So I’ve been tagged by TG and now I’m supposed to come up with eight overly-personal anecdotes/factoids…
People who are tagged need to write these rules in their own blogs & share eight things about themselves that others might not know. At the end of the their blog post, they need to tag six people and list their (blog) names. Leave a comment on the blogs of the people they’ve chosen telling them they’ve been tagged and encouraging them to come over and read the eight things you’ve written on your blog.
1) Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
I came face-to-face with an armed-and-vested US Marshall last week as she charged into KC’s Crossroads Infoshop. My first thought as I saw her striding purposefully through the door was that something must have gone horribly wrong at the Bush speech in KC earlier that day and my presence at the most visible anarchist presence in town was somehow going to result in a one-way ticket to Gitmo. This was not helped by the fact that I had just been chatting with a visitor to the store who kept making bizarre, unexplained references to almanacs.
2) I call her “Mini-Me”.
My daughter, “Z”, continues to freak me out by looking so much like myself at her age (apart from having her Mom’s blue eyes).
3) LSD is a gateway drug…
Totally bass-ackwards. I was more or less the straight-edge type in my teen years apart from some very occasional drinking. In my early twenties, I jumped feet-first into a short period of experimentation with LSD. Later, I started smoking weed on occasions when nobody I knew could score any trip. Marijuana, in turn, made me cough so much that I took to smoking cigarettes to try to train my lungs. I still smoke a pack plus daily.
4) O-positive.
5) Military vet? Depends…
I have roughly as much law enforcement training as a rookie cop from being a former military policeman in the US Army Reserve a long time ago, having enlisted two days after my seventeenth birthday. Two and a half years later, I went active duty in the US Air Force as a computer/communications specialist and was kicked out roughly a year later on a general discharge for “assorted minor disciplinary infractions”. I don’t really think of myself as a veteran because I never went to war or even overseas. I came out of the administrative discharge process with no criminal record and (if I recall correctly) eligibility for all standard veterans benefits except the only one I ever actually wanted — GI Bill college money. Shortly after, as a newly-minted civilian, I discovered libertarianism, thereby became strongly anti-war and was alienated by the media spectacle of the first Gulf War. For going on two decades since, I’ve been glad I got out when I did — being neither proud of that part of my life, nor particularly ashamed of it either. Since my choices were shaped by the culture I grew up in, I didn’t know any better. It’s just a part of my personal history.
6) Yes, that really, really hurt…
As a teenager, I accidentally came within a couple inches of burning my testicles off while playing with homemade thermite.
7) I hate this sort of chain-letter stuff…
Which is why I’m only listing seven things and not passing it on to anyone else. Readers can start it again themselves if they wish, but I refuse to put other people on the spot.
