Welcome to R.A.M

I had just parked my car in the back parking lot of a small shopping center at the intersection of West Cheyenne and North Hualapai at the end of a long day. One of the things one notices turning onto North Hualapai is the direct sight of a sizable mountain, resembling a rock-formed pyramid. You drive closer and the mountain gets larger. A sense of grandeur becomes more pronounced. Suddenly, the road curves to the right, and the merging of North Hualapai into Alexander Road shifts the mountain from being directly ahead to standing proudly by your side. A complete change in scenic perspective.

With the afternoon sky both blue and clear, the sun descended in such a fashion that, at a certain point in time, the sun hit the shoulder of the mountain exactly right to give a radiant sheen that nearly made the entire mountain glow.

I parked just close enough to the lot’s Hualapai exit. I quickly jumped out of the car with my cell phone camera and, after checking traffic, ran right towards the concrete median barrier found near the T-intersection of Hualapai and West Issac Newton Way.

(Yes, there is an Issac Newton Way in Las Vegas.)

Even though there wasn’t any heavy traffic at that moment, I felt an urgency, a restless energy, and even impatience in what I was doing, which was not actually anything important. I snapped as many photos as I could, and swiftly returned to my car, speeding off to somewhere that, regrettably, escapes my memory.

The grand point of the story isn’t so much what I did, taking random shots of a falling sun coating the mountains in a bright and shining brown. What matters, at least to me, is what it meant. At that moment, I was doing exactly what I always do, and what I’ve done since I was old enough in my youth to know better. I was squeezing time to steal a good moment, one that I was certain that I’d want to remember. Maybe it doesn’t stack up to grand importance, but it matters to me.

When one strips everything down to the basics, it’s not simply thoughts and the will that create actions. It’s actions themselves that create actions. Any actions begin as thoughts that must be created and moved through free will. Some acts occur as a reaction. Newton’s third law is still real, exact, and alive today. “For every action, there is an opposite and counteraction.”

This is a long way of saying that, at my very core, I’m a writer.

Writing gives me a sense of fulfillment and joy that transcends anything else that I do. There is something freeing in the endless possibilities that being a writer brings me.

This is what leads me here, and what brings me to what I call R.A.M. Also known as Random Access Moods.

Random because the pieces I hope to publish here are not unified by a major theme. The closest theme is perhaps pop culture since some of the pieces involve a specific film, a piece of music, or some type of art that has shaped me and that I find interesting enough to discuss. Some of the pieces discussed might be obscure to mainstream eyes, but that’s perhaps what makes them more essential or interesting to talk about.

Access is exactly that. These are pieces that I hope to send out to a wide enough audience. As I move forward in professional writing, R.A.M. will hopefully serve as a testing ground for what is popular and what draws readers’ curiosity.

(This is just in case one thinks I’m too set on writing about unknown cult favorites and obscurities.)

Moods is…well, it was the most attention-grabbing word I could think of that could work in the context of naming my work R.A.M. To be honest, Random Access Moods was only the second-best attention-grabber I thought of.

I initially thought of using the title Random Access Madness, but that seemed a little too wild for even my tastes.

Some of the early pieces might be slightly too long, but that is partly how my mind works. It is hard to condense thoughts down. I will do better as readers reach R.A.M. Pieces later in the future.

I have spent enough time reading pieces on other writing platforms to feel that there is a space for writers to hone their craft and reach out to an audience. I hope I can have the same impact with what I offer.

So, now I begin my journey and my long and fruitful search for Random Access Moods.