A New Challenger Enters the Arena

Due to writer's block, I haven't written a whole lot on this blog, even though I vowed I would. Another problem is that my upcoming trip to Canada and New England for a week (starting on Sunday) will also resort in me not posting anything, exacerbating the posting situation. All of that is superfluous to this post.

For the few people who read this, and the one or two people who have stumbled here, a new poster has been added to the blogroll of Heartland of Darkness. He doesn't go to a liberal-arts college in the so-called heartland, but he does go to a college and I do know him. His name is Sam, and if he wants to introduce himself proper in anyway, he will, but for now I will introduce him.

His name is Sam.

Anyway.

Sam and I knew each other in high school. He was a grade behind me, but he's two years younger than me due to the fact that he had been bumped up a grade. I first came in contact with Sam through Quiz Bowl (yeah, we were both quiz bowl dorks), where his intelligence was quickly noticed by all. If my memory serves me properly, and it may not, I was still playing on the JV team (where the freshmen and sophomores were relegated to, and I was a sophomore), while Sam the freshman was immediately bumped up to varsity level. It was during my sophomore and junior years that Sam and I became a kind of intellectual rivals with each other, at least when it came to politics. Sam often viewed my beliefs as a bit crazy, and so it went, we debated each other and played Quiz Bowl and often mocked each other in class.

During my junior year was when we were both on the varsity team, and where him and I started to respect and like each other more, greatly due to the fact that we were 2/3s of the team. My junior year didn't yield a lot of varsity quiz bowl players. Normally teams at the very least have four players (the maximum allowed to play at once in the league we played in), but there was only myself, Sam, and our captain Julie; a trio fighting against the odds.

Senior year was when I inherited the title of captain for our varsity team. I got to spend the year leading a rag-tag pack of five other quizbowlers, only one of whom was a senior like me. I might not have been the smartest of the six, but I had to be the stable center and lead all of us on. I also got to prep Sam to take the title of captain for the next year, since I would be gone. I probably failed in this regard and I'm sure Sam just figured it all out on its own, but I like to make up memories of me being a good mentor.

It was also during that year that I was starting to slowly win Sam over to my side. As we debated Frederic Bastiat (he's still a favorite of mine) and laugh along with the inimitable H.L. Mencken, we began to see eye-to-eye much more. Oh, the woe I brought to his parents by radicalizing their son. I just have that effect.

I lost contact with Sam for a while when we were both in college, mostly due to the fact that I went completely crazy and just the general effect of our lives drifting apart from one another, but now we've come in contact with each other again, and I think we've both become surprised at how different the other is. Even though we still find interesting ways to butt heads with each other, we still manage to see eye-to-eye as well.

And that is my terrible introduction for Sam, the other poster at Heartland of Darkness.