More than most, I believe I'm highly attuned to how heresies eventually become mainstream belief systems and how the vast majority of people who consider themselves 'edgy' are those who only embraced radical ideas LONG after it became safe for them to do so.

I was exposed to violence while I was still in the womb - my father punched my mother in the stomach while she was pregnant with me.

the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.

I'm more muscular than I was in my younger days. My biceps and shoulders, especially.

I prefer for a woman's most private of areas to have as much hair as Carlos Santana's entire band, head to toe, circa 1972.

I've noticed that if you spend ten years without shooting dope, people consider you an ex-junkie, but one never is considered an 'ex-woman-beater.'

I still partially suffer from the delusion that if you explain things logically and systematically, most people will abandon their emotional prejudices and respond to logic. But I don't suffer from that delusion as wholeheartedly as I did in the past. So if there's a fundamental difference, it's that I've accepted the fact that most imbeciles will never 'get' me and I shouldn't allow myself to get so upset about it.