about me.

I'm Jim Stone. Welcome to my world.

I was born in Schenectady, NY, on August 26, 1958. That makes me, most likely, older than you are -- the Web seems to be full of kids. I've been told that I'm too caught up in Generation X things, like indie rock, tattoos, stuff like that. I don't know. I guess I'm interested in what I'm interested in, and I shouldn't have to make excuses. Of course, what interests me today may not mean anything to me tomorrow. I tend to, erm, shift focus a lot.

There have been some recurring interests. Music, for one. In high school it was choir, choir, choir, and Barbra Streisand records (don't ask). At Williams College in Massachusetts it was Bowie, Iggy Pop, and the beginnings of the New Wave, and I sang in a band called "Tim and the Distractions," which was basically an Elvis Costello imitation band. After graduating in 1980 I moved down to the Washington, DC area to live with my old bandmates and try to put a serious band together. All my life I've had to fight the demon of regret, and one of my big regrets is that my musical career ended after only one gig, playing for a friend's Hallowe'en party. The Bad Brakes left behind a demo tape recorded on a cassette deck in the basement of the house we rented in Arlington. A couple of the songs (they were all covers) weren't bad. I wish we'd rocked harder.

After the band drifted apart, I had other fish to fry besides music. It was time to sow my wild oats, and Washington's, um, glittering nightlife beckoned. You see, it was 1981, and in 1981 what a young Gay male did was go to bars, dance to disco, and sleep around. Well,I did go to bars a lot and loved to dance, but I never learned to like disco very much, and I wasn't very successful at being promiscuous. Of course, we didn't know then that the wages of our supposed sin really might be death.

My angel showed up on August 14, 1981. That's the night I met Chris, my lover. The first year of our relationship was rocky, but we made it. I think of Chris as my angel, because he saved me from what probably would have become a very self-destructive life. Have you ever heard Iggy Pop's song, "Angel"?

I spent most of the early 80s working as a paralegal. After quitting the big ol' law firm to find a real career for myself, I stumbled back into theatre. All through high school and college I'd done lots of acting, and theatre was my college major, but I hadn't pursued it since graduating. I fell into a job as a fundraiser for the Source Theatre Company, then got into stage managing, acting, and directing. I'm very proud of some of the shows I directed -- Christopher Durang's The Nature and Purpose of the Universe (my first professional directing job) and Mother's Day, by a wonderful but crazed local playwright named Barbara McConagha -- both at Source, and a production of Julius Caesar staged in the empty top floor of an office building for the Washington Shakespeare Company, for which I got a Helen Hayes Award nomination.

I've been fairly inactive in the theatre for the last couple years, other than an occasional sound design (my last one was for Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver). Frankly, I haven't missed it a whole lot. I co-directed Brecht's Life of Galileo this past winter, and it wasn't a happy experience.

I worked for the Office of Membership & Development at the Smithsonian Institution for twelve years, first as a prospect researcher, then as a computer specialist (the first job morphed into the second over a period of years). My areas of responsibility included network administration, taking care of the Sequent machine that ran the office's main database (an Oracle application called "Heritage"), lots of report writing, user support, desktop publishing, and the occasional web page. I took the job because I couldn't make ends meet with my theatre salary. I never dreamed I'd stay so long, but it was a good place to be for much of the time. I was kind of an asshole there sometimes, so some folks there were probably happy when I left. But I left the Smithsonian with lots of skills for the next great adventure: freelancing.

My business, The Wixie Concern (named after my trusty feline pal), was a short-lived venture, frequently scary but also frequently exhilarating. My goal was to be a web developer, but most of my income (such as it was) came from desktop publishing and PC support work. Along the way I managed to pick up new skills in ASP database integration (like most of what I know about computers, all self-taught) -- enough to get myself hired by my current employer, The Redmon Group, a small but very successful multimedia/web company in Alexandria. It's as close as I can imagine to my dream job -- programming, design, project management... the works. The company is almost like a family.

Some music I like:

I went through a pretty intense phase for a couple of years of exploring lots of music that I hadn't known much about before. It's like drugs, you know... you start with Nirvana and before you know it, you've got a pile of CDs and 7" vinyl by bands that nobody's heard of. That's kind of cooled off, but in the process I did find some music that I still care about a lot. My tastes are pretty conventional by indie rock standards, I guess. Some bands I like: Pavement, Grifters, Sebadoh, Silkworm, Polvo, Unwound, Hüsker Dü, Rocket from the Crypt, Ugly Head, the Beatles, Versus, Guided by Voices, and Nirvana. I also have a major weakness for country music, even some artists who are rather mainstream, like Patty Loveless, Radney Foster, and Steve Earle. Where country and indie/alt rock intersect is where you'll find me a lot of the time: bands like Palace Brothers, Uncle Tupelo, Tarnation, Giant Sand, and my latest favorite: Richard Buckner. After listening to him sing, most other music seems pretty lame by comparison.

Some other stuff I dig (daddy-o):

I've liked bicycling since I was a tyke -- I used to ride around the neighborhood on my old one-speed so I could work on my street map. I still like maps, too. I used to put on a lot of miles commuting between my house in Alexandria, VA and my job in DC. Now that I work only a couple of miles from home, I'm getting kind of fat and lazy. (Damn, no job is perfect.)

Cars, cars, cars. My brother and I used to memorize wheelbases and stuff like that. Now he drives something like an Escort and I drive a pretty cool Eagle Talon. It has about 70,000 miles on it now, and Chris and I are planning to drive it to Seattle this summer. And, of course, I have my too-cool AMX, which isn't exactly "transportation" in any meaningful way right now, but it's fun to obsess about.

Cats, cats, cats. We have three of them. Besides Wixie, who's sitting on my lap in the picture on my main page, there's Angie (big, black and beautiful) and Blanche, the little trailer-trash cat who used to live in our yard but decided to move in with us. I guess I should put up some pictures.

I have a friend, Scott, who lives in Richmond. We have a really rocky relationship sometimes, but there is no one in the world whose opinions i care more about, or whose approval I need more. I dig him, too.

Some things I believe in:

That's all for now.
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