Who Am I?: EARL GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!

As of early 2012, some vital statistics:

Race: 90% human, 10% post-consumer recycled fiber

Age: a habit I’d really like to give up

Eyes: checking… yep, still got ’em.

Hair: checking… nope, it still hasn’t come back yet. Let me know if you see it wandering around like a shaggy fiddygibber somewhere.

Religion: get it out of here. Faith is the natural human desire to believe in something bigger than yourself, be it a cause, or a god, or family. Religion is a man-made exercise in dividing and conquering by perverting that faith, typically to appease regional or local political forces or (perceived) “needs.” Organized religion is the bastard stepchild of politics (if the restless locals aren’t obeying mere laws, why not attach the fear of God to it?), and once a religion begins codifying its paper-thin justifications for excluding or harming others, it’s simply another political system, more profane than profound, closer to defiling than it is to deification. And the moment a preacher’s telling you how to vote? No thank you. Take it away. Everyone is entitled to believe what they wish; it’s when they go forcing it down everyone else’s throat that they need to be shown to the door. And the god(s) they rode in on.

Politics: I’d rather not, but if you insist. The government should exist to serve and provide vital services to its people, not to tell them who they can or can’t marry or what they can or can’t do with their bodies. So long as the individual’s activities are causing no harm to anyone else (and by harm, I don’t mean “offending someone’s sensibilities”), it’s the individual’s right to do what they like. Our society, at least in the past, championed free speech; sometimes that means putting up with other people’s freedom of speech too. But never give up the freedom to think. Before goose-stepping in line behind your favorite media-personality-cum-demagogue, conservative or liberal, check the facts on what that person is spouting through their megawatt megaphone. Even the most outrageous fringe elements are following the money from somewhere. Following that trail usually uncovers their agenda. Be skeptical.

One thing I can honestly say I hate: willful ignorance makes me want to shoot people in the face with a live, slimy frog fired from a slingshot. And then I want to apologize to the frog afterward and make amends for the frog for having to make contact with someone stupid enough that they don’t want to learn and don’t want to expand their horizons. Learn to form cohesive opinions and beliefs, and learn to defend them. Learn to see it from other people’s point of view. Don’t be afraid to be challenged. Appeal to logic, not to base emotions or crowd-pleasing soundbyte catchphrases. And if you’ve got too much free time on your hands, for God’s sake, wash that free time off your hands. You don’t know where that free time has been.

Children: I has one! As much as I love him, though, I’m not sure any more are forthcoming. He’s the best part of being me, and he’s my favorite human-type person on the whole planet. The rest of my kids have four legs and tails. Make of that what you will.

Where you know me from: I’ve worked at several radio and TV stations in Arkansas and Wisconsin. I’ve been a DJ at KBBQ and KLSZ, and a promo producer at KPBI/KFDF, WACY and KHBS. I have a whole separate blog to chronicle samples of my work down through the years here. At the moment I’m between jobs. I attended Kimmons Junior High School between 1984-1987 and Northside High School between 1987-1990. I was, and still am, weird.

If you’re wanting something that reads more like, well, something that’s meant to be read, here’s the old bio.


February 2007: A lot of stuff has changed lately – a lot of stuff. As a result, I’ve decided to cut-and-paste relevant sections of my old bio, and archive the original version at the bottom of this page, as much for myself as anyone else.

Actual photoSo, what goes on in the head of someone who puts together a site like this? Not a lot, sometimes. But occasionally, some thoughts occur. And here they are. Not that I’m going to tell you everything, mind you. Just some bits about my interests.

TeeVee and Me: I’ve had a tumultuous love affair with the little screen my whole life. Whether controlling the action via the mighty Odyssey2, chilling out while watching Battle Of The Planets or Star Blazers in my youth, or getting so deep into Star Trek: The Next Generation that I’d do something nutty like write an episode guide that would later form the core of a 3,000 page web site that consumes at least an hour of my life every day, the tube has been a constant fixture in my life.

