Why I Write

If I am not creating, I get restless. It's been that way all of my life.

Somewhere, there are radio-play-style cassette tape recordings of me at around 5 years, re-enacting scenes from The Empire Strikes Back with my action figures, and also imagining their adventures between Episodes IV and V. I promise you, they were more interesting than the recent Marvel comics told in the same period, and featured a lot of IG-88 and Greedo.  (Greedo lives.)

When our parents decided we'd idled away enough of our Saturday afternoons playing NES, my friend Corey and I folded blank paper into booklets, stapled them near the crease, and drew our own games, creating more than a few volumes of The Book Of Rad Games. He and I also busted out my old cassette recorder to create Fart & Bart's Radio Station, consisting largely of us recording live pop radio from WGLQ, singing bad parodies ("Heaven Is A Place On Earth" = "Heaven Is A Place In The Toilet Bowl") with liberal flatulent noises seasoned in.

Late and beloved Escanaba Senior High teacher Doug Fix assigned regular journaling to his Creative Writing students. I did so daily, sometimes for hours, filling many spiral notebooks throughout those months. Near the end of that Junior year, he wrote a lengthy note in my final notebook and sketched a WWF-style belt in it, proclaiming me The Journaling Champion of the World.

It takes me much longer to consume print than it does others with similar reading habits and skills. While enjoying a book, extremely detailed images form in my mind. When a passage really strikes me, I'll re-read passages and envision them with still more clarity. Even the words of straightforward news articles are read in the voices I imagine their authors having.

Before video game RPGs were lushly voice-acted, I would cast each character with the voice of a TV or film star, and read their lines in those voices in my head. Friends who clicked through scenes of dialogue left me aghast.

I "started" this blog sometime several months ago, with a few intentions:

1) write more often, since I was finding less times and fewer opportunities for creative pursuits; 

3) share my writing, and the fact that I was writing, as a way to keep myself accountable to whoever meandered along with me;

2) focus on comic books, which I found myself thinking about often and deeply as I got serious about sorting, bagging, and boarding my collection.

I'd actually written a few complete entries, but each felt too serious, even pretentious. They're comics, man. What I read today runs the gamut and some have serious stories to tell, but comics should be enjoyable on some level, and my writing about them wasn't.

The single theme also felt too confining. I loved The Mandalorian. I wanted to write and share my reactions to it, and especially the experience of watching it with my son in the waning days of our holiday break. Would I just do that in a Facebook post, then, rather than blog it?

A good name escaped me until tonight. So, now, I write, because for the first time since "Philosoraptor" came to me in the shower in 2012 and I was stricken to discover someone already had the same shower-thought years before, a suitably fun and distinctively geeky blog name fell into my head.

I write because it has always been an easier way for me to articulate my thoughts and feelings than spoken words.

I write because, unlike Brock Lesnar, I have a championship belt that I need to defend, and I wouldn't want to disappoint Fix.

But, ultimately, I write because - if I am not creating, I get restless.

(This blog will be updated weekly, or more or less often, as life allows and the moods strike.)