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About Me I live in rural California (yes, there is such a place), in an egg-shaped ferrocement dome, on 50 acres of land, where I have a good-sized orchard and garden and raise Kiko goats and the odd bird (I'm deep into ducks). I studied engineering for a couple years at U.C. Davis in the '60s, but ended up graduating (after a hiatus that took me well into hippiehood) with a degree in applied behavioral sciences, a department that was sort of hunkered down in an obscure corner of the College of Agriculture — obscure, that is, until Isao Fujimoto, a professor in the department, enlisted us in challenging the university/corporate ag cabal on every single destructive program, practice, and technology they were getting up to. Which was a wonderful education. Thus armed, I returned to my home county; got involved in community economic-development issues; and co-founded, with a couple friends, a nonprofit corporation called Net Energy that engaged in solar and energy-conservation outreach. A few years later I created a for-profit business that did much the same work. I decided in 1982, though, that I didn't want to be a shopkeeper forever, and I was still unmarried; so I set sail for Japan. I taught my fair share of English, pretended to be an advertising copywriter, and enrolled in a PhD program in cross-cultural psychology. I wrote a thesis on the psychology of creativity in Japanese women, graduated … and grossly abused academic ethics by marrying my favorite research subject. Together we returned to California in 1989, where I had landed a job as vice president of a Berkeley multimedia startup (did I mention that my thesis had a multimedia appendix, and that I ended up consulting to Apple Japan and a few Japanese companies — later for psychology!). That outfit went belly-up within a year, but I had my foot in the silicon door and managed to carve out a nice little niche for myself as an educational-software developer and tech editor in the '90s. Meanwhile, though, this business about Apocalypse was nagging at me again — as it had from early childhood, in one way and another — and so in 1996 I started looking around for a place that was outside the box and off the grid. I found that place, and a wonderful little community to boot; and after about 100 500-mile round-trips and several years of persuasion, I actually got Harumi to move here with me. But not for long. The Japanese have a saying, "inaka no inaka," which translates as "the middle of the middle of nowhere;" and it began to crop up increasingly often as Harumi struggled to build a video-production business ... from down on the farm. So, long story short, she's back in Japan — her career and family and culture have reclaimed her. And I'm a lone voice in the wilderness, doncha know. ________ Have I mentioned my hidden agenda with this web site? Better late than never, I guess. I've done all this work, and gone strongly in the direction of seeing Apocalypse as our likely future. I figure that if I'm wrong, the universe (or whoever) will nudge me and say, "Hey, lighten up. There's more here than has yet met your eye." In other words, I'm really just trying to find out what the heck's going on. Charley Sweet |