And now I hardly watch it at all. Odd, eh? Well, this is due to more than one factor. In 1989, I embarked on a bizarrely meandering broadcast career that started in radio and then moved into TV in 1993. And I still work in TV, writing and producing nightly news promos and content-managing the local end of our station’s web site. But when I get home…the TV tends to stay off, or I’ll put on CNN on the Weather Channel or NASA Select, just so the thing is offering some sort of useful information.

My disdain for TV and radio as it is these days is hard to sum up in any other way than the following words: the good old days are gone. The technology is now there for TV to do more than it has ever done before, and yet we still get Jackass and the Man Show and so-called “reality” shows. Kids’ shows are now hollow marketing ploys, attached to a video game or toy line, with no inherent value of their own. And where radio is concerned, the deregulation of the industry – removing the requirement for FCC licenses and their attendant training – has trashed much of that side of the industry. Back when I started out behind a microphone, saying “ass” on the air wasn’t cool, trendy, or acceptable; it was a one-way ticket to unemployment. Now everything’s changed, and suddenly I’m a member of the old guard.

It could be that I’ve lost my sense of humor where broadcasting is concerned – I’ll admit that, now having spent nearly half my life working in radio and TV stations, that is a possibility I can’t deny. But I still have hope that every once in a while, we may yet be graced with some gem of television storytelling or news reporting that speaks to the human condition rather than minimizing its dignity and importance and then exploiting it.

Past favorites include a healthy dose of British science fiction shows, their American counterparts, and an oddball selection of other shows: Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Red Dwarf, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Star Trek, The Prisoner, Max Headroom, South Park (especially in recent years), Jeremiah, Crusade, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, some of the early seasons of Roseanne, M*A*S*H, and a show that apparently only I saw or remembered, a very short-lived PBS all-star comedy anthology called Trying Times. And since it’s almost un-American not to list a favorite Japanese cartoon or two, the aforementioned Star Blazers and Battle Of The Planets. And begrudgingly, though I resisted the hype until long after the show had left the air, I’ve grown to like Seinfeld reruns.

I have now escaped the soul-sucking day-to-day drudgery of working directly in broadcast. I still do TV and (much less frequently) radio work, as well as web design, only now I do them from home, at my own pace and with my own rates. As someone who’s a few months into the freelancing life, I can confirm that one can indeed do it, and survive, but for anyone considering it, a nest egg is a good thing to have going in, because there will be lean times when you start out.

I will confess that I sometimes miss the constant IV drip of local and national news, but in the age of the internet, you can easily get that at home if you really need it. A few weeks after leaving the TV station for the last time, I realized that I didn’t need it. I need to stay informed, yes – I’m kinda big on the informed citizen/informed electorate thing – but I’ve managed to wean myself off of the “breaking news” thing. It’s not really that I was addicted to it, but just that I’d gotten used to it – it was a part of my everyday life for years and years.

As for my years of working in TV, did they diminish my fondness for watching TV? Oh yes. When you have to sit through stuff like Melrose Place, Homeboys From Outer Space, Mercy Point, Baywatch, and countless others, because you have to, yes, you begin to go home, walk in the door, and not turn on the TV. (The same thing happened to me after working in radio for about a year – I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio now.) I get frustrated because television has so much potential, and now it’s being wasted on “reality” shows which are as pre-fabricated as anything to have emerged from the confines of a soundstage. Even the once-intellectual field of science fiction on TV has fallen several notches, overloading on effects and forgetting to use them to tell a story. C’mon, I grew up watching BBC sci-fi shows. I don’t care what’s making the spaceships fly, whether it’s a length of fishing line or a high-end 3D rendering workstation. If they’re not there in the service of a worthwhile story with interesting characters (and I don’t ask for every story to be some kind of sociopolitical allegory), it’s worthless.

I’d still like to take a shot at writing for television, in something bigger than 15-second chunks, to try to give back some of that potential. I think this is why I’ve fallen in love with the arcane medium of the radio/audio drama in recent years – the visual trappings (and traps) are ripped away, so if it’s not on the page, it really isn’t on the stage.

