For Anna, with love and squalor

My niece on The Book Of The Face tagged me approximately 100,000 years ago in a meme-driven trivial tell-all viral annoyance campaign, and since I don’t know enough about Facebook to operate its inner workings with any reliability, I am responding here. The request was for 16 random facts etc. about me. If you know anything you know how much I love divulging personal information on the internet, especially the Facebook part of it, so here we go:

1. If I don’t have a pen with me I die.
2. If you don’t have a pen with you, I wonder how you manage to sustain your life force.
3. Don’t ask to borrow my pen. Or if you do, don’t think it’s weird that I hold on to the cap.
4. I have this weird thing about backpacks, camera bags, courier bags, little mesh bags for sorting, lens cases, crampon pouches, map cases, dedicated zippered passport pockets, etc. It seems to be an illness.
5. I have a lot more neckties than is strictly necessary. But I also enjoy wearing them more than is probably healthy. I know a couple of different knots. Lately I’ve been all about the double Windsor.
6. I have some certain strongly-held theories about chili.
7. I have heard that if you feed apples to a pony and do not stop, the pony will continue eating apples until it is dead. I have never tried this, sadly, but it also holds true with me and stroopwafels.
8. Swiss army knife, see #1.
9. There is a part of me that is deeply sad to think that I will never be father to a daughter; another part of me is thoroughly convinced that I already have several more children than I can handle, so, whatever.
10. I have some poems in my wallet. The wallets soften, droop, collapse, and die, but the poems abide. Some have been there since the [GHW] Bush administration. I take them out from time to time and read them on airplanes, but after so long in various wallets they are as fragile as spiderwebs and equally useful.
11. If I don’t get to see the Treasury of Atreus and the deathmask of Agamemnon and whatnot pretty soon here I am going to blow a gasket.
12. I love music but listen to almost none whatsoever ever anymore. That said, if John Peel liked it, I probably do, too.
13. Wine.
14. Magda asked me tonight how I would handle being a vegetarian. Though meat has no particularly Svengalian hold over me these days, I’m still not interested in giving it up arbitrarily.
15. I do not like sweets much at all (though see #6).
16. Once, after I had left home for good and was back for a visit, I got extremely angry with my mother for having cleared the house of some books I once owned about World War II aircraft. For some reason on that particular night I just had to look up some vital detail about the Heinkel 111. This was before the internet. Obviously.