Interview by Jeremy Puma

Posted on August 20, 2003 in Interviews

Here are the questions submitted to me by Jeremy of frog n’ blog. I welcome other interviewers to submit up to five questions though I reserve the right to ignore them.

Are you aware of your more-than-passing resemblance to cat-loving Orange County sci-fi author Philip K. Dick?

I will allow the readers to decide for themselves. This is Phil K. Dick:



This is me:



Both cats look equally unhappy, don’t they?

Twenty years ago, the question would have scared me out of my living gourd. In the middle of a bad drug trip when I was in college, a joker who shall be known only as J.D. screwed with my head. He was a big fan of Phil K. Dick and started suggesting that I was losing it and should explore drugs to see if I could lose it even more. I steered clear of Dick’s novels for many years and am only now coming around to being able to see his name without freaking.

I know that I am one of those bloggers who seems to be able to talk about the origins of his phobias effortlessly, but as for the details of this, let’s just say I’m not in a place where I can talk about it.

Poor PKD, though. A victim of guilt by association.

If you die and get to heaven and find that the Southern Baptist fundamentalists were correct about everything, what would you say to God?

This question almost comes straight out of one of my favorite unsung movies, The Rapture. It’s a scary thought that God could be evil and that all that we learned that was good from the Sermon of the Mount was actually thought to be rebellion against the Holy Order.

I’d say “Evidentally you love evil people more than those of us who struggled in every moment to achieve the spirit of the Beatitudes in our lives. I know what this means. It means that I will be thrown into Hell for all eternity. Put me next to Jesus.”

But God, I hope they aren’t right. I’d rather face annihilation than a hateful God.

Do you have a tragic flaw? If so, what is it?

When I ask Lynn my best quality, she says it’s my honesty. And when I ask her what my worst quality is, she says it’s my honesty.

I think she’s right. Look how my big mouth gets me in trouble here all the time.

But then think again about this. Oedipus got into trouble because he, too, was a seeker after the truth. He had to know who killed Laius and he wanted to make sure that his laws were carried out. When it turned out that it was himself, he did not hesitate: he carried out the law.

Most readers say “How stupid of Oedipus not to let things go!” I say “How brave. How magnificent. How true to himself he was!”

Can you imagine George W. Bush acting like that? He’d frame someone.

When was the last time you drank yourself into a stupor and had a great time while so doing? (Other forms of intoxication acceptable.)

When I’ve been that drunk, it hasn’t turned out to be such a great time.

If you could choose to go back in time and eliminate one invention from the history of mankind, what would it be?

It would be very tempting to eliminate the vacuum tube. Mass communication would be impossible. People would have to read, write letters, and talk to each other. No television, no radio. No O’Reilly. No Limbaugh. No fight over ownership of the airwaves. Ideas shared person to person.

A nice dream, but then I find myself pecking away at this keyboard and realizing that I already live without radio and television. This, too, however, stems from that technology. So I’d stand ready to bop the inventor over the head, raise the mallet, and then — back off.

Let history go where it will on this.

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I keep hoping that Yule Heibel or chari or Doug the Mute Troubadour will type “interview me” in the comments here or somewhere else.