(Because today is the one-year anniversary since the start of this daily log, I thought it was about time I included some sort of personal profile or “creator page.” Until I figure out a way to treat it as a separate file, I’ll just use this entry for the “About Uncle John” link. Thanks for all your help, Brendan.)
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Within a nine month period, Uncle John had a niece and two nephews named Jerusha, Brendan, and Joshua, but that’s not how he got his name. Kristi or Rachel was probably the first person to call him that. He was already a stepfather, by virtue of Terie and Bruce, but was never called Stepfather John, thank goodness. Lots of exceptional young people now call him Uncle John on a regular basis and he likes it that way. Marty calls him GrandyJohn, and he likes that even more. Nobody ever called him Daddy, and that makes him sad at times, but that’s just the way things work out.
The best way to know more about Uncle John is to frequent this log, but if you want to go to school on the guy, you can learn something from what he likes and what he doesn’t like.
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UNCLE JOHN LIKES—
Dana
In fact, he likes her a lot.
Family
Especially his
Mombo.
Exercise
Because his ticker came from his Dadbo.
Art
Not Uncle Art, who he also liked a lot, but the other kind—paintings by Paulo Veronese, Maurice Utrillo, Carl Rungius, Paul Klee, Andrew Wyeth, or Sheldon Tapley. He’ll always take time to appreciate a Dürer print, a Blake watercolor, a Mucha poster, a Stickley chair, a Rockwell cover, a Schwitters collage, a Patterson woodblock, a Wright interior, a Cassandre litho, a Kent engraving, a Link image, a Watterson strip, or a Glaser design.
Pirates
For good or ill, they’ve always been lurking nearby, outside, underneath, and inside.
Television
He thinks Mission: Impossible was the pinnacle of series television. In addition to great vintage shows like The Rifleman, Combat! and The Wild, Wild West; animated classics like The Adventures of Jonny Quest and Rocky and His Friends; and obscure gems like The New Breed, The Rogues, Tenspeed & Brownshoe, and The Yellow Rose, he also thoroughly enjoyed The Prisoner, Kung Fu, thirtysomething, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., and Firefly.
Words
His favorite living writers are Allan W. Eckert, Paul Watkins, Tom Wolfe, Peggy Noonan, Sebastian Junger, and Brendan Adkins. He also likes Homer, Kipling, and Clavell, but, unfortunately, they’re dead. In all seriousness, at different points in life, he’s found significance in the creative insights of Michel de Montaigne, Carl Jung, Alfred Korzybski, Ayn Rand, Morihei Ueshiba, Koichi Tohei, Gyorgy Kepes, Ann Wigmore, Mark Prophet, Juno Jordan, Twyla Tharp, and Deepak Chopra.
Motion Pictures
At the top of Uncle John’s list are movies like this: Forbidden Planet, The Great Escape, Silverado, The Big Country, Out of Africa, The Player, Groundhog Day, The Pale Rider, Braveheart, The Sting, Will Penny, The Conversation, Gorky Park, The Cowboys, Spirited Away, Indian Summer, Master and Commander, The Princess Bride, Fitzcarraldo, The Last of the Mohicans, Amadeus, Five-Man Army, The Rounders, Open Range, The Verdict, Red Sun, The Hustler, Quigley Down Under, The Great Santini, Z, The Man Who Would Be King, Hell in the Pacific, Sneakers, My Dinner with Andre, A Clockwork Orange, and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. (Like hell he’s gonna provide links for all those!)
Uncle John has a very likable business with Dana in Danville, Kentucky. He also likes to make greeting cards, collect vintage plastic toys, catch fish from Lake Huron, listen to music, shoot all types of firearms, and, like everybody, spend time with his friends.
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UNCLE JOHN DOES NOT LIKE—
Coyotes, opossums, cormorants, and snapping turtles.
Idiots who yell at cyclists and runners.
Con artists who aren’t in the movies.
Computers that won’t cooperate.
Sloppy or incompetent work of any kind.
Manipulation (except advertising and politics, of course).
Squandered potential (especially when it’s his own).
Lies (that includes advertising and politics).
The absurdities of safety-net health care.
Leaf blowers, hydrogenated fat, do-it-yourself junkyards.
Litterbugs, deprogrammers, identity thieves.
Ideological elites.
Meth pushers.
Abortionists.
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Some other things you may want to know about Uncle John:
He normally doesn’t write about himself in the third person. He wishes he could still be a gardener, teacher, and practitioner of Aikido (and perhaps someday he will). He’d like to run a half-marathon in under two hours. He hopes to visit Alaska, Chile, Norway, Slovakia, South Africa, and Japan. He looks forward to documenting all the details of his lifelong “Legend” project before he heads to that big playset in the sky. He wants to build a studio in The Knobs and live to see each of his nieces and nephews become grandparents, unless he or she is destined to bequeath only influence, rather than genes—like him—and in that case will always be welcome to stop by the Valley Retreat for a visit, taste some Amarula, and listen to the Blue Bank Farm whippoorwills…
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