So We Meet Again for the First Time
- Post By: Jason Santo
- Date:
- Category: life
The first time I wrote a blog was in 2000. Blogger was in its infancy, well before being swept up under Google’s brand, and I was still fairly convinced my future was in filmmaking. Like this blog, there was a self-taken shot set as the blog’s background: an image of a Canon XL-1 video camera held across my chest like a shield, sketch filtered and made monochrome blue by some now-defunct Adobe photo editing suite for newbies.
Now there’s this image as a background. Weary Metro riders heading home after a long day of work in Washington DC. I am not a photographer – my gift was creating art within a frame where everything was in motion. But this setting caught me and I produced my camera to save it for posterity.
It’s not because it’s a favorite shot that it sits behind these words. Rather, it’s because the shot means transition to me and I am in transition.
Who isn’t, right? We’re all changing, transforming, learning every day, are we not? Yes and no. A lot of folks like to believe that what they believe is a constant. That “flip-flopping” is for losers and a mind set in stone is a force of nature, immune to the erosion of emotion, sympathy or common sense. I’m cut from a different kind of cloth. Yes, I’ve got some pretty firm beliefs about things – a few even worth dying for, God forbid it ever comes to that. But I’m fairly malleable, open to most any viewpoint as long as it isn’t based on hate.
This openness puts me in transition. Each day, week, month I live, I learn. And I want to talk about that. Candidly.
2011. It’s been eleven years since I last maintained a blog of this kind, minus a little MySpacing back in the mid-aughts, but who the Hell counts MySpace? We can all laugh now about it, right?
I suppose the one thing you really need to know before digging in here and getting comfortable is that I’m not going to pull any punches. While I do still record my most candid ruminations in a handwritten journal, being obtuse isn’t my game and never will be. In 2000, I stopped writing my blog because I’d offended a few friends with my candor and I regret that a bit. It made me gun-shy for a lot of years about vocalizing what I really think about certain things, but even more importantly, it made me gun-shy about just being, well, me.
So if you’re reading this, you’ve been invited to do so with the hope that you’ll be comfortable with honesty, frank subject matter, and some pretty descriptive profanity. And even more importantly, you’ll find something entertaining or even useful by reading what I need to say, expressing art in whatever form I must, and documenting a life always in transition.