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I’m 32 years old. Never imagined I’d make it this far.I identify as lesbian. I love women.I’m whiter than sour cream. I took a DNA test through the National Geographic Genographic Project and my ancestry was 34% Scandinavian, 27% British-Irish, 19% Western/Central European (I’ve got a lot of German in my family tree on my dad’s side), 10% “Asia Minor” (I’m assuming they meant Armenia or something, because I sure as hell ain’t Turkish), and 7% Eastern European.I’m also 1.2% Neanderthal, which is 0.9% less than the average person…and less than my wife as well. I delight in reminding her that I am technically a more advanced form of life than she is.I was born in 1986, the year the Challenger disaster took place, The Phantom of the Opera debuted, the first commercially available 3D printer was released (older than you thought they were, eh?), and the Iran-Contra scandal broke. The Troubles were still going on in Ireland, the Soviet Union was still technically a thing, Halley’s comet reached perihelion, and the Voyager 2 space probe had its first encounter with Uranus. [snicker]I was born in Auburn, California, the county seat of Placer County. That’s pronounced “PLASS-er,” by the way. It comes from the term “placer mining.” As the crow flies, Auburn lies less than twelve miles from the little town of Coloma, wherein lies Sutter’s Mill, which is where gold was discovered in 1848, kicking off the California Gold Rush. That’s right, peeps: I’m from the Gold Country. You’re looking at a 24-carat Quoran right here.I’ve lived in seven states: California, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Nevada.My Meyers-Briggs personality type (yes, I drink the MBTI Kool-Aid) is INTJ. That’s the reason I geeked out in #5 about all the historically significant things that happened the year I was born, and it’s probably the reason I almost killed myself. (See #14.)I used to know how to ride a horse. You’ll notice I didn’t write “I know how to ride a horse,” because it’s been twenty years since I rode a horse, and the last time I checked, horses ain’t bicycles. You actually can forget how to ride ‘em.I’ve been an atheist since I was ten years old. Nothing in particular happened to make me an atheist, like my grandmother dying in a tragic bingo parlor explosion or anything like that. My parents (also atheists) took me to a few churches (including a Unitarian Universalist church, which was feckin’ weird) and then I pretty much made up my mind that I was an atheist.I have one sibling, a younger brother. (He’ll be 31 in April.) I haven’t spoken to him in something like three years. He lives in Hollywood and is trying to become an actor. He actually had uncredited, blink-and-you-miss-it roles in Hail Caesar! and Suburbicon.I also cut off contact with my mom’s entire extended family—my grandparents and all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. (Long story.)The only living relatives I have on my dad’s side are an uncle in Michigan and a great aunt in Ohio, and I email them semi-regularly. My great aunt recently took a Kroger cream pie to the Radio Club meeting. Fast times in Ohio, man.I came very close to committing suicide when I lived in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2015. I had a horrible job, was in a horrible relationship, had no money and no savings and no prospects, was in a ton of debt, hated Las Vegas, and was watching my dreams slip away little by little every day. I’m ashamed to say it, but I almost gave up hope. I went so far as to pen a couple of suicide notes and even lay out a detailed plan. What saved me? I got religion. Well, no, not really. I got philosophy. I started studying up on Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, all that jazz. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it saved my life.I lived in South Korea for four nonconsecutive years (2008–2009, 2012–2014). Some of the best times of my life. Which made living in Vegas all the suckier later.The hair on my scalp started thinning in late 2014, just before I moved back to the United States from South Korea. I’m not sure whether this was due to diet (I was living on nothing but kimchi and rice for four months straight, pretty much), stress, Korean shampoo (Korean handsoap gave me chemical burns on my hands), or heredity. But my hair never really filled back in again. I got so tired of seeing flashes of my pasty-white scalp whenever I stood out in the sunlight or under bright lights (and so sick of being insecure about it) that I finally decided to practice a bit of Stoicism and shave all my hair off. I now look like a scary ex-con, but I’m no longer obsessing about my looks. (Nor do I have to comb my hair in the mornings, which is another added bonus. And do you know how many days I can get away without showering now? I should have done this years ago!)I also have partially bleached eyebrows. I had bad acne as a teenager and started using Clearasil pads to counter it. They cleared up the zittage, but they also permanently blonded my eyebrows. