The Fabulous Sage, in full wail at karaoke.

The conventional resumé stuff of my own life is too tedious or painful to discuss, but I'll hit the lights, high and low. After graduating from Hiawatha High School (the Exeter of northeast Kansas) in 1969, I spent two years at K-State. It was then that I took two philosophy courses under the brilliant Dr. Charles Reagan in which I was introduced to such thinkers as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus (in addition to Reagan himself), and began to learn how to think. For a weird series of reasons not worth discussing I ended up graduating with a B.A. in philosophy from Washburn. Then, with unpardonable idiocy, I got a second undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia. I should have pursued a doctorate in intellectual history, but figured out too late that those who can, teach, and those who can't, work.

So I ended up in newspaper journalism, first in Charleston, S.C., with the News and Courier and then with the Dallas Morning News, where for four and a half years I wrote daily editorials and two bylined columns a week (under my actual name, Bradley Miller) on whatever topics I chose. Nice forum but an insane writing load. I then spent several years in Washington, D.C., as manager of editorial services at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Among my roles there were ghostwriting columns and helping to turn policy studies into pieces for newspapers and magazines. Great people, but I'm a libertarian who at this stage leans more left (at least by American standards) than right, and in time I quit to become a freelance writer and editor (usually a euphemism for unemployed bum), which allowed me to work at home in D.C. and be the caregiver for my suddenly widowed mother, who suffered from dementia.

When she required a level of care beyond what I could provide, my sister, who lives in Abilene, and I moved her to a nursing facility in Chapman, and I moved to Manhappiness, where I've lived since 1998. My most notable accomplishment here (putting aside some thrilling karaoke performances) has been Sage, a weekly essay with football picks that I did for nine years. Sage was carried by the Mercury and distributed to sports bars during football season. After football season, I'd return to my soap operas during the day and my nighttime job as sommelier at Fat's. Over the years my essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun Times, the American Scholar, and Rogue Elephant, a weekly essay I did for a couple of years from Washington.

All of which can't help reminding me of one of life's worst tragedies: we can judge others only by what we can perceive, and the most important parts of people - their minds and hearts -- remain mostly imperceptible and even unexpressed. How many, for example, would be defined by their jobs? (Another of Sage's laws: life's two tragedies are unemployment and employment.) By their academic majors? My sense is that most jobs are so tedious and warping that the rest of life is spent trying to escape them and express, or find, one's "real self" elsewhere. It seems to me that most Americans would prefer being defined by the high points they've had in romance, or even on a golf course or fishing trip, than by what they've spent their lives getting paid for in this most workaholic and leisure-deprived of advanced nations.

So, as I look back from the threshold of senility on a life marked chiefly by failure and frustration, conventional and personal, what (aside from omnipotent inertia) has sustained me? Through a life of searching, I've found only two reasons to live: love and beauty ("the art of love and the love of art"), and in both realms my success has mostly been less than I'd hoped. As best I can tell, what has chiefly sustained me is a faith in myself that at bottom is scarcely more rational than the superstitions of religion.

I have no faith in life itself (let alone in an afterlife), and view it as tragic. If life is loathed, it's tragic for that reason; if it's loved, the more tragic its inevitable loss. In that sense, there are no silver linings. In any case, irrational as my faith in me may be, I've been sustained by whatever meager talents I fancy I have. For reasons I'll pass over out of one of life's all too rare blessings, the Fear of Being Boring (FOBB), my passions are more musical than literary, but most of my efforts, such as they've been, have been channeled into writing. If I were able to wail "One Moment in Time" with half Whitney Houston's power and passion, or "I Who Have Nothing" with half of Tom Jones's peerless blend of soul and operatic power, or "Feels Like Forever" with half of Joe Cocker's fusion of tenderness and soul, or even "Gimme Shelter" or "Bitch" half as well as Jagger with his inimitable R&B stylings -- one performance before an appreciative audience might be worth more to me than producing acres of mere configurations of pixels or ink even if I had Shakespearean talent.

I might have the passion but nothing close to the power or talent. I've severely damaged the voice I used to have, and am now reduced in karaoke to relying chiefly on my ineffable beauty. So I echo Woody Allen's "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else." At least writing is better than wailing for developing and imparting ideas, as opposed to expressing emotion, and prose can have its own beauty (pale though it is next to music's). Still, to me ideas are mere means, while music is an end, a magical way to achieve one-moment-in-time eternity. Better to fail at music, perhaps, than succeed at almost anything else. As with true love, no other joys are worth even its pains.

As for my conception of this blog, it's too late in my life to do anything other than write what I'm genuinely moved to write, and to shut up when not moved. I define myself by what I've written and read, and 95 percent of my best stuff consists of unpublished emails to kindred spirits. Save for money, connecting with such spirits is the only reason to write anything besides a private journal. I'm no unreserved apostle of the digital revolution, but in at least one respect blogging is surely a giant leap forward from the conventional journalism of yore, when columns had to appear at regular intervals and fill a pre-set space with, say, 650 words, regardless of whether you could get it said in 200 words, needed 2,000 or indeed had anything at all to say.

There remains humor, especially for those of us who can't plausibly claim to be towers of love or beauty. One of the Walpoles said that life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think. Though it's ultimately tragic for all, without humor even the journey to the ultimate would be unendurable. Finally, I can only hope that on my deathbed I'll feel I've not lived wholly in vain if I've contributed, however modestly, to the destruction of the family and religious values that have made America what she is.
 

Sage, If you are a 69 graduate of Exeter NEK, then you must have know, if only for a couple of years, my old pal, Jack Lofton. He would have been a couple of years younger than you. He lived in Stockton (home of the Andover of Ks), and was my good bud during the grade school years. Yes? No? Ho-hum?

Sorry to be so late getting back to you, Randall -- I'd forgotten about this intro blog. Did not go to Exeter NEK unless that's what I called Hiawatha High in my ramblings above. Jack Lofton does ring a dim bell, but you know what they say about the '60s: if you remember 'em, you weren't there.