Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers.

The part I always seem to hate yet never seem to be able to avoid, the "short bio." The problem is that who I am changes infinitely in short spurts of time, yet I always seem to be the same person on the inside. So, to sum up who I am in a paragraph: I am a 28-year-old male living in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. At one moment I can be everybody and everything to everybody, and in the next moment I can be a big nobody. I like to think of myself as a big adventurer, yet I can be extremely stable. I like to think I am very intelligent, but I can do the dumbest things sometimes. I like to write, I like to play on computers, I like sports cars, I love to travel, I have a passion for music, I love baseball, and I love to read. That's basically me. I'm very large, insanely large, but it's wierd...I'm not fat, but I'm not Schwarzenegger either. I'm just this 6 foot tall, 250 pound guy with giant shoulders and a huge chest, but I don't look mean. I once took a college psych course, and the class had to vote on each member of the class as to whether they were introverted or extroverted. With each member of the class, it was pretty unanimous as to whether the person was intro or extro. With me there was a 50/50 split, and the teacher said I was an enigma. So, in the shortest of bios, I am an enigma.

Why did you choose this username?

Well, I was in a band a long time ago, and that band needed a name before we could play out in public. We were three completely different guys whose only common interests were our own band and the level of mischief we liked to cause. I had always thought the line from Lewis Carrol's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that mentioned "Of Cabbages & Kings" was really neat. Well, truth be told, I was on some really good acid once when I heard the Disney version of "Alice in Wonderland" and the Cabbages & Kings thing got me thinking. It was like a class system, cabbages were peasants and then there were kings, and I never heard such a great reference to the lower class before, so it stuck in my mind. When we were trying to name the band, the drummer was into rock, cheesy rock, and kept coming up with tough names. The guitarist wanted something cool, original, and not cheesy. My drug-muddled mind figured that since we were young and poor with great aspirations we should be Cabbages & Kings. We were Cabbages with the hearts and dreams of Kings. The other guys didn't think it was too cool, but it wasn't tossed, just put on hold. We had a show scheduled, our first, a while later. We needed a name, and Eric, the silent guitarist, turned to Tory and said, "We are now Cabbages & Kings." A couple of years later when I first got on the internet, I needed a name for my fresh and new AOL account, so I took the name Cabbages. Of course AOL insisted I add a number to my name (as if there were countless other Cabbages) so out of pure cheesiness I chose "69" and my internet persona was then and forever Cabbages69.

Why do you keep a diary online?

I graduated from high school about ten years ago and I lost touch with everyone. I have gone through many phases where I travelled around the States following the Grateful Dead, I took a job travelling around installing computer networks when the internet was an infant and only a few dozen people knew how to wire up servers in the whole world, I was into the band scene, and I partied a lot, and I was anything but stable. So one day I was using Google to try to find people I used to be friends with. I couldn't find too much, but in searching under my school name I found a resume from someone who went to my old school. I had to be nosey, so I looked at it. It turned out it was for a girl who graduated about eight years after I did, and it had a link to her own personal diary. She was a great writer and she did the whole layout with Greymatter and hosted it on her own domain. Parenthetical.Org, her diary, was great reading. I was fascinated, and it was the first time i had ever seen an online diary. I got in touch with her and we shared some alma mater stories and some writing experiences, and she suggested I start my own. I didn't know where to go, and I was too proud to ask, so I chased down her Greymatter link. Greymatter is great software for maintaining a diary if you have a lot of time and patience, and a good deal of skill. I apparently lacked all this, because I couldn't figure it all out. So I used a free Geocities webpage and a web page builder I got for Christmas the previous year for my first journal. I actually created and uploaded a new page to my site for each entry, and updated my links. It really sucked pretty badly. One day, I discovered a link that lead me to a Diaryland diary, and I went to Diaryland. I didn't know much HTML, so I used a template for a while, until I saw how cool everyone else's diary was. Then I was on a mission to learn enough HTML to make my diary at least presentable. What was the question? Oh, yeah, why do I keep an online diary? Basically, to write, to share my thoughts, ideas and stories, and to have something to look back on when I wonder in a few years what happened to my life.