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The previous sentence contains two completely made-up words, “zittage” and “blonded.”)I love guns and weapons in general. I consider myself a connoisseur of firearms, the way some people are connoisseurs of fine wine or fine art. Think of that sommelier dude from John Wick 2. One of my favorite Quorans, Sheri Tanner, taught me a new word for this sort of person: “hoplophile.” I think that describes me pretty accurately.My dad is a gunsmith in his spare time and taught me to shoot and respect firearms at a very young age.I’ve never been hunting. I almost went pheasant hunting with my college buddies in North Dakota, but that never panned out. I just bought an awesome lever-action rifle in .45–70, and my dad and I plan to go hunting for wild pigs somewhere in California (maybe down near Monterey) this summer.Speaking of Stoicism, I used to have pretty bad road rage. It’s almost unavoidable, living in California. I used to get so mad at all the slowpokes and rude, reckless drivers on the roads. (Californians, in particular, have absolutely no idea how to merge. It drives me insane.) One day I decided to try something new. I started driving the speed limit on the highway. Suddenly, instead of being just another angry, reckless driver, I was the slowest thing on four wheels. All the other road-ragers passed me by and went on their way, getting ulcers and aneurysms. I drove along sedately, at peace with the world and everything in it. I’ve been driving the speed limit (or even less) ever since, and love the peacefulness and tranquility of it. Stoicism is all about letting go of things that just don’t matter, something I’ve always had trouble doing. It was a revelation to discover that my commute wasn’t a race, and I didn’t have to go as fast or faster than everyone else.I’m a pretty hard-right conservative libertarian. My political compass says I’m just a hair shy of being authoritarian—probably because I believe in the death penalty, can’t abide the idea of open borders, and am generally pro-life. Not too fond of unions, either.I voted for Trump in 2016, and am going to do it again in 2020. The Libertarian presidential candidate in 2016, Gary Johnson, was a bad joke. (“What’s Aleppo?”)After reading The Conservatarian Manifesto by Charles C.W. Cooke, I’m considering switching back to the Republican Party.I love puns, and will emit them at the drop of a hat. My most-upvoted Quora answer (almost 10K, last time I checked) was a dad joke.I have just a touch of thalassophobia. I can get on boats and go whale-watching and stuff like that, but leaning out over the side of the ship and looking down (especially if a humpback whale happens to be passing by) makes me a bit vertiginous. So do those parts of documentaries where they show some diver swimming over the edge of the continental shelf, and we look straight down at that endless blue-black void below. [shudder]I’m not afraid of bugs or spiders or centipedes or anything like that, but solifugids creep me the hell out. (Follow that link at your own risk.)I can stand the heat, but I can’t stand the humidity. I was raised in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, the proverbial “dry heat” and I’ll take 117 degrees of arid heat over 90 degrees of mugginess any day of the week.I love deserts, but I honestly prefer having four seasons—and I love winter. Cold weather in general is ideal for me. I don’t like it when the temperature gets over 80 degrees. I start sweating harder than Henry Fonda on jury duty, or Paul Newman on a chain gang.The worst heat/humidity combination I’ve ever experienced was Hong Kong. That place was muggier than Tennessee, Virginia, South Korea, and Vietnam combined. I’d walk three feet and be soaked to the bone, both in ambient humidity and my own sweat.Speaking of travel, I’ve been to fourteen countries: South Korea, North Korea (yes, walking around that conference table counts), Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the Seychelles.I have a rule: I can’t say I’ve been to a country unless my boots have touched virgin soil. For this reason, I don’t say I’ve “been” to Iceland, even though I had a layover there and had to walk across the concrete apron to the airport terminal, smelling the cool breeze and seeing the wildflowers growing in the fields near the airport. Nor do I say I’ve “been” to Dubai or to Phoenix, Arizona because I only had layovers there and never left the