Please fill in ink.

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Copyright?

I've noticed a few people putting Creative Commons licenses or copyleft notices in their user info. Get off your high horse. As if there's something in your journal that BEGS to be copied and sold for profit. If you want to write for money, stop fucking around with a blog. If you write because it's in you, then you don't care about the money or, for that matter, where it ends up. Woody Guthrie summed it up best in the copyright notice of his first songbook:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

I write the stuff here. That's what I want to do. If you wanna yodel it, sell it, make a hat out of it, go on right ahead. The point of this journal is for me to write. Not to sell or maintain an egomaniacal dominion over my creative output.

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I spend most of my time thinking about writing. I spend a significantly smaller amount of time actually writing. But I do write. Trust me. I actually get paid to do it. Occasionally.

Sometimes I've been known to teach philosophy at local community colleges. Actually that's happening more often than I care to admit.

I also love to gamble and to play backgammon. With any luck, I'll be able to escape my grey cubicled prison and go on to play games for a living.

If you've come here to try and get some kind of insight into me, and how I think, you won't find it in my journal. Mostly I'll post about something going on with my body or happening at work, or complain about traffic. Or the news. And then occasionally I'll blast forth with a nugget of unheralded simplicity and length about a deep philosophical topic (and when I say philosophical, I mean philosophical) that generally makes people stop and realize that they'll have to think to much to finish reading what I've written and then move on.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

--Bill Vaughn

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

--Bertrand Russell

After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws.

--Daniel Dennett

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

--George Santayana

Never trust a philosopher who hasn't been arrested.

--me

I grew up in Fayetteville, AR. Since then I've lived in West Berlin, Troy, NY, and Seattle, WA. Most of my childhood was spent in a restaurant, since dad and grampa were chefs and dad had 17+ restaurants at one point. Whenever work gets to me I think about how I should open a restaurant of my own. I usually come to my senses the next day.

If you're lucky and you get me drunk I'll either start talkin cajun patois or German.