About

About the Blog

I’m Derek Wood, and I am responsible for the blog you are now browsing. I hope that you are finding it interesting, and if so, that this expository page will stoke rather than dampen that interest.  The idea is for me to tempt you to browse it again in the future, or maybe add my blog to your feed reader — whatever you like, it works for me.

When I began this blog, I viewed largely as a means of keeping family and friends abreast of what was going on with me. I imagine that many others who have tackled the task of catching up on personal emails have found themselves thinking the same thing I did: “I’m having to write the same stuff about what I’m up to in so many different emails that I might as well just start a blog.” It was eminently sensible. Or rather, it would have been; as it turned out, this blog came to be comprised primarily of my perspectives on the world around me, with very little reportage on the events of my own life. The best-laid plans of mice and men, yadda yadda yadda.

The central subject of the blog is best stated as one of my original post categories: “America?” The question mark is operative, i.e., I write about the never-ending stream of conditions and events in my nation that surprise and befuddle me, or arouse my passions in a way that seems to warrant expression in print. At least to my own self-centered, myopic, typically 21st century perception, anyway.

As I sift through the complexities of our culture, experience has conditioned me not to expect discovery of fully intact, definitive answers to society’s problems. America is a magnum opus — an expansive human tapestry of discord and rhyme, far too unwieldy to be distilled into a single line of arithmetic or a catchy epigram. How could it be otherwise? Human nature is endlessly complex, and man-made institutions that seek to contain it by imposing dogmatic absolutes pave the way for repression and suffering. The most humane societies are those whose structures reflect the variation and complexity of the people that comprise them.

If I were to say what one thing my blog is about, that would be it: America, the glorious mess. Really, though, it’s not about one single thing. A quick examination of my tag cloud reveals a handful of other subjects that I touch upon regularly. Here are a few key ones:

• Words. As the late, lamented George Carlin said, “There are no bad words — there are bad thoughts. Bad intentions.” I love language. Its use (and misuse) reveals so much about the speaker.
• Politics. I considered making this a completely apolitical blog, but decided that it would be too restrictive. I sincerely hope that readers who disagree with my political opinions will not reflexively click away, never to return, and that they instead post their disagreement in a comment. I value discussion and debate very highly, and want to encourage the expression of all viewpoints. My webmastering scalpel will be unsheathed only in cases of blatant trolling, comment spam, or in the distasteful event of a flame war.
• George W. Bush.  The frequency of this topic is finally diminishing with the passing of his administration, which came not a damned moment too soon. Needless to say, all one need do is look around to observe the wreckage that Bush and his neocon cronies left behind.  Bush showed us (as if we wanted to see) how many decades of American work and achievement can be scuttled in a mere eight years of reckless buffonery. I don’t think I can ever forgive the Bush administration for what they have done to our country. Never in my most cynical, dystopian nightmares did I ever imagine an American President conducting the affairs of the nation with such shallow hubris, ideological blindness, mendacity, monarchical arrogance… such out-and-out criminal incompetence. Bush and his cabal are a stain upon the honor of our nation. For all Bush’s claims of alliance with Christ, he and his administration were, in the purest sense, disgraceful.
• (in)humanity. The conjunction of these two opposites terms is my point: humanity, or the lack thereof. My concern is that in today’s American culture, we seem disinclined to treat each other very well. The hell with community — get what’s yours, and love your neighbor if you have extra time. Or don’t, he’s probably an asshole anyway.  People choose to buy into these convenient but very false choices: it’s me or him, us or them, red or blue, you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.  With that in mind,  I didn’t want to separate “inhumanity” and “humanity” out as keywords. Maybe this is hurting me SEO-wise, but whatever.
• News media. There is a mindset that if it doesn’t happen on TV (or at least on YouTube), it effectively doesn’t happen. Why not? Because if it’s not on TV, no one is making a profit off of it. Filmed media is about drama, and for drama you need conflict. Hence, it may be a “news” show, but just reporting the news has become almost a quaint notion. No great insight is required to see that the commercial news media is less about journalism than it is about selling advertising. Hence, they pick a news topic, bring on two guests of opposite dispositions, and have them yell at each other. Hooray for the Information Age.

About the Blogger

Derek was born and raised in the leafy suburb of Palo Alto, California, during the time when the area was becoming known as Silicon Valley. The scholastic grandeur of adjacent Stanford University suffused the town, resulting in a premium on academic achievement for kids in the public schools. In a place where fourth-graders rode their bikes to school wearing Yale sweatshirts, being the son of two teachers with Ivy League diplomas was, for Derek, the extra “eleven” notch on the academic amplifier. Aware though he was of his good fortune compared to the average American public school education, within the limited sphere of Palo Alto High School Derek wore his status as a B+ student in AP-level classes somewhat sheepishly.

As a young boy Derek was obsessed with sports and excelled in grade-school athletics. At the age of 13 he got involved in theatre, which would prove to be serendipitous on more than one level. Firstly, the stage was ideally suited for his top priority as an adolescent: showing off to impress girls. Whereas in normal, non-theatrical settings this activity and its desired result tended to be mutually exclusive, in the theatre they more often had the cause-and-effect relationship he was aiming for. Derek’s talents as a performer would prove to be both more extensive and more uncommon in a guy of his age group than his athletic abilities had been. Best of all, the performing arts were an arena with a high occurrence of attractive girls and a relatively low occurrence of competition from other guys. Suffice it to say that at the outset, he was in it for the chicks^*.

A graduate of Palo Alto High School and the University of California at Irvine, Derek has studied acting and musical theatre with teachers including Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Helen Gallagher, Buzz Miller, Andy Gale and Ron Melrose. Among his credits are The Royal Family at the American Conservatory Theatre, Aldo and the Magic Lamp off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre, and Forever Plaid. He is currently a member of Theatre Neo, where his appearances have included Once in a Lifetime, Mall America, and Deep Tissue Comedy Release II: The Quickening.

Derek lives in Los Angeles with his dog, Bella.

^* Nowadays he’s in it for a handful of reasons, chicks being only one of them.