About Me

The Facts

I am Charles and I live in Northern California.   Not somewhere impressive like San Francisco, Berkeley, or Sonoma, although I am just a train ride away from those locations, so feel free to picture me in any one of them if it makes me appear more cosmopolitan.  I’m dangerously under-traveled, so having people imagining me somewhere else would be swell.

Now that’s all settled, why Cat Boy?  At some point in high school (I’m thinking 1986) I wore a cat collar on my wrist, and I mentioned to my Civics teacher that I liked Cat Stevens, so sometimes she called me Cat.  I liked it far better than my actual name, but trying to get people to call you something new is a hard sell.  When I joined a few online groups, I decided to use the name Cat since it was unlikely strangers would object to calling me that in the way the people I actually knew had.  

Eventually I revealed my given name, but the people who came to know me as Cat, still think of me as such to some degree.  As far as the “boy” portion of the title, I think someone sarcastically called me “Cat Boy” once, and when I started the blog, I knew it was the only choice.  I have since learned there are Cat Boys all over the net, including a few who claim to be the “real” Cat Boy, but I wouldn’t change the title of this blog for any amount of money (unless it was enough to travel three months out of the year, for life).

What else?  I drink enormous quantities of tea, but very little liquor since I have become a compete lightweight (and I am a very boring drunk).  I eat too much, cook too little, and ramble incessantly about the most insignificant things.  Before my online life began, that last quality seemed to be a problem, but I have since discovered it is a quality valued by many people.  “Hooray for me,” he says, sticking his tongue out at the fourth grade teacher who said “Someday that mouth of yours will get you into trouble.”