airport.I suffer from a mild form of ulcerative colitis (UC) called ulcerative proctitis. The symptoms of UC are extraordinarily painful, inconvenient, and embarrassing, so I’ll spare you the deets. Let’s just say that bathrooms have been my best friend since I was diagnosed in early 2017.Whoa, this answer’s getting a mite heavy. Let’s get back to the fun stuff, shall we? Did I tell you I know how to fly airplanes? Not the big stuff, dummy. Cessnas and Pipers and Mooneys and the like. Single-engine fixed-wing aircraft that land on, uh, land. Not water. Would love to get certified to fly seaplanes at some point, though. I hear they’re the shiz.Speaking of planes, the coolest date I ever took a woman on was a flying date. I picked her up, took her to the municipal airport, we rented a Cessna 172 (the same one I’d trained in), and we flew from Apple Valley, California up to Big Bear. The landing was hairy. At one end of the runway, tall pine trees. At the other end, Big Bear Lake. A 20-knot crosswind, gusting to 25. I kind of smacked the bird down on the tarmac, but I didn’t get blown off the runway or anything. We parked, tied down, ate a lovely lunch at the airport restaurant, and then flew home. Needless to say, I think I impressed my date.The sound of nails on a chalkboard doesn’t bother me. The sound of a fork scraping across a plate, however…I’m terrible at math and I hate it. My favorite classes in school were English classes. My English teacher in my freshman year of high school, Mr. Schlosser, made us memorize Greek and Latin roots, which enabled me to easily suss out the definitions of those five-syllable words on my SATs. I owe you a cold one, Mr. S.I thought I was going to be a world-famous zoologist growing up. Then I got to college and ran smack into organic chemistry. That was my “f**k this sh*t, I’m out” moment. I switched into mass communication, then journalism, still managing to graduate college in 3.5 years.When I was a little, little kid, I wanted to change my name to “Bruce.”Before I hit my teens, I hated hamburgers. Grilled cheese was where it was at. A few slices of melted American cheese on Texas toast was the pinnacle of culinary excellence, as far as young Master Andrew was concerned.I graduated from bartender’s school in Riverside, California in 2011 and worked briefly as a bartender in Stockton, California (at a golf course) in 2016. I did events only. Introduced a bunch of people to Moscow mules and my go-to “girl drink,” the Madras. I’m probably going to wind up bartending again when I move to Idaho in summer and go back to flight school.Oh yeah, I’m moving to Idaho in summer and going back to flight school. Going to learn to fly helicopters this time.I have never been to New York City. Nor much of New England, for that matter, except Boston. Had the best fondue and the best pisco sour of my life there, at Stoddard’s (speaking of bartending)…I am apparently quite lousy at most board games and card games. My wife beats me hollow at progressive rummy and Battleship. Every freaking time. Also, I do not know how to shuffle cards properly, and that, along with my deplorable lack of other manly skills (such as driving a stick-shift), causes me no end of shame.Other things I suck at: most organized sports, playing any sort of musical instrument, cooking meat, grilling, writing fiction, drawing, cleaning, fishing, dancing, singing, juggling, bowling, painting, riding a unicycle, organizing, managing people, comforting others, taking care of sick people, giving compliments, taking care of animals and plants, flinging otters, and recognizing different types of trees from quite a long way away.Things I’m awesome at: pub trivia, writing letters and greeting cards, not getting lost, cooking any sort of pasta dish, shooting, swimming (my dad was a lifeguard in his youth), making cocktails (and hosting cocktail parties), driving long distances, planning excursions and vacations, having deep conversations, packing a suitcase, Canfield (a form of solitaire), rock-hopping, editing and proofreading, learning, philosophizing, and flying (remember that crosswind landing I told you about in #35?).I don’t have a favorite color. It used to swing back and forth between forest green and blaze orange, though. I actually talked my parents into letting me paint my room orange. The exact name on the color swatch was “papaya,” which was one notch below “jetfire,” the shade of orange I really wanted to paint my room. My parents talked me down to “papaya.” When the painting was done, they rolled their eyes until one evening in late summer when the setting Mojave Desert sun shined into my bedroom and lit up the walls like an old adobe hacienda. They thought it was pretty cool after that.My two favorite films in the