Reporting Live From Outside The Box...

When I worked as a gonzo journalist for an online magazine called The Monarch Review, my first article was entitled Here And Now: A Night At The Josephine.

It wasn't written very well, at least not according to my current standards. But I was convinced at the time that it was brilliant, and at the end of the article, I quoted Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston (Esquire) as saying "The best place to be is here-" "And the best time to be is now."

But I'm no longer convinced that that's the case.

In a different blog, I wrote about some of the events and experiences that led to my working at The Monarch, moving to Portland (Oregon), and ultimately to the genesis of my novel. And because of the way that blog was designed, I was able to write and organize entries in whatever order I chose. So (although entries were written in random order), I chose to organize the events they described chronologically, telling a story that should be read from top to bottom.

I knew ahead of time that Wix worked differently because I knew that its blogging platform was designed with hard-coded publication dates. And that although I probably wouldn't be able to write and later reorganize entries in the order of my choosing, I took it for granted that entries would at least be displayed according to their publication dates, with the first entry displayed at the top and the last entry at the bottom. Which meant that as long as I planned ahead and wrote them in chronological order, they'd be read in the order of my planning. But I was shocked to discover that Wix places the latest entry at the top, because that meant that when people visited my blog, they'd be presented with the last entry first.

To put that into perspective, imagine opening a book and finding the last chapter in the front. Sure, you could read the last chapter first, but then you'd have no idea what events led to it, and therefore no idea who any of the characters were or why the ending mattered. So if you wanted to find out, you'd have to turn to the back of the book and read the whole story from back to front.

And to bring things back to my perspective, imagine how shocked I was when I started looking at other people's blogs, realizing for the first time that on WordPress, Blogger, Squarespace, Tumbler, Medium Review, and every other platform, ALL BLOGS ARE BACKWARDS. Even when I look at my old articles in The Monarch, the last article is at the top of the list, the first is at the bottom, and every other news outlet organizes their articles in the same way.

Why?

Because we live in the present tense and are therefore living under the very natural impression that the most important thing in our lives is what's happening right now.

I'll concede that news happens now, and that if you've been following a traditional blog for a long time, it makes perfect sense to want instant access to the latest news from that blogger. But this and my other blogs aren't meant to be traditional. Each one was conceived of in advance as an individual, sequential installment in a larger story. And the colossal irony is that the finished story was always meant to be read backwards.

When I designed my first three sites (using Wix, WordPress, and Yola), I only wanted each to have two pages: a homepage and a blog. The WordPress site's domain name is the easiest to remember, so that site was always meant to be the one I refer people to and was therefore always meant to be the one people saw first.

I don't know which blog entry or which site you may've read first, but the first entry I wrote on each site explained that they're meant to explore the differing perspectives of the id, ego, and superego.

The superego is the most socially attuned, and therefore (theoretically) the part of my mind and yours that's most capable of making a good impression. However, as an introverted artist, I'm naturally inclined toward the socially-out-of-tune id. So that's the perspective I wrote from first, and that's the perspective I designed from when I put together the three hero images at the top of each site.

Here's the first one I did...

And here's the second...

And here's the last...

The colors red, gray, and blue mean nothing. The characters depicted in red, gray, and blue mean almost nothing. But the brains (or partial brains) depicted in what looks like black and white mean everything. Do you see that there are three brains in the background of each image? And that the left hemisphere of the brain on the left side of the image directly above stands out as being colored differently than the other two?

That's the key, because I believe that if the socially-attuned superego has a seat, it's on the left brain. And the reader's journey is to start from the extroverted left, moving through the balanced middle, toward the introverted right in order to better understand the id. Whereas my personal journey as an author is to move from right to left in order to better understand the superego.

It doesn't matter whether my anatomical interpretation of psychology is scientifically right or wrong. What does matter is that my graphic expression of that interpretation supports the literary premise.

It also matters that I'm not done designing. Because, although I didn't draw any of the characters in the aforementioned hero images, my long-term plan is to eventually include drawings of the three most eye-opening characters in my first novel.

Again, I have no idea what you're seeing at the top of this website right now, but the red, gray, and blue hero images depicted in this blog entry are just snapshots taken in the present tense. And now that blogging on Wix has made me painfully aware of the fact that when seeing most blogs for the first time, I am in fact seeing them backwards, it's been fascinating to scroll down to the bottom of those blogs and read them from beginning to end. Because people exist over time, and may therefore change over time, and witnessing that change in order to better understand people as a whole is infinitely more intriguing than just understanding them now.