I really have no idea what I want to be when, uh, if I really grow up. As a kid, I wanted to be a cowboy. So I rode a bay mare named Sox all over the rolling hills of southwest Iowa. And I actually herded cattle, on occasion, as I went.

My dad wanted me to be a farmer, so I milked cows, and slopped hogs, and fed chickens, and drove tractors (standing up) before my feet could reach the pedals. I learned to wipe my feet before entering the kitchen.

By junior high, I was torn between becoming the next Ernest Hemingway or the next OJ Simpson. Boy, could I pick ‘em. I did win a couple of writing contests tho’, under the pseudonym “Ricky” Leonard. And I was a starting halfback, weighing in at almost a hundred pounds.

High school came and went with the usual amount of high drama and broken hearts… the writing and general jockery filling space between class plays and student council. I graduated fourth in my class with high hopes of becoming a hippie. And I succeeded.

University brought the promise of com-pu-ter-s and I went right to work on that three-story mainframe, feeding it hundreds of punchcards as fast as it could digest them. Which wasn’t very fast.

By the end of sophomore year, I decided I could do more to stop the war by becoming a journalist and going undercover as a short-haired tv reporter. A decade later, I was writing and producing newscasts for an ABC owned-and-operated television station in San Francisco. And I was still undercover.

Four superbowls, three World Series, two earthquakes, one Emmy and a Peabody later, I decided to work for Bill Gates. And I did. Sorta. Writing technical manuals for Word, and Excel, and Windows and such. At one point, I was the “webmaster” for a non-product called Internet Explorer. Janet Reno took a real interest in what we were doing.

Today, I continue to write, I build and manage Web sites, and I look for new projects. Looking back, at where I’ve been and where I started, I think to myself, “Good gawd, man, you’re becoming Forrest Gump!”

Just shoot me. Please?