Meet the press.

My name is Pojo.

Or at least, that's what I keep telling myself. In reality, my name is Brian - which stands for strength and nobility, according to the baby book. Pojo is the name for the Internet persona I have developed - it also stands for those things, but in a somewhat more symbolic manner. It is at the basest level the name assigned to a fire-breathing chicken from an ancient arcade game, but I would not have kept it so long had I not assigned more meaning to it than that. My handle is generally LocoPojo, but things have settled a bit and I no longer aspire to the claim of insanity.

I am a writer - and again, these things I say to comfort myself. In 21 years of living (nearly 22, now), the grand total of works I am proud enough to call my own amounts to a mere fifty something in poems and short tales - of those, I have sold and published none. Still, words have been my friend since childhood, and while of late we have sometimes been estranged there is not a day that goes by in which I do not think about or physically attempt to place my thoughts into text. There are stories still lingering in my head that I have been drafting since middle school, and now in my junior year of college they are still hanging around, though the text of them has changed somewhat. For all my love of speech and debate I find I communicate best, and sometimes only, in the written word.

This is my third weblog. My first, somewhat unofficial blog started in the year after Blizzard's WarCraft III was released, and consisted of a collection of humorous articles on the game written by myself as an adolescent to my first ever active audience. They're as mist now, but a few crucial pieces remain, comedic stories of no relation to the game at all.

My second blog was and is a LiveJournal, and contains the larger part of my life in diary format, but recent events have led me to believe that starting anew may well be an appropriate course of action. The company has been bought by someone new, and their actions towards their users have been somewhat unpleasant as of late, though my initial sources of information on the subject appear to have been greatly exaggerated. In the course of the next few weeks I will quietly back up every scrap of information I own on that site somewhere tidy, and if the abuse continues or deepens I will resign the account. I view the Internet as a system of information that aspires to something loftier than the shenanigans this new company is pursuing. We'll extend on that theme later, my promise to you.

In any event, starting afresh is a grand thing to do. The labors of my past efforts at journaling have been filled with frivolities and short, near incoherent ramblings about the world around me, which in my opinion has never been the point of blogging but rather an effective way to waste time. Coupled with that was a general fear and aversion towards really exploring my thoughts in detail, despite the fact that writing is invariably how I think. And the thing I wanted to do the most with it - to practice writing - I don't know if it really amounts to good practice anymore.

So this is my goal for this blog: to create a meaningful, substantive work of nonfiction, a diary open to the world (should the world care to take a glance) that details not the events of my life, but the images and ideas I extract from those events. A profile, in the truest sense of the word, both personal and public - written as something that I would want to read were I someone else, containing thoughts that I would normally never attempt to unveil to another person. For now it is a secret, but in time I will link it to those that I trust - or they and the general public will find it on their own. My life is an open book, tucked away in a dusty attic amidst a thousand others. Whether you knew exactly where to look or you found it by purest chance:

I hope you enjoy the read.

-Pojo