Please allow me to introduce myself . . .

I'm a man of no wealth and little taste, to paraphrase the bard of wherever he's from, Mick Jagger.

My day job (well, more accurately, early afternoon/evening job) is medical transcription:  I transcribe medical reports dictated (spoken) by doctors and others (nurses, social workers, et al) who live and work a thousand miles away from me, in a place I've never been and to which I likely never will go, which is kinda weird, when I think about it, and NOT, at the same time--I number among my Flickr friends and Facebook acquaintances many people who live and work multiple thousands of miles away from me, in places I've never been and to which I likely never will go.

Physically, I live out in the country, 9 miles from the nearest tiny town, 18 miles from a town somewhat larger, yet probably not quite qualifying as a "city," no matter what it calls itself and no matter that the local university has a nationally known (among universities of a certain size, that is) football team.  I'm dead smack in the middle of what people on the coasts like to call the "flyover zone," and I like it here--keep right on flying over, thank you very much.  When the light hits them just right and the sky is blue enough, the contrails of your jets are wayyyyy cool!

Somewhat surprisingly, I don't miss living in the "big town" ("still hayseed enough to say, hey, look who's living in the big town!"  Thank you, Mr. Mellencamp).  Sometimes I wish I could get a pizza delivered, or Chinese, and sometimes I wish there were someplace I could go to walk where there were actually other people to gawk at and wonder about, try to imagine the lives of, but those wishes come less and less frequently with every sunrise I view from my front porch, in the company of my dogs and cats, especially when I've accidentally made a good cup of coffee and it is steaming in my hand.

I haven't figured out yet what this blog is going to be "about."  When I first set out to do it, I had a pretty clear idea (well, for me it was clear):  The "Occupy Wall Street" movement, or whatever it is, had set me off on a soul-searching meander through my working past and working present, and determined me to turn on my inner rant--and we all have "inner rants"--let "my voice be heard," etc.  We all want our voices to be heard, right?

But then it occurred to me that my ranting voice, while valid and all that, is not my only voice, or even my main voice.

While there would be no shame or embarrassment, or whatever, in being defined by my ranting voice, neither would I want it to define "me," any more than I want to or can be defined, as a person, by the job I do.  My ranting voice is part of me, my job is part of me, but neither one is "all" of me.

So I've decided that,  yes, I will rant sometimes (eloquently, I hope, but at least with all the words spelled right), but other times I will talk about dogs and cats and wayward possums and maybe the occasional bald eagle.  My job, my status as a worker in a decidedly worker-unfriendly age, is a part of my life, but the other stuff--the dogs and cats and possums and eagles--is what fleshes it out, what makes life matter to me.  The "other stuff" is my life; work is just a helpful way to structure my day (and pay the mortgage, of course).

The Habit of Seeing

There is a certain freedom that comes to you when you both realize and acknowledge that your life will never be fodder for a "reality" show, that you are distressingly normal and undoubtedly never will become a rich reality star or even a Kardashian (what IS a "Kardashian," anyway?  Is that from "Star Wars," one of the prequels?  Certainly it sounds like a creature that would drive Captain Kirk or Spock or Deanna Troi to distraction).

The realization/acknowledgement, conversely, gives one freedom to blog.  Like those people out in Arizona or wherever who doggedly send radio signals randomly out into space, in the mostly forlorn hope that someday the signals will be heard by an alien culture that doesn't want to turn them into food, and might even message back, you can sit down, write words, and send them out into the ether, then come back and do the same thing tomorrow.  Of such are our tomorrows made, right?

I'm a newbie to this whole blog thing, and had a hard time even coming up with a title.  My first choice, "The Habit of Seeing," was already owned by somebody.  (Which is irritating because it would have been perfect for me, damn it!  It's a play on my photography hobby and on a book by Flannery O'Connor, "The Habit of Being," which really was just a collection of letters she had written over several decades.  Read that book and you feel you come to know her, which is a trick.)

The title I eventually settled on--"Slow Change, Troubles and Doubts," comes from an old song by Simple Minds (which aptly describes me, albeit in the singular form), "Don't You Forget About Me."  "Slow change" was part of one line, "troubles and doubts" part of another.  I've always loved the song, and figured that my mixing-and-matching lyrics, chances are no one else would have come up with that particular combination before.  It also works for me because I'm slow to change, and have ALWAYS been about "troubles and doubts," it's what I do best.

(It's so weird calling that song "old," by the way--I still hear it on the radio from time to time, but it dates from the early 1980s.  Which makes it old, but new at the same time.)

Thought briefly about calling the blog "Ritalin," for more or less the same reason Simon and Garfunkle, or Simon, anyway, named a song "Kodachrome"--"don't take my Kodachrome away."  I could sing the same about Ritalin, if I were actually on it (probably should be).

To get back to "the habit of seeing," I occasionally take pictures, and likely will post some of them here.  Carrying a camera around, with the intent of actually using it, forces you to develop the "habit of seeing."  Among all the habits I have, and all the habits I could name, that might be the only one worth any kind of while.

Once I get through this introduction stuff, I'll actually get down to blogging.