 

And, in the process, develop a voice and presence here that will interest others. 

A fascinating assignment.

What I would most like to write about, and what Lauren seems to invite in his note, are the people, events and situations that I encounter on my journey through time and space. 

At present my centres are Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island (not to be confused with the city of Vancouver, which islanders know as that yellowish-brown blob on the other side of Georgia Strait), in the Province of British Columbia, Canada, where I can be found from June through November hiking, gardening, writing, fumbling around on my guitar and practising Taoist Tai Chi. 

My other centre is Santa Rosa, where I reside December through May and play with my children and grandchildren, fumble with my guitar, hike, practice Taoist Tai Chi, and write, mostly by myself in an ordinary little overpriced bungalow with a view of Mt. Hood in the winter when the obscuring trees are leafless. 

In both places, and along the way, are beautiful sites, fabulous people, neat things to do, and yes, poverty, sickness, fear, anger, cruelty and greed. 

I'll be telling more about these things as I go. 

Welcome to my world.