Welcome to My Brain

By Dave Fox

My brain is a crowded place these days.

It's like a thrift shop run by an eccentric old man – a room cluttered with dusty photographs and old toys, brown fuzzy coats that were probably never in fashion, and dented lunchboxes with bad drawings of the "Welcome Back Kotter" cast.

When you get too much clutter in life, you need to clean. It's tedious, wondering if you might actually put together that jigsaw puzzle one day if you just let it accumulate another inch of dust in the closet first. Maybe that self-help book you bought at a garage sale in 1992 really does contain the answers to all your problems, and maybe if it sits on the shelf for a few more years, you'll read it. Maybe that brown fuzzy coat will come into style if you keep it long enough; worse things have happened in the fashion world.

This column is my way of weeding – of poking around in my internal maze, and seeing what's there. I'm a packrat. I don't throw much away. So there's a lot of clutter in my brain, but every now and then I find something fun to play with.

I started writing in high school – typical angsty teen poetry about why my community was a superficial mess. I wrote a lot of pretty bad stuff but I didn't care that it was bad. It just felt good to write. In college I was a raving workaholic, writing for the campus paper, attempting to write a travel book, and claiming to have three distinct majors at one point. I sometimes wrote for 20-plus hours in a week. It wasn't healthy, but writing isn't always about being healthy.

Somewhere along the line, I became an adult and halfway calmed down. But I drifted to the opposite extreme, still calling myself a "writer" even though the only writing I did involved composing to-do lists. That's my reason for this website: To jolt myself back into writing down some of the off-the-wall thoughts that jangle through my brain each day.

One of the brilliant things about the Internet is that anyone who feels creative can be read around the globe. One of the disastrous things about the Internet is that anyone who feels creative can be read around the globe. There's a lot of junk floating around in cyberspace. I crash into it myself from time to time when I'm searching for useful information – websites people create with pictures of their ugly two-year-olds ("Isn't he just ADOREABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!"), lists of their favorite movies, and webcams from their kitchens. Like anybody cares. I want to e-mail these people and tell them to get a life. Then I realize I've just spent 20 minutes of my own life clicking through their websites, and I worry about myself.

Personal websites can be embarrassingly self-absorbed. I'm doing my best to avoid this. All art is driven by ego though. If writers didn't care what other people thought, if they didn't think their writing was worth reading, nobody would ever publish anything. We would also have no paintings, no music, and (eek!) no reality TV. I hope I can manage to feed my ego in ways others find entertaining. I hope you'll enjoy sifting through the small portion of clutter in my brain that I'm choosing to expose. I hope you'll find something useful, or fun, or at least helpful in your momentary quest to procrastinate.

The site is divided into several parts. Dave's Words includes this column, which I hope to upload on the first of each month, and travel and humor articles I have written. Lost in the World is my travel area. I lead tours overseas each summer. This is where you can read my reports from the road. Stuff I'll Do for Money highlights my freelance services in writing and editing, word coaching, public speaking, and Norwegian translation. Dave's Photos should be self-explanatory, except that if you are logging on during my Grand Cyberopening on April Fool's Day, 2001, you'll wonder why there are no photos. I'll develop this area in the summer, when I'm home for the tour season, with more time and sanity than I have right now.

April Fool's Day seemed as good a day as any to launch this site. I haven't yet had time to format all the articles I'd like to put online. So check back periodically and see how it grows.

In the meantime, welcome to my brain. Grab a beer or a cup of ginger tea, be careful not to spill on your keyboard, and sit for a spell.