I am a string bass player, playing jazz, swing, blues and bluegrass. I play bass for Back Burner and have been for a long time. More recently, I have become part of Gypsy Fire, a Gypsy Jazz band. Very hot and fun, and my chops on bass have grown by leaps and bounds to keep up with this.
I am also a fiddler. I play bluegrass, blues, and swing/jazz music, and I'm getting better all the time, but I don't expect I'll be satisfied with how well I do it any time soon. You can hear some of my playing on the CD "Not Far From The Tree", from Lost In The Fog. I am no longer in that band, but I really had a good time being part of it when I was.
I am a computer geek. More specifically, I'm a toolsmith, a database wizard, and a Configuration Management/ software development lifecycle process expert. I like to make the computer treat me and my friends better, so I get development groups to adopt best practices like Test Driven or Behavior Driven development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing and so on.
I love and collect little one-line quotes. I have a lot of Will Rogers and Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin in my head. There's a bunch of them on my web page, if you can stand too many at once, but it's like peanut brittle - a little piece is fine, but it gets to be too much pretty fast. I recently discovered that if you google 'signature quotes', I'm #1 and have been for quite a while.
I am very fond of humor, absurdity, irony and ridiculousness. Good nonsense is very damn difficult to write, let me tell you.
I have become a lot more politically inclined since the election where George W. Bush was appointed President. I tried hard to get Obama elected, so the excesses and unconstitutional behavior would be remedied. Now I'm at a loss for what we can do instead, since Obama seems to have decided to keep all the really objectionable unconstitutional stuff Bush did as is, or make it worse.
I'm trying to wake up. I have been working on clearing my mind of artificial walls and assumptions, trying to live more in the moment and to not dwell on the past or future. It's more difficult than I thought it would be, but it's rewarding - my mind seems to come up with better ideas with less effort, the more I rest it from constant worry.
I have a lot of really good friends, and some pretty great acquaintances too.
I'm good at recognizing the excellence in people I know. I find it in everyone. I don't think it's because I'm lucky in the people I know, though I am; I think it's inherent in people in general, and I'm willing to expend the effort to look for it. Some people don't recognize their own beauty and strength, though. It's fun to react to it and watch them be startled, and then warmed, when they finally see it themselves.
I think I may be a poet in hiding. I was a poet in college, but taking classes in it and hanging out with the other poets drove me away from it. It hurt too much. Maybe I wasn't ready then, but I may be strong enough now. I find phrases that are unmistakeably poetry hanging around in my head fairly often.
I'm married to one of the most amazing people I've ever met in my life: LauriBeth. She's warm, generous, brilliant, patient, mysterious, deep, genuine, talented, and she has put up with a lot from me as I grew into the person she somehow knew I would eventually grow to be (I guess).
I am the father of Frank Adam Hull, a musician living in Tampa, Florida, an electrician by trade, a wise, patient and non-materialistic man and a terriffic father. I can't believe I have the good fortune to be the father of such an enviable character.
I am also the father of Robert Kenyon Hull, who is also a remarkable and creative musician, a good friend to quite a few people, steadfast and creative, responsible and philosophical, outgoing and capable. He tries to keep me honest. He's succeeding in his career at an astonishing and gratifying rate, because he's smart but not arrogant and really knows how to work with people. I am, obviously, very proud to be associated with him at all, even more so to be his father.
I am a spiritual and moral person, trying to make the world a better place. I realize that I am responsible for my own happiness.
I am _not_ a religious person. I am not a Christian, though I am sure if Jesus and I met in the parking lot we'd hug each other like long-lost brothers. That's just the kind of guy He is, and I've always loved Him for that.
I'm a Unitarian Universalist. We're a community of people who agree that truth is to be ardently sought after, but we understand that the transfer of this truth from one person to the next is extremely difficult and error-prone, so we try to help each other search without actually interfering too much.
One thing I know most certainly is this: when I understand The Big Truth, I savor that moment with all my soul, because I will lose my grip on it and it will slip away again. It's done this to me several times; I feel like a fisherman with my One-That-Got-Away stories. It's the human condition, I suppose, but I really like those Aha moments.
Words cannot capture truth, any more than a net can capture water.
What true believers often fail to grasp is that their powerful truth consists of everything that's happened to them in their lifetime, and that the only way to teach somebody that truth would be to give them your whole heart and mind to understand it in. If you can do that well enough, it doesn't matter if you're a born-again Christian, an Atheist fundamentalist (the most common in our culture), an Islamic fundamentalist or any of the others - the light you see is the same One Light.
I recognize and accept the role of the unpleasant, sad and ugly in life. I used to try too hard to be nice to everybody and never hurt anybody's feelings and so on. The problem is, there are hard things in the world, and hiding them or hiding from them won't make them go away. I have been a jerk a lot of times due to how hard I was trying to ignore the dirty side of life. Sure, it's better to be kind than to be right, but sometimes you have to grab the bull by the tail and face the situation.
However, we still get to design the reality we will live in, by acting on it to create what we want and to turn away from the things we don't want. Things are not good or bad in themselves, it's how you percieve them that adds that. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Ugly is, too. Just keep plugging away toward what you want and don't let fleeting things like that bother you. Do you see?
I find that as I have solidified in self-image, my need to feed my ego has faded away. I really like that; maintaining an ego is very ticklish and unforgiving work, fraught with disappointment and heartbreak. I don't think I really have any particular use for a self separate from my surroundings. I plan to give it up right after supper.
I used to think of myself as not being well domesticated. I actually used to think of myself as a lot of such silly rubbish, and since I stopped thinking of myself much at all, I find that all the silly labels I applied to myself fell off when I didn't keep plastering them up. I stopped self-defining and discovered that I was actually self-limiting.