Here's 10 things no one knows about me. Well, at least mostly no one knows about me. I'm still sticking with my gut feeling that these kind of posts are totally conceited but whatever...

1 - When I'm driving by myself I regularly turn the radio up until I can feel the music and frequently drive over 100 mph on the freeways.

2 - During high school we were so poor that I lived in an unfinished garage, without electricity for several days. Our family car was also repossesed and the only food we had in the house was canned corn.

3 - I tried to kill myself when I was 9 and again when I was 12, I also came very close to dying in a car accident when I was 16. While some people know some of that, what no one knows is I have to regularly talk myself out of feeling like a lot of people wouldn't have been beter off if I hadn't made it.

4 - I got beaten up in the park across the street from my house when I was 8 by some kid I'd never seen before. I was afraid to leave the house by myself for almost a year. My mom and stepdad didn't believe it actually happened and forced me to take the trash out alone every week. I've never been more afraid of anything in my life than walking out into that pitch black alleyway to find those trashcans.

5 - Almost five years after the fact, I tracked down a kid who used to pick on me in high school and beat the living fuck out of him. I heard that he was in the hospital for days and even though I made sure he knew it was me, I think he was too embarrsed to tell anyone.

6 - The first credit card I ever got was from Radio Shack the week I turned 19. They mailed it to me even though I'd never applied for it. The limit was $750 and I spent $690 the next day on speakers and stereo equiptment that I still have to this day. I paid the miniumn payment for several years and finally paid it off two years ago in one final chunk. The following month they cancelled the card saying my credit rating wasn't high enough.

7 - When I was in 3rd grade my grandmother convinced me to give her my dog so she could go live with her friend who's husband had just died and was very lonely, promising I could go visit her when ever I wanted. Several excuses as to why I couldn't go see her later, my school went on a field trip to the local SPCA, where to my suprise I found my dog. The school kids went back to school and I stayed there crying until my mom could come pick me up, just me, not my dog. Turns out that was the plan, they had assumed I would just forget about the dog and didn't figure in the SPCA fieldtrip. I called every week to see if she was still there until finally they told me no one had adopted her and she'd been put to sleep. Ironically enough that's when I wish I'd been lied to. How hard would it have been to tell a crying 3rd grader that his dog was adoped by a loving family with kids and a yard and would live happily ever after? Many years later I'd meet a friend of a friend who worked there and said after the dogs and cats were given lethal injections they were incinerated, however this happened very quickly and most of the animals were still alive when they threw them into the fire.

8 - The very first time I met my wife, Caryn, she came with her then boyfriend, Shawn, to my office (read that as extra room at a friends house) because he was in some band and wanted me/us to help distribute his record. Nothing really came of that and he got pissed and wrote a "scene report" in Maximum Rock n Roll about Gainesville, Florida that spent a lot of time talking about what and asshole I was.

OK, that's only 8 but do you really think I'm going to write it on my blog for a bunch of people I've never met to read? Please.