Exposure

I had an email sent to me the other day asking about Sam the Eagle over there and a related question about why I don’t post a pic of myself. The former is a bit easier to answer than the latter.

A number of years ago I was in a fraternity (yes…I was a frat boy, and yes…the stories are true) and my closest friend and I were out on the town with a bunch of people. Now being a typical 19 year old I always felt like I knew everything and I had an opinion about every minor facet of life. Well, in a drunken haze while I was going on about something or another, he called me “Sam the Eagle”. Let’s just say that the general consensus was that the moniker was apt.

At first, it was a little bit disturbing to be compared to such a pompous blowhard. But I eventually realized that they couldn’t all be wrong. It is so difficult to properly gauge how other people perceive you, and here I was given a clue. A not very flattering one, I admit, but a clue nonetheless. At first I tried to stop emulating Sam, but there is no way that I can completely extricate him out of my persona, and so he is one of my talismans. His presence is to remind myself of some of my excesses and also to not take myself too seriously.

The lack of a photo aspect is a bit different. To be honest, when I first started on this blog journey, I didn’t really think that there would be a lot of people reading this crap. But I wanted to keep myself honest here. This world is a small one, and I didn’t want to find myself engaged in self-censorship in fears that someone would recognize me.

But here is where the difficulty lies and the complexity of my thinking arises. Anyone that knows me at all would be able to recognize me from my writing here. It wouldn’t exactly be a big mystery.

Its more of a question of people I don’t know being able to tell who I am. I find it odd that some guy I see at the gym might know a hell of a lot of things about my life from reading my blog and be able to “put my face to it”. I can’t imagine how awkward it would be if I met someone for the first time only to be told that they “know” me already.

I think this stems from the fact that throughout my life I have always considered that fame is one of the worst possible destinies imaginable. I would consider it the height of misery for people to know me on a global fame level, but even a local one is not my idea of a picnic. I enjoy being able to go through my life with a degree of anonymity. Being a lawyer this is not always possible, but generally this is what I strive for. There have been many a career that I chose not to pursue because of the chance that success in them could lead to too high of a public recognition than I prefer.

And so I chose Sam. I didn’t want to use some picture that obscures my face and just shows off my body. This is not a “dating” vehicle for me but a place for my psyche to rest and reflect. I have only been at this for a very short time, but I can already see the benefit of having a record of my thoughts. I wish I had some concrete evidence of how I thought when I was 18, 22, 25 instead of just my perception of that person I once was. And to me this blog is to become a bit of my personal history.

Which brings me to the subtitle: How Did This All Happen? Its, once again in my totally self-obsessed life, a question for myself. How, at any point in my life when I look over these entries, did I end up at the place that I will find myself. These minor notations will be a map through my life. A way for me when I am old(er) to trace the little steps that lead to a great path.

To see where I went right – where I went wrong – where I went too fast – where I went too slow – and where I might wish I were again.