Welcome! My name is Thomas Izaguirre, aka Ratrarvaman; my "dharma name," meaning "He who is armored by the night" in Sanskrit. I taught myself to read it and took two accelerated semesters of it in college. My Western birthsign is Aquarius, my Chinese the Water Hare. Everything else about me you will learn through exploring my site, after all, scrolling through a generic text list is SO boring...

Let me get this out of the way. My dislikes are quite simple: racists, drunkards, homophobes, people who mistreat their pets and/or train them to do harm, crappy televi$ion, sensationali$tic media that spreads fear and panic, the hypnotized who unquestioningly accept said media, self-righteous, strident people, most radio talk show hosts (Tom Leykis excepted), and mean, greedy corporations. They have made my life miserable for me, my friends, and this world in general. They deserve scorn and ridicule but they are often in power and can torment those who are not.

It was the time of the burgeoning Counterculture & Beatlemania. I was in awe of it as far as my infant mind could be. My memory started functioning early enough that I could remember seeing Star Trek and The Smothers Brothers when they first ran. It was also the time I saw Dark Shadows, Marvel Classic Comics, Spiderman, and Golden Age anime like Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Kimba. I went to Catholic school starting with kindergarten at St. Marks by University of Maryland-College Park. I got into reading as my Dad had a subscription to National Geographic but I was so voracious I went through Cosmopolitans when I waited for my Mom when she went to the beauty parlour. It was my manner of reading that my myopia was discovered, necessitating Buddy Holly style horn-rimmed glasses. I had lots and lots of questions and wanted answers. I obssessed with looking at the night sky. I had a child's propensity for wandering and getting lost, often finding more interesting things in the process. This continues even today and I am glad a book has been written on this. The local independent TV station stoked my curiosity by showing vintage horror and science fiction movies, hosted by the inimitable Count Gore DeVol. 1969 was my most memorable year because of the moon landing and vacationing down in Florida by a salt-water tributary. I was into animals but couldn't handle them well as I had that insensitivity children have that makes them treat animals like toys rather than living things. I thank my Mom for spanking that out of me. In any event, I came away with a life-long fascination with Chihuahuas, spiders, and cold-blood critters like turtles and salamanders. My Dad loved to work with his hands and liked camping and that rubbed off on me. I was considering a career in science at this time. I also discovered a knack for eating that turned to genuine culinary connoisseurship later on.

My first discovery during this period was insomnia. I loved staying up late, partly because most of the movies I liked were on at this time and I also like watching rock concert shows like Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special, ABC's In Concert, and Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. I discovered Rush this way. I got into Halloween in a big way as well. I was also being elevated by a steady diet of Public Television and British comedies like Monty Python's Flying Circus. My musical tastes, which were slavishly dictated by ritual listening to America's Top 40 with Kasey Casem, had evolved to pay more attention to New Wave, early Kraftwerk, King Crimson, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush. A local long-haired aficionado introduced me to Ian Dury and a magnificent but short-lived heavy metal band named Armageddon. My favorite wild cousin Douglas spent an afternoon playing his Frank Zappa records for me. I took up guitar in 1980 after an aborted attempt to learn it when I was younger and didn't have the patience and willingness to admit my talent lay strictly in rhythm and not melody. As for my science ambitions, I am happy to say that I was one of those prodigies that burned out. I am glad since I realized my humanity was slipping away and sometimes the brick of reality has to come crashing through the window to wake me up. I had made myself miserable in denying my eccentricity and trying to fit in by doing the Boy Scouts and Altar Boy thing. I got into the whole mental improvement thing started by Durk Pearson after watching him on Tom Snyder and reading him in the late, lamented OMNI magazine. I also kept up my fascination with electronic and popular science though the math part of the science always escaped me. I just love nifty gadgets. I bailed out of my Catholic grade school a year early to finish up at a then all male, Catholic, ROTC high school in D.C. Managed to survive that, come away with a better appreciation if not whole acceptance of the military, and got involved with the Ranger unit to maintain my interest in the outdoors. I was the most academically underachieving geek I could think of but it helped that my receding hairline made me look far older than I was. College at U-MD was better, filled with colorful characters like manic preacher Tom Short (a protege of Campus Ministries' Jed Schmock) and the Markland Medieval Mercenary Milita. I tried one last valiant attempt to learn computer programming and failed. If you can't do even COBOL or Fortran, it's best to hang it up. My science-fiction interests really took off, no thanks to the awful Star Wars. It was my Golden Age for con-going and I take this moment to salute the late, lamented Unicon. I was still interested in strange phenomena, but totally unconvinced of aliens. I put more stock in the program SETI At Home. My interests in the supernatural proved more fruitful, especially as I could pursue them academically.

