Current Schedule:
Non-Fiction Book Report Every Other Sunday
There’s a great old Patton Oswalt joke about the kind of people who go to open mic nights, “. . . lunatics that [were] like, ‘There’s a microphone attached to speakers and I can talk into it? The demon monkeys in my hair will have their message heard!’” Yeah, that about sums it up.
One of the first comments I got about Tethered Swimming was, “I don’t know who your target audience is.” Fair point, neither do I. My only counter argument is that I don’t care. I don’t write Tethered Swimming to build readership, sell a book, get a job or generate revenue, the scatterbrained topic list should be proof enough of that. I write Tethered Swimming because I enjoy writing and because putting these posts together is a better way to organize and explain my thoughts than sitting on a barstool and boring my drinking companions. If someone out there wants to read it, hey that’s why I posted it; and if anyone wants to drop me a line to tell me that I’ve got my head up my ass, that my grammar sucks, or anything else, the e-mail address is in the upper right hand corner for all to see.
I don’t care about traffic or readership and I consciously avoid the stats. (Judging by my e-mail volume I think I’m safe in assuming that it ranges somewhere from extremely low to comically low.) There is no set topic list; the posts are just whatever happens to be on my mind twice per week. It’s nothing more than thinking and learning for the sake of thinking and learning, and the best way to organize thoughts, observations and facts has always been to write them down.
If you’re reading this page then you might have read some of the actual posts, or at least you’re thinking about it. When I read over what I’ve written, it occurs to me that the preceding paragraphs and everything else on Tethered Swimming can come across grossly differently depending on tone of voice. So as you read, please consider my words offered in the warm, affectionate tone of a friendly and well meaning human being, albeit one who can sound like an ignorant and overbearing know-it-all.
A Brief Note on the Title
"I don't feel right." - Ralph Wiggum
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, and boredom and pointlessness are two of the founding pillars of the internet. The second is that I wanted a Simpsons reference that no one else had used yet. Besides all that, I need to show a little humility to atone for being pretentious enough to use “Zeno Amerikanos” as a pseudonym.
New posts usually go up at noon, but sometimes later.
