Tell us a bit about yourself - who are you, where are you from, where have you lived-worked-played?
I was born a poor, black sharecropper....wait, wrong movie. My name is Stephen Frederick Johnson, I was born in 1967 in the pulsating center of southern hospitality known as Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I moved to Florida when I was ten, and thanks to the thirteen years I spent in the US Air Force as a Russian Linguist, have since also lived in Texas, California, Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, Germany, and Russia, where I currently live (in Moscow). My favorite cities in the world are, in order, Moscow, New Orleans, Baltimore, and San Francisco. I am a flaming heterosexual, though I hear everybody has their price and I like to consider myself open minded. Well, I wouldn't eat rat feces for all the gold in the world, but that's another story line.

If you're so well-traveled and open-minded, why do you constantly refer to yourself as a hick?
Because I have very low self-esteem, borne of a childhood spent exposed to the belief that most Southerners are ignorant hicks. As a result, I make those frequent references to my own backwards-assness as a defense mechanism, sort of a sleight of hand so you'll think I'm being cleverly self-deprecating, when in fact I really do believe I'm a hick from Louisiana whom no amount of education, money, worldly exposure, or fancy websites will ever change. No matter what sort of fortune befalls me (pretty ironic word combination, don't ya think?), I can't help feeling like I'm some kind of imposter who stepped into somebody else's life. I feel more positive about this than that sentence might lead you to believe....a better way to put it is that I feel like a kid who managed to sneak into Disney World without a ticket, and believe me - like any self-respecting Southerner who drops in to leech off his rich relatives for a few months, I'm getting on every goddamned ride I can before they catch up with me! By the way, did you know that the Russian word for hick is "lokh" and that Russian lokhs are every bit as backward and disparaged for it as are hicks in the States?

No, I didn't know that. What other Russian etceteras do you find worth mentioning?
Women here, my wife very much included, who are so beautiful it breaks your heart to look at them. Making it through six months of pure white snow covering the ground and temperatures so cold your snot freezes before it completes the journey from your nose to your upper lip. Learning to like the taste of vodka to the point that I can actually discern the difference between certain brands. The many rituals associated with drinking in general, especially the one that says the man with whom you pass out in a drunken haze after sharing an entire bottle of vodka is your friend for life who will kill for you if you ever ask. Russians' frustrating, contradictory combination of self-loathing and their belief that they're better than any other culture in the world. The fact that even sixty years after the end of World War II, most Russians still understand in their souls what it means to fight for their homeland on its very soil. Outdoor parties in public places that get started when just a few people show up in one spot with beer and a guitar, and the next thing you know you've got a crowd of dancing strangers. The taste of shashlik; khachipouri; chicken satsivi, tkemale sauce; kvanchkara; and an entire meal of beer and herring with olive oil, raw onions, and boiled potatoes.

What's your favorite food, drink, movie, book, automobile?
My favorite food is anything that doesn't contain either olives, pickles, or the yellow part of a boiled egg, which pretty much rules out most varieties of Southern-style potato salad. Beer is my drink of choice, the darker the better, and I believe in my heart that man could truly live for a while on nothing but Guinness. My favorite movie is Cool Hand Luke...nobody does laid back the way Paul Newman does it in that movie. My favorite book is "Brothers K" by David James Duncan, a book full of parables on baseball, Russian tragedy, the Viet Nam war and Christianity, and which has been an absolute delight all seven times I've read so far. The only car that is authorized personally by me to exist on my planet is the Chevrolet Corvette. And don't try to hand me any bullshit about the correlation between sports cars and small penises - I am blessed by the genetic gifts of my father, Jim Johnson, a man from Texas where everything is bigger.

Do you believe that our lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, shed his blood on the cross for your sins?
No, as a matter of fact, I sure as hell (tee hee) do not believe in the whole "Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook" phenomenon that has gripped half the world in such an increasingly harmful way the past couple of millenia. What I do believe is that some two thousand or so years ago, in the midst of a lot of chaos, cruelty and general despair, there walked a very charismatic man who grew up under rather austere circumstances, whose childhood and young adulthood were so unbelievably rough and who witnessed so many senseless acts of violence and was so horrified by the capacity to which man can harm his own brother that he vowed to himself never to be a party to such inhuman degradation. Instead, he conducted himself in a completely unheard-of manner by deliberately treating his fellow man with respect, compassion and kindness, even when they visited their worse on him. His behaviour was so revolutionary that people began flocking to him, believing him to be some sort of oracle or saviour, when in reality he was nothing more than a simple mortal who had decided, for personal reasons, not to hurt a fly. Unfortunately, he was persecuted for this belief, as were his eventual followers. On the other hand, he's lucky not to have been witness to the next 19 centuries of warfare and brutality carried in his name.

