ex-lion tamer

yeah, you know, i’ve seriously considered it a few times.

i’ve indulged in some intemperate speech elsewhere, so i might get one or two visitors. welcome. sorry there’s no ushers, we’re what they call a “black box” theater here.

we do, however, serve crawdads and popcorn instead of mixed nuts, so that’s a plus.

a little bit about who i am, and what this is all about:

i started blogging approximately six years and two months ago; when i started it was because i was lonely and depressed, yet too antisocial to reach out to anyone in “real life”. i hated my job, myself, and had no reason to think anybody cared what i had to say. so, in a fit of hubris, i spewed my meaningless noise, lo, unto the very aethers. and behold, someone commented on one of my posts, saying something to the effect of “keep writing”, so i did. then september 11th 2001 happened, about two weeks after my first post, and i immediately found an eloquence i had forgotten i once had [i spent the 90's as an aspiring poet, but lost some momentum when the millenium turned]. my first big thought which i felt needed to be shared with the world was:

in the face of absolute uncertainty, human beings will tend to seek refuge in any idea that shields them from the underlying chaos and unpredictability of existence. faced with a lack of reason, a solid dichotomy of good and evil, or even a dependable locus of blame, we cling to ideas of who we are, as well as who “they” may be.

i was born in 1965 and started my first band in 1981. i am, therefore, more or less, a spawn of the original punk rock generation. as such, i am not one for measured speech or well-considered points of view. a good friend of mine, perhaps one of my oldest and most respected, told me that my writing is easily categorized as ranting, at best mediocre when compared to the masters of the craft, and is in the main wholly uninteresting. i thanked him for his frank and candid feedback. then i shot him in the face.

i was raised by moderate liberal children of far left radicals on one side, conservative christians on the other. so as you might expect i’m something of a mutant. i am pro-abortion, anti-death penalty, pro-gay marriage, anti-capitalist, and yet, i eat meat and am an avid consumer. i’ve been trying for years to go green, and i think one of the ways i do my share in this area is that i almost never buy anything new, unless it’s something like food or band-aids or toilet paper. my wife and i have a daughter who will be 2 in december, and for that reason, like most first time parents who started late enough in life to be overly opinionated, we find ourselves goaded towards thoughts of violent revolution every time we hear about women being harrassed for breastfeeding in public.

i live in the pacific northwest of the united states. i pay taxes, mostly out of fear. i own a house, but i neglect mowing the grass until my neighbor does it for me out of exasperation. there’s a pile of brush in front of my garage that’s been there since about may or june. i am currently a satisfied user of psychiatric medication.

i veer crazily between anarchism, socialism, and economic conservatism; while it has been joked that libertarians are liberals with guns, i am a libertarian without a gun. if there’s some sort of revolution, i’m going to be the guy with a tire iron.

my mom, the intellectual and academic, raised me to be a feminist, while my father, an ordained minister, raised me to be a doubting thomas. i love jesus, but i hate his friends. i think god probably is a woman, and in that case, i’m fucked.

i’m a dog person more than a cat person, largely due to allergies, although we had cats when i was a kid.

i have about 3 or 4 online personas which seldom intersect. in one of them, i might possibly be the messiah.

i’m pretty much done talking about myself for now.