As for my current work, I can’t escape local TV completely. I’ve already been tapped to work on an independently produced local weekly series, with the possibility of some other work along those lines waiting in the wings. I may be done with the local stations, but it’s a pretty good bet that as long as I’m around, they haven’t heard the last of me.

Music: To say that music is an important part of my life would be an understatement, somewhere along the lines of “the second World War was a really bad thing.” Some people have vices, some people have drugs. I have music. And I listen to a lot of it. Having served my time as a disc jockey in my late teens and early 20s, I actually seldom listen to radio (and spend absolutely no time with the abomination that MTV has become). Despite this, I’ve got a sizable and eclectic collection, top-heavy with stuff that no one else has ever heard of as well as stuff that everyone has heard of, along with quite a few guilty pleasures. There’s at least one of everything in there – techno, rap, opera, country, gospel, you name it. I generally like at least one or two songs on every CD in that monolithic shelf of mine, else I would’ve gotten rid of it. I do, however, have a soft spot for:

  • Anything that combines rock, world music, and/or classical, or any combination of those three. Good examples: ELO’s Eldorado and A New World Record, Pyramid by the Alan Parsons Project, Peter Gabriel’s OVO, The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed, The Seduction of Claude Debussy by Art Of Noise, Further In Time by Afro-Celt Sound System, and even not-quite-orchestral concoctions such as Split Enz’ Second Thoughts, Ben Folds Five’s The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner, The Juliet Letters by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, and countless other examples. I grew up on the soundtrack from Star Wars, so I’ve got a thing for strings, especially if they can be incorporated in original ways. They don’t even have to drench the whole song.
  • Complex or, failing that, interesting arrangements – Tori Amos’ classic first album, Together Alone by Crowded House, ELO’s Time, Neil Finn’s sometimes-challenging Try Whistling This and One Nil, Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk, Todd Rundgren’s groundbreaking A Capella, Time & Tide by Split Enz, Circle by Ralf Illenberger, Broken Frame by Depeche Mode (back when they were consistently great), and almost anything by the Beatles. And again, these are just a few examples. I like songs that take me to unexpected places, songs with innovative uses of harmony and counterpoint, songs with complexity, both structurally and emotionally.
  • Soundtracks. ‘Nuff said.

Computers & Video Games: One of the biggest, and most popular, destinations on this site is the Phosphor Dot Fossils classic video game museum. Though it’s hardly the only one of its kind on the web, this part of the site easily nets more feedback than anything I have on offer.

I think I know why, though. As my generation slithers inexorably toward middle age, we’re starting to pine away for the trappings of our youth. And for me – and I suspect I’m not the only one – that means blocky, old-school video games, Star Wars action figures, and new-wave 80s music. Admit it – if you actually dig this site, this is probably your childhood too, or perhaps your adolescence. I wasn’t even ten when I became a certifiable Pac-Man addict, and then when my Uncle James gave me his seldom-used Odyssey2 console, there was no going back.

Somehow, I don’t think my folks minded. It kept me out of trouble, and yet it was something all the kids were into at the time, so it didn’t exactly make me a social pariah either. My allowance was saved up for video games, action figures, and the occasional LP – not cigarettes or worse. Now, beginning my trend of staying indoors all the time parked in front of a TV playing games also likely directly contributed to my weight gain at a young age, and that may come back to bite my now-vast ass later, but I’m okay with that. It’s a fair trade.

I got my first real computer around 1981 after months of pathetic begging, an Apple II-compatible, 64K Franklin Ace 1000. What did I do with it? Play games, of course. I also started spending a lot of time at the word processor, coming up with all manner of juvenile Star Wars and Doctor Who spinoff stories, trying to make my own role-playing games, and other such silly activities. I also did a lot of amateurish BASIC programming, trying to create my own games (with varying degrees of success), and then, in fifth grade, I fell in love with a new and very expensive piece of equipment: a blisteringly fast 300 baud modem.

