This isn't meant to be a personal website in the usual sense though I seem to do everything in life in an intensely personal way whether appropriate or not. My Myers-Briggs type is ENFP — if you do that kind of astrology — and I'm all the way at the end of the bell curve on the N, F and P parts. Translated, that means I’m something like a visionary, tree-hugging commie pervert and a mystic.
When I was in my 20s at Berkeley during the 1960s, UC president Clark Kerr said of us New Leftists, “They have the righteous indignation of the prophets of old, combined with the personal behavior of the romantic poets.” He was right. And we laughed at Governor Wallace who called the Berkeley faculty "a buncha communist anarchists." But if there ever was a living oxymoron, some of us qualified for that characterization too.
My career has been very ambitious. Trouble is, most folks are ambitious in a vertical direction -- they want to stay in one place and advance toward the top. Me, I have been horizontally ambitious and wanted to do it all and see it all. I was a professor of languages and linguistics at Berkeley, Tel-Aviv and a couple of small black colleges in the south, did field work in India and was IT director of a college.
Later I wore hats of union carpenter, commercial beekeeper, oil field roughneck, contractor and electrician, spent two years with the Peace Corps language training staff and seven years at the US Department of State managing language training for diplomats, drug agents and spies. And I tried to marry or date the whole United Nations. Often a bride, never a bridesmaid.
Throughout my adult life I have been learning, teaching or using a dozen or more foreign languages. Today I occasionally do network consulting — programming Cisco routers and firewalls and Windows servers — and lots of art woodworking and now knives and metal work, the raison d’être for this site.
If you're one of the horizontally-ambitious types, then you probably know by now that you don't always look so good even to your fondest admirers. In the end you won't have a lot to show for it besides memories and a special kind of wisdom and consciousness. At age 68 I am the happiest, most immature senior citizen in the state, living alone in a $4,500 trailer in a construction dump in the woods behind my son's farm. Part of my great peace of mind is attributed to not having a job or even a girlfriend though I don't go out of my way to avoid the girlfriend. Retired Indiana Joneses are not greatly in demand in these parts. I used to think people retired because they got too old to work until I realized that I have enough energy for 20 more years of work -- but nobody can tell me what to do any more. And I don't like to have to show up. I like it this way even though the material compensation is pretty marginal. I get consulting work setting up corporate VPNs which I enjoy doing, about the right amount of work and play time.
My main project for the last 28 years — over 20 of which I spent as a single parent — has been raising my fourth son Seth, who was born almost totally blind. The realization that I would be raising him alone was the spark that made me leave construction in my forties and go back to earn my PhD. Baby Seth has finished his MA in history at Oxford and is a beginning professional writer in LA, and my nest is empty.
Altogether I have four sons, a daughter, a stepson I have not kept in touch with as much as I wish I had, 23 grandkids, seventeen great-grandkids and two sisters also with large families. At most any given time in my memory we have been five generations strong. The whole family except for Seth, who probably has the same horizontal ambitions as his dad, lives in East Texas.
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October 2009
I plan to buy land in Van Zandt County (East Texas) soon and build an energy-efficient straw bale house with some stained glass and an outdoor bath (indoor ones too), and build a better forge and power hammer, and expand from just knives and woodwork into metal and multimedia sculpture.