universe are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yojimbo. Jeremiah Johnson is a close contender.Indiana Jones was, and still is, my hero. I’ve tried to model my life after the guy as much as possible. Oh, and there may or may not be a fedora, a satchel, and a leather jacket in my closet. And they may or may not have been there since I was twelve.I like black-and-white Kurosawa films, 80s action flicks, war films from the sixties and seventies, Westerns from the forties, fifties, and sixties, old comedies, film noir, and classic sci-fi. I don’t watch a whole lot of films that came out after the year 2000, and only rarely do I watch films made after 1990. (The most recent was just yesterday: Falling Down from 1993, starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. Pretty bleak film.)If you haven’t figured it out by now, I pretty much hate modern cinema. Especially all these reboots and remakes that are coming out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single reboot or remake that I’ve liked better than the original. The only one that came semi-close was that remake of Flight of the Phoenix with Dennis Quaid. But that might have just been because there was a cool old plane in it. (A Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, to be exact.)I like whiskey (Scotch, rye, and occasionally bourbon) and gin. I used to like rum drinks a lot, but they’re a bit too sweet for me now. Never have liked vodka or tequila much. I also like sipping brandy out of a snifter and making cocktails with pisco.I tend to go for red wines over whites, but if I had to pick my two favorite wines (so far), they’d be malbec (which is red) and sauvignon blanc (which is white). Albariño is quite nice too.I have very boring tastes in beer. Pilsners and lagers, mostly. Can’t stand IPAs, and the darkest I can go is porter. Don’t much care for stout. Wheat beers and hefeweizens mostly all taste the same to me.I’d have more facts up here that pertain to me and my wife, but she hates it when I write about her on Quora. So I don’t. Except for what I just wrote, obviously. Apart from that, I hardly ever write about her on Quora. Sorry for writing that, dear. I just thought they deserved an explanation.Oh yeah, I met my wife on Match. She likes to joke that she bought me online (you know, because she had to pay the membership fees to be able to message me).Sorry, sorry, dear! That was the very last thing I’ll tell them, I promise. Except for the fact that I married a woman who was born only a month earlier than my brother, and who therefore has the exact same zodiacal signs as he does (both Chinese and Western). So I basically married my brother, astrologically speaking. That’s all I’m going to tell them, dear. I swear. Don’t cut me.I had only two serious girlfriends before I married my wife. One was a tall, statuesque, raven-haired, olive-skinned woman of Czech descent (my college girlfriend) and the other was a five-foot, pale, freckled redhead of Irish descent (old high school classmate). So I guess I don’t really have a “type” as far as women are concerned. I like any woman who sees me and doesn’t run full-speed in the other direction.I tried to join the military after college. I wanted to get free flight training, so I talked to an Air Force recruiter first. He told me that, basically, only 2% of the people in the Air Force actually fly, and that I would most likely wind up being a security guard at a nuclear missile silo somewhere in the Midwest. Just for kicks, I asked the recruiter what kind of weapons training I’d get. He told me that, apart from the usual (M-16) rifle training airmen receive, I’d probably also get trained to use a pump-action shotgun. “Why’s that?” I asked, surprised—and pleased, because I love pump-action shotguns and would never have dreamed I’d be using one in the military. “So,” the recruiter said, “if somebody’s coming down the ladder in the silo, you can just lean out of the hatch and blast ‘em.” I thought that was pretty cool. I wound up not joining the military and going to South Korea instead to teach English, so I guess that situation worked out well for all concerned: me, the Air Force, and anyone stupid enough to try invading a nuclear missile silo.My favorite book of all time is The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. (Most days, The Island of Dr. Moreau is a close second). But it’s getting close to being edged out by The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.The only artist whose philosophy and work I’ve ever really felt I truly understood was Paul Gauguin. I even went so far as to visit an exhibit of his at the Seoul Museum of Art when I lived in Korea. (If you know me well, you know that art exhibits are not something I voluntarily