I quickly discovered the rather sleepy local bulletin board system scene and did my damnedest to become a major player, even to the point of joining the local Apple user group and taking over custodianship of their BBS, which they named after the software, Public Messaging System (or PMS). I was trying very hard to be a great promoter of that BBS, but it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re 12 or 13 years old, and you keep calling the damn thing PMS. (I almost used the adjective “bloody” there, but thought better of it.) I also fancied myself a hacker, though I was really more of a poser than anything; I was asked to vacate the premises of the local Apple dealer – and the club – when I was busted making a copy of the demonstration disk of an Apple II animation program called Fantavision – not the actual program, mind you, but just the demo. Right in the store. I was also dead guilty of other common childish BBS antics, like logging in under several names and talking to myself, and even occasionally giving myself hell so I had someone to evict from the board and show what a good SysOp I was. Unlike today, when kids routinely get banned from message boards or flamed to a crisp for pulling such pranks, I think most everyone was quietly ignoring these strange cries for attention. Quite wise of them, really.

I was on the modem all the time. My parents eventually had to get a second phone line. That opened the floodgates for a whole new time-wasting activity for me: running my own BBS. Still zipping along at 300 whole bits per second, that bulletin board system seemed to change names every third or fourth day. Various iterations of this included 10538 Overture (the name of the first ELO single), Scorpio Stargate, and numerous others I’ve since forgotten. By now I had ditched my pirated copy of PMS and was using a BBS package I actually bought, called SnAPP.

By this time, my main topic of discussion on my BBS was Star Trek, and it was about this time that I started writing synopses of each week’s episode and posting them on my board – an exclusive feature you could only find there, woohoo! – and thus was born the Star Trek: The Next Generation LogBook, which, aside from a few high-school writings and drawings in Scribblings, is easily the oldest material on this site.

Around 1989 or so, I discovered the opposite sex and suddenly lost interest in running my own BBS. Isn’t that always the way? I migrated to Steve Prado’s Pseudocode BBS (later Jackalope Junction) to do my Trekking, and that’s when the LogBooks started to get an audience.

I was still Apple II-bound until 1993 or so; once I discovered the power of a 286 running Qedit (the DOS-based, minimal-memory-footprint text editor I still use to this day), there was no going back.

The only video game consoles I had back in the day were the trusty Odyssey2 and the venerable Atari 2600. I got myself a Game Boy a couple of days after New Years’ Day 1990, primarily to amuse myself during my interminable weekend radio shifts. I lost interest in it about a year later, though, and went into gaming hibernation until 1995 or so, when I once again hooked up my Odyssey and this time left it hooked up – I had a fairly steady stream of guests around that time, and the Odyssey’s nutty two-player games were a big hit with anyone who ventured into my apartment. That unit was later destroyed in the great 1996 tornado that blasted through the north side of Fort Smith, but I tracked down an identical replacement; fortunately, I was already in the habit of keeping the Odyssey’s games securely under lock and key, and the console was the only thing to be damaged. I did a Saturday’s worth of Odyssey2 screen grabs at work around this time, and Phosphor Dot Fossils – originally an Odyssey archive only – began.

In 1998, I was living in Green Bay and was having to undergo some major dental surgery. It was long, drawn-out and painful – to say nothing of expensive. It wiped me out completely and I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all when I say it demoralized me, especially when that pain and that expense stretched out over months. In the kids’ area of the dentist’s waiting room, there was a cocktail table Pac-Man machine which I would go and play after getting out of the chair. I wouldn’t leave until I’d cleared level two and gotten to the first intermission; at that point I figured the local anesthetic wasn’t quite clouding my reflexes as much. By chance, another client sitting in the waiting room one day asked me why I was over in the kids’ area playing that game, and when I told him, he told me I should go check out a used toy store called Toy Exchange, not too far from the dentist’s office – they had a ton of used Atari games that no one ever touched, if I was into that sort of thing.

