: About Me

At present, my passion is making "personal history" films for people, which can be anything from a three minute photo montage of a child set to music, to a multi-DVD retrospective on the life of an elderly person, constructed from countless hours of interviews shot with friends and family members, old home movies, old photos, scanned documents, music, other visuals I research and obtain, and more. It's a wonderful way to get to know people, and to facilitate their preserving their memories and leaving a legacy for their loved ones. (See the first link under "My Links.")

So though I enjoy writing, it's actually now my second favorite way to communicate. Video has become my favored mode of expression. Writing means writer's block and all sorts of tortures; by contrast, I can sit and edit video for hours and be so engrossed I'm surprised when I realize it's the middle of the night.

I published a book of oral history interviews with prisoners in a maximum security prison. (See the second link under "My Links.")

When I was much younger, I taught Philosophy for several years at the college and community college levels.

I made a living for approximately a decade betting on sports.

I have lived (so far) in Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Florida, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, and California, in more than one place or at more than one time in some of those states. I have taken several long road trips (the longest totaling about 10,000 miles) all over the country.

My worldview would loosely be considered of the Left, though I'd be hard to pigeonhole. My values, my philosophy of life, is focused on truth and nonviolence. As such, the figure I have probably most been influenced by in my intellectual and moral development is Gandhi, though Immanuel Kant, Socrates, Tolstoy and many, many more have no doubt played an important role in making me who I am. Heck, people think I'm joking, but growing up I learned as much about character and about standing up for what you believe is right even when it's not popular, from Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell as from anyone.

Nothing is more important to me than the love I feel for the handful of people I've been closest to in this life. I have been privileged to fall in love with a tiny number of extraordinary women (in a sense I am guided by the notion that my life ought to be as closely aligned as possible with what I'm aware of when I'm most in tune with my love for Teri); I have had a few friends who are very dear to me; and most recently my heart has been opened in ways I would have never thought possible by my experiences with a small number of wonderful children, most notably Amanda, Abigail, and Annalise, whom I could not love more if they were my own.

My passion is ...

The people I love, expressing myself through filmmaking

I know too much about ...

Sportsbetting (actually I don't know "too much" about anything)

My parents always told me ...

Not much that stuck with me

My childhood ambition ...

To escape

My favorite memory ...

Teri spontaneously embracing me from behind in a supermarket for no reason except she wanted to

Why I write ...

Self-indulgence, have things to say and I like to make believe someone else might care

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Changes constantly (and I don't feel like updating constantly)

My first job ...

Miscellaneous restaurant drudgery in a chili parlor in Blue Ash, Ohio

My best moment ...

Whenever I feel like I've gotten through to someone I love - pleased them, made them laugh, taught them something, improved their life

My inspiration ...

The people who've inspired the greatest love in me, the public figures who seem to have lived lives most guided by truth, nonviolence, and courage

Arts & Humanities > Philosophical Concepts Is truth absolute or conditional?

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"Absolute truth" is redundant, because "conditional truth" or "relative truth" are confused or meaningless notions. Put as simply as possible (and this is certainly amenable to many elaborations, qualifications, caveats, etc. - that’s what keeps philosophers employed), truth is a property of sentences (statements, propositions, claims, beliefs, assertions, etc.) whereby they correspond to reality. You can add "absolute" in front of that for emphasis if you like, but substantively it doesn't change anything. A sentence either corresponds to reality or it doesn't. "Aloysius likes to pl...

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