How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? bearing in mind that you noted in this entry that people often create "alter egos" to compensate for something missing in their lives. Can you also comment on your layout?

How important a layout is depends on the diarist. I've read some great diaries that still use templates. I've also read awful diaries that look like works of art. I guess the main goal of an online diary is self expression, and if you can express yourself better by changing and customizing your layout, than that is a great thing. Yes, people can create an "alter-ego" of someone they're not with their diary and layout. Sometimes this is healthy, and sometimes it is not. I'm kind of laid-back and very toungue-in-cheek, but I've also got a few tricks up my sleeve, so I tried to design something to reflect that. I try not to pretend I'm someone I'm not, and I try not to fabricate or exaggerate my life in my diary. As far as commenting on my diary, I have basically given up on trying to make my layout any better. It has gotten many mixed reviews and it seems to have a love/hate audience. The layout is basically a long series of trials and errors, and I just got it to a point where I am comfortable with it, not too plain, not too fancy, not too loud, not too soft, it's just where I come and write sometimes, and I'm finally okay with that.

You seem to be able to make the most out of any kind of situation and have remarkable tales to tell because of this. Do you think that people create their own state of happiness and how do you go about achieving yours?

I hated my childhood because I was sheltered and my parents were basically insane. I was a poor kid sent to a rich kid school, and I wasn't used to being around other kids, so I was very unpopular. I created a sense of humor as a defense mechanism to save my mind. I learned to laugh at everything and see the humor in everything. At times, this kept me alive. When I was in junior high, I was fortunate enough to have a very good friend who was popular, rich, and good at sports take me under his wing because he shared the same sense of humor. Together, we found ourselves in the most wild and amazing scenarios while just trying to amuse ourselves. Suddenly, I was popular, and when I was in high school I realized the more outrageous the things I did became, the more I was idolized and I became a living legend. When I graduated, and got into a really wild scene of people and mixed drugs and alcohol into the equation, I had some really wild stories to tell. The guys in my band seemed to share a brain with me...we were very intelligent, came from very good yet working class families, and we were all insane and would do anything for a laugh. We were convinced that if we didn't have a new, true and yet totally outrageous story to tell, than we weren't living. I finally discovered not too long ago that I don't need a fantastic story or to live on the edge to have a good time, but I still find a way to laugh at things. I discovered as a child that if I can laugh my way through something than it can't hurt me, and I find it is still true today.

In this entry you talk about higher authorities controlling the actions of children. Do you think that life was a lot freer and easier when you were a child? and how would you change the laws protecting children so that they could have fun, yet be safe at the same time?

I am no authority on child laws, and certainly no one should take me seriously about my opinions on how to raise children, but I just see a lot of children being way too overprotected today to the point that it's really a shame. Kids have to wear bike helmets everywhere now. When I was a kid, only professional road-racers wore helmets. I can see a kid wearing a helmet riding near traffic, but in their own yards? It's insane. I see every kid at the beach wearing these arm floatie things, and every pond has buoys. And Tonka trucks are no longer made of steel. Now, it probably isn't safe for kids to ride in the back of pickup trucks, but I remeber as a kid the joy of riding in the back of a truck on a hot summer day, and waving to tons of other kids riding in the backs of other trucks, and I didn't live in farm-country, either. Today, you would be put in jail for letting your kids ride in the back of a truck. I've heard of cases were Social Services took kids away from their parents because the kid broke his arm climbing a tree and the parent allowed it. But then again, too, when I was little it was okay to drink a beer while driving as long as you weren't intoxicated. Everyone says the world changes, but man, there are so many things kids can't experience because they are so sheltered. Don't take this as prejudiced because I have no problem with people being gay, but doesn't it seem a bit strange that half the teenaged boys I know today are out of the closet, and they are the same ones forced to wear a helmet and pads every time they ride a bike, never rode in the back of a truck or station wagon, and had to ride in the back seat on a booster seat until they were twelve?

