Just like everyone else, I am totally unique: evolution's answer to the same basic question: "So, what should we try this time, boss?" In some areas, I may have some of the best genes ever tossed into a single person: really great eyes (can YOU still read the phone book w/o glasses?) a huge mind, a strong will and an enormous curiosity about the world around me. I do not tend to give up just because the going gets rough. On the one hand, I have been too self-absorbed to reproduce. On the other hand, I have managed to extend my adolescence and my adolescent curiosity and enthusiasm for life into my early 60's. But because I am somewhat old now, I am also getting somewhat obsolete - I have seen so much of this movie go by already that I tend to approach 'novelty' with less enthusiasm than it might appear to deserve. Or even, some might complain, with cynicism. But I think history will probably be written that demonstrates that I was in fact overly optimistic about most of this adventure ...

What else? Until recently I rode my bicycle a lot more often than I drove my car, and I kayak a lot more often than I ski. Lately, I have been sitting on the beach playing guitar instead of kayaking, but there was a time when I spent close to 100 days a year in the Olympic backcountry and tele-skied avalanche chutes on 4th of July weekends.

I am molting. I am now seriously shifting into the next chapter of my life, selling off most of the stuff that I have accumulated over the years, simplifying my connections to the world, in the hope of finding time to do things that are more worthwhile than some of the stuff I have been doing lately. Trying to get myself free of the money-chase ASAP. I just sold my 7 acres with house, shop and garden. Now I have a smallish apartment in a compound that is a community. Normally - based on the past 15 years or so - I would have been down at Oregon Country Fair for much of June and July helping get the event set up and torn down/put away. But a couple of years ago I had my second Saturn Return down there and suddenly found that I no longer believed in the mythology of it, and w/o the myth, the reality was far less appealing.

I have not really traveled much in the past decade simply cuz I do NOT really enjoy travelling alone. I think the reason is clear: for me at least, the most important part of an experience, regardless of how amazing, is not validated unless it has been shared. It is very simple, really. It is hardwired into me. No matter how astounding the sunset, it is shallow compared to a mediocre one shared with someone in a moment of mutual awe, and ironically I am feeling pretty darned alone at this point, and even in PT, where I have a huge number of acquaintances, some going back years and years and years, unless we have a "shared purpose" like a shared project, shared focus, it does not get to the place where I am hungry for connection and shared experience

fixing things that are broken. I used to love to teach women to fix their own cars. Then, after a decade and a half designing and building stuff - custom sailboats, musical instruments, huge auditorium PA systems, software company and a R&D commercialization think-tank, I wasted literally years of my life fixing people's computers and documents and organizations. I tend to take on activist roles, and work openly for social change. I played pretty hardball roles during the 'war of the woods' - the Jobs vs Owls business- 20 years ago. And took on reforming our Food Co-op, which was rapidly slipping into Food Co-opt, but from my POV, I/we failed to stop the slide. Lately, for the past few years, I have been fixing industrial sewing machines, which I find to be gloriously straightforward, and worth fixing, cuz when they work, the people who use them can work, too. I started a new song the other day that begins: " I can fix anything but your broken heart, or your organization that is falling apart." I am also really good at teaching people to repair bicycles, paddle kayaks and teleski ... I am still pretty good at riding uphill and I sort of assume I am looking for someone who can at least bicycle and paddle with me. When I have a sweetie who likes to ski, I ski backcountry, but left to my own devices, I tend not to travel to recreate: instead, I just hop on my bike and recreate as I transport my bod to North Beach for sunset, or to the Food Co-opt or the bank or the sail loft.

that I probably need a haircut. that I have been up all week? that my smile is either on or off, that I either look totally ridiculous or that I am wearing the coolest hat they have ever seen, and that like it or not I am really looking at them and probably really seeing them. Or maybe that I am saying interesting things that they have never heard before. Cuz I really do talk to strangers. Or maybe even that I am wearing the clothes that THEY really ought to be wearing. Or that what I just played on the guitar touched them? I actually have NO idea what people first notice about me. Maybe at this point in my life I am no longer narcissistic enough to be looking for my refection in other people's eyes. I do know what I notice about other people. I still weigh about what I did in college and still wear pretty much the same clothes and haircut I did in my 20's. In those days I was a pioneer, and it was seen as symbolic of a generational rebellion, a social change movement. Now it is just who I am. A relic of a time gone bye. A change that by-and-large didn't happen.

