Gareth S. Young - - 1000 Trillion Suns

I'm trying to be a writer (you may have heard mention of this fact a couple thousand times already...lets just pretend this is the first time) and writers need an audience and an ability to connect with them. So, I'm gonna try something different in the blog this time. I struggle to talk about myself in any meaningful way to strangers. I don't know you and you don't know me so, for the most part we are strangers. I show up on Twitter and tweet some mundane fact about myself: "I like cheese!" or, find myself chiming in about movies, cracking wise or ruminating about the size of the universe.The bulk of what I "talk" about is in short, sharp blasts on Twitter and that's lead me to wonder how much of a connection I'm making to the people I interact with through the myriad of social forums. I'm not the most social of animals since I do not find myself in the least bit "special" or "interesting" so find it hard to fat...

I admit it: I talk a lot about Scotland and being Scottish. I can't help it, it's in my blood (seen under a microscope, my blood vessels take the shape of bagpipes). And despite having spent the better part of thirteen years living in the States, I still have a strong connection to the place of my birth. The days of Scotland being the center of the universe are long gone, in fact it's hard to believe that such a small nation could exert so much influence on the whole world but, for a short time at least, it did. Engineers, architects, economists, scientists and writers blossomed in an age when the rest of the world was having trouble finding its feet. The Scottish Enlightenment, during the 18th century, triggered a time in Scotland where books and reason influenced and exerted great change in many fields bringing about changes which affected the entire modern world. As a boy growing up in Scotland, I was taught and inspired by these things but no more than the country i...