seek out, let alone pay to be admitted to.) Even his impressionist works (which he did before he moved to Tahiti) spoke to me. That might be the reason I like The Moon and Sixpence so much—Maugham based the main character on Gauguin.Speaking of escaping to tropical islands, I went to Hawaii for the first time in November. It was life-changing. Stunningly beautiful place. The stereotypes are real. Gorgeous beaches every three feet. Tropical flowers perfuming the place up. Hula girls. Incredible fishing. Hot lava. Delicious coffee. Incredible poke. Great beer. Refreshing sea breezes. It was so…exotic. I’ve never felt so much like a foreigner in my own country. (That’s a good thing, generally.) I did things I never would have believed it was possible for me to do. I wore Hawaiian shirts unashamedly, got a (fake) tattoo, bought a lava-rock bracelet, wore a shell lei proudly, and didn’t even care about the feckin’ gecko on the back stoop of our Airbnb whistling and hooting all through the night and keeping me and my wife awake.I’m right-handed but left-eyed. For that reason, I shoot long guns left-handed. I have a difficult time with bolt-action rifles (most of which are built for right-handed people) as a result. Ever seen Saving Private Ryan? Private Jackson, the sniper dude, is my spirit animal. Uses a right-handed bolt-action Springfield ’03 but shoots left-handed, which means he needs to reach up over the rifle with his left hand to work the bolt. That’s why I tend to prefer lever-action rifles, and pump-action rifles too (yes, they exist).The very last time I trick-or-treated at Halloween was when I was 13 years old. I went out with style. I was a robot. My dad helped me rig up an awesome costume. I had air conditioning duct on my arms and legs, a big cardboard box (spray-painted silver) around my midsection, and another smaller one on my head. Into the sides of the box on my head were stuck two spark plugs. (My idea.) My nose was a lightbulb, and I had a slit cut for me to see through, which Dad covered over with screen cut from an old door to hide my eyes. On my chest was a drawing I’d made of a screen (purple with a green lightning bolt or something), plus some oven knobs glued next to it. The kicker, though, was that my dad had ripped the display from an old bathroom scale and rigged it to flash different numbers. This was embedded in the box around my midsection, right about where a name tag would be. This tickled the adults who answered the door to give me candy to death. “Hey, Herb! Come look at this boy!” Unfortunately, the slit I had cut to see out of wasn’t wide enough, and I kept slipping and falling in dead leaves all night and knocking the oven knobs off my chest.After my best friend in Tennessee moved to Idaho, I made friends with the two Israeli kids living next door. We played hide-and-seek a lot, and climbed trees together. I really didn’t think there was anything all that strange about them except for the fact that they had a funny accent.I’m really easy to buy for. Just get me books, pipe tobacco, or ammunition (preferably .45–70…that sh*t’s expensive) and you’re golden.Oh yeah. I smoke a pipe. I think I’ve mentioned that in other answers, but it bears repeating. My collection of pipes is about 10 strong now, and I have about a dozen different kinds of tobacco aging in jars in a nice dark spot in my bedroom closet. I tend to go for aromatic Cavendish blends, but I do like Latakia and Perique.I don’t drink coffee or soda. I’ll do black tea sometimes, but that’s just about all the caffeine I can imbibe. Caffeine makes me feel like my head’s being pinched in a vise.So do cigars, generally, which is why I smoke pipes.My three favorite places on the face of the earth are, in order, (1) Joshua Tree National Park in California (I grew up in the Mojave, sue me), (2) Anse Lazio, Praslin, Seychelles (best beach EVAH), and (3) Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. Simply magical in wintertime.I have no idea why, but no matter what kind of day I’m having, this tune calms me down every time.The strangest thing my eyes have witnessed (predictably) was in South Korea. I was walking along one of the streams there—a tributary of the Han River that flows through Seoul. The Koreans, nature nuts that they are, have taken the liberty of building paved pathways along the streams and the river. These greenways are overhung with trees and secluded (mostly) from traffic, so people can take a stroll and forget that they’re in one of the most heavily populated metropolises on the planet. Anyway, I sat down on a bench and was just taking in the scenery. I looked over to my right and, on the bench next to mine, sat a Korean salaryman. Nothing out of the ordinary about him—at least at first glance. Balding, grey two-piece suit, white shirt, black tie, yapping into a cell phone. The only thing slightly odd about him was that he had a giant blue macaw on his shoulder. The damn bird was just sitting there, looking around, preening a little. