Head Wide Open Mission Statement

Head Wide Open is a funhouse, madhouse and demolished house rolled into one. It is a clearinghouse for ideas, a multinational conglomerate of one and a time capsule purposely designed to deceive the future. It is a studio apartment overlooking the apocalypse. Through disparate musings, lists, articles, photos and commentary it is an attempt to make real the author's elusive intangible sense of self: to document, in the words of Plotinus, "the flight of the alone to the Alone." It is less an exercise in psychology than an exercise in phrenology. If the author dies an untimely death it will stand as his Rosetta Stone, a code for unravelling the seemingly indecipherable.

Head Wide Open is the product of an obsessiveness that has come to terms with its own futility to the point of overcoming it. If Head Wide Open has a guiding principle it is supplied by André Malraux, who said, "Man can build his greatness on the nothingness that crushes him." The pyramid in the desert: what else is it but a glorious middle finger to the gross realities of inconsequentiality? The pyramid doesn't need to serve a practical purpose: through its very presence, towering above the sand and dust, it screams defiance at time and nature and every other unwavering inevitability.

Head Wide Open is not a pyramid in the desert. It is a stick structure in a patch of sand. It is a makeshift raft in a dried-up lake. It is a word of graffiti in an abandoned building in a ruined city in a forgotten nation. It does not speak to the glories of an ancient civilization: it speaks to the trials and triviliaties of a solitary peon. The pyramid is too big to be ignored. Head Wide Open is almost too small to be noticed. But still, it exists: and existence doesn't need a mission statement. It speaks for itself.