The Secret To Creativity is Knowing How to Hide Your Sources (To Steal a Quote About Stealing Quotes from a Guy Who Stole it From Another Guy)

“Where do we begin? […] We begin by beginning, I guess.”
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Unfortunately, beginning is more difficult than Bradbury‘s quote conveys. Pondering the various options I had to start this blog, I considered several options: opening with a bit about myself and the blog; letting my first post be like I plan all my other ones to be; or even starting with a simple, “Hi. This is the first post of my new blog, ‘Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman.’”

However, I think I’ve finally come up with a good introduction for this blog. I’ve decided how to make my first post pack a real punch.

The words you’re about to read have been carefully planned. Each one has had much though put into it. I hope it will show my virtuosity and intense devotion to writing.

“How will you do that?” you might ask. Well, quite simply, really. This post will rip-off beginnings that people much better than I made (I never said the thought going into the words was mine.) Then I’ll probably indulge in some self-depreciation, boring everybody with a lack of wit. But enough of that, and onto the words of masters. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not let better authors do all my work for me?

So, here you go:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [Crap, there’s no way I can top that!]” - the Bible

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
-J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

“After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world.”
-Winston Churchill’s Gathering Storm

“‘The Bwiti [I.e. African tribe that believes iboga, a plant, has mystical properties] believe that before the ceremony, the neophyte is nothing,’ Daniel Lieberman told me on my first morning in Gabon, as we took a cab from the Libreville airport.
‘It is only through the initiation that you become something.’
‘What do you become?’ I asked.
‘You become a baanzi. One who knows the other world, because you have seen it with your own eyes.’
‘What do the Bwiti think of iboga?’ I asked. Lieberman barely hesitated.
‘For them, iboga is a super-conscious entity that guides mankind,’ he said.
‘Okay.’”
-Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head

“Ten miles outside the city screaming begins in earnest. Quiet at first, like a commotion heard in another room, it grows steadily louder with each step. Screaming. The monkeys screaming. Rattling the bars, hammering the wire mesh, playing their cages like tuneless instruments. And the smell, God! the stink of the city. Huge and sick. Coughing up its guts, voiding its bowels into the rivers, into the seas. The smell of people squeezed together like grapes in a press. The sour bouquet of sweat of all the tiny lives that go unnoticed in the belly of the monster. He had forgotten just how bad it could be. Gritting his teeth against the pain that pounds the walls of his skull, the Beast wipes blood from his nose. If only the noise would stop… the terrible noise… an orchestra of cages… a heedful of screaming monkeys… Why did we ever come down? Why did we come down out of the trees?”
-Grant Morrison’s Animal Man Issue 1

It’s a funny thing about beginnings. Some of them really set the mood, some of them foreshadow everything to come, and some grab you by the throat and refuse to let go. This post probably hasn’t done any of those things.

Then again, perhaps comparing my blog to the Bible was unfair. No one‘s turning into a pillar of salt on my watch.

Oh, and I hopefully won’t turn into a hermit after writing from the viewpoint of an emo, so Catcher in the Rye is out of the question.

There’s also a good chance my words won’t be remembered generations from now as a call against tyranny and a warning against a deranged madman. (I mean, Schwarzenegger isn’t that bad.)

Oh, and I’ve also never messed with intoxicants of any kind, despite people’s predisposition to think so upon meeting me. So I guess the likelihood of me discovering that God exists and it’s a plant is pretty slim.

Finally, though I do wish I could go on insane meta-fictional romps through the DC universe, that’s probably got only a 40% chance of happening.

So you’re stuck with me: an average, not-so-interesting teenager.

Guess it’s better than writing about emos…