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. Ordinary-looking Korean salaryman talking his phone, with a parrot he may or may not have realized was even there on his shoulder. Wacky.My favorite smell in the world is probably barbecuing meat. Woodsmoke is a close contender, along with fresh-cut grass. Oh, and wet desert. The petrichor that arose from the Mojave just after the rain was a balm for the soul, let me tell you.My least favorite smell (apart from the obvious: skunk, outhouse, steamed Brussels sprouts) is probably marijuana. And unfortunately, since I currently live in San Joaquin County, California, I smell a lot of it.I’m not that fond of new car smell, either. I much prefer old car smell. Or airplane cockpit. Or any of these other smells.I get hit on, but not by young, attractive women. Mostly drunk cougars. Oh, and there was this one old, gay Korean guy once…Stupidest thing I’ve ever done while drunk: actually, there are two things. Both happened in Busan, South Korea, and on the same night too, which is even better. I had gone to a Lotte Giants game and gotten properly smashed on makgeolli, soju, and beer. My expat friends and I decided it was time for a pub crawl after the game, so we were walking along the road near Haeundae Beach. Fireworks are perfectly legal in Korea, so we thought we’d buy some Roman candles and set ’em off on the beach. Only I guess I was too impatient to wait until we got to the beach. I lit mine up right there on the feckin’ sidewalk and walked down the street, holding the Roman candle at arm’s length, at a right angle to my torso, firing it directly into the traffic on the beachfront boulevard. I swear to God I saw the sparklers bouncing off the cars as they drove by. It’s a miracle nobody called the cops on me. I came even closer to having the cops called on me a short time later, as we were walking to a different part of Busan. I saw a parked car in front of me. Ol’ drunk Andy decided he was going to Dukes-of-Hazzard his way over the car instead of just walking around it. Well, the driver was still in the car. And he wasn’t happy that I’d just belly-flopped across the trunk. So I did the only thing I knew to do: I bowed low in apology, said “Sorry, I’m an idiot” in Korean a couple of times, and the guy just sort of rolled his eyes, tsk-tsked under his breath, and walked away. Crisis averted.I’ve never met a celebrity face-to-face, but I did go to see a live speech by then-President George W. Bush at my university (he never stuttered once, and was funny as hell), and I’m pretty sure I saw Alan Jackson standing on a corner of Oak Ridge, Tennessee once when my mom and my brother and I were driving by. That’s about it.I’ve been to only one live music concert in my life: Vertical Horizon. Go ahead and laugh, I don’t mind.I’ve also only ever been to one live sports event, too: an LA Galaxy game. That was back when David Beckham was playing for ‘em.I won a whole dollar at a horse race in Seoul once.My favorite comedian is Bill Cosby, and always will be. Yeah, I know what he’s in jail for. But he’s an important part of my childhood. We had all of his comedy albums on CDs when I was a pre-teen. When we lived in our rental house in California, shortly after moving from Tennessee, my family and I used to put Bill Cosby albums on, turn off all the lights, sit on the couch, and just listen. And laugh our fool heads off. We had Wonderfulness, Why is There Air?, I Started Out as a Child, Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow Right!, Revenge, and To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With. Couldn’t tell you which one was my favorite. They were all gold.I was heavily into the Harry Potter books when they came out, because, for a very brief time, I was the same age as Harry. I read the first book when I was eleven, the second book when I was twelve, and the third and fourth books were released when I was 13 and 14, respectively. I read the fourth book in one day.I actually fought a duel once.The last present I bought for myself was a kukri.Three things I want to learn in 2019 are (1) how to shuffle cards, (2) how to drive a car with manual transmission (I technically already know how to do this, but I need practice) and (3) how to throw a knife. Wouldn’t say no to some self-defense classes, either.Been thinking about taking up boxing, too.The cars I have owned, in order, are: a maroon 1986 Chrysler LeBaron (inherited from a deceased great uncle; had just 18,000 miles on it, and I crashed it after only a month); a