OWhata

MY FOLKS NAMED ME JAMES after Sweet Baby James the James Taylor song – sometimes that and my New York/Long Island/Dutch Pennsylvanian accent combo get a woman to say more than those five magic words to me: “You’re cute, but I’m gay” (the DP accent is an ongoing symptom of 5 straight years at Penn State.) My last name is Palazzolo and my middle name is Vito – I cannot speak Italian, have no family members in the Mafia and, yes, I cut the vowels of the end of long, long, long, long Italian food words – meats and cheeses just shouldn’t be gender specific.

I live in the Phoenix Metro area of Arizona and sometimes friends come over to play Wii bowling. The neighbors use my driveway as a Ford graveyard and to deal Tweek. I work in the tech field, peripheral to any real geek work – I do marketing, communications and PR work; wear Banana Republic way too much and often get asked if I’m homosexual before anyone introduces me to their female friend, you know, just to be certain. Billy says I wear too many roll-necks.

At the core I’m a storyteller and have written a novel.   I have 5 short stories published, one comic book, and some ‘essays’ that were meant to shock and awe and instead they shirked and vanished. I read fiction and then I read some more.

Zen, Tao, Jameson whiskey, George Carlin, Reid Fleming World’s Toughest Milkman, web-curating, Mouse on Mars, Big Trouble in Little China, pigtails (on of-age women, not kindergartners), Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, candy corn, sunlight – these are a few of my favorite things.

I’ve won one trophy in my life. When I was in cub scouts they had a make-a-little-wooden-car-and-race-it event. My car under-performed admirably and won the distinction of MOST UNUSUAL. I shit you not – I still have the trophy. As a matter of fact, I’ll post a picture along with the specter of my malnourished ego.

I began this site around March 2007 with the technical assistance of a 9,000 pound albino Silverback in a Hanes beefy-T named Jeff Nickoloff. The intention is this – “untangle” the web for people to show them how cool the WWW can be by giving them URL’s to awesome web sites I find. I know – I can’t believe I get laid either. I called it OWHATA after the Sir Walter Scott quote: “O what a tangled web we weave…” Catchy, nes? Politely ignore that the next line is “When we practise to deceive” because I can’t explain that shit.

I will sometimes write about miscellaneous thoughts, perceptions, toenails, beliefs, family members, friends, events, favorite volcanoes, burritos, narcotics, and more.

Bon Apetit.

[Photo by Mariel Cordero]