Sprung

So.

I am back in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin after twenty years in DC and Baltimore. I never, ever thought I would be here again, wanted only to get out, get out as soon as I could and never look back.

But I am here, and I cannot do my work as an aesthetician or play the drums because of a series of nasty spinal injuries, surgeries, injections, a murky and exceedingly unpleasant realm which nobody can understand save those of us who have been through it. But rest assured, Dear Reader, this is not to be a forum for my public whining. Rather, I seek to continue to explore the meaning, expression and discovery of beauty, in all its forms, in theory and practice, internal and external, emotional, mental and physical.

Last year, I authored a beauty blog for the Examiner online. I treated it as a series of articles, addressing a different topic, product or idea in each post. Gradually, after my dear, brilliant and beautiful editor, Anne Henslee, left the Examiner, I was told by the new guard to change my approach, my titles and references (“too obscure”), jokes, language, and eventually to limit my posts only to products and local services, which, to me, would have been an incredibly narrow and exclusionary approach to the idea of beauty; since I was basically unpaid to do it, I felt that it had become a dishonest representation of my intent as a writer, aesthetician and appreciator of the myriad facets of what beauty means in American culture.

Over the years, I have published articles, reviews of books and music, interviews, and other stuff for the Washington City Paper . I always thought of writing as a little something extra that I could do in a creative pinch, that my skills in this arena were limited and unimportant as a real contribution. This may or may not be true. I intend to find out.

So now, like the lush and sparkling Wisconsin spring in which I am enveloped, I have sprung; I am attempting to silence the paltry excuses ( I don’t have a journalism, or any, degree, who would possibly take anything I have to say seriously, I am not really a writer because I dropped out of college, I don’t know the rules, etc.) and I am writing, because that is apparently what writers do.

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