I live along the Front Range of the Rockies, near Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado (USA).
I love walking about the town, and I tend to walk at a fast pace.
Some of my other interests are:
painting (mostly acrylic portraits),
reading (mostly non-fiction science and history),
writing (mostly essays),
composing poetry (mostly a wee bit experimental),
tutoring (mostly
@Terese),
and soaking nude in hot springs (mostly to the horror of any bystanders).
I paid my university room and board by working as a fire fighter.
When I was at university, I would now and then get drunk with a few friends and then, after the bars closed, climb to the roof of one or another multiple story building, where we'd dare each other to walk along the building's edge. Looking back now, that was one of the dumbest things that I have ever done more than once or twice in my life.
I once owned and operated a small business with 13 employees, including my ex-secretary, who I was especially fond of, in part because she taught me — better than anyone else in my life until then — that people with absolutely no intellectual interests could be lovely, wise and compassionate.
When I was 16, I hitchhiked around the Western United States, living on the streets of the cities I found myself in. At that time, I was one of four people I met who were 16 or younger. Nowadays, there are thousands of kids even younger than 16 living on the streets.
I didn’t figure out I’d married my first wife for her exceptionally good looks until after I was divorced — the obvious often escapes me.
My mother was the CEO of a small business for 30 years. Her company came to be recognized as a model for other businesses within its industry. My father died when I was two years old, but he had been an inventor, a manufacturer, and a portrait artist.
At university, I went an extra year and a half beyond the standard four years because there was just so much that I wanted to learn, and tuition was cheap back then. I took courses in all the major sciences (except chemistry), but I majored in philosophy and had a double minor in comparative religious studies and anthropology.
I was raised in a tiny Mid-Western American town of 2,000 people in which the dogs were allowed to vote in local elections on the theory they knew everyone in the community at least as well as anyone else.
A traumatic event when I was eight years old triggered childhood depression in me. Undiagnosed and untreated, it developed into a series of frequent adolescent and then adult depressive episodes that afflicted me on and off for most of my life. I finally got professional help and with that help brought the attacks under control. For the past dozen or so years, I've been virtually depression free and insufferably happy.
I had a nice little basement chemistry lab when I was a kid. I learned how to make gunpowder which I then often enough sold to other kids, or now and then set off at night in the yards of such adults as I or my best friend, Dennis, considered obnoxious.
My second marriage was to a brilliant, but abusive woman who herself had been abused as a child. After leaving her, I vowed not to pass along her abuse of me to anyone else by abusing them, and to live well, as my only revenge.
At thirty-seven, I lost nearly everything I owned within a short period of six months, including my business, my wife, my money, my home, and most everything else I’d built my self-identity on. Perhaps strangely enough, it felt like a huge burden had been lifted from me.
When I was young, I had an artistic bent and somehow managed to twice win adult art competitions for paintings
I'd stolen from my elders had done -- once when I was eight, again when I was sixteen. But I gave up painting when I was eighteen, and only returned to it about six years ago. I figure it will take me at least another dozen years if I work at it before I get to where I want to be with my paintings.
When I moved to Colorado about 25 years ago, I had no inkling at all of the radical life-changes in store for me. Had someone described to me my future self when I was younger, I would not have easily recognized me.
I think of myself as having known in my life far more than my rightful share of fascinating people.
