I have spent my life trying to appear as badarse & reckless as possible but in all honesty, writing my first blog ever right now and having no idea how it will appear online, with no control over the aesthetics and design scares me more than just about anything. Although I'm sure that sounds less than hardcore, I assure you jumping forty feet on my snowboard is fine by me... But deciding on a title and subject for my first one of these feels like a thousand knives of icy doubt waiting to do their stabby best. Clearly, the biggest variable for us sitting behind a computer typing anonymous thoughts into our chosen online portal is that anyone can then judge (or mis-judge) us based on a few badly chosen words. However as scary as that thought is to me, the older I get the more I realise how important these mis-judgements are to the development of my character. It is with shaking hands then, that I pat each one of these unfashionable yet grammatically correct sentences on the head and usher them out the door to an unknown world, full of people with far more time and harsh criticism than they are used to in my small circle of supportive, if not partially retarded friends and co-workers. I don't expect anyone reading this to give two hoots about me or my thoughts and therein lies the attraction. The idea that we now have the ability to throw all our proverbial shit onto a wall the size of the milky way and quickly realise it smells just like everyone else's is astounding, frightening... and yet oh so comforting. I guess I can always hope the server crashes and this message never quite makes it... Then I will get to go through the exquisite agony of trying to remember what I wrote, being absolutely certain it was the best thing I had ever typed, then slowly realising it was just the first draft of something far smarter and poignant. Ah well, here goes...