July 13th, 2008

About me

Since I’m new around here, I thought I’d post a little bit about myself.

I live—as I have for almost my entire adult life—in the city of San Francisco, a place as frustrating as it is beautiful. I live with my partner of 22 years; we celebrated our anniversary just a few nights ago. I’m 41 and he’s 39, so you can do the math and figure out we were young and crazy when we got together. Ours is that rare teenage romance that lasts, and I hope it does for the rest of our days.

Also, it turned out that the 1980’s were an excellent time to fall into a committed, monogamous relationship as young gay men (boys?) in an urban area. We saw people die like flies; we dodged the bullet.

I work in politics, and we’ll leave it at that; I’m having one of those midlife crises where I’m 41 and trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up, and I doubt it’ll be what I’m doing now. At some point, I promised myself I wouldn’t become that midlife crisis guy but I did. On the other hand, I promised myself I wouldn’t go bald, and that worked out fine. And my midlife crisis hasn’t resulted in the buying of a sports car with a low center of gravity that makes me look like that midlife crisis guy, so I think I’m ahead of the game.

My partner works as a senior manager for a Very High Profile Silicon Valley company. I went to college (and more college, and more college) and he didn’t. He makes a good deal more money than I do. So just in case you’re wondering if the universe is fair: no, no it’s not. I’m an active investor, and I surely make more money from that than I do from politics, so when people ask what I do for a living it’s, as they say on Facebook, complicated.

I’m fascinated by cities and towns, buildings and streetscapes, the spaces, public and private we create for ourselves. And I’m always in search of the perfect place to live.

I’m a guy of many divergent interests. This makes career planning an almost insurmountable challenge, but life an ever unfolding pleasure. Like a lot of people whose interests spread out in every direction like the roots of an old tree, busting up some sidewalk here and there, I live on the business end of an info fire-hydrant, with too many books and magazines to read, to many films to see, too many seasons of The Wire to catch up on, too many newspapers to browse, and too many blogs to check. And yet I want to add my own bit of pressure to the hydrant. I’m here because I feel like I have something to say, but I won’t know what until I write it.

A few core beliefs, to give you a sense of my overall Weltanschauung:

  • The good old days weren’t. If you doubt me, read up on pre-20th century dental care.

  • Market capitalism with division of labor and trade is the single best idea anyone ever had about anything.

  • The internet and the accompanying Long Tail mean much more than a wider array of colored sweatshirts to buy at Wal-Mart; they profoundly empower our species.

  • Manned space exploration, and eventual colonization, is important because astronomy and geology have shown clearly that catastrophic things happen to planets all the time.

  • Science and reason are the only ways we have of knowing anything.

  • Religion and spirituality have vastly less to tell us about our lives than literature and art.

  • Wealth is not a zero-sum game. The rise of the economies China and India are unambiguously good things. Competition? Bring it on.

  • Technological singularity? Maybe.

  • Enjoy in moderation.

I’m sure there are more, but if I dropped all my crazy opinions into one post, what would I have to write about for the rest of my entries? Pictures of LOLcats?

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@obscuranta

Thoughts, en passant:

"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study, and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think." —John Stuart Mill

"Earnestness is stupidity sent to college." —P.J. O'Rourke

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." —H.L. Mencken

"This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there as no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world's history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men." —C.S. Lewis

"Politicians taking credit from what they’ve done for the economy are like little kids working the controls of video games without putting any money in. There’s all kinds of stuff happening on the screen of the video game and they think that it’s all due to the frantic work of their fingers." —Tom Foreman

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." —Ed Howdershelt

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big." —Daniel Burnham

"Careless exaggerations are a million times worse than the Nazis." —Merlin Mann

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