I love how you use a list to describe yourself as a person. I would like to single out those which I know, including my favorites, and, perhaps, add some of my own. Let's start with your list first: "Here's to: Claude Monet, Crazy Horse, Jack Kerouac, the Grand Canyon, hippies, Martin Luther King, blue, bluegrass, Andr… Read more

I love how you use a list to describe yourself as a person. I would like to single out those which I know, including my favorites, and, perhaps, add some of my own. Let's start with your list first: "Here's to: Claude Monet, Crazy Horse, Jack Kerouac, the Grand Canyon, hippies, Martin Luther King, blue, bluegrass, Andrew Wyeth, Albrecht Dürer, Johann Sebastian Bach, clouds, basil, Pacino, DeNiro, coffee, the Beatles, fog, the sun and moon, poets and wind, Psilocybin, Billie Holiday, Ella and Louis, all the shitty cars I have owned, all the feckin' money I ever owed, Neil Young, David Crosby, Ansel Adams, haiku, Van Gogh, old Volkswagen Beetles, Alfred Stieglitz, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, hiking, hitchhiking, all the shitty jobs I ever had, Joni Mitchell, the limitless field of all possibilities, Bill Nighy, Japanese Woodblock Prints, five-string banjos, and four on the floor." Here are a few of mine just right off the cuff: Edward Abbey, Paul Gauguin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, "The Brothers Karamazov," "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Rasputin, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, "S.S. Crispin Oglebay and S.S. Frank Purnell,"* Taraf de Haïdouks, Russian, Russian-Soviet history, Russian and Soviet literature, PANO-Vision, digital art, oil painting, drawing, pastels, Lee Friedlander, Jean-Paul Sartre, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, my Yavapai College studio art professors, Jimi Hendrix, "Me and Bobby McGee," Oregon, Portland, California, San Francisco and Napa, Arizona, Grand Canyon, Verde River (many white-water canoe trips), Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Shiprock (New Mexico), Tucson and its Santa Catalina Mountains, Organ Pipe National Monument, Tahiti (Moorea and Huahine), Kauai, "Catch-22" (both the movie and the book), Tom Waits and the movie "Night on Earth," Winona Ryder, "The Quiet Earth" (the film and its director Sam Pillsbury whom I know personally), Yavapai College, the University of Toledo, Portland State University, the Oregon Historical Society.... (this has been a very interesting stream-of-consciousness activity which could go on and on and on!) *I did two stints in the Merchant Marine on the Great Lakes to help pay my way through college. On the first ship I worked in the engine room in the summer of '69. In the fall of '71 I served as a deckhand on the Frank Purnell. I much preferred being out in the elements instead of confined to the noisy prison of the engine room.