This is me.  Well, sort of.   It was one of the logo markings on my first on-line blog, and he has graced every blog ever since, in one spot or another.

If I could I would spend a LOT more time writing.  I  used to write more than I do now, and I need to get back into the practice of writing something every day if I can.

I am currently 60 years old, with four adult children and 10 assorted grands and step-grands.  I was married 9.5 years, divorced in 1983, and have been out-and-proud ever since.

I earn my living dyeing yarn for knitters and designers.  I got into this by an accident of Nature — a year after Hurricane Katrina I left my job in New Orleans and moved to Houston.  This has been my only income since April of 2006.

From 1973 until after my divorce I was a minister with the Assemblies of God denomination. Being a divorced Pentecostal minister, dealing with coming out and accepting myself as a gay man, I was forced to look at what I had been believing, and preaching.  That put me on a journey from fundamentalist religion through a trail of less dogmatic ideas, then into a time of “spiritual but not religious”, and ultimately realizing all religion is just superstition invented to explain things ancient people didn’t  understand and to cope with the hard realities of life in the real world.

I am registered as a Democrat, but I am not 100% committed to every element of the Democratic platform. The Republican party, of course, is 100% evil and must be destroyed, one way or another. I am more interested in the politics of social justice issues, more than foreign policy, economics, and other aspects of politics.  I am particularly interested in First Amendment issues, as well as marriage equality, women’s health and universal healthcare, science education, and removing religion from national policy and practice.

It’s not that I expect people to wake up and stop believing their religious nonsense; but I do expect nonsense-believers to stop expecting everyone else to respect those beliefs.