What is Skitch

Portmanteaus and intersections

If one plans to take a journey longer than he can see, he should take his portmanteau and pack it full. That's my philosophy. It's not too taxing to have a book you may not read right away - but surely will later - tucked in one of the leather compartments; your lunch bundled up in another, so as not to spill it on the papers and notebook in another; and pens, of course; and maybe a laptop or iPad in another, because it is portable, and what's the point of having portable things if you don't port them around in your portmanteau.

A portmanteau is a bag of two compartments, if often leather, and mine looks like this:

At least, that is my daily portmanteau. The portmanteau I look forward to using is this one:

It may not be a portmanteau, technically, but since it appears to be made of leather, has two compartments, and I intend to carry port in it, it shall henceforth be my portmanteau.

The portmanteau was made more familiar by Lewis Carroll, the genius author who brought us Alice but also introduced us to the Jabberwocky and several other made up words. Slithy and frumious were some of his inventions - combining parts of two words to come up with a new one. He compared such words to a two compartment suitcase called a portmanteau and thereby made the word more popular than the bag. And now we have smog, consequently.

And skitching. A lesser known portmanteau, but a great one - a combination of skateboarding and hitchhiking, as performed so well by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, as he travels through town on his board, utilizing unsuspecting automobiles unbeknownst.

I was nicknamed Skitch three years ago when I joined a free, outdoor, men’s workout group called F3. It was at the end of my first workout with the group, and it was early in the morning when I received my name, so I didn't grasp its full meaning until much later. As people do, I grew into my name and learned to appreciate its nuances.

I’ve always been a sucker for puns, and always been fascinated by the intersection of seemingly dissimilar ideas, so the fact that my nickname is a portmanteau is fitting. Skitch fits.

I'd like this stack to be a journey through the intersection of ideas - ones that may not look related on their surface - but may reveal truths about each other when viewed alongside each other.

To start, we'll look at abstract concepts like justice and love alongside traffic circles and turn signals. Hopefully they will shed some light on each other as we cross a few intersections together - travel bags in tow.