Post #1

Welcome to Life with Spidey. Every blog has to have a first post and this is mine.

In this post, I’m going to answer three questions pertinent to most blogs and the bloggers who write them:

1. Why am I writing the blog?
2. What is the significance of the blog name?
3. What am I going to write about?

(Let me apologize in this first post for the constant numbering of things in twos, threes and fours in my writing. I’m an ex-management consultant, and those of you in that fraternity know that everything comes in lists of two, three or four — or in a 2×2 matrix.)

I’m writing this blog for two reasons. First, I’m writing simply because I like to write and blogs provide a great outlet. I mean — who would start a blog in the first place, if they didn’t like to write. I’ve written for newspapers in college and grad school and even had a summer internship at a weekly newspaper in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. I had a radio show in college and thought I might go into print or broadcast journalism. However, when I learned at a lunch with Hedrick Smith that I’d probably have to write obituaries on the late shift in some place like Jackson, Mississippi or Helena, Montana or do the weather and sports on a station in a place like Fort Smith, Arkansas, I decided that journalism wasn’t for me. That didn’t diminish my love of writing. Second, I’m writing for the challenge of coming up with relevant content on a regular basis — whether that’s once a week, twice a week, etc. I am amazed at the information I get from blogs that I read, tweets that I follow or podcasts to which I listen. I can only hope to replicate the freshness of this information for readers.

I wish I could write that Life with Spidey reflects living my life according to the motto “with great power comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately, I’m probably not that deep. The significance of Life with Spidey can be explained in two (yes, two!) parts. The first part is my interest in Spiderman. I am a Spiderman collector. I read comic books in and after college until the volume of comics purchased each week exceed the time available to read. I quit comic books cold turkey. I had to. That was about 1992. Spiderman was always my favorite. Spiderman is different. He’s not from another planet, like Superman. He’s not a mutant by birth, like Wolverine. He didn’t choose to be a superhero, like Batman. Peter Parker (the poor boy) was bitten by a radioactive spider. His life story through high school and into the working world and marriage is not dissimilar from many of our lives — except that he swings around in a red and blue suit over Manhattan. By 1998, now with a wife, two kids and a mortgage, I wanted to start collecting comic books again. Knowing how I can obsess, my wife suggested that, rather than buy the comic books, I choose one superhero and start to collect stuff. So — I chose Spiderman. Now, I have a room in my house filled with Spiderman stuff. More on that, perhaps, in a future post.

The second part of the explanation of the title relates to a blog I wrote internally at my company for most of 2008. It was a blog that I used to connect with a team of over 100 folks spread across the country. That summer, my wife, kids and I traveled to Japan for two weeks to visit my younger sister and her family, who lived there for a year. I decided to post daily and share what we saw in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima. You can read this at http://ourjapantrip.wordpress.com. As a lark, I brought along with me a small Spiderman and put him in nearly every photo that I posted in the blog. Yes — this convention has been used before (with gnomes, for example), but it works for me. When I decided to write again, I thought, as a theme, I would bring back the photos of Spiderman (Spidey to those that know him) to accompany the posts. That’s him there on the right.

If you give this blog a chance and either subscribe or visit often, I think you’ll read mostly about what I see while traveling, both for business and pleasure. Because I’ve benefited from others’ blogs, I want to share my experiences on tours, in airplanes, in hotels and with local cultures. I’ll pass on relevant information I find regarding travel, but I’ll try not to be too overbearing. Inevitably, some posts about other experiences will pop in – from coaching kids sports, watching my favorite sports teams, to events in and around St. Louis.

Spidey, of course, will be prominent throughout.

This weekend, we’re traveling to Phoenix to watch our son march with his high school band in the Fiesta Bowl parade. I’ll try to post from there or when I return about the flight down on US Airways in the days following Delta 253 and my experience with Pink Jeep “Broken Arrow” Tour in Sedona.