While I've worked for
(what is it, 13 years now?) as a corporate
cartoonist/visualizer/etc. , Theres' more to me than that
I've nearly always had
some "different" notions about how I would
live, work and all. I more or less created the job I
have, and the way I approach things seems to always come
from some alternate veiwpoint, that either sheds light on
things for the good, or infuriates the management and
anyone else who preaches "there is only one right
way..."
As for specifics...
I'm one of that dreaded
species of "white male", of Swedish and
English descent, with a possibility of a little
mongolian tossed in (from an old family story
about an ancester going into russia to fight in a
war and returning with an asian wife...) Why I'm
not big and blond.
I'm also left handed
I prefer riding bicycles to
driving cars
I'm married (to Kris
Erickson )
I'm a father (my son Jason is
now 10)
Music is a big deal with me. I
play guitar left handed (I like blues/rock, old
jazz, electric guitars). My wife is a
"killer" first suprano, who also comes
up with melody's and words, so we work together
to get them more or less finished with all the
other parts that make a song.
I used to be into moderate
rock climbing and alpine climbing (mixed ice and
rock) but being a parent my opportunities have
been a bit "amended"... BUT, I retain
my enthusiasm for rope. I recently completed a,
18 foot (diameter) "spiders web"
climbing "thing" for Jason. It hangs in
our tree's near our home, and provides him a safe
place to "dangle and thrash".
I'm a Mac(intosh) biggot.
While I use PC's at work my tool of choice is a
macintosh computer.
Basic History:
Born in Anchorage Alaska, which in the
early 1960's had this odd white american frontier/techno island
thing going on (heavy with airplanes) positioned amid an
indiginous culture not that many generations out of a
"lithic" (stone age) culture. I recall playing with my
toy trucks and my stone ax, and bone hunting lance... equally
comfortable with the "lithic" technology of the
indiginous people. I recall my great aspiration at age 7 was to
become a Sled Dog "musher".
My father built our home-more of a cabin as
it had only one bedroom and remained unfinished during the 9
years we lived with him. He worked as a carpenter putting up some
of the larger buildings in Anchorage of the 1960's. But on his
own time he loaded his own ammunition and aspired to be the
"great white hunter". Having learned how to fabricate
things (both metalic, wood and leather) by hand from his father
and during a 7 month trip aboard the 3 masted schooner Wawona in
1947, I was exposed quite early to the notion that doing it
myself might be "better" than buying what I need.
Being an avid hunter and fisherman, he
brought home the bulk of our families meat supply from his
hunting trips. I recall trying to stay out of the way as my
parents processed his latest "kill", be it a thousand
pound Moose carcass, hundreds of pounds of copper river red
salmon (caught by means of an indian style fish wheel, legal for
use by us whites in those days - 1962) where we worked far into
the night cleaning, cutting, smoking, canning, freezing and
preserving.
Oddly enough, my mother never developed the
knack of cooking fish, so I only found out in my later life just
how succulent a fresh "copper river salmon" really is
when cooked on a cedar plank on a grill... I didn't know what we
had.
In college I'm sure a lot of my friends
were convinced I had aspiratons of being some sort of lazy
jobless bum because I didn't want an 8 to 5 job in some
corporation. Having a collection of Mother Earth News magazines
that promoted the "back to the land movement" and
having seen the abuses of life as a wage slave, I was convinced
there was a better way, and experimented with different
approaches to that end.
So here I am, 25 years later, working as in
a corporation giving all the appearances of "falling off the
wagon" and abandoning my principles.
Meanwhile...
Little did they know... that the
"world" as they knew it would change so drastically.
Where in former times it was a "normal" expectation for
one to progress through school, either the military on into
college, on to career with one company (or at most 2), family and
retirement in a fairly predictable order.
Who would have thought that the kind of
"stuff" I was talking about in 1978 would become
"the normal thing" now at the turn of the millenium?
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