how does one sum up 19 years of living in one place in a concise way? simply put, i don’t think you can…but i can try…

.:middle school:.

we…my mom, dad and my brother adam, moved to cincinnati in august of 1988.

let’s recap my looks…straight brown hair, gold wire-rimmed glasses with the springy things that wrapped around your ear to keep them from falling off, braces and super-skinny. man, i was a goofy looking kid…

i made a couple of friends right off the bat in the neighborhood, and thought things seemed on the up. i’d start school in september…7th grade…middle school…and i’d be well on my way to becoming nicely integrated into the little suburb of amelia, oh., which was approximately 24 miles outside of the city of cincinnati.

i mean, ANYTHING was going to be better than rolla. this place had a MALL. two of them that were fairly close to each other to be exact. and where st. louis and the cardinals were almost 100 miles away, i now had the cincinnati reds to worship just a short distance away. i was ready to make a new start…

7th grade ended up being a pretty rough year. for starters, nobody likes a goofy looking new kid with a slight southern accent. i instantly became ‘the new kid target’ to just about every shitbag in the public school system. the ‘gritters’ didn’t like me at all because i was too square. the jocks didn’t like me because i was actually a pretty good athelete, but i looked like a complete tool. so i went ahead and joined up with a random collection of misfit kids. depression consisted of being one of the last chosen in gym, randomly beaten on on the bus, getting called names and just generally taking a lot of typical middle school shit.

i turned to petty thievery to get in good with some of the other kids. ended up being pretty good at it too. i stole tapes…guns & roses, metallica, warrant, poison…which i would then turn around and give to the gritter kids that liked that kind of stuff. that would provide me with about 10-12 minutes of friendship at a time, and that was cool.

of course, i ended up getting busted…which brought me into the ‘theft awareness program’. it was like being handed the book without actually going to jail or juvenile. they made me see a probation officer on a weekly basis. but even worse than that, they made me go on a tour of the juvenile detention facility, and it was there that i had my second extremely low moment. walking through there and learning about the merits of lice baths, sampling some gourmet juve cuisine and getting to hang in the the fine 6×6 living cells, i decided that this place was definitely was not for me. this feeling was further rooted into my soul when who should i see but this kid jerry…one of the kids that i stole stuff for. jerry shot a look and a smile at me that basically said, ‘glad you could make it! you’re gonna’ love it here with me!’

baseball was pretty much my only escape, and even that i could not enjoy to it’s fullest because i was getting made fun of so much. but i still managed to stick with it and i still managed to make it through that summer and into my eighth grade year. eighth grade ushered in my first year of starting to feel comfortable. i actually started making some good friends, was in a musical and eventually figured out that sports were not the end-all of the universe

.:high school and music:.

by the time i made it to my freshman year in highschool, i had pretty much flat out decided that i would never play sports again. all of the friends i was making ended up being those who were interested in music and in the band or choir. and so i traded in my baseball glove for a saxophone and learned to play that. i played in the marching band, the concert band, the jazz band. my sophomore year saw me in a production of ‘into the woods’ as jack (from jack and the beanstalk), and then of course i had to join the choir. oh yeah, and then there was that rock music thing. if i was learning to sing and play all of this other stuff, then i had to learn to play guitar.

and grow my hair long.

grow my hair long into a giant mullet…which was sweet.

by my senior year, i was firmly convinced that i’d be doing something with music. i was in my very first band…drywall…with some friends of mine from school, and we were playing at parties and even did well in a huge battle of the bands. when it came time for me to apply for college, however, i decided that it would be better to do something a little more practical.

.:college, jobs & my luck:.

i went and got a degree in electronic media where i focused on multimedia and video production and marketing. but i still continued to play in bands and do the whole ‘i wanna’ be a rockstar’ thing.

graduation happened in the summer of 1999, and by fall, i was working for an advertising agency in town as a producer. i did that for a year and ended up being miserable, so i quit and ended up going to a software developer where i did project management and product management for the e-learning software they authored. i did that for a year and four months, and then the bottom fell out with 9/11. over the course of the next year or so, i would find this to be one of the most difficult times of my life.

in december of ’01, i got diagnosed with a digestive disease called ulcerative colitis. in april of ’02, i got laid off from my job. that same month, my girlfriend of 2 ½ years…someone i was talking about moving in with very soon…decided that it would be a good idea for us to split up. and then i got a cold. to top it all off, i found out she had been cheating on me two months before we officially broke up.

ouch.

so i spent six months unemployed. during this time, i think i started figuring out who i really was. where before in bands i had just been the bass player, now i had taken quite an interest in songwriting, and so i took a bunch of the material i was tinkering around with previously and turned it into a serious set of songs. i was playing out quite a bit during my unemployment phase, and i was trying to find a job that was going to be a stable source of income. and it was around THIS time that everything would start magically coming back together.

i started bartending at one of the places i was playing. i was running a really good open mic. i started running a songwriter night with a good friend of mine. i landed a contract position with an interactive developer in town that would pay me well. i started hanging out with the people that would eventually be the start of my band. and i met my future wife christy…

the contract position transitioned directly into another job where i would spend the next 2 ½ years. i started dating christy seriously and, after a couple of misfires, got the band together and into shape. we recorded a great CD, were playing out all over the place and were having a generally really awesome time. i got married! we bought a house!

i got laid off AGAIN! dammit…

but even that ended up being a really great thing because i landed at a place called barefoot advertising that will always remain close at heart. i was very fortunate to have gotten to work with some of the most talented, smart people in the state. in some cases, i would even say the country…

.:exes:.

of course, in between all of this stuff, there are a million other little details that are happening. i’ll leave those out for rainy day stories or something like that. what i will tell you is that one of those details obviously involves girlfriends. boy, did i EVER have some crazy girlfriends. i consider myself a pretty normal dude. i come from a normal family, and i never had any real issues with my life in general. this must have marked me on some subconscious level…turned me into a big bright light that all of the moths are generally attracted to.

girlfriend #1: dated for 3 years. threatened to commit suicide if i ever left her. wanted me to commit to some kind of odd religion. because i wouldn’t want to go to church on sundays, she wanted me to sit and talk about the bible with her. broke into my apartment one evening with me there after an argument earlier that day. had a dad that was an alcoholic. had a mom that actually had sex with one of her friends in highschool. had a brother who was into drugs and caused all kinds of family grief.

girlfriend #2: dated for 2 years. lied about going on a vacation with a couple of friends. well, didn’t lie about it…just failed to mention that she was meeting a guy that she would end up cheating on me with. went out to L.A. for an internship and ended up getting hooked on speed and various other drug related madness. got a DUI and totaled her car while out there. had warrants out for her arrest. cheated on my multiple times with her ex-boyfriend; didn’t find out about it until he actually told me. ended up working at some porn production place in denver as a ‘video editor’. screwed me out of a lot of cash.

girlfriend #3: dated for 2 ½ years. had serious bi-polar disorder. was kind of a ‘throw-around girl’ at parties. worked at a make-up counter and was into expensive, high-fashion stuff…even did some modeling…but would turn around and want to live a hippy lifestyle by smoking inordinate amounts of weed and dressing like a slob. cheated on me several times. has a sister who thought that her boyfriend was some kind of government agent sent to spy on her; thought when helicopters would pass over, they were surveying her.

pretty fun, eh? i dated here and there in between, but none of them are really worth mentioning. some of them were really cool girls and some of them were really awful. what matters is that i ended up with the greatest woman in the world…