So, it seems that with my gallery comes the option of a journal. Or a blog, if we’re not being sophisticated. I have to admit right off: I’ve never liked the word "blog", or 90% of the "personal" ones I’ve ever read, so I feel a little dirty to suddenly find myself among their authors. Entirely of my own volition, as you might well point out, dear reader (if you actually existed. I know nobody is really seeing this). So, since dA certainly isn’t making me fill this in, why add my own drivel to the global cess-pool? Well, the short answer to that is ego.

The long answer has to do with several things: loving the sound of my own voice (or look of my own type, or whatever), seeking practice for some ill-defined future career and, not least, that tingly little sense of excitement you get from realising that this is your space. You can write things here and (improbably, but potentially) other people can read them. And, presumably, become better people for it. Or at least shower you with praise and possibly money, validating your squalid existence in the process. That’s why most of us have galleries here, right?

The truth is I feel a little like the buyer of a brand new house, confidently throwing open the front door to stride proprietorially through it, look proudly around and take a deep, satisfied breath. It’s a beautiful day - the garden outside is dotted with butterflies; the scent of newly mown grass drifts in through the curtainless windows; there’s not a cloud in the sky. The air is heady with the potential of things to come.

And yet, were you to step outside onto the freshly laid tarmac of the new housing estate, your gaze would travel over dozens of homes identical to the one I entertain such naïve hopes of. Allow the mind’s eye to drift outwards, and my new house vanishes hopelessly into the infinity of dwellings, themselves only a minute patch in the rich quilt of the Earth’s surface, itself a mere speck in an uncaring universe.

Likewise this blog: a single wave on the ocean of the blogosphere, a tiny thread in the great web of consciousness, an insignificant blip in cyberspace. Invisible, inconsequential, overlooked.

But hey, it’s home.