My Dad finally retired after devoting years as a civil statistician for the Navy. The Beltway was expanding and so was public transportation. I refused to learn to drive and made daily use of the bus and Metrorail since high school. That got a bit more difficult when, after retiring, my parents sold our house near P.G. Plaza and moved out to an isolated area 8 miles south of Annapolis. At least there was a bayside beach, however small, where critters could be seen and I could walk our second Chihuahua Ponchy. My sister was miserable in the isolation but at least her musical tastes had matured beyond her disco zombification. I could lend her my tapes and vinyl. I was glad to see geek becoming chic in the persons of Elvis Costello and Thomas Dolby. I got to hear new stuff from such places as WHFS before it became WHF$ and the Sub Ether Waveband hosted by college chum Andy Looney. Today he is a successful game designer. Most of the friends who mean anything to me now I made during this time. We kept in touch through conventions and the occasioal encounter in real life. I explored my interests in cooking, photography, writing, martial arts but always felt something lacking. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin to finally escape the nest and found paradise for a while. Then Gov. Tommy Thompson was busy making the state Temp Agency heaven with a clever hiring freeze that gave a loophole to private sector outsourcing. Under Kafka-esque circumstances, I became unemployed and remained jobless for most of 1992, during which time I came to understand the sorry state of the welfare system in a way that all the strident Marxist types on campus never could. As bad as it was, the welfare deform brought by esteemed former President Clinton and furthered by our current one has just made things far worse. Madison had a lot of great things about it: a thriving community of Bohemian slackdom that entertained the tourists and made spring and summer afternoons never boring. In fact, there was so much to do culturally that there was no excuse for boredom. All that changed when, after being declared the best city in the country, it started believing the hype. Now it seems hellbent on driving out the very people that made it so much fun in the first place. But I get ahead of myself. I got a custodial job at the fantastic student union there which I held for nearly six years cuz it was fairly secure, if seasonal work, that was the only thing that I could structure to my school schedule. I was not impressed by the UW-Madison's art education resources, save for continuing education, and attended The Madison Area Technical College. The one thing I could never get used to was the weather. Our kind of winter STARTS in October up there and gets worse by February. It was not unusual to have snow in May. But I was in a college town and in my element. I drank it up!!

The second half of my time in Madison was marked by trying to keep the boat afloat. I endured a next door tenant from hell in one place and a roommate from hell in another (guy left me with a $500 phone bill). Trips to Chicago introduced me to the the art andgothic scenes there, as well as the people of Projekt and DivaNation, two of the best indie labels out there. I should have listened to the advice of my portfolio instructor when his first words were: "Get Out of Madison!" I remained stubbornly unconvinced and had excuses to stay. I thought having a computer would give me an edge employment wise but it didn't. I ran out of them when a business venture fell through. A friend of mine, a rather interesting if ultimately tragic character, got me into doing the web marketing thing. He died during a buying trip in Guadalajara where he spent his winters. I began to see why so many people, even the ones who urged me to come, had been leaving. The character of the place was radically changing and not for the better. Since returning home, I've had time to make friends with our newest chihuahua, eat regularly, and cultivate my green thumb and actually get good at it. I am indebted to Rush Limbaugh and Dr? Laura Schlessinger for motivating me to drive. Cuz if I had to let my Dad drive me to and from work just one more day having to listen to their vitriol, I was going to go nuts. I found work at a major regional newspaper in Annapolis in the ad production department. It gave me the real money I needed to get out of my debts and start to pursue my artistic interests in earnest. I am grateful to the colorful characters that made the Dilbertian drama there so tolerable. One of them realized his dream of going to Hollywood as a screenwriter. He does work for the Smallville series on his website here. If you visit, tell Craig that Tom sent you! I am currently "between jobs" as they say and now again have an undesired amount of leisure with which to do things. This is one of them and, though the circumstances could be better, I am glad to get this finally done after sitting in virtual limbo for two years.