My name is Scott. I’m a traveler, a collector of sights, sounds, and stories, a Sytseer. These are the things that matter to me in the world. I like to be on site to see for myself what’s going on and how it shakes out. Then I like to think about it , frame it, and pass it along. This seems to me to be a worthwhile activity. I’ve made a lot of friends doing this and I’ve formed a few opinions, but I try to pass along the stories without too much of the opinions. Everyplace I've been had something to recommend it, whether it was a person or an animal, a business or a view or a point of view. Some places just have an attitude that you can't ignore. It might not be a good one, but it's probably worth noticing. More important to me than the collective tenor of a place is the strength of it's characters. It's the characters that get my attention. They're often the ones that I meet first, and the ones who stay in my head the longest. I like to think of these people as the ambassadors of their places, the local arbiters and ad hoc historians.
I've been doing this for a while now and can say with some certainty that there's no place on this planet that isn't worth visiting at least once, and several are worth a story or more.
That's what keeps me going.
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WHO WHAT
It follows that I would write about these places and people. That's what I'm good at. I'm a kind of a tour guide to the lesser noticed. Sometimes it's a plain look at a quirky person or situation, other times I get swept up in the fantastical crazy magic of it all. Always, I like to pass it along. Whether in song or story, written down or told aloud, I find that if I can pass it along it will find it's own place and satisfy it's purpose.
Lately my interests have turned to smaller places, compact communities where somebody knows somebody who knows who you're talking about, if not by name, then by reputation. And the places that I pass it along to, usually places with their own set of quirky magicians, are frequently the sites of my next discoveries. This is fortuitous and makes for a self sustaining circumstance. Who doesn't want to know what's going on over the next hill, or down in the flat lands, or up the river?
Some of these characters and situations come from my own home town, a city that has nearly doubled in size since my arrival (a common story in the western U.S.), but one which has nevertheless maintained more of it's legacy attributes than we who live here are apt to admit. Change is here to stay. It always has been.