Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

"8"

It is that magic number on which I start.  

So why this?  
Scraps of paper and half completed journals be dammed.  Have started and stopped too many.  Can this medium be what those never made it to be-a constant in which I, the forever participant-observer carefully records a perspective, my perspective?


So why now?  
A long time ago I decided that the true currency of life was experience, as memories are the sustenance of our deathbeds.  But as I progress through life with this mantra, a miscalculation has arisen:  memory.  Once ironclad, it now has begun to slowly lose its hold on the moments of the past.  Now I know that this is the way of the world.  Oral history is a flexible beast, both gaining or losing volume.  But, as I have decided experience to be my value, I wish it to hold some form.  So as a buffer to this loss, I find myself here.

Also, as I have hermitted myself away for the past three years, I have a need to open and spill.  And, as a place for family and friends to be able to always access me, to catch that spillage.  No matter where I am.  No matter what I am being.

Lastly, a nod to the number.  
Eight signifies how many weeks I have left in my occupation of a corner of space, in the area of Hawiyah, not quite Taif, in the country of Saudi Arabia.  Eight weeks till I begin an open-ended venture, as slowly as I possibly can.  And here is where I shall record those observations, of a forever participant-observer.