Hello, 2014 . . . and Welcome Back, Sports Fans!

Welcome back, and a Happy New Year!

Our blue-green jewel has completed another spin around El Sol, and as humans will do at this time of year, I’m reassessing. As I mentioned here two years ago, I don’t make New Year resolutions, per se; instead, for the coming year I think about things I want to accomplish in a general sort of way, and maybe a few specific professional goals. (But I also returned to the gym this week.)

One of those goals is to write more. Friends and colleagues notice my activity reports in terms of video, film, and stage work on Facebook and often remark, “it’s great that you’re living the dream.” But to be honest, acting and modeling never were my dream. They’re a job -- a pleasant, not too demanding, and often fun job -- but a job nonetheless.

Writing is harder, but ultimately more rewarding. I’ve been at it a lot longer, in one way or another, but it’s kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years. In the four years American Currents has been an online forum, I’ve done a lot of writing, but most of it was in the first year.

This blog started as a communal effort: It featured a team of writers addressing breaking and controversial news stories from differing points of view. We discussed everything from high-minded subjects such as proposed health care reform legislation and the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to First Amendment protection, to more pop-culture topics like the woman who was seeking to break the Guinness Book record for the heaviest human being ever, and the gal who got revenge on her jilting lover by putting up a billboard in Times Square.

As I described in a wrap-up a year after the launch of American Currents, the original concept collapsed after six months because the other writers couldn’t keep up the blistering pace of turning out at least two or three columns a week. (I was typically doing four or five, but I was also unemployed then.)

The creator and site owner, Jeff Weiss, and I revived American Currents after a few weeks of silence, and it has bumped along on its uneven but merry way ever since. I wrote a lot more in 2010 and 2011 than the last two years, however. And I’d like to change that in 2014.

I got an unpleasant surprise a couple of months ago when I discovered that the host for this site, Blogger.com, was either sold or renamed so the URL for every page on my site got changed. That meant that none of the internal links work anymore, and web searches for my commentaries come up empty.

I often want to refer friends and colleagues to some of my favorite pieces, such as “Two Years Before the Cast” (which assessed my first two years without a day job and steady progress into acting and modeling) and “Coming in Sick to Work” (about playing a patient for students at local teaching hospitals), but I could no longer find them easily on Google. Even when the search engine purported to have found them, the destination for the link was empty.

So that’s another reason to write more, and fix internal links. I need to get American Currents back on the radar of the search engines. A little SEO (search engine optimization) is in order here.

Expect to see more personal content -- the life and work of an actor as well as an online editor and writer -- in addition to the usual political and socioeconomic topics. Like my American Currents pieces on Sartre and Beauvoir, and Proust, I’ll probably write about things I’m reading, as well.

It might also be interesting to go back and see what has happened to some of the kooky, evil, and hapless subjects of our past news analyses: the 15-year-old Florida boy who set a classmate on fire in a dispute over a $40 video game, the popular blogger who tweeted about her own 2-year-old son’s drowning in progress, the Minnesota man arrested for coaching people to commit suicide over the Internet, the lesbians denied access to their high school prom in Mississippi, the New Mexico family who discovered the funeral home had sent over their grandmother’s brain in a bag of her “effects.”

In a couple of the above cases, I’ve directed you to the initial description of the situation. If you want to read my reaction, you’ll have to arrow down the page and watch for the title and my name along the right margin. At least those internal links are still working.

Some matters discussed here two to four years ago remain ongoing today. Amanda Knox is back on trial for the murder of her roommate in Italy, and would-be Portland terrorist bomber Mohamed Mohamud’s sentence has yet to be imposed.

Tomorrow morning, New Year’s Day, I’ll be leading a two-hour walking tour of downtown Portland so I probably won’t be up late partying tonight. My work as a “Resident Expert” for Portland Walking Tours began almost two years ago … and that’s another thing I can probably talk about on this blog one of these days. (The tour route takes me and my guests right through the square that Mohamed Mohamud thought he was going to blow up, as well as the blocks where Occupy Portland made its stand a little over two years ago; I wrote a lot about that on this blog, too.)

Over the next four weeks I’ll be in rehearsals for staged readings of new plays -- many short, a few full-length -- as part of the annual Fertile Ground festival here in Portland. If you’re curious about what I’m doing, go to this link, click on “Staged Readings,” and read the descriptions under “PDX Playwrights presents Short Works” (Jan. 26), “Zombiella” (Jan. 26), “Show Us Your Shorts, Again” (Jan. 31), and “The Strangest Story Ever Told” (Feb. 2).