"It's a one-man operation," Hollister explains. "He's a little peculiar. He's decided that if he doesn't sell every one of his LPs, he's not going to put out any CDs. Personally, I think that's insane."

He says one of his current projects is to transfer his favorite compositions onto CD.

Along with his composition, Hollister practices numerology on the side--keeping up a commitment to mysticism that he says arose in his early twenties out of a feeling of disillusionment with his parents' leftist ideology.

"Most of my friends look at me and say, 'Something's gotten into Hollister. He's a little nuts,'" he says. "I don't take it as seriously as they think I do. Hobbies don't have to pass any test of rationality."

Hollister has coined the term "dodecasophist" to refer to his base-twelve system of matching numbers with letters to describe personality traits.

The dodecasophist arrangement works something like a clock, divided up into four quadrants: thinking, sensing, feeling and intuition. By adding up the letter values in a person's name and locating that number on the clock, Hollister believes he can learn about the subject's personality.

As for his own name, David adds to "four; Manship, his middle name, is an "eight"; Hollister is a "ten." Four and eight add to twelve, so they cancel out in a base-twelve system.

"Ten is another thing altogether," he says, "a little like narcissism, a little intuition involved."

Numerology, which he sometimes supplements with character tests designed by professional psychologists, is just part of Hollister's lifetime of dabbling.

"I don't have a vision of a future and working toward something," he says. "I just keep doing things as I feel like doing at the moment."