Seeing that this is my first post, I will start off with a little explaining.

I went to college, as you do, and studied Creative Writing, as almost no one does these days.  After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I found the whole world open to me.  Then, after months of searching for jobs that related to that degree, I became a barista.  Twice. And not much more after that. And suddenly that open feeling felt more like a drowning feeling. I began to feel as though I were barely keeping my head above the flow of my own life.

Three years later, I now find myself tucked away in a fairly good-paying job that has nothing to do with that creative spark I felt that guided me through college.  I am finding my ability to read massive amounts of information and then apply that information to real-life situations only being used to preform mindless tasks over and over.  And over.

For a long time I saw writing as just a hobby; something I could do on the side and not care too much about.  I was wrong.  Not being a writer was killing me. Is killing me.  I still feel as though I’m struggling to stay afloat.

But I’m finally doing something about it.

And here we are, reader.  Breaking the fourth wall. Because I need to.  I need to share what I write and I need to be certain that what I write is good enough to be read. I guess that sounds like I’m using this blog as a validation tool, and maybe that is close, but I don’t think it is the whole story.

Throughout my life I’ve moved to nine different states, started a new life nine times. Granted most of those times took place in high school or before, but in the past few years it has started to even out. After college I went from New Mexico to Illinois, then to Texas, then all the way to Alaska.  If you are looking for a guide on how to move to Alaska, that will have to come later.  And it probably will at some point. Stay tuned.

Just last week I found myself moving from Alaska to California.  And for no other reason than I wanted to.  This has been my round-about way of saying that I love change.  I love to try new things and I love experiences.  I love life. Even though it’s been tough and not quite what I pictured, I always found a way to be happy with what I was doing.  I found a silver lining. Sometimes it took a little longer to do, but I always seemed to find it eventually. That’s what this blog is or will be about.

If you’re reading this after reading dozens of other blog posts that seem to have followed no general theme at all, I hope this will provide some clarity if nothing else.

Being that this is my first post I also want to explain the title of my blog.  Holding the Universe Together.  Humble, don’t you think?

I got the idea from Salinger, one of my favorite writers and a huge personal inspiration.  He wrote in one of his less-famous stories, A Girl I knew, about a girl and a boy.  When the boy saw the girl standing on the balcony, leaning on the railing, he understood that she was doing nothing at all, except holding the universe together. Sometimes life is as simple as seeing a person and understanding that everything is the way it is because that person is standing right where they are. Sometimes life doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

I have always liked the idea that life was simple, and we make it so much more complicated than it ever could have been on its own. Sometimes, I think, we need a simple idea to bring us back home again, and remind us every now and then that a girl holding onto a balcony railing might just be what it’s all about.

In my experience, a girl can be a metaphor for just about anything.  More often than not the girl is literal, especially for us romantics, but stay with me here. She’s a metaphor, too. This means that anything can provide meaning to life. If you need it or want meaning bad enough.

I’ll give an example: In Illinois I found myself in a small collection of towns known as The Quad Cities.  It consisted of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. Like I said earlier, I found work as a barista and for four months I did little else.  It felt like a colossal waste of time, as if I had pushed pause on my life.  I was 22, just out of college, and for the first time I found myself thinking: “This is it?”

I had a small apartment to myself, a boring job, and the only people I talked to outside of work were family. At the same time, my grandmother had developed cancer. All of the sudden I found myself in prime position to spend time with my grandmother, time which now had a foreseeable limit. I had lunch with her, I brought her blankets, I made sure the television remote was accessible, and to this day the time I spent playing songs for her on my ukulele stands out as a few of the most meaningful moments of my life. And those moments took place at a time when I felt stagnant, bored and lost.  At that time, my grandmother held my universe together.

If you agree, or disagree with any of this, that’s fine.  I do hope that you enjoy what I put up on here, regardless.  These stories, fiction and non, poems, pictures and anything and everything else that helped me find the universe in one piece again. And if you have some feedback, if you like or don’t like something I talk about, let me know.  I’m sure it’d be good to hear from you.

So thank you reader, and let’s get started.