This is the first day. This is today. I’ve been sitting on this site for a while, not willing to start. I’m not sure why, but today is the day.

So here I am — I’m at work, on my lunch hour, sitting in front of my Dell. I’m 40. I’m reasonably happy. My wife is a poet and an English professor, and my 5-year-old is a prop comic. My dog is a German Shorthair of immense loyalty and an iconoclastic nature. It’s been raining. I just remodeled my basement by myself. I enjoy a beer in the evening. My heroes at the moment and in no particular order are George Orwell, Johnny Cash, George Eliot, Matt Groening, John Lennon, Billy Wilder, Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames and Stanley Kubrick.

Yes, Jane Austen.

Like my dog, I have no fear of being labeled.

The daunting part here is deciding where to begin. The dimensions of hyperspace are such that I could, as some do, try to put my whole life out here. Transfer my personality onto the network, as it were. But that does seem like just a bit too much work.

The accepted idea is to offer something of value, thus generating traffic to my humble spot on the web and a measure of fame for the Iconoclastic Dog. I’ve enjoyed personal sites devoted to mullet spotting, 70s design nightmares and the fascinating world of mesh caps. They get themselves on Yahoo Picks, generate real traffic, then of course try to sell ad space. But that  approach seems a bit too mercantile for me. To be honest, I don’t really care if anyone visits the site.  And to be brutally honest, I don’t really have an abiding interest in anything in particular, unless you count living.

That would seem to be a real stumbling block to a web spinner, this lack of interest in all things temporal and physical. But it’s true, and maybe it should guide my approach. I am a huge fan of books, music and art of all kinds, as the buttons up there should attest. But that’s not a “niche,” is it? That’s not something unique for the Internet consumer to consume. I’ll bet you like books, music and art too.

Maybe I’ll just do a topic for the day. This day, of course, is the fist day, so it doesn’t count. Just getting comfortable.

So I’ll think about it. I have a lot to build here. I’m going to log it all — the hopes, the dreams, the laughter and yes, the tears — but also I want to build the Books and Music sites just for me. This will be nothing grander than a catalogue of what I like. But I just think it will be fun to get it all together. There it will be, all in one place, a museum of greatness according to my taste.

And no one to tell me how it should be done.