Welcome!

Hello future loyal readers!!

A bit of introduction to this blog. I'm writing this for a lot of reasons. First, I'm living in Proctor, Arkansas right now. In case you were wondering, Proctor is incredibly flat. So flat that you could watch your dog run away for two days, and write a song about him before he went over the horizon. In addition to Proctor's simply ravishing topographical features, theres another issue. I have lived here for three and a half months now, and I don't know if Proctor is a town. To be more clear, I have not witnessed an old-south style square with a courthouse, and bookstore, and malt-shop (did I just use the phrase "malt-shop?"), and small scale compounding pharmacy. There is a post office about three minutes away from my trailer, which my sister, Josie refuses to call a trailer, and insists upon calling it the cabin. I love her anyway. But, as far as I can ascertain, Proctor is inhabited by roughly 200 people, and many thousands of acres of the richest agricultural land in these fifty states. Seriously, you can grow the crap out of anything here as long as it isn't coffee, coconuts, or pineapple.

Why am I residing in such a flat, agriculturally rich, non-populous area of the American south, you ask?? Small scale organic farming. I could get into why I think that the small scale farm is the way of the future right now, but we have plenty of time for that later. The point is, I'm here to learn how to make things grow, whether those things are okra plants, lettuces, beets, cows, chickens, or pigs. And if you want to, you can listen to me ramble about all of these things and more. Here in my own little corner of the blogosphere. I just used the word 'blogosphere.' Oh no. I need not to do that.

I'll also be talking about things that interest me on a daily basis. These can be projects like taking care of my backyard chickens, or making wood carvings, or cooking, or growing facial hair, or smoking cigars, or motorcycles. I'm incredibly obsessed with motorcycles at the moment even though I don't own one. I really really want to though. This is normal for me. I go through cycles of really wanting a motorcycle, and then I get worried about the dangers of motorcycling, blah blah blah, and ultimately decide I won't ever get a motorcycle. Then it all starts over again. Complete with watching hundreds of crash videos (partly to get a real idea of the risk, and partly to learn from the mistakes of others)  The thing is, the more I research riding a motorcycle, the more I learn that a lot of stupid people, or people who aren't riding vigilantly make things seem more dangerous than they actually are. It seems like most of the time I'm on the highway, or driving through the city, I see some young guy about my age riding around on an ultra high performance bike in a t-shirt, some lightweight jeans, and a baseball cap. Don't get me wrong, he has the right to expose himself to whatever level of risk he wants to, but I can't be convinced that a great deal of motorcycle fatalities are guys like this who don't have any amount of respect for the machinery they have in their command. If they had been wearing proper gear, I suspect mortality rates among motorcyclists would be substantially lower.

Then, there are other statistics floating around. Nearly half of all deaths in 2007 involving a motorcycle and another vehicle precipitated out of conditions in which a left turning vehicle did not see an oncoming motorcyclist and give him/her the right of way. The way it seems to me, if you are extra, extra, extra vigilant about approaching intersections, you negate quite a bit of risk (almost half) when it comes to two vehicle collisions. Of the one vehicle collisions that resulted in a motorcyclist fatality, 48% were speeding, and 42% had a BAC over 0.08%. Don't drink before you ride, and don't speed. That's another huge chunk taken out of your risk factors. Also, if you wear a helmet, you are 40% less likely to die in a motorcycle accident.

Don't get me wrong. Driving a motorcycle is dangerous. But, if you keep your head on your shoulders, wear protective gear, and don't drive after you've been drinking, it could turn into a relatively safe-ish hobby in comparison the the bad rap I think it gets. It's all risk mitigation. And, for my purposes, waffling in between wanting to get one and not wanting to get one, I should put my worries aside for now. Because when you worry, you pay interest on a debt you don't owe.

Long story short, I think I might have an itch that I can't cure until I get one. Sorry Mom.

I'll leave you all with a pretty amazing Alan Watts video/speech I found not too long ago. Hopefully it works. I don't fully understand how to work this blog thing yet. But if it works, please try and watch it. It takes 3 minutes, and might change the way you look at your life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN64kLei0Ac