I am a pretty voracious reader. I often spend 2-3 hours a day reading. But for the past 40 years I have almost never read fiction. I used to maintain a very diverse nonfiction library of many thousands of volumes. Much of that library was rendered obsolete (at least for me) in the mid 1990's when I got access to a high speed internet connection via the think-tank where I worked.
Lately, I have been accumulating a hard-drive based digital library in pdf form. But I am now reestablishing my dead-tree library and creating a classic 'library' corner - a dedicated reading room. I have not found the perfect chair yet: one really designed to read in, not to watch TV on.

I had a fairly complete movie list on facebook, but their interface apparently ate it and my desert island album list as well. Wings of Desire, Battle of Algiers, M, Belle et Bete (Cocteau), Bladerunner, Bliss (the Austrailian one from 1985), Betty Blue, Blood Wedding and Diva? There are scenes in some of these that I would have cut, like the date rape in Bladerunner ... and in fact, I wish I had left the theater after the trunk opens in Betty Blue. For "second tier" movies, movies with deeper flaws, I'd guess "El Topo and La jetée" probably top the list.

I live in silence but the records that really affected me include Stravinsky's ballet music, Beethoven's string quartets, Jacqueline Mary du Pré playing The Elgar, Gordon Jenkins' Seven Dreams (the first "concept album'). In high school, I got introduced to ethnomusicology by Robert Garfias, with whom I later studied. I collected recordings of John Cage, Dylan Thomas and the SF beat poets Rexroth and Ferlingetti on transparent red vinyl from Fantasy Records, and I collected ALL the recordings I could find of Stravinksy conducting Stravinsky and Ansermet conducting those symphonies and ballets as well ... pop music: Sketches of Spain, Lhasa, Manu Chau, Sandy Bull's Inventions, Hearts & Bones, Santo & Johnny, Rubber Soul, Blonde on Blonde, Latcho Drom and lately, some of Joni's later work. I got gifted a great seat to Leonard Cohen last month and I am pretty sure that it was the best big show I have ever seen. I'm a sound guy so usually if I go to a show, I am mixing, rather than sitting and listening, but in the past few years, I've paid money to see Chandler, Alice Stuart, Sweeter Than The Day and Harry Manx. In the distant past, I saw Miles several times, saw the Stones on their first US tours, saw Dylan play electric in '66, got recruited to play in a band with Tony Visconti and his wife right before Tony went to London, quit my band in '67 rather than open for The Dead on their first tour, got high with Dexter Gordon, still remember EXACTLY where I was and what I was doing when I learned that Coltrane had just passed, sat right next to Bob Dorough when he started a song with the words, "Nat King Cole taught me how to play this ..." painted a Ferrari for Bill Takas and the night John Lennon was murdered, I played my big quad EL34 Traynor amp through each of my loudspeakers until their voice-coils unwound and burned up and next morning I took the speaker cabinets to the dump. Cuz THAT was the day the music died.

I am an art-house film guy and was a projectionist married to a film librarian for a long long time and we used to "run" a local film group before this town had a decent movie theater. And in the mid-late '80's - we still didn't have a decent theater in PT yet - we had the only big-screen video projection system in town and had a close-knit group who met to share dessert, film and discussion.

I am still interested in film-making, as a process, and would like to be involved in a large-scale film project at some point. I have learned several several video editing programs and recorded several soundtracks. I surrender to movies fairly easily, but have not seen many mainstream releases in the past decade, though I went to Seattle to see Avatar in 3-D at the iMax and had a pretty good time watching Lincoln with my mom last month. I will go on record here as being 'anti-pornography' because I am convinced that even CGI-based porn changes the viewer in ways that I actually consider toxic and cumulative.