I went. The rest was history. When five bucks could buy me a big heap of working Atari cartridges, that became my new hobby, and my escape from the pain – I’d go every week after getting out of the dentist’s office. Those poor people must’ve thought I was stoned every time I walked in the door, with my big puffy lip and slightly slurred speech. (I can see where they’d think that too; it’s to their credit that they never freaked out or called the cops, and instead just smiled and sold me stack after stack of Atari games.) My collection, which had mostly been bequeathed to my nephew, was almost empty, but now it was growing by almost a dozen or so games a week. Even common stuff was good news to me, and the Atari came out of its cardboard box permanently, a new full-time fixture in my entertainmet center. I got the Odyssey2 out of its box and set it up too, and it grew from there. I bought an Intellivision and a ColecoVision through the newsgroups, and as if by magic, cartridges for those systems started to show up at Toy Exchange.

The rest is history. Especially after I discovered eBay. But if you want to learn more about the collection I’ve built, you’ll have to click here.

Critters: If it boiled right down to it, I could probably live without my music collection, my computer, and my games. Just give me my four-legged friends and I will be happy.

Self-portrait with Othello I’ve actually been in that situation before. I’m not going to go into it, but there have been a couple of occasions where it’s been down to me, a cold hard floor, and a couple of cats named Othello and Iago. Iago is long gone, but Othello is still with me, approaching the ripe old age of 13, and he’s helping to raise the next generation of kitties in our household.

Othello is the “alpha male” of the herd, protector of the household, and as such thinks he’s entitled to an all-access pass which includes the kitchen counter. He gets nervous easily, and the sound of the doorbell puts him on full alert. Our youngest cat, Olivia, is only just now (early 2007) approaching her first birthday. Like any kitten, she’s inquisitive, but she’s also incredibly sweet, is fascinated by watching birds through the windows (but has absolutely no desire to step outside the house to chase them), and loves to play with her two brothers. She’s very protective of my wife, but not in the possessive way that her predecessor, Chloe, was. Olivia’s favorite toy is a stuffed mouse named Claude (because he’s nearly been “Claude” to pieces), and a slightly older cat named Oberon. Oberon (Obi for short, which has been twisted into everything from “Obi-Wan” to “Toblerone”) is a stray who appeared in our yard. He was such a sweet cat, we assumed he was a she. He’s laid back and playful and, for a male cat who used to have the world as his oyster, very submissive to the other two. He’s none too bright, but very loyal and friendly. Our dog, Xena, is bigger than all three cats put together, but she loves all of them and is very protective of them. They love her too – especially Olivia, who likes to grab Xena’s big wagging tail.

Self-portrait of me and SultryAnd then there’s Sultry. Sultry was an Arabian mare who went through some very tough times of her own; her previous owner rescued her from a path that probably would have led her to the slaughterhouse. She was moody and didn’t trust easily, but for some reason she accepted me instantly – maybe she sensed a kindred spirit, or maybe she sensed someone who would never in a million years hurt her. Whenever I showed up at the farm for feeding time, she was always waiting for me – not whinnying at the gate when I show up, but calmly and quietly waiting for me to come pay her some attention, or brush her, or take her for a walk. She was never trained to ride, and neither was I, so we ended up being quite the sight, a big brown horse and a short balding guy walking side-by-side through a field somewhere. On a few occasions, she’d lay down in a patch of sunlight, and I’d half-sit, half-lay down, with my head resting on her belly, and we’d both catch some shut-eye. And that, my friends, is contentment.

Sultry spent seven years at my in-laws’ farm, surrounded by other Arabian horses, a few quarterhorses, and almost all of them treated her with respect (and those who didn’t were taught to, fairly quickly, by Sultry herself!). In 2006 she lost part of her eyesight but was still happy to be in our company, and was fully functional without needed to be penned up in a stall. But in December of that year, she fell into the large pond on the farm property, got tangled in something under the water, and tired out and drowned before I could reach her to help her (though it’s an ongoing debate as to what I possibly could have accomplished aside from drowning along with her). I was there with her, and saw the whole thing, and it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never felt so helpless or useless before.

