Five Question Madness!

These questions are from Meghan:

Five Questions:

1) When did you first start listening to Jimmy Buffet, and what hooked you on his music?

February 1999. I had a roommate who was trying to figure out the name of a song he couldn't stop playing. He'd heard it in a bar once, and figured it out from his head. Of course, he didn't know any of the words, only the riffs. So one day, he goes back to the same bar, and the same guy is playing, so he asks the guy what the song was. It was "One Particular Harbor", and (using Napster), my roommate downloaded the song and then learned the words and the rest of it. I got hooked on it because it was simply such a good song.

Of course, my addiction was fed by my other close friends. Damn enablers. Anyway, I quickly realized that Jimmy was a great storyteller, a quintessential American bard. His words are poetic, romantic, and extremely moving.

Then again, there's a lot of pressure not to like Buffett. He's bad music for old people. He's a paragon of excess. He's a hippie who never died. He's always talking about that damnable shaker of salt!

But it's the magic of the music that still draws the crowd. Despite almost non-existent airplay on radio stations, he constantly sells out some of the largest venues in the world, and everyone's heard a couple of his songs, even if they think they haven't. Hell, I never realized he wrote "Come Monday" until I heard it on a live CD.

He sings about simple lives, though, and about the earth. He sings about social responsibility. He's led the effort to save the manatees. He sings about change. Women and drinking are just icing on the cake.

As anyone who's heard me talk about him knows, I really think that he'll speak straight to the soul of anyone involved in Paganism. The values are the same, and he sings them well.

2) If you had to choose between death and castration, which would you prefer?

Well, I'd *prefer* not to choose. I would have to weigh the options of each, and figure out what I might get from either option. I'm religiously disinclined to castrate myself, but similarly I'm religiously disinclined to kill myself. The reason I'd even consider looking at this in a religious light is that there is precedent for the Gods no longer seeing a castrated man as a man, and I'm very interested in how They perceive me.

In all, it's a tossup, and I'd have to be in the situation to make the choice.

3) Why "Chronarchy"?

Well, once upon a time, I had AOL. Using that, as everyone knows, is an amusing venture.

Anyway, I found out one day that you could create other screennames, and I decided that I wanted one of my own. So I thought about the name for a while, and couldn't come up with a good one. So I pulled out my dictionary and started looking up random words. Chronarchy was a word I found, and it sounded cool, so I took it.

As for more amusing anecdotes about my "name":

I once had a girl IM me. Her screenname was "Chronarchi", and she said I stole her name. Well, in the online world, it's first come, first serve, but she and I had a good conversation anyway. Turns out she was an anarchist, and was asking me if I'd read Proudhon and a few others. I think I was 15 or 16 at the time, and she was about my age. I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah, she's probably read it, but did she get it?" I knew I wouldn't have gotten it.

"Chronarchy" has disappeared from the dictionary I swear I found it in.

I've had accounts set up on all the major services online with Chronarchy. At this time (and this could change) anyone with the name Chronarchy is likely to be me.

All my Diablo 2 Necromancers have a variant of "Chronarchy" as their name.

I once received an email meant for a model. Apparently, her email address also started with Chronarchy, and somehow it had been bounced to me. I wrote back to the sender telling them that they'd used the wrong email address, and also asked the sender to let the model know that I thought she was really, really hot. Don't know if the sender ever told the model, but it was true.

And for the record: Chronarchy is not an obsession with me. It's my name.

4) What do you think of The Beatles?

Eh, they're okay. I tend to like certain parts of their songs rather than entire songs, though "Eleanor Rigby" is a very, very cool song.

When their songs were re-released on that disc with the apple on it, I picked that up, and suddenly realized that they put out almost as much crap as good stuff, if not more, so I haven't bought any Beatles music since. No big loss, I think. I can always flip on an Oldies station if I really want to hear The Beatles. They're on every 10 minutes.

5) How did you find Druidry, or perhaps, how did it find you?

Ah, that's a long, complicated story. Druidry found me through ways of my choosing. I wrote up the full story once, and put it online. Of course, I couldn't resist an esoteric version that reveals a lot more, so I created my Odyssey as a supplement. There are things in the Odyssey that never occur in the exoteric version. Both are being updated at the moment.

Content © 2003, Michael J Dangler
Updated on 07/22/2003. Site Credits / Email Me!
Basic site design from ADF.org
(Yes, I stole it!)