If you want to learn more about this (the ways that the images and ideas in your feed stream impact your consciousness) there is a fascinating website at Harvard called Project Implicit, with online tools that actually allow you to measure (quantify) the impact of various inputs on your associative processes. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about it called Blink!

I've studied ethnomusicology for a long long time, starting when I was a 16 year old helping KRAB-FM get on the air, and I suppose I am a pretty accomplished musician at this point: I have been an on-and-off professional guitar player for the past 45 years. I went to NYC to be a rock-star in the middle '60's and played acid-rock during the 'Summer of Love' and I still find music to be one of my major forms of release. But I really do not listen to music much. I work and live in something akin to silence, unless I am playing music (or someone is playing it for me). I had a collection of around 2300 CD's stolen in 2001 and did not feel the need to replace very many of them. Now, unless someone brings me something to listen to, or I need to play something for them, I don't.

I have been playing 'vintage cowboy music" with a great singer for the past year and it has been great fun to dig into the roots of what got me playing when I was a kid, so while he channels Marty Robbins, I channel Grady Martin ... and I play sessions for other people and post customized guitar lessons on youtube ... and Artis and I did a seriously wild and wonderful set last week at OpenMic

I have a great collection of microphones, and a roomful of outrageous instruments from all over the world and I am definitely looking for someone who I can really play music with, but it does not have to involve money or careers or even gigging. It's another way to make love with someone. Time on the beach with people who play better than I do would be magnificent, and it is a long-term goal.

I have a wonderful kitchen full of chef's tools and I love to cook. I have been a hardcore food faddist - I even had a food-based cult of sorts in Seattle in the the early 70's - but for the past 20 years I have referred to myself as a "functional omnivore" and eat what is put in front of me w/o complaint, thankful to share food. I tell people that I would rather fart about what I ate than fight about what I am about to eat. Left to my own devices, I avoid spending money in ways that directly requires that an animal be killed, except when it involves my fisher-person friends, and though I can't afford to be a Freegan, I really admire that approach and I would definitely rather avoid money entirely, if I could.

Most of my diet has been mostly local and organic for the past 40+ years; mostly cuz neither coffee nor chocolate nor Oolong teas are ever going to be local for me. I know that 'life-styling' is utterly futile and presumptuous and that no matter how cleanly I live or how much effort I make attempting to parlay self- sacrifice into smugness, I cannot ultimately make up for the mess the mainstream culture is making, but I still carry may own bags to the store and avoid buying stuff that I have to buy in plastic, glass or metal packages. I do NOT have garbage collection where I live and I am fully aware that there is no such place as "away". I spent several years attempting to get our Food Coop to get serious about product labeling, and product vetting, to get the clearly inappropriate stuff OFF our shelves, but this effort was overwhelmingly defeated by employees who were far more concerned with their bonus checks than with the organization's mission or social responsibility.

For my 50th birthday party I had two full size 10# blocks of good-enough chocolate (Callebaut http://www.bernardcallebaut.com/ and Guittard http://www.guittard.com/ and had holes drilled in the blocks for the candles and everyone got to experience unlimited doses of 70 - 72% bittersweet chocolate for dessert.

I have been overwhelmed by things at various times in my life. And I still am but I know that I don't need many. I would be hard pressed to be me w/o a microscope or two or at least some good magnifiers and lights. My bicycle and my guitar probably really matter, but I don't need 4 bicycles and 10 guitars. I have scaled down from a multiprocessor desktop with 4 big CRT screens that literally heated my office to a pair of laptops with 2 LCD screens each, but I still have close to 20 GB of used email squirreled away on Google servers and a safe-full of hard drives. My phone is NOT a prosthetic part of my brain, and it is NOT smart: it is just another tool, and I am not a slave to it. If I have a visitor, I let my voice-mail intercede, and when my sweetie visits, I literally unplug it.

