About the Cotton Boll Conspiracy

Being a proponent of honesty and transparency, it seems illogical that I’ve never made an effort to attach a name to this blog.

It would be great if this space could be filled with personal tidbits along the lines of: “I’ve retraced the Trail of Tears, wandered through the Hagia Sophia, brought Alois Brunner to justice, and caught and released a Coelacanth off the coast of Madagascar.”

Alas, I’ve done none of the above, though I once did get a rental car up to 131 mph on a rain-slicked German Autobahn just outside Frankfurt.

The reasons for my self-imposed obscurity are many-fold: First, when I began this blog in 2008, I worked for an advertising agency and didn’t want to take a chance at scaring away lily-livered clients who might be offended at something I’d written. That was my decision, not the company’s, which never knew about the blog.

More importantly, though, my goal has been first and foremost to write this blog as though I were the only one reading it. The Cotton Boll Conspiracy exists simply because it’s something I enjoy doing. Its topics are ones I enjoy, find interesting or believe to be of significance to someone somewhere. I never saw a need to attach my name to something that I was essentially writing for my own enjoyment.

Of course, in the long run, as Keynes said, we’re all dead, so what I blather on about here won’t amount to a hill of beans. Still, it gives me a place to elaborate on those things that catch my attention, stick in my craw or simply amuse me.

What I won’t do is vouch for the quality of the writing or the depth of thought. The infinite monkey theorem posits that a monkey hitting typewriter keys at random for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, say Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. If one puts stock in that theory, one could deduce from this blog’s decidedly un-Shakespearian prose that it would take a single neuron-impaired monkey approximately 15 minutes to bang out what you’re perusing here.

The final reason I haven’t attached my name to this random smattering of postings on history, politics, pseudo-culture and an array of other bric-a-brac is the simple reason that anonymity fits my personality. Churchill once famously described the action of the Russia as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. That would, unfortunately, I suppose, be an apt description of my inner workings, as well. Some understand how and why they feel as they do; others never obtain that ability.

You’re not going to get much out of me about how “I” feel about things. In fact, with the exception of this page here, the word “I” is used in probably less than a dozen of the more than 1,250 posts written here over the past 30 months. Besides, as Proverbs 17:28 says, “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.”

The blogosphere is full of self-important blowhards who can’t wait to opine on everything from the less-than-attentive baristas at the local Starbucks to their toddler’s latest toilet-training antics. There’s no need for me to add to the gasbaggery. 

Whatever your reason for getting this far – whether it be boredom, bemusement, bewilderment or simply to see how the train wreck turns out – thanks for reading.

- Kevin

FYI: The content on this blog is released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license (or, in the case of an image, any other acceptable free license).