The reason I kept this blog secret for a while was twofold. On the one hand, “blogging” is a good example of the formal right to free speech – everyone has the right to speak but they don’t have the right to have anyone listen. Thus, the purest actualization of the blog is the blog that not a single person reads. The other reason is that in the past I’ve started blogs and found them too much work to keep up. The hope for this blog, the hope it might be different, is that it has absolutely no polemic goals.
I take this claim seriously – this is not the blog “so you can keep track of my antics while I’m in X”, and it’s not a blog on any particular topic. It is not a blog to be of interest to the humans. If any of you read it, that is contingent and fleeting. The purpose of the exercise is simply to write things down, as if in a notebook. It is an exercise in public writing, however, because the standard of comprehensibility is universal (anyone should be able to understand).
A “theme” of the blog, if it has one, will be “beginning”. “Beginning” because this is what writing is, beginning over and over again. Re-beginning. Beginning is repeated in every entry, every entry has a “first word”. But this theme is contingent, one could as easily say writing is “continuity” and you never “merely begin” but always add to a pre-existent narrative. However, when one opposes beginning to continuation, one fails to grasp what is essential about both.
Only a Northern Song 
What makes me a ‘nefarious public servant?’
I would rather not be linked to on such terms, as it is best practice to keep any sites I run as separate as possible from the work I do.