My bed is the most comfortable bed I have ever met, and I would miss it and all its wonderful accoutrements (Egyptian cotton, hand-carded hand-washed wool, goosedown, silk, etc.), but I am sure I could be happier in the mountains on a thin thermarest pad.

In some sort of order, I see these as needs: human contact, meaningful work, community, sleep, sexual tension, musical engagement. I have already demonstrated to myself that I can live with out most of them, but that I am not happy that way: I feel "wasted". But there is not much more that I could not live without. Some of these "things" presume other things - one cannot sleep for long without some form of shelter, meaningful work tends to require both an organization of things (tools and materials and markets) AND an organization of people (an economy) ... but I can go a long time without sleep and even longer without human contact, but I grew up in family and have lived closely with other people most of my life, and real closeness is currently missing and I am feeling it.

ways to make things better. Not in an abstract way, but in actionable ways. I spent a lot of the past 5 years using bicycle and public transportation to get around, instead of driving. And developing mathematical models for energy efficient (zero net energy w/o photovoltaics) affordable houses (target customer = single mom with one or two kids in school) and have been working on a locally adapted design for a "living machine" AKA a closed loop recirculating aquaculture system that uses grubs grown on compost to feed fish and the fish waste to grow hydroponic or aeroponic plants which remove the nutrients from the water, making it once again safe for the fish. Right now I am busy designing a heat pump-based soil heating system for a commercial greenhouse operation that is intended to dehumidify or even desiccate the air inside the greenhouse to discourage plant pathogens and run the cold storage off the same power that heats the soil. To be up and running this season ...

I have also been wondering why I am spending so much time alone at this point in my life, when it seems like time is at SUCH a premium. Most of the stuff I want to do with the rest of my life requires the involvement of other people, and their energies, skills and perspectives to accomplish more difficult stuff than I can expect to do on my own. I am looking to build or join another team.

writing introductory essays and posting links to what I honestly believe is the most interesting crap in the world onto Facebook, and sometimes wondering why I am doing that, instead of doing something actually worth doing. Here's a perfect example of the sort of stuff I write and post: "The word antibiotic (from Latin anti, "against" and Greek βιοτικός - biotikos, "fit for life") is a fascinating symbiotic portmanteau bridging 2 epochs of civilization, and a fitting paradigm for the 'Faustian Bargain' if ever there was one."

that I have probably been wrong more often than I have been right. And that my past 4 long-term sweeties have probably all been way too young for me. It did not seem that way at the time, but in hindsight it is finally becoming clear, even to me.

If your profile (your answers to this site's hundreds of questions) generally lines up with mine. I don't need more enemies in my life, although their matching algorithm seems to think that is what I need.

If your interests and appetites look compatible, send a smoke signal and let me know. Start writing essays as well as choosing their canned answers. I look to see who visits me.

Of the approximately 450,000 hours I have spent on this planet since I was 10 years old, I have put less than a few hundred into trying to conform to mainstream social norms. I am NOT a conventional person and I do not expect matches or soulmates to come easily. I have put quite a bit "out" and will put more, but it takes an awful lot of time to do that and I have a lot of other things to do.

Because I am a writer and by nature a fairly public person, I have put a lot of essay answers (like this) on a lot of the questions and I wish others would do so as well. Because clarity in communication is preferable to projection or ambiguity and the range of answers provided rarely encompass the entire range of issues that these questions raise. Regardless of whether you are intrigued, or put off by my detailed answers, please follow my lead and get real about answering these questions. Most of the questions are lame and the range of answer choices has a vary narrow gamut, that totally fails to reflect where I am coming from.

So I have elaborated. All the while recognizing that the imbeciles who created the match algorithms on this site are NOT taking the problem - or the opportunity - seriously: parsing free text and extracting intelligence from it through the use of ontologies IS the fundamental technology of the semantic web,

I visit the sites of people who OKC tells me have visited mine, but I do not think I am going to initiate contact with anyone who has NOT used the opportunity to elaborate on and clarify many or most of their answers. But I suspect that like any other rule, there might be reason to question it ...