"I'm sorry, I'm terrible with names..."

It's what my blog is saying to you right now... If you leave a comment, it'll remember, but otherwise I'm afraid this blog will forget your name. Don't be too offended. Google's servers will have logged your IP address, so there will be some token of having met you still there, but names just don't stick the same way.

You've happened upon a blog which I intend to use for a few purposes. Probably the most important of those purposes is the one that gets me a nice pretty "A" on my transcripts to make this final semester look good enough that anyone who's looking at said transcripts doesn't flip back into the dark days of yore where "D"s, withdrawals, and potentially dragons reside.

But there are other purposes. After all, to do a good enough job to make that shiny "A" appear, I'd have to care at least a little bit about what I was doing. I'm going to try to care more than a little bit, even. I've been doing this internet-writing thing for a while now, which means I probably enjoy it, so I'd like to continue doing so here and now.

But I've never needed a topic before. It used to be, all I had to do was make something funny. Go to Clunkline.com. It's not all mine, but it's funny, and some of it is mine. It's also often horridly offensive. By nature of my personality, this blog will probably end up being that way whether or not I intended it to. Especially given the topic I've chosen.

"Dave, I'm very impressed by how much you like to talk about yourself, but what's the topic you've chosen?" Is that what you were thinking? Probably not. But for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume you were asking that question.

This blog aspires to be a catalog of the musings, experiences, and discoveries of a young person trying to keep his head above the sea of elderly folk so he can breathe without choking on Ben Gay, Pall Mall smoke, and conservatism. It's not going to be all about old people, though, that's just one distinguishing feature of Southwestern Pennsylvania (Greater Pittsburgh, if you will).

The point is, I was born in Monroeville. I grew up in the shadow of the USX tower, but I've also lived in Wuhan, China, and Jersey (the new one, not the island in the English Channel), which gives me some perspective on the area but still makes me, both proudly and tragically, a Pittsburgher. And that's exactly it: I need a catharsis for this horrid ambivalence I've got toward my hometown. And I'm going to try to do it in a way that helps other young people here try to ignore that feeling being surrounded by dying people and a dying economy and get a new lease on this place we call "home."

So, you two have been introduced. I'm not sure why I've written this introductory post, because it'll just end up buried under a mountain of posts the same way Khrushchev said the Soviet Union would bury our amber waves of grain, purple mountains' majesty, etc., but here it stands, a monument to inutility and an excuse to write a post without needing any real content.