2000-05-19 - 22:37:15

Hello? Is this thing on?

After much trepidation and hemming and hawing I've decided to start my own online journal. I'll bet most people spend less time picking out a car than I have in starting this journal. Well, so be it. Here I am.

Who am I? Well…

I'm a guy, that already puts me in the minority here in Diaryland.

I'm 40 years old, born on July 18, 1959. This puts me on the far, far end of the age scale. Oh well! I don't feel as old as I am, in fact I think I might be missing 10 years someplace or other. Maybe they'll turn up in here. Already you can probably tell I don't act my age. I barely act my shoe size.

I'm not married, and I never have been. I currently don't have a love interest, and I haven't had one in a while. A couple of bad experiences with women in my past have made me a little hesitant about going out and seeking a new playmate. Someone needs to kick me in the ass. Patience, patience, I'm working up to it.

"The Hamster Empire" is my ironic title for where I live, in an apartment by myself with eleven hamsters. That's right, eleven. That's a lot, even for me. I am the emperor around here by default - I'm the only one with opposable thumbs to open the bags of hamster food.

"Uberhamster," my nom de net, is actually the name of one of the hamsters that lives here. His cage is right next to my computer tower. Shhhh. He's sleeping now. I wanted to have "HamsterEmpire" be my name but that has 13 letters, and the Diaryland limit is 12. Darn.

I live in a city in Upstate New York, USA that has seen better days. It's kind of depressing here. In fact, it may not even be a city much longer. For now I am just going to call it Frown Town. It has a typical profile for small cities in this part of the world: the actual city, once a thriving commercial hub, is now a virtual ghost town. This almost-lifeless husk is surrounded by a teeming maze of shopping malls and suburbs. Another sad story that I'll eventually get around to telling.

My main source of income is from a store I own, a comic book store. I've loved comics since I was a kid, but over 15 years of selling them has made me a bit cynical about them. I'm probably going to do some talking about comics and the business of selling them here - those of you who don't care about that will probably be bored silly.

I also do some freelance writing work for the local newspaper - I write the weekly chess column. I'm probably also going to talk about chess here, and that also will probably not interest a lot of you out there. More bored-silliness will occur. My apologies in advance.

Now, with the information provided above, it is probably laughingly easy to find out who I really am. It would take some clever person not much work at all to pierce my flimsy veil of anonymity. What can I say? I'm shy. Probably I'll get sick of this cute subterfuge pretty quickly, and just start spilling the beans.

I really have no precise plans for what I'm going to do with this journal. However it probably will not be a journal in the usual sense, in that I probably won't talk that much about the day-to-day events in my life. I really don't think that they are that interesting. My overall feeling is that I'm going to treat this as my own personal playground where I can talk about whatever I want to. I may tell a lot of stories about things that I've heard, or things that have happened to me in the past. I may experiment. I may rant about things that bother me. Whatever! I want to have fun here and hone my writing skills and in general think out loud.

I hope to update every day, but I make no promises because I find that I am notoriously bad about keeping such promises. Maybe I can change that.

That's it! The rest you can find out along the way. Wish me luck!