That Midwestern Thing

For anyone who knows me, I talk about this a lot. And now, it's here. I declared the STL Renaissance here the other night at about 3 a.m. while drinking beers with Duane in his old storefront bedroom. [It should be noted, by the way, that I am not the only one to think this, nor the first person. I simply have always had dreams of the Algonquin Round Table, or the Bloomsbury Group, and now that I have lived here long enough, I feel like we have our own thing going. Despite my being dogmatic, I am not dogmatic enough or peremptory enough to name it.]

...But it is; it's here. Even if no one else outside of STL knows it, even if it takes five more years for the rest of the country to even hear about it, and another decade for them to see why it matters, it's here. And I declare the South Side its epicenter.

I have started blogs before, and always given up. I have had no focus other than random musings. But the other day, I started thinking about the fact that this is the majority of what I talk about and think about-- in some form or another, both personally or professionally. So I am going to wage my electronic argument for St. Louis on these pages. Let everyone else weigh in. Let me be wrong if necessary. But damn it, let's at least consider the possibility that we are creating something good, something others can learn from. It's a process.

But, like it or not, the machine is already churning.