Throughout the course of your diary, you undergo a change in lifestyle, from the "seedy bar scene" to the high-flying job that you are in at the moment. Could you share with us, what it was exactly that motivated this change in you?

Well, this change in lifestyle was not totally mine to make. I spent five years of my life working six twelve-hour days a week, earning decent pay, and spending all my spare time playing in bands, chasing girls, and having fun. I liked my life, but I knew I couldn't go on like this forever. Then one day, boom, I broke my chest plate in half at work. I could barely move, let alone work, for two years. Over those two years, I did a lot of thinking, and I realized I was making over 50 grand a year and had nothing to show for it, I realized I put all my spare time into the band and it was going nowhere, and I realized most of my friends were still smoking tons of pot and living in shacks or their parent's cellars. So, before I returned to school and the workforce, I realized the band had to go before it sucked out the rest of my prime years. The chest still hurts like a bastard, but I have money in the bank, a lot more free time, I barely drink, I had quit doing drugs long before I quit the band, and my friends don't start every sentence with "Dude" now. Do I miss it? To a degree, but it's behind me. I miss the free days of childhood where I used to spend entire days throwing a baseball as high into the sky as I possibly could and catching it, but I'm not about to start doing that again. I just opened a new chapter, and my accident helped me open my eyes, especially when the derelicts I was hanging with would sit on my couch and help me figure out ways to spend my lawsuit settlement on them.

At Interview our last question is always reserved for fun! so here's yours: As the owner of "one on one" did you feel it necessary to have an interview with us, because you are indebted for the idea, or did you just not trust your other colleagues?

Long before I started One-On-One I applied to be interviewed here. This was back in November of 2001. I got tired of waiting for an interview and thought, "How hard can it possibly be?" So I started my own site. At the time, it had been like seventeen days between updates at Interview, and I was pissed. Of course, I was also still recovering from my accident and not working, and would spend 18 hours a day at my computer. I also hadn't realized Ginger's mum had just passed, and being the ass I am, I gave her some grief about her site and me starting my own. We fought a little bit, but we eventually worked things out, and she promised to interview me. She also warned me about how difficult it is to run a site. Oh, I was a regular hero for a while, doing up to five interviews a day, thumbing my nose secretly to Ginger the whole time. Then I got overwhelmed with requests, and hired a few staffers. They were great, then they got overwhelmed, too. All the while, I had yet to be interviewed personally. What I didn't tell anyone, and this is the first time I've told anybody, is that I felt bad asking one of my staffers to interview me for One-On-One, so what I did was ask random people who wrote to One-On-One to request an interview to interview me for the site. A few said they would do it, and I must have asked a dozen people, and not a single on came through. Can you believe that? If I had initially requested an interview from Interview, and Ginger wrote back asking me to interview her, I would have been ecstatic. What I finally did to get myself interviewed was there was a gal who was just starting up a site called q-n-a who e-mailed me asking how I got such good response to my site. I explained my stupid battle with Ginger over not giving her credit basically gave me all the publicity I could handle and more but told her instead of starting a war with a sweet woman whose mum just passed away, that I would promote the hell out of her in exchange for an interview. Well, she's still in business, albeit in a small way, and I have an interview posted at her site. As far as my colleagues, I would trust them with my life. Abby worked with me at Dream Review and she's the best, Sharon is a girl I know personally who is just fab, and Molzo I just kind of threw the job on. I just didn't want to burden them with the task of interviewing me. Well, thanks for the interview...I hope it was as good for you as it was for me!

Interviewed by Deepblueday

most recently:

9:33 a.m.
2002-09-03
cabbages69

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