An Official Introduction To The Blogosphere

Hello. My name is Apparition Jones. The name, which I’ve gone by for years now on the internet, was given to me one night in a cloudy haze of revelry by a close friend, and has stuck. I’m a writer, a father and husband, an office worker, a performer, a musician, and an all around stand up guy. Who does not lack for modesty.

As a younger man, I was certainly modest, to a fault. I was obsessed with being the nice guy, the good guy, the person everybody liked and the person who could always be relied on to do the right thing. Right. Now, this isn’t to say that I’m any kind of bad now. I hold down a comfortable job with a comfortable company. I play Transformers with my son. I console my infant daughter in her fits of colic-induced outrage. I try to provide for the family: money, heart, happiness, whatever it takes. I’m 34 years old. And this is what gets me.

When you’re young, really young but not a child (past the dog eyed wonder of the intellect’s infancy), you start to get these ideas. You start to think about what you can do to let the whole world know that you’re there. You start to think about your own mythology. Forgive the parlance of academia here. What I’m saying is true, whether you’re using the 75 cent words or cashing in your nickels.

You go out into the night and you drink liters of cheap wine, cases of beer, shot on shot of liquor. Maybe one night you have too much even for your own bacchanalian standards, and you tear off your clothes in the middle of an unnamed street in the middle of nowhere and you scream out to the world that you exist. Maybe you challenge God himself. You take up with strange people, anyone who will add a new story to your life. Pagans and priests, the homeless, the privileged, gypsies, transients, good girls, bad boys, anything and anyone who can show you how they live, where they come from, who they are. You do these things to find out who you are.

And therein lies the real bitch of the whole thing. When you do finally find yourself, when you realize that you’re a relatively normal, well adjusted nobody from middle class Middle America, you look back on all these crazy fuckers, and you really start to long for them. But that’s the trick. You long for them because they’re a part of this mythology you created for yourself. You long for them because you’ve created a pantheon in your mind, and these crazy, crazy people are all your own little gods.

You convince yourself of their immortality, and you hope and you pray out loud that you meet them again, that they can remind you of who you really are.

This is what it means to long for your friends.
This is what it means to be a titan of good times.
This is what it means to be torn between who you are and who you were.

So this is where I’m at, as I reboot my name in the blogosphere. I spend my days in corporate America, my nights entertaining and consoling my family, and every free minute I have still chasing down that pantheon of little gods in my mind, now fully mythologized. And if you’re reading this, where are you? Have you acquiesced to the comfort of a shallow grave, or are you reaching, always reaching, for ascension?