Faux FAQ

Answers to Questions that would be Frequently Asked If Anyone Actually Cared (Which, Just For The Sake Of Clarity, They Almost Certainly Do Not)

Q: Is this going to be another rambling, self-aggrandizing exercises in pretending that there is a greater significance in your existence and activities than is strictly warranted under the circumstances?
A: Yes

Q: What is this blog “about”?
A: Nominally, a one year sabbatical following a San Francisco family of four as they wend their way to Paris and what happens there. The cast includes a guitar-playing, recovering entrepreneur, rehabilitating himself by recapitulating his many business sins to impressionable etudients at INSEAD; a hard-skiing, recovering Accenture assoc. partner-cum-mom rehabilitating herself by becoming a French wine expert; plus two mono-lingual male progeny, post diapers, pre-teen terrors.

Q: Why are you writing this?
A: Blogs are a simultaneous exercise in laziness and self-deceit. Laziness, because if I had something truly interesting to say, I would take the time to write it down well enough to get it published. Self-deceit, because despite the fact that I have not taken the time to either think of something truly interesting or to express it well in writing, I still cherish the illusion that someone will care to read it. Also, our parents want pictures of the grandkids.

Q: What warranties, limited and otherwise, are you prepared to make to your readers?
A: I solemnly vow and aver, that I will use reasonable commercial efforts to make this blog entertaining, provided you have a sense of humor in a permanently arrested state of development circa Animal House and This is Spinal Tap.

Q: What is wrong with everyone?
A: Loss of context, of identification with shared goals and common goods. Increasing fragmentation into mutually hostile factions with no interest or even language for finding the shrinking middle ground. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” One of many symptoms of this loss of context is the widespread desire to create a purely personal context and share it with total strangers as an examplar of the “right” way to think about things – otherwise known as a blog.

Q: What are your influences?
A: Well, let’s see. Bach, definitely (Ich Habe Genug, Goldberg variations), then the bible (psalms, John), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), Yeats (The Magi), Melville, Ian Tyson (Four Strong Winds), Emmylou Harris (Red Dirt Girl). Also, more humblingly, The Partridge Family (first album bought with my own money), that awful Mark Spitz Olympic medal swimming poster (also the Farah Fawcette one if the full truth must be disclosed), pretty much any trashy science fiction novel and Hellspawn comic books.