Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Hi.

Blogs have always given me a vaguely sticky feeling. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but whenever I’ve thought about starting one over the last few years, the skin on my feet has gotten real hot, and my tinnitus has ascended into a kind of needling, strangled whine, the kind I imagine dogs hear when you blow those special whistles. On their own, these two physical signs rarely portend good things. Together, I thought, they were a clear sign to stay away. Still, here we are, in the clammy expanse of the interweb.

Why the change of heart? One night, several weeks ago, a tall man with intense, glistening thighs appeared to me in a dream. We were together on the shore of some kind of lake. He wore a beard of white velvet, and communicated to me non-verbally through a series of short beeps. After a few drinks, he started asking about my freelance business, and how I was planning to get it off the ground. I told him I was going to set up a website. He nodded sagely. Then he lifted off his beard in one motion, as if it were a loose piece of skin. “You need a blog” he said. Without the beard, I realized that I knew this man: he had been my sister’s partner for some time. His name was Steven. I didn’t know he had these kind of powers. Still, I should have recognized those thighs.

So you know what you’re in for, I thought I’d use this first post to lay out what this blog will be about. For my edification and your entertainment, I hope to be primarily covering the following issues:

—The food pyramid

—Unpopular Music

—Wilderness

—Subversion as fun

—Werner Herzog

There probably won’t be:

—Funny cats

—Acerbic references to other personages in the blogosphere

—Bird metaphors

—Photos of myself taken with a camera I am holding

—Jazz solos

—The use of the real names of people close to me, like Ed Nicholson, Pascal Babare and Steven Watts

But there could be:

—Sweeping changes to all of this without any prior warning.

By way of introduction, my name’s Pete. I’m 6”1 and white and live in Melbourne. Based on a recent DNA swab my father submitted to National Geographic, I probably descend from hunter-gatherers who migrated through north-western Europe several thousand years ago. This at least explains my ridiculous feet, which only seem to make sense when I am walking large distances.

I write and edit for a living, which is what this site is primarily about. I thought about keeping this blog relevant to said profession, but that would get tiresome pretty quickly. So instead, let’s move on to something far more interesting and edifying: the food pyramid.

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