I'm 47, male, and live about 25 miles from where I was raised in SE Tennessee, with no plans to ever move farther away. I love my country but fear my government. Porn bores me unless it's S&M or strapon or something else unusual. I was raised in (well, reasonably near) a small town without any open homosexuals, but have had one close male gay friend (who moved to the big city, came out, had a lot of anonymous sex, caught AIDS, and died) and two close lesbian friends, as well as two lesbian lovers. I am extremely conservative in a libertarian way, i.e. I don't care what you do as long as it doesn't affect me and I don't have to pay for it. I don't suffer fools gladly unless they are entertaining. I am the guy who fixes screwed up projects (I'm an engineer), the guy who gets assigned to sooth angry clients, and oddly enough sometimes the guy who gets called to be a total A-hole to some richly deserving tool. I think I can out-think most of my competition and out-work all of them, which is actually funny since I'm sitting here typing into a forum for no good reason.
I believe in G-d - He actually spoke to me once, when I was making the mistake of feeling sorry for myself and coveting, of all things, a friend's new bass boat, and it felt like being electrocuted (sometimes I worry about what that says about my soul) - but don't go to church, even though I think church-going people are on average nicer than the rest of us.
I was raised in a house with honey bees living in one wall who would occassionally chew through the wall and attempt to colonize our house. We didn't get indoor plumbing until I was three, and not an indoor bathroom until I was five or six. I was about eight or nine when I saw my first color television, and twelve when we first owned one. I didn't see a video game (Pong) until I was twelve or thirteen, but actually owned one of the first models, a big yellow console that played pong, tennis, and hockey. My first computer had 4 KB of RAM; my first PC I built in '85 had 640 KB, and the one I'm building now has 4 GB. (Gotta play Crysis!) I once blithly said "Now for the smoke test" and burned up a $1,500 video card. (ALL the magic smoke came out!)
I am happily married (the "married" is the important part in the sentence.) I enjoy hunting, especially bowhunting, but seldom kill anything. I love stalking and eating deer but they are so sad (and heavy) when they are dead. I love fishing in any form, especially fly fishing and ultralight spinning, and I love to collect native fish, including some very colorful darters, minnows, sunfish, and topminnows that I've kept in aquaria. My wife has collected darters with me in a mountain stream in December and January, with ice around the water's edges and snow drifts on land - now that's love! (Note to AnGel. SLayer - some darters and sunfish in the USA are as colorful as tropical reef fish. Check out nanfa.org and nfc.org.) I love to read and to write, but don't have the patience to finish anything.
I never studied any kind of martial arts. I developed a completely undeserved reputation as a tough fighter in high school in spite of the fact that everyone I knew had seen me get my ass kicked numerous times - the stereotypical small kid with a big mouth - and the fact that I'd usually try anything short of running to avoid actually fighting. I was the smallest kid ever on the team when I played football in 7th grade, so small that the smallest helmet would spin completely around on my head with a good hit. (Now THAT will get some parents off the benches...) I love motorcycles in spite of the fact that I've garnered a crushed foot, broken collarbone, and broken off rotator ball on my shoulder blade. I once hit a tree head-on and broke my cheap helmet into two pieces, and I once actually jumped at the wrong angle on a trail and wedged my motorcycle into the fork of a tree several feet off the ground. I had to wait for my buddies to miss me and come back, and it took all three of us to get it out.
I'm a survivor of thyroid cancer and it wasn't a big deal, but now my internal clock is really screwed. Friday I didn't get up until 2:00PM, then I didn't go to bed again until 2:00AM Sunday morning.
It sucks when your friends die. It REALLY sucks when your friends start dying of natural causes.
Hmm - that about enough sharing?
