Tag: Random Observations

Ask most people who know me, and they’ll probably tell you I’m one pessimistic mother-fucker. Mostly, near as I can tell, this is ’cause I have opinions on things, and ’cause most folks aren’t willing to accept that “being critical of something” and “not liking something” aren’t the same thing. It’s also ’cause I’d rather watch something that’s poorly made, but ambitious than technically accomplished, but soulless. I like to see flaws. I like to see people trying, stretching themselves, aiming higher than they usually would. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: every story is a mission statement; every climax is a world-view. But then, I’m me. I would think things like that. Truth is, like most pessimists, I’m actually fairly optimistic. I like to believe the world can change, even if it doesn’t. I like to believe that I can change it, even if it’s just a little at a time; blog post by blog post, story by

I assume I was a weird looking kid. I don’t remember for sure, but that would seem right. I should be the kind of person who looked weird as a kid, if only so it matched the way I generally felt around people. Weird looking avoids any undue and unbearable pressure that might seep up from my childhood and mug me as an adult. At five, if I can trust my memory, my family lived up in the northern parts of Queensland. Family lore suggests I already was pretty weird – telling pre-school teachers about imaginary pets, a menagerie of dogs and seals and mice that got treated like there were something real. I remember living next to the school where my dad worked, remember playing G-Force in the yard around our house. I remember someone finding the abandoned skins of carpet snakes beneath our house, in the days before such things would have sent me into spasms of ophidiaphobic paranoia