Though we have three other Arabian mares, they really belong to my wife – they put up with me feeding them and working with them and grooming them, but none of them did anything like picking me as their trusted person the first time they met me. I love them and the rest of the horses on the farm, but Sultry was a singular phenomenon. I wasn’t a horse owner before Sultry, and I probably won’t be again after Sultry.

I can confidently say that my pets at any given moment are among my very best friends. I truly think that animals understand the concept of “unconditional love” better than humans do. I don’t think humans can grasp that concept. It’s not enough for people to just be kind to each other – there’s always some other underlying motivation, be it money, politics, race, classes of society, or what have you. For animals, it’s simple – just provide them with the basics of staying alive, and kind words and attentions, and they love you. Maybe this means I’m a simpleton, but that’s the kind of relationship I can handle. I still get along better with animals than I do people. And I think how people relate to animals tells more about their true inner nature than any interaction with other humans.

About Me: So all this doesn’t really tell you about me. Maybe that’s for the best. I’m a centrist on both the political and religious scales, with liberal leanings in some directions and much more conservative ones in others. Politically, I’m beginning to find that most of my views are echoed by Libertarians or independents. In terms of faith, I have a relationship with God, and yet I don’t throw my lot in behind any particular church or denomination. I feel that faith is an intensely private thing, your own unique relationship or lack thereof with your particular deities and/or prophets of choice. Religion, however, is a man-made construct, with differences and deliniations and dogmas laid down by various people as their best guess as to how to serve their God. Small churches are just fine, but the ones with business holdings and political lobbyists and public relations machinery and payrolls and their own television shows? That, to me, is a sign that someone’s lost the plot. That is the point at which someone – a mere mortal – is trying to use their visibility to wield influence over others – and that’s the point at which religion becomes a bastard stepchild of politics. To sum it up: I do think God exists, I do try to live by some basic precepts that are my best guess as to what He might have in mind, and I think that large-scale organized religion takes us away from God – and can often be used as a tool for manipulating the masses.

You also won’t find me trying to preach to anyone (despite a fair few e-mails accusing me of doing so through the guide to the Left Behind radio series and other related media). As I’ve stated above, your relationship with God is an intensely private thing. I’m not going to try to invade anyone’s mental or spiritual airspace with my beliefs, because those are just that – my beliefs. You can’t be prodded or coaxed into finding God and truly find Him – you’ll only see His reflection through the mirror of other people’s beliefs, which ultimately may not help you. To find Him directly, that search must take place under your own motivation. And too often, those who try to hammer the point home, actively trying to convert or recruit are doing more harm than good. If and when you do find God, it’s not going to be a color-by-numbers experience proscribed in the Bible or the Qoran or the Talmud. If it’s the real deal, it will be your own unique experience – and your own decision. And I’ll leave it at that while you either (A) wait for your head to stop spinning, or (B) sharpen your knives.

I’ve actually been writing quite a lengthy diatribe on the faith vs. religion thing for quite a while. It’ll appear here in my blog at some unspecified future date, presuming that faith wins out before the demon that is man-made religion gets us all killed.

Also, for practical reasons more than anything tied to a particular belief system, I do not drink, smoke or use drugs. Without going into too much detail, I’ll just say that there’s ample evidence in my family of the kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior thar often results in addiction. Considering that I already have trouble knowing when to stop eating sometimes, I’m sure as hell not going to get started on anything that has its own built-in track record of addiction. And I prefer to stay away from situations where people will be doing that sort of thing around me (a necessity, since I’m very allergic to second-hand smoke).

What else? Let’s see…personality-wise, I’ve struggled with an instinctively hot temper my whole life. A few years ago, I began making a conscious decision not to let that anger get the best of me…and it’s really worked. It can be done. And it helps a lot. Learning to laugh about almost everything, especially myself, has been a big part of that (and my habit of launching into smart-ass running commentary on almost everything that happens is my attempt to share that with everyone around me). I do take things seriously, but even the serious stuff is best tackled without a lot of stressful baggage. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard is as follows:

Find the comedy, not the drama.

