The Select Samaritan

The title of this blog is of course taken from the eponymous poem Select Samaritan by Robert Finch.

I have never really liked the poem, it being too didactic for my tastes. Beyond that, I've never liked the way it was written. Obtuse comes to mind. Blunt. But whatever. The point is that I have always loved the title. It put an elegantly ironic twist on our well-worn Good Samaritan metaphor and opened my mind to a whole new level of possibilities within the greater literary world.

This all occurred during my high school days, long before I became a proper netizen and well before the Internet itself became the big player it now is in our daily lives. It existed of course, but only hardcore PC users were jacking in every day. The rest of us were dilettantes at best.

Anyway, once the Internet invasion had advanced to the point where it could no longer be ignored, I began to test the waters by participating sporadically in select (no pun intended) forums. Gradual immersion in online culture ensued. This led to the development of a general online persona that showed slightly varying sides of itself depending on the forum of the day.

I say varying because circumstances themselves varied between the handful of forums I was associated with. So in a very real evolutionary sense, I would always adapt to meet the demands of the surrounding environment. This ensured survival first of all, and then prosperity if one was good enough. And by that I mean sufficiently intelligent and well written, among numerous other necessary qualities.

At the end of the proverbial day however, all "personalities" led back to Rome. It was always me, it just wasn't all of me. And while I took pride in knowing that I was always more authentic and less exaggerated than many of my peers, I also despised the fact that I had to constantly play the very characters that I had created in the first place.

I pondered blogging, but it just wasn't kosher at the time. As I wrote in my first post, the mere thought of it induced nausea. Instead, I moved on to bigger and better forums and brought increasing amounts of my own personality to the table.

With each new arena I searched long and hard for a nom de plume that would jell nicely with what I knew my persona would be. And each time I had to scratch Select Samaritan off my list because I had not yet reached the point where I could unabashedly revel in the totality of my personality, which for me, simply means being a well-written bastard. Publicly. Anything else (of a positive nature, like being at least somewhat funny or even marginally interesting) is just icing on the cake.

Welcome to The Select Samaritan.