The Evolution of Jakewood (Part 1/3)

I remember the exact moment when I started this blog last November. I was sitting at my fiancée's new apartment after helping her move to Portland from Coeur d’Alene (Back then I figured it wouldn’t be long until she moved back to Idaho after not being with me … guess who won?). I had about two hours to myself as she was working at her new job, although the cable/internet hadn’t been hooked up yet and I was extremely tired from unpacking. Too bored to sleep, I noticed my computer somehow was able to steal the neighbor’s wireless web.
Suddenly, I had the urge to write.
Not knowing why, where or how, a glimpse of the blogger.com logo flashed across my memory and I knew at that second I was ready to start a blog.
I had never done this before. I never kept a journal or a diary. The only things I really enjoyed writing up until then were articles about hunting with my cousin or sports stories while on the NIC newspaper, The Sentinel; I loved writing essays for any class, and short stories were fun.
But last November, sitting alone in a dark apartment with boxes strewn about, the floodgates suddenly opened, and Jakewood was born:

__________________________________________________________

I’m rarely right, but I’m never wrong.

Originally published November 10, 2008


Ingrained in my persona for as long as I remember, there has laid a deep affinity toward the written word. Perhaps this is due to the sharp contrasts with the spoken word: You cannot mumble while writing (a predicament I have dealt with all my life through the verbal aspect), and unlike speaking to a crowded auditorium, you rarely see the expressions from those who read your work while you're in the process of creating it. Needless to say, I have never been one to avoid criticism or comments concerning that which I pen, as my level of modesty is rivaled only by the boisterous Muhammad Ali - cocky, to say the least. Yet in my sophomore year of high school, I discovered I could collect a greater response to my writing than a simple chuckle: Journalism.
Though I started as a simple sports fan covering high school venues, I subsequently morphed into a collegiate drunk who typographically stammered through columns about shooting birds from a truck. While in high school, my sports column made fun of fat girls and cowboys, in college it was handicapped parking. Reverse evolution is what they call it, I believe: Getting progressively dumber as time elapses.
You see, I love evoking responses from those who would otherwise look away. Why would someone read the feature I wrote about an injured basketball player when, if they simply turn the page, they can peruse my defamatory article condemning recycling? Would the reader in turn, if they were so inclined to actually read the feature I wrote next, think I'm some ailing idiot begging for attention, or, after reading the thought-provoking, most-likely comedic and provocative recycling article even read the feature at all? And if they read the feature, would I seem smarter for covering two completely polar-opposite categories of the journalism spectrum, or merely an idiot?
I have ultimately reached a writer’s paradox.
Why is it that I can create a mixture of words, sentences – nay, paragraphs! – that beckon the most strict of college journalism judges to acclaim the serious feature as award-worthy, yet in the same newspaper issue alienate myself from most of humanity with a dim-witted piece on the similarities between Bigfoot and the Bible? More than likely it is to settle a debate in my own spacious mind. For every serious, well-written and gloriously articulated article I construct, subconsciously I must seemingly produce the opposite as well, a counter balance of sorts (see knee-boob column).
Why? I do not know. I would love to write like Ernest Hemmingway, but at the same time I would also love to achieve the same literary success of Tucker Max.
I’m more confused than you are.
However, of all that I’ve done and dreamed of doing, this is the first blog I’ve blogged, and hopefully the first of many.