Are you a cynical person?
Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the Pope Catholic? Is the atomic weight of carbon 12.011 amu? Do I like to sniff bicycle seats? You're damn right, I'm cynical, you have to be these days. Anybody who still has their Pollyanna little skull stuffed in the sands of ignorant bliss will most assuredly be rudely awakened at some near point. Life moves so fast that people are forced to take shortcuts, and in doing so they end up stepping on a few toes. You better be ready to ask the hard questions and act on the answers you get, otherwise you'll end up one of the ones minus those toes.

What would you do if you won the lottery?
How much?

Say....$5,000,000.00 dollars.
Before or after taxes?

Look, who's the interviewer here, me or you? Fine, five mil after taxes...god, what a pain in the ass!
I heard that, you runty little shitstain journalistic feeb! You think you're so funny and smart, with your Ivy League education, your coke-bottle glasses, and your sassy Abercrombie & Fitch sweater, don't forget, you might be smarter, better-educated, politer, and wealthier, but I can still kick your ass!

Feel better?
Ahem, as a matter of fact, yes I do. You know, my mom taught me to cuss like that.

You seem to harbor some serious class hatred.
You ever notice the only people who make such a statement are the ones who think they're better than the person about whom they're making it? Of course you haven't, you're one of them. Yes, I do have a chip on my shoulder against people like you, I think you're a bunch of smug, pedigreed pricks who have never let me relax and just peacefully be a good ol' boy, noooooo, I have to go get an education and work my ass off for forty-odd years instead of moving into a nice, doublewide trailer and sucking on the public tit of welfare like I really want to!

Any chance you'll answer the original question?
Yeah yeah yeah...If I won the lottery, I would first set my wife's mom and my parents up so they're debt-free, driving their paid-for dream car, living large and knocking back umbrella drinks on some warm, sunny beach while a maid took care of the household bullshit, and in general would ensure that they had not a care in the world. I'd do the same for my little brother and my nephews, I'd just be careful to exclude any "baggage" that might want to get involved, if ya get my drift.

As for me personally, I sure as hell wouldn't work! That annoys the shit out of me, some poor jackass who's been feeding his family Kraft macaroni and cheese six meals a week on a garbageman's salary wins umpteen million in the Powerball lottery and the first words outta' his drooling piehole are "I'm not going to change a thing - gonna' keep hangin' on the back of that truck." Nope, not me, I'd never report to another boss the rest of my life. As for more noble pursuits, I'd take about a year to do a driving vacation around the entire United States with my family. I'd visit every state, staying long enough to learn about its history and make friends with as many of its residents as possible. I'd stay in some states longer than others - the Carolina Outer Banks, Florida, Arizona, California, and Maine come to mind. We would obviously have a home-schooling tutor traveling with us for Maria, since we can't neglect her education. Just to spice things up, I'd make interim visits to foreign places like Thailand, Viet Nam, Japan, Australia, basically just hop around the Far East periodically, assuming I didn't pick up some weird, carnivorous, intestine-dwelling parasite along the way.

I think I would also go back to college and complete a degree in nuclear physics. I doubt I'd use it in practice, it would just be cool to run around telling people I have a degree in nuclear physics. I do that now, anyway, but it sucks when I tell that to somebody who it turns out really is a nuclear physicist and he gets all excited to be talking to a fellow professional and asks me some very complex questions and I trip all over my dick trying to fake an answer.

Why do you have this website?
It started off literally as a my lazy-ass way to post photos in one spot so all my friends and relatives could see them, instead of me having to send out a gazillion different emails and piss off the system administrators in my office when I lock up the email server with personal shit when I should be reviewing contracts. In just a short time after my website's inception, however, I began to understand that I held an awesome power in my hands, a power that would allow me to carry out my good work spreading the word of peace and understanding, and somehow, someday I could bring together entire nations of people who would hold hands and sing Coca-Cola's version of "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" just like they do in those Christmas commercials. Damn, I love that commercial...'scuze me, I have the sniffles now.

