Matthew Wayne Selznick

I usually ignore participating in memes; after all, I have an independent punk-rock non-conformist reputation to uphold (he says while blogging like 50,000,000 other people.)

However, when your oldest friend calls you to duty, you answer. Seattle writer and photographer Geoff Carter wrote his “sixteen things” post on Facebook and that’s where he tagged me. I’m writing mine here; I’ll link to it in there.

Look out below; you might be next…

Here are sixteen random things about me: goals, habits, little known facts and other minutia.

1. I will release at least ten short stories in 2009; no promises on the novels.
2. I’m a nail biter. You may say it’s a filthy habit, but hey, I’ve never smoked anything, ever, and I rarely (once or twice a year?) drink. So there.
3. People from my past that I haven’t seen or heard from for years make regular guest-star appearances in my dreams. This almost always sparks a usually fruitless search engine expedition to find them. I’ve come this close to using one of those for-pay information harvesters on some folks… but I’m holding out hope the Interwebs will snare them eventually.
4. I was raised a Catholic and I’ve been an evangelical Christian and “spiritual warrior” before there was such a term, Runic Asatruan, and pagan… but I’ve self-identified as an atheist since the mid-nineties. A universe that doesn’t require the existence of the divine is more awesome to me than anything our folklore can provide.
5. I spent most of the late eighties in San Clemente, California. When I drive south to Oceanside to visit my mother, I stop in San Clemente on the way there, or on the way back, or sometimes both. It’s not the same town it was twenty years ago, but it’s still high on my list of adopted home towns. Long Beach, where I lived during the nineties, would be right up there too. These are the places I became me — witnesses to my best and worst moments.
6. Regrets, I’ve had a few.
7. When I was in eighth grade in 1980, my friends and I created a schoolyard advocacy group, APAD. That stood for “Anti-Punk and Disco.” We came to our senses pretty quickly. Hearing the first X album helped me along quite a bit. Today, a glance at ten random tracks from my music collection reveals Fugazi, Roxy Music, Son Volt, James Taylor, Elvis Costello, Paula Cole, John Coltrane, Shannon, Kool and the Gang and Al Jolson. I seem to have put aside my musical prejudices.
8. When I first moved out of my parents’ house, I had a tiny kitten I adopted from someone at work. I cannot remember what became of that cat. I hadn’t thought about it until now, trying to come up with sixteen things. Now, damn it, I’m not going to be able to stop trying to figure it out.
9. Speaking of cats, when I was at that same job someone calling themselves “the Passion Panther” left anonymous love notes on my car. The prankster never revealed themselves, but I suspect my friend Roger and his girlfriend at the time, Vanessa. Alas, the one and only time I had a secret admirer, it was probably fake.
10. I’m planning a major new project involving collaborators. It will be educational in nature and will generate revenue for the participants. One of whom might be you; you never know.
11. In my life there have been five people I would have married; two of them, I did.
12. I will never again knowingly work for a person, company or institution whose ethical and moral standards do not stand up to my own. Unfortunately or fortunately, this severely narrows my options looking for work.
13. The last time I played a pen-and-paper role-playing game was in 1988 or 1989. That said, I still have all my Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, Champions and other gaming books and a bunch of polyhedral dice. I have a fondness for the art form even thought it’s been a decade since I rolled a natural twenty.
14. When I was ten or eleven, I was part of a college student’s never-completed attempt to create a filmed re-creation of “Star Wars: A New Hope” using grade school children. We actually got out of class for this craziness. I was Han Solo, complete with black vest and a blaster made of paper towel tubes and aluminum foil. You better believe I shot first.
15. The people for whom I am most grateful and love the most are, almost entirely, the people I see the least. This is due to geography and circumstance and not by choice.
16. I would like to write a comic book. Who wants to draw one?

This is a meme, which memes (hah hah) I have to now pass the baton to sixteen others to compile their own list of sixteen random items about themselves we may not otherwise know. I choose Evo Terra, P.G. Holyfield, Danielle Evenson, Anne Bray-Tassinello, Thomas Gideon, Grant Baciocco, Andrew Kaufman, Chris Fisher, Veronica Yanco, Tucker Smallwood, Cat Dumas, Mark Jeffrey, Paula Berinstein, Heather Martindale and Lisa Sage. Go to it, kids — you’ve all got blogs or Facebook accounts where you can post your sixteen things and choose your own sixteen people.