dark green 1996 Ford Taurus (my college car; sold it when I left for Korea in 2008); and a white 1995 Jeep Cherokee I bought for $2,500 cash in the Mojave Desert in 2009. Still driving that heap.The first nightmare I remember having involved, of all things, pirates. I dreamed I was in my bed, in my bedroom, at night, and a couple of muscle-bound, stripey-shirted, bandanna-headed, sword-wielding pirates with red, glowing eyes were down at the end of the bed and reaching for my feet with their hairy hands. Stuff of nightmares, man. Stuff of nightmares.Most of my nightmares as a kid involved dinosaurs, which is weird, because I loved dinosaurs more than ice cream or girls with pigtails. Still do.I love reggae, even though I don’t smoke weed. And I resent the people who like reggae and listen to it only because they smoke weed. Posers.One skill I just discovered I have today: I can stealth-open a bottle of champagne. My wife and I abruptly decided to go on a date this fine Sunday afternoon. A picnic. We bought sandwiches at Mr. Pickle’s, picked up a cooler at Save Mart, filled it with ice, bottled water, and 750 milliliters of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumanti, and drove out to New Melones Lake. We sat on the stone wall at the scenic vista point and ate our sandwiches. There were always cars pulling up and curious gawkers getting out to admire the view, so I had to open the bottle of champagne silently. What we were doing was pretty illegal, after all. Anyway, I hugged the bottle close to myself, worked the cork almost all the way out, and then pulled it out with a quiet little pop! Nobody else heard. My wife and I enjoyed a stealthy bottle of champagne with each other at New Melones Lake today and nobody was the wiser.If I could change one thing about the United States—just one thing—I’d put us on a four-day workweek. Ten-hour days. Three-day weekends every week. Hell yeah.If I could change two things about the United States, I’d bring Britain’s pub culture over here. The US has plenty of brewpubs, yeah—for hipsters—and plenty of dive bars for truckers and bikers and construction workers and the like, but it doesn’t have pubs. If you’ve been to one, you know what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t say to no to a few German-style beer halls, either. Always wanted to stage my own beer hall putsch.I used to have really crazy, complex dreams and ambitions. Nowadays all I think I want is a piece of land somewhere. A hundred acres or so, not too much. Enough to build a dirt or grass airstrip for my Piper Seneca and an outdoor shooting range for my ridiculously huge gun collection. I’d have a nice big shed where I could reload ammo, make beer, and maybe even write. I’d have a cozy house (not too big), with a wood stove and a well-ventilated den and smoking-room filled with books, memorabilia from my travels, hunting trophies (if any), and a display case of rare antique weapons. There’d be enough space for the kids and grandkids to run around and be crazy, inside and out. Matching rocking chairs on the porch for my wife and me—maybe even ones I’d built myself. That’s all. Sounds heavenly.A couple of celebrity encounters I forgot about: I once wrote a letter to Dick Van Dyke (another childhood hero) and asked him for an autographed picture, and he sent me one. It’s framed and hanging over my bookcase as I write this. Last year I wrote a blog post about Vonda McIntyre, and either she or her publicist saw it, and she contacted me and offered to send me an autographed copy of one of her books, Superluminal (an extended version of the story I’d reviewed). I accepted. That book is now on my bookcase, right under the Dick Van Dyke picture.I’ve broken exactly two bones in my life: my wrist, in the Boy Scouts (no, not that way, you pervert) and my tailbone. I was sitting on a steel mailbox in the back of my dad’s truck, and we were going down a bumpy dirt road, and my dad thought it’d be fun to take it up to 50 miles per hour, and…well, I’ll let your imagination do the rest. Hemorrhoid pillows were my best friend for a few weeks after that.I kept my brother in stitches when were little. I don’t mean that I made him laugh; I mean that he needed stitches after the hijinks we got up to. I was chasing him through a museum in Ohio once and the idiot ran straight into a display table and gouged his head open. Needed eight stitches. He still has the scar.My father only gave me one piece of advice when I left home: “Don’t screw up.” That’s it. “Just don’t screw up.” Best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten. Applicable in any situation. It’s come in handy a fair few times, most notably during my pilot’s exam.And finally…I’ve never been to Spain, but I kind of like the music.