In my line of work and my personal life, I’ve run into far too many people who live for confrontation, and if there’s a particular type of person I tend to stay away from, it’s those drama queens (who can be male or female, by the way – I still call ’em drama queens). There are plenty of opportunities in your daily life for others to challenge your skill, your worth, your knowledge, and your honesty. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel that inventing extraneous challenges isn’t necessary – because it just invites more of the same (I think this is why, with very few exceptions, I have an utter and complete loathing for “reality TV”). Patience, humor, and an ability to know when to laugh at something and when to rage at it are vital.

And what does piss me off? Aside from the usual ills of the human condition (man’s inhumanity to man, needless violence, intolerance, bigotry, and compound interest, cruelty to animals, and those with the inability to respect others and admit their own mistakes), the modern American health care/insurance racket is one of the most twisted schemes anyone’s ever dreamed up. I don’t know if socialized medicine is truly the answer, but the money-obsessed health care system in our country thrives far too much on its own shark-like economy, with little in the way of accountability for those reaping the benefit. And the insurance industry is almost a kinder, gentler edition of the classic mob protection racket: you pay us, up front, a ton of money – and we’ll decide at some later date how much of it will apply to your care, or if you can even be covered for certain things. That’s brilliant. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work, but the right set of scruples keeps me from getting into anything like the insurance industry. I’m sure there are honorable people in both the health care and insurance fields, but whoever dreamed up the whole thing, and whoever helped escalate it to the kind of Rube Goldberg-esque bureaucracy that it is today, needs to be subjected to an even more classic staple of the mafia, the aluminum bat to the kneecaps. The people who made that industry what it is can, presumably, afford to have that patched up.

Accountability in our health-care industry is all but a charade these days, and I find that more deeply disturbing. And I know of what I speak, for I have been a victim of that side of the medical profession. In 1996, I had a severe attack of abdominal pain that sent me to the hospital. After waiting in the emergency room for hours, I was finally told that it was almost certainly an ulcer (which I didn’t dispute, due to my level of job stress at the time and the fact that I was still spending much of my time, at that point, an Angry Young Man). I took the prescription meds for a year, and the attacks kept on coming and going. In late April 1997, another attack literally doubled me over in pain while I was at work, and once again I was taken to the hospital. After running urine and blood tests, and taking X-rays, it was determined that my gall bladder was failing and needed to be taken out immediately. When I asked if I could go home and take care of some vital tasks such as feeding my cats and getting a change of clothes, the doctors refused: these damned attacks had been gallstones all along, and now that I had been having a constant string of them for a year, my gall bladder was infected enough to toxify other vital organs and kill me. I was scheduled for a laproscopic surgery the next day, and immediately taken off of solid food.

Then it got worse. The surgery was botched.

The surgeons removed the offending organ and tied off the bile duct – which links the gall bladder to the stomach itself – with gallstones still inside. Within a week of ending my two-week hospital stay, I was once again in pain and had to go back to the emergency room. This time, it wasn’t going to be the easy surgery where they just poke a couple of small holes in me. This was going to be the big one where my stomach would look like a well-used tic-tac-toe board by the time I woke up.

And still, there are complications. To this day, I frequently have an alternating parade of both diarrhea and constipation. None of it is linked to any specific food, and it’s always painful. I tend to have upwards of 3-4 bowel movements a day, frequently lengthy and unpleasant. It disrupts my work, my life at home, my comfort, and my well-practiced patience and good humor. While I haven’t ever really been a social butterfly, the complications of that surgery have also enforced a strictly indoor lifestyle on me for the most part, and in the past five years I’ve been dealing with a new problem – psoriasis, a nagging skin disease which establishes persistent (and, thus far, unremovable) patches of itchy, irritated, raised skin on arms, legs, fingers and toes – and I’ve got a doozy of a patch right in the middle of my forehead which always seems to be threatening to eat my face. One of the many suspected culprits of psoriasis in general is a lack of exposure to sunlight, and when you can’t go anywhere because you’ve got to take a major crap every four hours or so, yeah, you’re missing out on natural sunlight. It itches like crazy, and flakes like dandruff without hair there to catch it, but I deal with it. Most people are a little too polite to ask what it is; it draws quite a few stares.

