Prelude

I had grand plans for my First Post, but, as it's taken me a grand total of 4 hours, 42 minutes and a whopping 6 episodes of Deadliest Warrior to get the damn thing set up to my liking, I have no choice but to keep this one short.

I wouldn't write anything now to begin with, except I hate that small "no posts" text mocking me from the empty page of my shiny new blog, calling me out for the 420-character facebook-status cheapskate that I am. My pillows, incidentally, are also plaintively calling me from the next room, but my pride is going to win this battle.

That said, I've decided to briefly explain the name of this blog, merely because it's easy. Easy, but interesting.

When I first started thinking about blogging, before I knew what I wanted to write or why, I knew its name. I wanted to call it "The Weight We Carry," from Allen Ginsberg's Song. The choice was easy. It's a line from my favorite poem, and it means something to me about my life. More importantly, it carries the perfect balance of the cryptic and the profound; just short and just vague enough to sound like a good blog. (Come on, that's TOTALLY how you pick blog names. Slightly enigmatic, pithy. Concise but open enough to be deep. Let's all be honest with ourselves.)

Then a few days ago I bought a book by a Sicilian writer named Gioia Timpanelli at a secondhand bookstore in Uptown, Minneapolis. I picked it up off of the table near the front window marked, "Special! $1!"  I knew nothing about the book except that it was called Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily and that it cost one dollar.

I'm only on page 31. But I loved the prologue so much that Ginsberg was demoted to mere 'blog description' rather than the more prestigious title role that I intended to give him:

"Sometimes the soul is tested. The body feels sore, the mouth dumb, the big red hands hang useless on their arms. Time passes. Surely, the soul will have its way. It lolls. Time passes. And the soul waits. Nothing happens. Come on, make something happen. Make lists! There are always urgent things to do, things to do for this morning, for today, for next week, for a month, for an entire year. But then a laziness takes hold, and nothing on the lists proves as urgent as this lethargy, so the lists are left out in the sun in a shopping bag, become bleached, illegible, are rained on, and finally forgotten under the beach chair. (No, not lists, certainly not lists. Poor, dear, little papers. It's too heavy a burden for them.) Minutes pass, hours, maybe a year, possibly a decade. At last, the soul is refreshed in the sweet company it has made.
      Then, one day, it gets up and stretches. Today is not like yesterday. The soul notes the difference. To the neighbors, opening and slamming shut their doors, nothing seems to have happened. Nothing at all. Finally, now, the soul lifts its arms and with its graceful hands brings down the fertile rain."

Timpanelli, Gioia. Sometimes the Soul: Two Novellas of Sicily. W.W. Norton &
       Company, New York: 1998.

That done, this soul (mildly ironically) is going to bed.