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Born too soon, I likely will die too late. Until that inevitable end, I believe neither in afterlife nor aftershave, so aspire to spend the rest of my life as a very hairy and very healthy corpse. That should suffice as my life's story, a short story.

Want to know more? Friends long have been clamoring for me to blab about myself all over the internet, and thereby engage in the same ego-maniacal shameless self-promotion as does everyone else with a MyFacial or SpacedBook account, or with a hundred bucks to jump onto the bandwagon and claim a piece of bandwidth to populate with a personal website such as this. So now there's no stopping me ... Am a Leo, and I can't help it, I was born that way. Am a college fine arts academic now bored by the arts, a nature photographer who seeks to shoot the sunrise at risk of being blinded, and an occasional instructor of Photoshop which helps me make my nature photos look more like nature and less like photos. My handheld-camera self-portrait was photo'd August 2007 and sunset photo at beach January 2009 and neither was photoshopped to make me look leaner or younger or better. You be the judge whether I, as a 58 year old, present the picture of health. If you think I look 10 years younger than my age, then try to imagine that even at the age of 9, I looked 10 years younger than my age. Along the route of our search for eternal youth, I have written books and articles with the intent to save the world, though I'm now content to save my breathe. Was a Cub Sprout who grew up into a Boy Sprout and wilderness backpacker, backwoods mountain biker, near-marathon runner, and more-than-mile swimmer. But now that I am a Man Sprout, I am permanently crippled by a sports injury, and probably pickled by nearby nuke plant radioactivity, to which might be attributed others' misshapen bodies and my misconceived thoughts. Family, friends and lovers shape our thoughts and our lives. Mine also are influenced by my animal neighbors in a nature preserve where I live, and by the books which I read. I've studied both Testaments of the Bible, and the tenets of Buddhism and Shinto. Add to my reader's dossier the nearly entire oeuvres of way too many Eurocentric dead white males, for instance Melville and Whitman, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rilke and Leopardi, Kafka and Borges, Cioran and Beckett, Plato and Socrates, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and my guru and mentor and doctor Seuss, to name some whose rhymes and rants I somehow survived without going crazy, but also without growing wise. I've also read more than a lioness's share of women writers too, just not anyone who has changed my life, say the way Socrates and Plato did, who taught me for instance that poverty is measured not by how little one owns, but by how much one wants. So while I want to foster happiness in our individual lives, I want more to inspire reverence for the planet upon which our meager lives depend. Consequently my own greatest inspirations are the writings of Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, and Edward Abbey, especially Abbey's Fool's Progress and Desert Solitaire, both which I've cried over and read twice over, the second times chapter-by-chapter backwards, after all according to Kierkegaard, Life is Lived Forwards but Understood Backwards. In deference to and defense of Mother Earth, I've never wanted to father a child, nor have I ever fathered an unwanted child. And though I like cats and dogs, I can't bring myself to bring home dead animals from the slaughterhouse to feed to live ones in the doghouse. Calves and lambs and kids and piglets are cuddly animals too, which is why since age 15 I have not eaten them, nor since age 19 drank the milk their mothers intended for them. I wonder what people mean when they espouse their love for animals, yet they love them also for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also I do not eat white flour or white sugar or take pharmaceutical drugs or drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, but I do unabashedly smoke medical marijuana, medicinally for below the waist, and recreationally for above. I am merely human, so certainly not a god. I believe in all of the gods, but none of the religions, especially not Western religions, whose pages of history are stained with the blood of infidels and animals. I am not religious, but if I were religious, I would be a Carthusian or Zen monk, except for my being incurably and heretically heterosexual, and except for my being more zany than holy. Am a former island resident of the nuthouse called Manhattan, where same as most of its residents I too was a nutcase, until I outgrew my ego-driven ambition to earn a livelihood as a painter, for which my only regret is not having renounced art sooner. As primary collector of my own art and primary caretaker of my own health, I reside as an ape man in a nature preserve where the chickadees perch upon me, and where, because I do not smell like a predator, the deer do not flee me. And where I live without a tranquilizing tv, metastasizing microwave, alarming alarmclock, or handcuffing wristwatch. I've never shopped at Wal-Mart nor on eBay, but have browsed the stalls of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I've never set foot in nearby Foxwoods, but have hiked the faraway Grand Canyon from rim to river to rim. I've never drank Classic Coke or Coors or Starbucks, but have fasted just on water many times and many days. I'll never attain enlightenment nor see god, but perhaps I'll look into the future and see you having endured reading to the very end of this webpage, for which I thank you.