Hey there! My name is Ben and I live in St. Louis, Missouri with my dog Sylvie and cats Marisol, Geneviève, and Louise. I’m a bleeding heart radical hippie nerd social worker-type person and I started a very small non-profit that helps people with résumés and resource searches and WiFi connectivity and stuff. I've been a vegan for over twenty-four years and have therefore attained the rank of venerable tofu elder. I'm probably kinda boring, but here's some more stuff about me:

• Some time ago, I consumed 25 lbs. (11.3 kg) of organic grade B carrots within a 1 1/2 month span. This was a Pyrrhic victory for I am more carrot now than man; bland and awash in beta carotene.

• In my kitchen I possess many thousands of organic beans, grains of rice, and kernels of popcorn. Perhaps even tens of thousands! A wizened old-timer adorned in a cloak of avocado skins bestowed them upon me during an interminable Greyhound trek from Teaneck, along with the title Paladin of the Dry Goods. It is a tremendous burden.

• The infrastructure of the brick alleyway behind my apartment continues apace in its decay, revealing an incipient glimpse below into the timeworn remnants of an ancient underground empire from a long-forgotten epoch. I have mixed feelings about this.

• My diet these days is about 47% healthy pancake-based. What was intended as a salve in times of profound uncertainty has become a ritualized slog - a futile attempt to cling to normalcy, bereft of joy and meaning...the whereabouts of the waffle press remain a mystery.

• Something I was thinking about earlier is how intensely distressing it is that Cookie Monster doesn't have a nose...what kind of malevolent entity would be so cruel as to create a being with a voracious appetite for something he can only experience as a mere shadow of its full sensory potential? What kind of universe is this? Maybe his fur is actually lined with olfactory receptors? Maybe I've just had a very pedestrian view of what noses are or can be?

Anyway, I guess that's all I have for you for now. I've been told that I am empathetic, kind, and reasonably self-aware - if those are qualities that you prize, feel free to give me a shout.