Look not above, there is no answer there;
Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer;
Near is as near to God as any Far,
And Here is just the same deceit as There.
And do you think that unto such as you;
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew:
God gave the secret, and denied it me?--
Well, well, what matters it! Believe that, too.
Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think,
And at the same time make it sin to drink?
Give thanks to Him who foreordained it thus--
Surely He loves to hear the glasses clink!
- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
First of all, I'm significantly nerdier than you would expect, I think that if it hadn't been for my love of Punk Rock when I was in high school I would have been part of the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.
I grew up in a military family with all that entails: moving every couple of years, learning what time “Colors†and “Taps†would be every day, being able to identify friendly and OpFor tanks and aircraft by the time I was nine, being able to hit a target at 300m from the prone position with an M-16 by the time I was ten and knowing how to make my rack and set my gig line by the precocious age of six.
Seriously, we did move around a lot, I was born in Sacramento, California but moved to Dayton, Ohio within a few months and Omaha, Nebraska when I was three. My family moved to Athens, Greece when I was seven and we were there for four years, when I was eleven we moved to Tokyo, Japan and when I was fourteen we moved to southern California, so basically I have not lived anywhere that people speak English since we left Omaha.
I joined the Marine Corps after high school and managed to get into a unit that spent a lot of it’s time overseas. Unfortunately most of that was in the hot, miserable, stinking sandbox of the Middle East, I can still say “damn it’s hot†and “pass the camel ka-bob†in Arabic and Farsi. The upside was that we also got to go to places like Thailand, Bali, Hong Kong, Singapore and, best of all, Australia (Side note on Australia, it is the second best place on earth, pretty, down to earth women, great beer, beautiful countryside and friendly people but then again I was so plastered on the beer I might have been imagining everything else).
I got out of the Marines and moved to Seattle for a little while, did the whole Seattle thing, grew a goatee, got some body piercings (still have one of them) and then moved back to southern California and joined a Marine Corps Reserve unit. I finally got tired of the embarrassing lack of funds and equipment in the Marine Corps and I switched services into the Air Force in 2004 Since then I've been stationed in Texas and Florida and I currently have joint duty up at Travis AFB near Sacramento CA.
A Smattering Of Hitchens.
The U.S. Military!
