“You will speak the blasphemous and self-denigrating dialogue that has been written for you.” – Captain Rahim
“Like I’m not used to that.” – Jay Sherman
Welcome to Tethered Swimming. As of this writing I have only the dimmest ideas of what these posts will be about, or even how they’ll be written.[1] I do know that I enjoy thinking and learning for the sake of thinking and learning, and that there’s no better way to organize your thoughts than to write them down. Having no desire to hear the Fates laugh, I will announce no plans. I’m just going to write. Hopefully the words that go up will be worth someone else’s time to read.
If this little endeavor was just going to be me typing and posting at random, I think it would die pretty quickly; so I’m going to at least try to adhere to a loose schedule of posting on Sunday and Wednesday. Of course, it can still die quickly, pretty much at any time. I might get lazy, or bored, or I might find something good on TV. I make no promises.
I’d like to get one explanation out of the way quickly. I titled this thing “Tethered Swimming” for two reasons. The first is that I can think of nothing more boring and pointless than tethered swimming.[2] The second is that I wanted a Simpsons reference that no one else had yet used on a masthead. Besides all that, I need to show a little humility to atone for being pretentious enough to take “Zeno Amerikanos” as my nom de guerre.[3]
There you have it. I don’t know what I’m doing, and if there’s one thing writing professionally has taught me, it’s that first efforts are always a catastrophe. Regardless, I’m pressing ahead for now, and I hope it’ll be fun.
NOTE: I originally posted this last Sunday, but I accidentally deleted it just now and I can’t find an un-delete command. Lesson learned. I’m posting it again for the sake of completeness.
[1] Come to think of it, there’s a good chance I’ll get disillusioned and there will never be another.
[2] Boredom and pointlessness being two of the founding pillars of the internet.
[3] And, for that matter, being pretentious enough to use nom de guerre in place of “pen name” or “screen name”.
