The Basics
Greetings! I’m Allan, and this is my blog. I’m a Gen-X, husband, parent, information technology professional, believing Christian who’s mostly had it with church, libertarian, video game player, side-gig Uber/Lyft driver, enjoyer of books, music, television, and movies, civil nearly always, profane when called for, inked (need more!), student of history, with his eyes focused on the stars.
So why, “I’m Younger Than That Now”, you ask? The title of course is from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”, with a refrain which sings, “Ah, but I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.”
Because, that’s me, just as much as the Thomas Jefferson quote “I cannot live without books” which is tattooed on my left wrist. The older I get, the more I see. The more I question. The more I realize self-evident truths are, well, self-evident. And seemingly at times, I find myself more in tune with the Millennials and Gen-Zers then I do with my own contemporaries or our predecessors. I think a lot of that comes from my love of technology, and how I see the future.
As I have in my Twitter bio, thanks to Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs:
“These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break.”
Some More
I was born & raised in New Jersey, but have lived in or around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania since 1989. As I like to say, I came here to go to school (Carnegie Mellon University) and I never left!
There’s one thing I try to be in what I say and write: intellectually honest. If there’s a case where I can’t be (prime example: I don’t think that the US Government should be doing anything without expressly enumerated powers in the Constitution, but I’m an unabashed supporter of space exploration, and both a supporter and fierce critic of NASA) I’ll do my best to call myself out, and try to explain why.
And I’ll get this out of the way: I’m sick and tired of politics. More precisely, I’m sick and tired of people who make everything political. In my life, I’ve been a Democrat, an Independent, a Republican. Over the last 10+ years, I’ve become thoroughly disillusioned with all political parties. As a libertarian, I’m also mostly disillusioned with the Libertarian Party. There is so much more to life than politics, and there is nothing in my opinion which has poisoned discourse more than political tribalism. Get over it.