Tagged again

This time the lovely Anna from Quaker Fruit Salad got me. I'm guessing she tagged me because I'm one of the few non family members who leave comments on her blog. Oh well, I love telling you people more about me whatever the reason, so here goes:

1) Even though I'm not a believer anymore, I love Christmas.

2) I'm probably not supposed to admit this out loud because I'm a guy, but I like shopping. And I especially love shopping in discount stores like TJ Maxx, Ross, and Tuesday Morning. I also dig thrift and junk store shopping.

3) I worked as a cook in a restaurant that my Aunt Rageholic owned for a bit. But what passed there for cooking was making burgers and deep frying frozen foods. I did not learn to actually cook proper food until I met my girlfriend Sparky. She taught me to cook with fresh ingredients and to use fresh green veggies in almost every meal.

4) I used to kick ass at church camp on Bible trivia. My tent always won whatever crappy prizes they gave out.

5) I never liked going hunting or shooting things. It seemed to be unfair to me that I could stalk an animal with a gun and while they had no weapons. If you like to hunt, then fine, it's just not my thing.

6) I was an extra on an America's Most Wanted re-enactment about a doctor who sexually abused some his female patients. The irony of it was that this same doctor had treated a person who was related to me by marriage. The doctor in question's name was Mohammed Ali and he fled to his home country of Egypt after he was arraigned. Some bounty hunters tracked him down in Cairo and they brought him back to the USA to face justice. I think he ended up doing ten years in prison and of course he lost his medical license.

7) The only country outside of the USA I have been to is Canada. I went to Windsor, Ontario many times when I was a kid living in Detroit and I also went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls when I was a teenager.

8) I wrote an experimental novel about my parents and my early years in Detroit but no one will ever read it. As I was writing it I thought, "Man, this is some great shit. I'm gonna win a fucking Pulitzer prize for this." But then after I re-read it, I realized it was dreadful and I shredded it. I don't consider the whole experience a waste of time however because it taught me that I had the discipline to sit down and write a novel.

9) The second novel I wrote, which is a crime novel called Trouble De Ville,

actually got published by a teeny tiny publisher here in Tennessee. I sold about 150 copies of it and for a time it was on Amazon.com. The publisher was a bit of a dick who stopped publishing fiction and he took down his web page without telling me. He did all that while I was recovering from my heart attack. He has since stopped taking emails from me so I gave away the last few copies of the book I had. I did keep one copy and I may scan it soon and offer it for sale as a PDF file.

10) No matter how many times I watch Airplane! or Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I still laugh at the same jokes every time.

I didn't tag anyone last time I did this but I'm going to go ahead and tag my running mate and one of my favorite Canadians, Jane Austen, Jr this time. If you two don't want to do it, I understand. I'll be hurt and I'll cry myself to sleep but I'll understand.