Sickness

It seems that northern California is enduring something of a plague. Nearly everybody I know has been afflicted with a respiratory infection that causes severe coughing, as well as nasal and respiratory congestion. It appears to go away after a few days or as the weather turns better, but it still gives me concern.

I had thought it was confined to the Central Valley. I myself caught it after an overnight stay in Stockton. It also seemed to be prevalent in Tracy. However, the fellow at the Apple store in Emeryville who sold me my new MacBook indicated that he had felt it as well, and the store had endured a string of worker absences, all due to the same illness.

It just makes me wonder what would happen if such a widespread disease was fatal, even in a minority of cases. I suppose if I had lived in China during the SARS scare, I might know. I hope that I can look back on this entry in the years ahead and declare that my fears were unfounded. But at this juncture, I cannot make such a statement with any confidence at all.

The experiment begins

Can I gain an audience?

That's the essential question here. I haven't seriously blogged before now because, really, I was afraid that nobody would care. The weblog can be used to archive the evolution of one's intellect, or as a dumping ground for the emotional effluvia of one's life. A little voice in the back of my head kept whispering, "good lord, man, if you somehow lapsed into the latter, would anybody take you seriously ever again?"

Of course, that voice still isn't completely quiet. But the future of localized print media, where I have been taken most seriously in the past, is not at all certain. No, I don't plan to give up on my old friends at the Tracy Press, but at the same time, this is the best way to expand beyond their pages. Ultimately, I'd like to serve my readers (if I can get any) as a bridge between the old media and the new. I'll hint in print at ideas mainstream papers usually won't touch, and then expand upon them here. 

And there is a counter-question which, if answered in the affirmative, would shut up that nasty old voice of doubt once and for all. Using little more than my wit and a bottom-of-the-line Macintosh, can I transform myself into a serious man of letters? Much of my life has been spent trying to play with other peoples' perceptions of me, to seem either more mature or more strange than I really am. But the world is changing, and ideas matter at least as much as identity. Here, I don't have to play with masks. Let the thinking begin in earnest.