This is the first official post of my new website, and I’ve written it six times. It’s taken six drafts because I have a great deal to say and also have no idea what to say. The drafts have ranged from serious to hilarious to blasphemous to reverent. I can be all of these things, and more, but none of these tones convey what I truly want to tell you here and now, at the beginning.

This website is about truth – but not absolute truth – because no man is capable of such a thing. No, my truth is as subjective as anyone else’s. So I make only one simple promise: If it is written here, you have my oath that I believe it to be true. There will be no omissions, no sugar coating, no lying. Even the fiction will be true in that I will not edit it for marketing, demographics, political correctness, or because I worry what my grandma will think when she reads it.

Reading the poetry and prose on this website will be the next best thing to sitting beside me in my living room while we drink beers and ponder the mysteries of life and the cosmos, with the occasional fart joke thrown in for good measure.

I make this promise, knowing that at times it will be difficult to keep, and occasionally I will pay a price for my candor. But I’ve tried writing the other way – through self-imposed filters and censors. It doesn’t work. I must be me. I must be true to myself. I must be faithful to the words. This website is me, and I will not apologize for single word written here, because apologizing for such would be the same thing as apologizing for being me.As I sit here, wondering how I should end this introduction, I think back to a concert I saw in 1999, down at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. Bible thumpers had protested the evil rock’n’roll show all the preceding day and night, and every lead singer of every band had something to say about it. Some of them bitched through their entire set to the point where I was ready to throw a Bible at them just to make them shut up and sing the songs I had paid to hear.

Everlast played his entire set without saying a word. After they finished their final song, he said, “I’m Everlast, and this is my band, the White Folks. We did our thing, and now we’re done. If you didn’t get it, then it wasn’t for you.”

I've remembered his words all these years because I respect the message. I’m doing my thing and not worrying about the people who don’t understand it or agree with it. For those of you who do get it and do like it – stay tuned – because we’re at the ground floor, and there’s nowhere to go but up.