No really. What am I doing here? It’s a question I ask myself every single day. It’s a question I think we all ask ourselves every single day. I am 52 years old. I don’t know how the hell that happened, but here we are. I have to tell you all that while I have been struggling for my entire life to figure out the answer to the first, very existential question, I have been also been struggling for at least 10 years to figure out exactly what this blog is doing here. What, pray tell, should it be about?

What I wanted, at the beginning, was simple … I wanted this space to be a resource to anyone newly arrived in North Carolina (central North Carolina to be specific), because having moved here myself from a foreign land (Maryland) 24 years ago, I wanted everyone else to know precisely what they were getting into.

But … in the beginning, I wasn’t always in the happiest of places and, knowing people I knew actually read this thing from time to time, I became paralyzed by the fear that I would offend someone. My posts never seemed quite right. Too bitter, too mean, too stupid, too negative. I reworked my posts, played with the horrible WordPress design templates, studied other blogs, deleted posts, changed pictures. None of that was really working for me so … I stopped. For a long time, I stopped. All the while, I continued paying a nominal fee every year to ensure the internets didn’t release my idea into the oblivion. I guess, despite me being the do-over queen, I couldn’t scrap this completely. I held on.

And here I am, at 52, and I realize I still have so much to say, along with a lot of unrealized potential (that may never realize itself even after deciding to write but certainly won’t realize itself if I never write) so fuck it.

Read on, people. Love it. Hate it. Decide I’m a monster, or weird, or sad, or normal. Decide my writing sucks. Or is brilliant. Mock my typos or grammatical errors that I will eventually correct (because I’m not stupid, just hasty). I will plug on because it has come to my attention that many of the world’s great (and not so great) artists were tortured souls. I am a tortured soul. Maybe something I say will resonate with someone despite or because of it. And isn’t that why creators create? Yes, I think it is. Enjoy.

— SL