I thought you said you're a cynic?
Don't make me bitch-slap you, four-eyes, I'm taking what you journalist creeps call "creative license," which means I'm using one of those fifty-cent words I love to toss out now and then to make myself look smarter than I actually am.

Tell us a joke that might best sum up your personality.
A strapping young buck of a man is walking along the beach, when he hears a plaintive cry coming from a nearby sand dune. Being the swarthy hero-type that he is, he investigates and finds a rather beautiful young lass, except that she has no arms or legs, and is confined to a wheelchair. He asks her what is wrong, to which she replies, "I'm 20 years old and never been hugged." Mr. Wonderful simply picks her up, squeezes her to his very manly chest, and says, "There, now you've been truly hugged."
The next day, walking along the same beach, he hears the same crying and investigates to find the same girl. This time, the complaint is "I'm 20 years old and I've never been kissed." Just like before, he gently lifts her up so their faces are even, leans forward ever so slowly, and kisses her with all the love his overflowing heart can muster, reminding her, "There, now you are well and truly kissed."
Next day, same beach, same guy, same cry, same forlorn little lamb in a wheelchair. "What can it possibly be now, my sweet princess?" asks our hero. "I'm 20 years old...I've finally been kissed, finally been hugged, but I've never had a man make love to me." Our hero, never one to shy away from any good deed no matter how great or small, picks the lovely lady up into his strong arms, walks with her to the edge of the water, then abruptly throws her in. As he watches her sputter and begin to slide under the water's surface, he yells to her "There, looks like you're well and truly FUCKED!"

Has anybody ever told you what a sick bastard you are?
Of course they have, nitwit, didn't the joke make it obvious? Say, you're not a very good interviewer...you asked a somewhat abstract question, I answer in the truest, finest spirit, then you ask me an obvious question that I just finished answering in the previous one. Where'd you say you went to school?

Okay, okay, let's get back on track...what are the four most significant events in your life, and what did they teach you?

1. My parents' divorce and the resulting move with my mom and little brother to Florida when I was ten years old. That left me with a few things...one, it really is true that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; two, ever since then, I start getting kind of nervous if I've lived in the same place for more than a year; and three, I'm not a huge fan of being alone.
   
   
2. Getting the shit beaten out of me by my mom's drunken boyfriend when I was 12 (see that scar above my lip?). From that, I learned to hate somebody so badly you want to kill them, that violence actually is a viable solution, especially to the runny mouths of skinny little boys half your size, and that love causes people to make the stupidest decisions over and over and over ad infinitum ad nauseum...
   
   
3. The entire time I spent in the Air Force, where I picked up a wife, two houses, a marketable skill and a ton of professional experience to go with it, almost every vaccination known to science, world travel and the resulting conviction that my country really is the best place in the world to live, a small dose of gamma-particle radiation, another wife, and enough confidence and exposure to land me a great job after I got out. If I had it to do all over again, I don't think I'd change a thing. Well, maybe I wouldn't mind having made it to the Philippines to try out that "pleasure swing" thing the Navy guys always told me about.
   
   
4. The time I snuck into the Playboy mansion to see if I could steal some of those diamonds Hef keeps around to hand out as party favors to the ladies. I was in past all the security and shit and on my way to the grand ballroom, when passing by an open doorway I saw one of those statuesque catamounts lolling naked on the bed, giving me the hooked "come-hither" finger and a wink. I figured what the hell, I got time, so I ambled in, figuring to knock boots for a while and make off with the rocks later. Would you believe, the little hussy locked me in the room with her for four solid hours and forced me to pillow-fight with her naked the entire time, then sent me on my way without even a goodnight kiss, not to mention the loot I actually came for in the first place? That taught me that no matter how high a man's goals and how great his resolve, both will always fall like a house of cards any time a naked lady comes bop-bop-bopping along.
   
   

That last one is a bullshit story...isn't it?
Yeah, but it sure as hell oughta' be true, the "Aesop's fable" line at the end is - wouldn't you agree?

I guess so. Well, looks like we're out of time - would you like to leave us with a few words of wisdom?
Certainly - brush your teeth before you go to bed, cherish your hair while you still have it, that cheesy stuff between your toes can be dangerous, mothers-in-law can be even more dangerous, people with guns are always right, and if something can't be fixed with duct tape or a simple hammer, then it ain't worth fixing.