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Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers. I'm nearing 40 years old and have no business writing a diary for this site. I've been married to Susie for 13 years and we had our first baby Andrew on November 2,2000 after 12 years of trying to conceive. I was born in Illinois and stayed there the first ten years of my life. After that we moved around quite a bit until 1984 when we came to Alabama. The rest of my family moved away and I'm still here today. I like to cook, watch TV and play with my son. I don't like the outdoors, bad drivers or waiting for anything. I have been a garbageman, a fry cook, a Waffle House manager, a concert security guard, a bank teller, a bookkeeper, a bouncer, a comedian, a telemarketer, a deejay, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a United States Chamber of Commerce salesman, a distribution manager, a newspaper editor, a humor columnist, a music reviewer, and am now writing books for a living. Why did you choose this username? "Uncle Bob" is a combination of two nicknames I've had in my life. The first was "Uncle Buddy". Uncle Buddy was a character that I would dress up as while I was doing comedy and later deejaying. Uncle Buddy was an alcoholic clown who would berate his audiences nonstop. He chain smoked and would say he was great for children's birthday parties with a maniacal grin across his face which would tell people you wouldn't DARE want Uncle Buddy at your kid's birthday party. Uncle Buddy was a persona I'd take on when I was bored with whatever it was I was doing. I'd get all bedecked out in a clown suit, wig and makeup that was more scary than funny. It was a character that would have my audiences in stitches and was out there WAY before Homey the Clown was ever considered. The other half of the nickname came about when I first came online in 1995. I went straight to the chat rooms which fascinated me at the time. My nickname there was Bobzilla, which was a slang term we used to use in college for marijuana. So basically, I shortened "Bobzilla" to "Bob" and added the Uncle part to it. Thus...Uncle Bob. Why do you keep a diary online? Originally, this diary was to serve as a supplement to my "real" website that was getting 15 hits a day from my friends in the chat rooms. After a few months, the diary picked up business and even though I had lots of people checking out the diary, they wouldn't take that step to visit my other site which was generally a lot funnier than my diary, IMHO. I quit updating the other site about a year or so ago and began concentrating on the diary as my main site. To the best of my knowledge, the other site is no longer in service. Why do I "keep" it? I only keep it going for the readers. If I didn't have any readers or feedback to the site, I'd quit doing it tomorrow. It's not for my personal consumption. I rarely go back and re-read any of my posts. I get up every morning before dawn to crank out an entry for the people who expect to read Uncle Bob when they get up after dawn. How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? A layout is not that important for a diary, in my opinion. Let's say you go to a new restaurant in town and order the biggest steak in the house. When they bring that steak to you, it's huge and it looks delicious. You take a bite and it's the worst steak you've ever eaten in your life. In other words, it can be the prettiest thing in the world, but if it tastes like crap, you're not going to eat it. Same with a layout. There's lots of great looking layouts with no substance out there. I think that with a diary, you should concern yourself with substance and not the look. Somebody may have an interesting layout, but it's not that layout that's going to keep me coming back day after day...it's the content within that sucks me in. My layout is simple and was done by Lisa. She sent it to me one day out of the blue and I liked it, so I decided to start using it. However, the "Uncle Bob Army" is getting a bit long and I'm thinking of doing something with that, because not everyone's getting a fair shake in the matter. There have been some suggestions made on how to handle that and when I get some time, I'll email Lisa and talk about it with her. So, to reiterate, layouts aren't important to me. Then again, I'm horrible with HTML and that may just be jealousy on my part. Being an infertility patient myself, and the mother of a miracle child, I cried when I read your entry about becoming a daddy. In your entry you talk about how long it took you and your wife to conceive. Now that your son is here, tell us how he has changed your life? My son has changed my life in so many ways. First and foremost...his life has brought me closer to God and I'm now a devout Christian. Anyone that can look at a little baby that they have conceived and NOT believe in God ... well, I simply don't understand how they cannot see that children are a gift from God. My son's arrival is also what spurred me to give up drinking and drugs, which has changed my life for the better. He has given me such joy every single day of his life. He learns something new every day and to watch his reaction to the little things like taking a bite of an orange or watching Daddy put on a puppet show just melts my heart. Of course, there's little things like sleep deprivation at times...never being able to completely submerge myself into a movie or book or TV show because he needs attention...and the times when he's sick. Having a sick child is the absolute worst feeling in the world. You feel helpless because you're not a doctor and you can't decide what's ailing them. In general, he's changed my life for the better in every single way and has made me more of a man in the process. Being Unclebob and having well over 700 followers must make you feel pretty good! So the hard question, what separates you (the author) from Unclebob?
I think a lot of people believe that I "am" Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob is a persona that I've invented. I share the same life experiences with Uncle Bob...but Uncle Bob was originally supposed to be that cool Uncle that we all had as kids. The one who would let a cuss word fly that you never heard an adult say before. Or who gave you a sip of beer and laughed at your scrunched-up face as you choked on it. Basically, I don't think I'm as "cool" as Uncle Bob. I would never say something derogatory towards a waitress or bank teller or retail clerk. I generally care when I hurt people's feelings whereas Uncle Bob doesn't. Uncle Bob is supposed to be a blowhard, know-it-all guy who sometimes gets the short end of the stick in life. In real life, I'm quiet, witty when I have to be, even-tempered, charitable and loving. I don't think Uncle Bob is any of those things...at least he's not supposed to be...but sometimes my influence on the persona overpowers him and I think people get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. I hope that happens less than I think it does. Uncle Bob is for entertainment purposes only and is not to be taken seriously. Yet so many people take what I write as gospel and get so angry with me. And believe it or not...Uncle Bob curses and obsesses over body parts a whole lot more than I do. Where do you come up with some of the crazy material you write about? I've always had a very overactive imagination ... all my life. When I was a kid, the one subject I did better at than anything else was Creative Writing. I don't even know if that's a subject anymore, but I aced it as a kid. I think it comes from the fact that my parents watched nothing but sitcoms while I grew up. I grew up seeing what made people laugh and what didn't and retained that information all my life. As far as the stuff I write about...all of it has some basis of truth...be it a trip to Walmart and seeing a kid throwing a fit, or finding my nephew surfing for naked women on the Web. I just take what happened and exaggerate the situation. I hope people don't feel robbed that the things I describe in my diary aren't always exactly as they happened and I think people understand that is the case with my diary. I can find humor in EVERYTHING, even tragedy. To me, it's simple to take any situation and mine some humor out of it. I guess it's a gift. Some guys are born with impressive genitalia...I was born with a warped sense of humor. You say in your diary you love women, so if you could be a set of anyone's boobs, who's boobs would you be and why? Ahhhhh...tough one. But I'll have to go with Mrs. Garrett from "The Facts of Life". Interviewed by Trinity63
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