But despite all that, I still think it’s important to know where your emotional center is and even more important to keep the ability to find it. I try to get out of the house as often as possible, even if it means stinking up someone else’s bathroom a few hours later (I’m still working on a sponsorship deal with major room freshener manufacturers that could help offset the cost of carrying cans of the stuff around wherever I go), or having people look at my forehead or arms and wonder what terrible disease I must have. My self-image is healthy enough that my glass is still half-full. Besides, I’m not a leading man on the stage of life anyway; I’m a character actor, standing off to the side, occasionally pushing events along, and commenting wryly on them the whole time.

Despite my rant about my medical misfortunes, let me touch briefly on another peeve of mine by letting you know that I do not consider myself a “victim.” Too many people claim victim status in our culture because of all the perks it offers – sympathy, lenience for unusual behavior, and, of course, being able to sue people who may be, in some way, tangentially related to whatever happened to “victimize” them. Sure, I’m upset that things didn’t go as planned, but I’ve learned to cope, and to work around it. Too many people strive to be victims of something, and that steals attention and resources that would better be focused on people who really are victims. (It also runs the risk of making a real victim of abuse or discrimination seem as though they’re crying wolf.) People should strive instead to be resourceful, and to get on with life. I try not to hold grudges. Looking back in anger is a sorry way to live one’s life. Along with the bit about finding the comedy, let me share with you another useful adage: resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die from it. I know that forgiveness can be hard, but in the end, you may need to find it in your heart to forgive – more for your own sake than anyone else’s.

So that’s me, in more detail than I usually care to reveal. I’d tell you what my favorite foods are, but then you’d know how to slip me a mickey.

Oh, and one other thing – money isn’t everything. At least not to me. It comes in handy, but it’s not everything. Just thought you’d like to know.

Putting Pen To Pixels: With all this time on the can, a nifty little technological miracle called the NEC MobilePro 780 handheld PC, and my own natural inclinations, I tend to write. A lot. I write more than I read, as a matter of fact – maybe that’s an imbalance I need to correct. (But then again, the handheld PC has to be recharged at some point, something books usually don’t require, so there’s still time to read.) Most of my output winds up here on the site – theLogBook.com is a monster which must always be fed, and you’d be surprised or perhaps alarmed to find out how much of the site’s stuff is written while other output is taking place. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Much of my professional life also involves writing, though usually in chunks of four to thirty seconds – and sometimes, given how hard it is to squeeze any kind of coherent thought into that space, I think that probably explains why I write the rest of the time too. To atone for all those times I’ve had to write “Police are still looking for a suspect in a string of convenience store robberies, tonight at ten.” (Or some variation on the parties involved and the crimes committed.) You can only regurgitate that sentence so many times before needing to say something of more value, even if you’re the only person who can find that value.

That’s a big part of why I keep doing this site. And so long as those of you reading this find some kind of value here, that’s all that matters. I know that what I write here isn’t going to change the world. It’s not going to enlighten you about the nature of humanity or the universe, or answer the big questions for you. But I’m not sure anyone can find that stuff on the web – or if that’s where they should be looking for it in the first place. If, however, you want to stick around and listen to my friends and I as we go on endlessly about music, TV shows, movies, games and other things that we happen to like, this is a very good place to find that sort of thing. And I hope you enjoy it.

I have but two rules for house guests: no smoking, and be nice to my pets.

With my trusty HAL 9000 computer.  Is that the pod bay door he's opened behind me...?