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100 Raw Facts about Joel Sax

1. Lynn and I married ourselves without a minister under the care of Palo Alto Friends Meeting.
2. I live not far from where the last wild California Grizzly was shot in 1908.
3. Somewhere near my home, Portola’s soldiers lost a blunderbuss in 1769.
4. I am descended from the first wife (Fidsel) of the Mormon polygamist Jorgen Smith.
5. I had my entire mouth reconstructed after allowing it to deteriorate during a long interval of depression.
6. I met my wife at a party that I almost didn’t go to.
7. I sleep with the same blankets I bought in Greece back in 1979. They have come everywhere with me since.
8. My sign is none of your business.
9. I collect Day of the Dead figurines.
10. My brown hair is extremely fine and very hard to keep combed.
11. Obsessive compulsive disorder led me to wear down my incisors using pens over the years. When I had my mouth redone, the dentist found that I had a perfect notch in that spot.
12. My brother broke my left arm with a baseball bat when I was five years old while we were rough-housing on the front lawn of our house in San Bernardino.
13. My ancestors came from all over Europe, often mixing with people from other areas before anyone moved to America. I consider myself living proof that ethnic purity never really existed. From my genealogical research, my ancestors came from Wales, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Spain, and possibly the Basque country.
14. When I was five years old I broke a window in the John Muir House in Martinez, California, which my aunt and uncle were restoring. The house is now a National Historic Site.
15. I collect antique postcards, especially ones showing San Bernardino, California and orange groves.
16. From about 1981 until 1986, I kept a daily journal. I keep them in a box in the garage.
17. During the Gulf War, I managed the Middle East conferences on PeaceNet.
18. The music in my truck consists almost entirely of classical music.
19. I once had a nymphomaniac roommate who never managed to seduce me.
20. Birds have long fascinated me and I have a shelf filled with nature guides.
21. Reading about saints gives me pleasure. Friends from IRC sometimes call upon me when they want information about a particular saint.
22. When I took the Belief-O-Matic quiz at BeliefNet, my highest score was Theravada Buddhism (100%), then Unitarian Universalist, then Liberal Quaker.
23. When I am very angry at an op on IRC, my hands begin to shake and it becomes almost impossible to type.
24. My earliest memory is being dragged off to my brother’s First Holy Communion at American Martyrs Church in Manhattan Beach, California.
25. If someone touches me while I am trying to fall asleep, I scream.
26. I haven’t touched alcohol since 1988. Coincidentally, this is the same point at which I got my first email account with access to abUSEnet.
27. I sleep with a blanket wrapped around my eyes, day or night.
28. Sometimes my wife and I hold conversations that include the cats. We fill in their comments.
29. I like objects that represent desert bighorn sheep. When some conservative calls me a sheep, I remind him that some of us sheep are rams.
30. I got the sex safety talk from my Dad after I lost my virginity at the age of 19. He didn’t realize that I already knew about sex. Three years later, my brother gave me the same talk.
31. When my mother worries that my brother and I won’t ever talk to each other again, she likes to remind us that we are the best possible donors for one another should we ever need a kidney transplant.
32. At the foot of the hill where I live stand a biker bar and a monastery.
33. I thought about becoming a Trappist monk when I was in my twenties.
34. My mother expects me to dedicate my first book to her.
35. I inherited my bad teeth from my grandmother Stella who also bequeathed me her depression and her diabetes.
36. My father worked in computer programming and systems analysis beginning in the late 1950s. I remember going to his workplace and seeing walls and walls of tape driven computers. I have about as much power as he had in my PDA.
37. All our pets receive human first names and bizarre last names: Tracy Tutu Wawa, Ambrose B. Ambrogo, and Virginia “And she’s going to stay that way” Mew
38. I was harassed out of Toastmasters for giving AIDS talks.
39. I have to take a xanax the first night I sleep in a strange bed.
40. Bishop Quinn (then auxiliary of San Diego Diocese) confirmed me. I took the name Stanislaus.
41. I taught my wife to pray the rosary.
42. When my cats fight, I am known to shout “Peaceable Kingdom! We want the Peaceable Kingdom here!”
43. I believe that all cats understand Greek.
44. I was in Serbia when the Time magazine cover of the starving Bosnian soldier appeared. When I didn’t call home, my wife thought the Serbs were torturing me.
45. I saw my father die of a heart attack just two days after I returned home from Greece and one week before my brother’s wedding.
46. I am known to drive cars and wear clothes until they are falling to pieces.
47. My favorite animals at the zoo are the okapis and the rhinos.
48. My wife and I fight about once a month but we have never hit nor call each other a nasty name.
49. I often pick a fight with my wife on the first day of a long vacation. Then I am a good boy for the rest of the trip.
