About
Welcome to my head, pull up a chair. Allow yourself some room, let down your hair. I’ll impose on you the history of a wrong life. - ”Am I Not Right?” by Tarkio
Welcome to my site. Here you will find my odd ramblings, conceits, fiction and reviews. A lot of it will be useless, some of it will be juvenile and some might actually cause you some degree of emotional turmoil or discomfort.
I did not set up this site. That was done by my good friend Dan. I have since taken it over and will likely end up calling him at three o’clock in the morning because I accidentally deleted the internet.
Most of you reading this already know about me, but for the rest of you, here goes… I was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day, when the New York Times said God was dead… Sorry that’s incorrect. I’ve confused my life with an Elton John song again. At least I didn’t think I was born a butterfly. I was actually born in Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh which explains why I’m a fan of the Steelers. But even more of a reason is that my dad was a fan of the Steelers. While I was still young enough to walk under tables rather than around them, we moved to Maryland where I spent my early years watching Ultra Man with my friend JJ. We moved from there to Hyattsville. Shortly after I received the Arrow of Light (that’s a Cub Scout thing), we moved to Riverdale.
It’s now called Riverdale Park because that makes it sound more like a place to golf than to buy crack from the ice cream man. Riverdale is where I grew up for the most part. When I think of home, it’s there. It was founded before everything became subdivisions, so our house looked nothing like the house next to it. In Hyattsville we played kickball and football in the street. There were kids everywhere and we knew them all, yet somehow I was still the youngest. But in Riverdale we did not have that for whatever reason. I was only at Riverdale Elementary for fifth and sixth grade though we moved midway through the fourth grade. My brother and I actually walked home from our old schools in Hyattsville. I would walk to his middle school and then we would walk the rest of the way together. Maybe that’s where I got my fondness for walking.
As if to further distance myself from the local kid community, when it came time to go to middle school, I went to a magnet school called Kenmoore. That meant getting on a bus and trekking across the county. I did the same thing in high school, ending up at a school called Suitland. You can probably still find pictures of me in high school on Facebook. I wasn’t exactly Zack from Saved by the Bell. Actually if I had been on that show I probably would have shown up in the credits as “Kid stuffed in locker.” That never actually happened, but I very much was the dork it should have happened to. I was on the math team, which I might point out was the only championship team at our school that year. Somehow I was also the only math team member to go to prom.
Senior year I took three math classes at the same time. This was not my idea. None of us signed up for the Linear Algebra class. We just ended up there. After taking the SAT I got a lot of letters of interest from engineering schools like MIT, Embry Riddle and Cornell. Naturally I went to college for advertising instead.
It’s a funny thing about advertising, they expect you to be able to pitch your idea. Here I was the shy kid afraid of how his voice sounded. The creative part of advertising thrilled me. The schmoozing part terrified me.
Shortly after college I got engaged and moved to Wisconsin where the only person I knew was my fiance. It stayed that way for quite a few years, then I received an email, almost by mistake, about a meeting for Star Wars fans. By this point I had gained some confidence and my voice finally changed. I should note that it was not a biological change, but a control change. Through the years I had gotten used to not talking so much and when I did speak it was largely from the roof of my mouth. There’s really no other way to describe it. Someone at my new job at the time insisted on talking to me and I broke out of my shell a bit that way. It wasn’t unusual for sore throats from a cold to alter my voice a while and in those days I liked getting sick just so I could sound normal. One day I got a cold and when it went away, my voice just stayed normal because I figured out how to speak in a more relaxed way. To this day I sometimes get colds and worry that my voice will switch back at the end as if it’s some sort of Fred Flintstone amnesia situation with a binary switch. If not for learning to control my voice and the bit of confidence from talking to my coworker, I might not have gone to that Star Wars meeting and that would have been a shame.
By now you should have figured out I’m a bit of a geek, so let’s just get this out of the way. I grew up on Star Wars, GI Joe and Iron Man. Yes, I was an Iron Man fan well before the movie. It was more or less the only comic book I read growing up. I’m quite happy that the world has finally discovered this cool character. I like video games, especially of an RPG or shooting nature. In games I am quite evil, which is contrary to my real world nature. Perhaps that’s why I do it.
When not hanging out with friends or playing games, I like to write, which I suppose is obvious by the blogs. I write more than is posted here because I like to write to clear my head. Sometimes putting something into print helps me focus my thoughts or even purge them. I find a situation is easier to deal with once I have defined it. As one of my favorite songs goes, “All I need is a starting place and nothing ever seems so hard.”
I also bake. I blame this on the fact that my mom never had a daughter. As a way to spend time with her, I would bake with her or stay in the kitchen while she made things. We did the whole Christmas cookies thing for the holidays, or I would help her with cakes, pies, etc. Now I find that baking reminds me a bit of home, which is a very good thing.
With my dad I played chess. Usually I would lose these matches, but they were always time well spent. Unfortunately we have played our last match. My dad passed away from leukemia in 2008.
My brother, Rick, lives in Florida. I can’t think of a single time in my life where I didn’t honestly like my brother. Don’t get me wrong, he was a bully at times, but I always knew he cared. We’re a lot alike and still very different. We have a similar sense of humor and train of thought, so it’s easy for us to follow a conversation, no matter how strange we make it.
I work for a trucking company as a pricing analyst. If I went into further details, you would probably get bored and fall asleep, so I’ll just say this: I try to figure out how much money we will make doing certain things, I advise the sales people that something is a bad idea, and then I write up the agreements when they do the bad idea anyway.
Though I love movies, video games and some television, I love music more than anything else. Maybe it’s because I have absolutely no gift for it. I was in the chorus in elementary school, but I can only assume that was some sort of test to see if they could get bats to attack our building. My favorite band is, believe it or not, Toad the Wet Sprocket. Their lead singer, Glen Phillips, has gone on to more projects and I enjoy his work. Some of my friends would argue that I’m almost stalking him. I’m not, but I did meet him once at one of his concerts. It’s easy in a crowd of 50 people. Truth be told if I had to pick between meeting him or George Lucas, I would pick him. The other bands or acts that I like are: Jimmy Eat World, Better Than Ezra, Jason Mraz, Matt Nathanson, Holding Mercury/Matt Hoffer, Tarkio, Jose Gonzalez, Tristan Prettyman, Neko Case and Minus the Bear.
When it comes to movies, I have to say I like violence. But not necessarily meaningless violence, though I like that on occasion. I also like character driven movies. Something about watching a character change intrigues me. You could say I prefer dynamic characters to static ones. Favorite movies include A Midnight Clear, Black Hawk Down, Heat, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, As Good As It Gets, Tears of the Sun and Garden State. Guilty pleasures include Smoking Aces, Tropic Thunder and Dodgeball. When “kicking it old school” I like Say Anything, Some Kind of Wonderful, Red Dawn and Robocop.
Sadly my list of favorite books is kind of short. Maybe I should read more. At the top of the list is Watership Down. I like the language of it, and how real the rabbit community seems to be. My other clear favorite is To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s filled with gorgeous descriptions and fleshed out characters. I’ve started to read a lot of Cormac McCarthy. I like his stories and some of his prose, but at times I look at it and think if I wrote like that, I would have flunked English… well, I almost did flunk English, but that was due to laziness and pencils.
So that’s it, that’s me. Probably more than you wanted to know.
If the sadness won’t ever go away, I suppose I’ll build it a home so it has a nice place to stay. … Seems like we always want what we can’t have, but that’s just life Baby, you can’t get mad. – “Don’t Work Yourself Up” by Tristan Prettyman