I'm from Staten Island, NY originally, but I moved to San Francisco in 1991 - to paraphrase Mark Twain, you go to the West Coast for the weather, and you go to the East Coast for the company! Someday I'd like to return to my roots, but right now that doesn't seem possible, so I'm making the best of it in California.
My basic philosophy of life was formulated early on; I never understood these people who said they had to go to college to develop "a meaningful philosophy of life" - if you haven't figured that out by then, you're in serious trouble! I've always had a strong negative reaction towards self-righteous, judgmental people, and I can't stand the idea that by just taking one look at somebody you can determine what they're all about. What's outside doesn't matter - it's what you have inside of you that counts.
One of the most profound events in my life occurred on April 30, 1975, when I came home from school and turned on the TV, only to see all the regular programming pre-empted by live coverage of the fall of Saigon. This experience taught me the central lesson of history - namely, the damage that inner passion can inflict upon the outer world: We allowed a bunch of spoiled, selfish individuals to dictate our nation's foreign policy, and as a result, literally millions of innocent people died gruesome, horrible deaths. This led to my voting for Ronald Reagan for President in both 1980 and 1984; he made me feel proud to be an American once again.
Later, however, I became appalled at our having turned into a sink-or-swim, survival-of-the-fittest society. We have an obligation to help the less fortunate, and this is not being done, mainly because we have become so selfish. Just the same, I have no patience with today's pointy-headed "peace" demonstrators, who must have been in some sort of stupor when the events of September 11, 2001 went down; these people are being truculent, and that's the last thing we need right now, in a time of such obvious danger.
When I feel the need to shut out a world I admit I don't much like, I listen to my chronologically-arranged music collection, which spans the decades of the '60s, '70s and '80s, all inclusive, and runs for nearly 100 hours; or I feed my sports addiction, of which the NFL in general - and the Philadelphia Eagles in particular - is my "drug of choice" so to speak. I'm also hooked on Mixed Martial Arts (e.g., Ultimate Fighting), where the classiest sportsmen on the planet can be found.
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