An introduction to Joe.

For those who don't know me or for the rest of you who've been in the dark about the more recent transformations in my life, I am saying a few words. I mean "few words" literally, as my life has little of interest to offer and I want to spare you all the stultifying boredom of having to listen to the trite, if not downright dismally depressing, details of my life. I am living in California, in Danville (in the bay area) to be exact. But that particular kernel of insight into my present status is soon to be obsolete. I'll be leaving within the month, if I live that long. I'll be registering for classes in New York in just over a month, going to Suny Stony Brook to study philosophy. Sadly, it's another MA for me. Maybe someday someone will be duped into overestimating my pathetic intelligence and allowing me to steal into the hallowed halls of academia and pursue, oh dream upon dreams, my PhD and allow me to begin, hope upon hope, my path toward professorship that I have long had in mind. I don't currently have a place to live in New York, but I'll be searching for one once I arrive. Most of my classes will be in Manhattan, so I'll be searching for something nearer to there. Once there I'll see if I am any closer to some of those old friends that I left behind at Goucher so long ago, back when I was but a bright-eyed child with foolish dreams of settling down in a mind-numbing job, in a crumbling suburb, with a nagging, perpetually pregnant wife and a gigantic television to tear me away from the agonies of my life for those precious hours that I could spend close beside it, resisting the constant urge to reach out and wrap my arms around as much of its gigantic girth as possible. But now I realize that it is vain to dream of so much, especially with the overpowering disappointments that have already accumulated in the short years since that time. I'm hoping I can find some comfortable, rotting apartment on long island where the rats and cockroaches engage in continuous territorial warfare in my living room floor over puddles fed by over a dozen consistent drips from the ceiling which I can just barely shut out at night by clamping my pillow tightly over my head. But I'm afraid with the little amount of money I have, I won't be able even to afford that.

As should be quite obvious from the content of my post so far, I'm a very well-contented person with little to complain about in my life beyond the myriad misfortune which impinge in the seemingly endless time between my almost nonexistent hours, nay but minutes, of sleep and dream. If it weren't for an imagination bubbling over like a large boiling pot in which one has placed to many dried noodles, I might even get a little down sometimes. Forgive the food metaphor, but its been such a long time since I can remember having a meal anymore filling than what I can collect with a long sticky wire from the ant colony nearby where I sleep on alternate Thursdays. To all of you who I haven't spoken to in so long, my fondest greetings. And to the rest of you, I hope we can get better acquainted in the future.