Inaugural Post

Even with decades of computer experience, writing a web log is something I have resisted. Sure, I've been known to haunt various forums and post my thoughts and opinions, but having a central location on the web where I keep those opinions never held much of an attraction for me.

So what changed?

There was no sudden epiphany, no seminal event that suddenly drove me to create a blog. This is simply another in a string of changes that have taken place along my long, slow climb out of the desert of the quantified, where the only reality was that of the tangible, and into the realm of the qualified, where the only limits were those of the imagination.

I discovered years ago that I had unwittingly sacrificed the creativity and free thinking that was such a part of who I had always been, all in the name of chasing an interest rather than a passion. This blog, among other initiatives and projects, is not simply meant to rectify that sad set of circumstances, but to serve as one of many sign posts and points of interests along the path I have now chosen to travel.

If you are interested in what that path will look like, and what I might see along the way, then you are more than welcome to stop back and see what there is to see.


- V.


ps

Some among you might be asking yourselves, "What the hell is a pharmakos?"

from Wikipedia:

• In Ancient Greek religion, a pharmokos was a kind of human scapegoat (a slave, a cripple or a criminal) who was chosen and expelled from the community at times of disaster (famine, invasion or plague) or at times of calendrical crisis, when purification was needed.

A pharmakos was nothing more than another kind of "folk devil, or a person or group of people who are portrayed in history and in popular culture as outsiders and deviants.They are typically the focus when mainstream society looks for someone to blame for crime and other kinds of social problems.

If you spend enough time on the fringes of culture and society, you begin to see value in the points of view you encounter from the outsiders and the deviants. In this blog, I hope present a point of view that encompasses observations that go beyond the obvious and the mainstream.