Frickin’ @jessabelle207 tagged me. I’ve done this before, only back in MY day they were TEN things. And let me tell you kids, that was hard livin’. I seriously don’t really feel up for it. It’s a harder experience than it sounds like. You do some soul-searching. You think about stuff you maybe didn’t really want to think about. You tell people stuff you maybe didn’t want them to know, but you’ve just finished learning that there aren’t that many interesting things about you, so you’re stuck and you tell them. I could be eating cereal right now.

However.

Maybe 3 years ago I was tagged for ten, and I present for this round 7 of those 10. Has nothing interesting happened since then? Of course it has. But that’s a different list and mostly it would have to do with the things that make me love my family. And I don’t really feel like it’s possible to make that sound as good as it is. I’ve never seen anyone else pull it off.

So here we go.

1. I worked at not one, but four fast food restaurants, including a six hour stint at Burger King, which I ended by phone the next day, citing irreconcilable differences. Arby’s was the most disgusting though. By a long shot.
2. A member of the band once dubbed me Steel Pole Bath Tub’s “Preeminent Archivist”. Even beating #3 below, I consider this among my nerdiest accomplishments.
3. Between the ages of 13 and 15, I estimate I played somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple thousand full games of the original NES Baseball. I kept elaborate statistics in a huge notebook, played out full 162-game seasons, and had no interest in the more graphically impressive games that followed it. I have some uncommonly quick arithmetic skills that I attribute directly to this. At some point it was not at all about winning (losing became basically impossible) and all about the stats (which were for the most part impossibly excellent). About 3 years ago, I discovered a Japanese game called Bad News Baseball, which is the only NES game I know of that trumps the original in playability and fun.
4. I’m fascinated by game show hosts and am slowly working on a collection of 8x10s of my favorites. My wife had a guitar strap made for me that features photographs of several hosts. She did not, when putting it together, realize that they were all dead (a couple of them untimely). It’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received.
5. For three years between about 22 and 25, I had a job providing support for four adult autistic men in their own shared house. It was, no doubt, the most taxing job I’ve ever held (and that means something - fast food is hard). Some irritating things people have said about this job: i) ”Wow, you have my DREAM JOB.” - Really? You want to, every night, take home the emotional weight of trying to help four grown men make their lives fulfilling when they sometimes can’t get out of bed in the morning, aren’t always in tune with their bodily functions, may be prone to fits of violence, scream all day long because they just can’t help it, or have gross compulsive habits that annoy the living hell out of you? It’s nice to have a dream. But these are the words of the sadly underinformed. ii) ”That’s very noble of you.” - It’s not like they didn’t pay me. Nobody would do that for charity for very long. iii) Anything at all having to do with Rain Man.
6. For my 4th birthday, I was on a television show called “Uncle Jimmy’s Club House” on the Yakima, WA CBS affiliate KIMA. I don’t really remember it, but I wore a brand new shirt my grandmother gave me for my birthday, and when asked where I got it from, I told Uncle Jimmy “K-Mart”. Uncle Jimmy stood for cake, games, and probably copyright infringement, judging by photos I’ve seen with Disney shit all over the place. The next television appearance I made was when my soccer team did some gophering for the KYVE public television auction, and at some point I went under a camera and didn’t duck far enough to be out of frame. Then in high school I did a few guest appearances, camera work, and probably some writing for “Cyrus… the TV Show”, a public access variety show one of my friends made. I also was assigned to take photos for Cyrus on a trip to interview Chris (that’s how it was spelled at the time) Novoselic, and the audio turned out to be so bad Cyrus would need to do the interview again, and the guy actually agreed. Very nice guy, but I was a nervous wreck and barely spoke. It was Nirvana, man!
7. In early elementary school I rode the school bus all the way to the bus barn twice because the driver didn’t see me and I was too shy to say anything. His name was Don, he looked out for me. Drove me back home both times.