50. I once had a camera stolen from me while I was trying to tell my Italian-speaking Uncle where I was over the phone in the railroad station at Torino.
51. I allow my cats to lick my cereal bowl after I am finished in the morning.
52. My senior thesis was a challenge to Levi-Strauss’s interpretation of the Oedipus Myth. Only one of my three readers liked it.
53. I sleep 7 to 12 hours a day.
54. I have been a Prozac user since 1994.
55. Though I have taken Spanish, German, Modern Greek, and Arabic, I don’t claim to speak any foreign languages.
56. I managed to score less on the GRE in math than I scored on the SAT. My Verbal score increased substantially.
57. I have not stayed over night in a hospital since I had my tonsils out when I was three.
58. I had the measles when I was seven. All but two kids in my first grade class were out that week.
59. I used to own a geophagus juripari who I named Ronald Reagan because he sucked rocks.
60. I have never liked to eat eggs that have been fried, boiled, or poached. I will eat scrambled eggs if there is nothing else and sometimes order omelettes.
61. I have had eighteen root canals, a procedure that has become so routine that I fall asleep during it.
62. The image that refreshes me when I am away from California is of oaks trees in golden meadows.
63. I am happiest when my home has a view of mountains.
64. I own many books of mythology and symbolism.
65. Several of my teeth have forking roots and on some I have an additional root, e.g. three roots in a bicuspid instead of the usual two.
66. The farthest east I have ever been is the eastern end of Crete. The farthest west has been the coast of California.
67. I am a white noise addict. I keep fans running all the time so that I can’t hear every little snap of every little branch, every conversation, and every footstep in the neighborhood.
68. I leave the window next to my bed cracked in the winter so that I am assured a supply of fresh air.
69. I had my wisdom teeth extracted in two separate operations using novacaine.
70. I had my first root canal at age 16.
71. Before I was married, I sometimes told people that I was asexual.
72. I scored a 5 on the AP English examination.
73. To calm my cats, I sometimes bite them softly on the back of the neck.
74. I like the word “purblind” to describe people who only want to see the parts of the truth that they want to see. I sometimes also use it to refer to when my cats have their eyes closed and are purring loudly.
75. I am allergic to horses and guinea pigs.
76. I have hair on my shoulders.
77. I have spent the night on Alcatraz twice. (The worst thing about it is that you can hear the people in the other cells snoring. The beds are very uncomfortable.)
78. I am one of a handful of living people who have slept in the John Muir House in Martinez, California.
79. For my senior picture at Pomona College, I posed with a flock of sheep in a Cretan meadow.
80. My baptismal certificate names me as Joel Martin Francis Sax. All other documents list me as Joel Martin Sax.
81. I collect hat pins and pin them to a vest that my wife made.
82. If they ever manage to clone the Dodo, I want to sample some of the meat.
83. I have been beneath the cell house at Alcatraz which looks nothing like the sets in The Rock.
84. I’ve played my harmonica in the theater at Delphi, Greece. I’ve since given it up. People are thankful.
85. I like to write in coffee shops.
86. My wife is my best friend. Then come the cats.
87. I salute whenever I visit the grave of Joshua Norton in Colma, California’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
88. If you ask my wife what my best quality is, she will say that it is my honesty. If you ask her what my worst quality is, she will say that it is my honesty.
89. I am actually 6 foot 3 1/2 inches tall, but to please my mother, I say that I am 6’ 4 inches tall when I am around her.
90. I was engaged once before I met my wife.
91. I was born in Inglewood, California at what I like to call the Daniel Freeman Memorial Baby Mill.
92. My preferred IRC nickname is EmperorNorton, a famous schizophrenic. I have also used Groucho Marx and Leprosy in various places.
93. I sometimes sign myself Joel GAzis-SAx because of my admiration for Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
94. The capital letter "A"s I type in GAzis-SAx are pure affectation.
95. I ran a World of Darkness MUSH set in San Jose, California for two years.
96. I have lived in the following places: Manhattan Beach, California; San Bernardino, California; Claremont, California; Ridgecrest, California; China Lake, California; Durham, North Carolina; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Mountain View, California; Menlo Park, California; Palo Alto, California; Trabuco Canyon, California.
97. Because of an idiosyncracy in the California marriage law at the time, my declaration of marriage is filed in the property register at the San Mateo County Court House.
98. Until recently, I had better than 20/20 vision. As I age, I grow more near-sighted.
99. I helped set up the National Park Service's web page for Alcatraz Island.
100. I am featured as an expert on Al Capone and Arthur "Doc" Barker in the Discovery Channel program "The Public Enemies on Alcatraz".

Posted Saturday, July 27, 2002 10:15:02 PM