Meme Spirited

Steven Hart whacked me with The Eight Things Meme. It's been a LONG time since I was similarly tagged*, and answering these questions will only delay me from starting his new book, en route from Amazon at last.

Eight [random things about me] is enough:

1. I met my wife working at a McDonald's. She was 15 and I was 18 at the time. We went to the same high school but never met there.

2. I'm continuously skeptical and suspicious to a fault, but I also believe bizarre and foolish things. I adore conspiracy theories of all shapes and sizes. I blame this on Leonard Nimoy and his craptastic speculative TV show In Search of..., which poisoned my mind back in the '70s.

3. I used to rail against the Bush family during the late '80s and early '90s, and told people the Bushes would one day destroy America. Like all prophets, I was maligned for outlandish and unsupportable statements, the painful truth of which has now been revealed to all global citizens, excepting 29% of Americans.

4. My most intense aesthetic experiences have been in Gothic and Romanesque churches. I could sit in Chartres for a couple hours every day for the rest of my life.

5. A list of my greatest intellectual heroes would include Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, Carl Jung, David Attenborough, and the Marquis de Sade. The list is typically much longer, but today I'm feeling particularly anti-intellectual.

6. I almost choked to death on a chicharrone while driving a desolate highway through the Yucatan. Completely unable to breathe, I pulled over, opened the car door, and was nearly struck by a speeding tractor trailer as I stepped out of the car. Although I was in great pain and my wife was freaking out, I was prepared to sit on the shoulder of the highway and meet Death. As soon as I accepted Death the chicharrone slipped down my gullet. I'd had a very similar experience nearly drowning when I was two years old.

7. I believe Darwin's Theory of Evolution is correct in its description of processes, but I'm convinced evolution is actually the result of conscious self-awareness. In my opinion, the gradual unfolding of life forms has little to do with random mutations and/or the weeding out of useless traits. I think Intelligent Design is bunk, however, and that it only accurately describes its proponents' lack of intellectual capacity.

8. I was horribly disappointed when Y2K didn't happen.

The tradition is to share the wealth when you get a meme, lest some broken-chain-letter fate befall you. It's likely nobody will bother, but let's see what the following people have to teach us:

Flea

Heather

Seth

Earthdragon

Sandstress

Silenus

Any of you non-blogging lurkers can post your random 8 in the Comments bin.

*The last time I got tagged was when Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake hit me with a music meme. Back then she had about 8 readers. Now, of course, she gets 2,000,000 hits a week, and deservedly so. I of course claim no causal connection between digitally tagging me and an explosive increase in traffic, but The Opinion Mill and STEVENHARTSITE deserve a similar increase, and you should check them both out. Steven wields an incisive--nigh Menckenian--wit.