typically as these stories go we begin at the end, go back in time towards the beginning and gradually work our way up towards the future scene. well I’m not going to do that. I’m just telling a story as obscure, simplistic, distorted, manipulated as I can through a colander that is my fractured memory. these things don’t matter anyways, my perspectives and my own past, the nuanced aspects of it. this is maybe why I find it easily writable.

of all the weird, whacky, wild places I could have grown up in mine was uptown, which is due north of downtown Chicago. unlike most of my friends who dwelt in a variety of places I was in a particular spot. it was a beloved, gorgeous and quite large vintage su casa on Dover Street nestled in Sheridan Park (historical district, whoopdie doo dah). approx 1.5 mile due north of Wrigley Field (da cubz!). toted as the 3rd largest American City, Chicago always felt quite small to me. that’s because it is in comparison to the city of Apples/Angels. its an architectural town and therefore more intelligently designed. easier to get around by foot and to find shit. it has an undeniable aesthetic charm to it. most of the natives aren’t terrible. they like talking to you if you don’t come across as a piece of human excrement (is that too much to ask? survey says possibly maybe). they aren’t as fake friendly as North Carolinians and have a propensity for telling it like it is. surviving brutal winters had an effect on us. it toughens you up but at the same time oddly nuff makes us socially warm, nicer, and more interesting. we come well read (you’ll go insane here if you don’t have tons of hobbies).

my own crazy life here was rapid and rich. some might say I was a definite adventurer, playboy, hustler and overall artsy fartsy creative nerd (or artsy fartsy geek of nature). highschool was a blur. I traveled much early in life due to my dad who took me places. He was a mechanical engineer and dispatched to purchase components for his company quite often. I used to think of him as being Tony Stark when he first showed me an autocad workstation at his work and made it do some crazy shit. thus I was in Dallas TX one minute, and Frankfurt Germany the next. sometimes Saginaw MI and other times Monterey Mexico. it wasn’t as glamorous as you might be thinking. I was confined to hotels and glued to books, hung at the swimming pool and subsisted on vending machine crap or fast food at times. often times making out with random chicks by the pool area. I think I was bitten by the travel bug whenever I’d see a unit of immaculate, gorgeous flight attendants at O’Hare international airport. with their perfect skin, hair, teeth, smile I couldn’t delete from my brain. besides the boring spots I was all too familiar with I would go to a place like Madrid (that’s in Spain), Tokyo, or Paris once in a blue moon. I was starting to think my dad was a professional assassin on the side. that would’ve been awessommmeeeeeeeeeeeee. in reality he had the intellectual prowess to be a doctor, only he couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. that’s how I know he wasn’t indeed an assassin. me on the other hand? I was a little Lex Luthor really heh heh. If I had any of his smarts it was put to good bad use with the ladies (sleazy laughter ensues). that and petty little side hustles. whatever provided amusement, pleasure, reward. strangely I was always a natural born leader. my friends tended to follow me, even if they thought I was a crazy eccentric kid. maybe because I was adventurous and over read. Yeah there is such a thing. but mostly I was a bad ass artist (still am!).
I breezed through art school (SAIC=school of the art institute of Chiraq) and bar-tended throughout. earning sufficient scratch to afford me a luxuriant loft. my side hustle was me being a pool hustler. and fortunately I knew enough martial arts to keep myself safe. there’s so many haters who couldn’t abide getting their asses shredded in some dingy pool hall. martial arts training actually imparted in me amazing eye-hand coordination. later I was a police sketch artist for Chicago PD, then a private self defense instructor (mostly for chicks wanting to beat up their stalker ex’s) and a graphic designer for Playboy online (later a web developer for them as well). IT nerd at Motorola and then product designer for As Seen On TV. hey if I could I’d be a tea farmer + prepper in the Andes Mountains raising llamas and penning the great American novel. I’d write poetry and crazy books about secret shit that sounds plausible. A hybrid of Charles Bukowski meets Fox Mulder. Space aliens, androids, vampires, zombies and hot chicks who needed rescue. and maybe something else as well bong chikki wong wong.

attending SAIC wasn’t fun. imagine trudging through the ice planet of Hoth burdened by heavy supplies. once arriving there having to feverishly perform art. without mind you benefit of some exquisite wine and gourmet coffee (how I manage to suffer so beautifully is a wonder in itself). the instructors there I noticed hated on anybody with even a inkling of true talent. most didn’t, and strangely knew they didn’t. they knew it was simply to escape going to a real school learning useless shit like Calculus or literature. or they simply wanted to impress people at dinner parties. their stories may as well be ‘I attended a very expensive school just to say I did, and brag. but I didn’t learn/do shit that made a wee bit of difference. not I, I wanted every penny of every dollar’s worth. the instructors oh they knew me, and even the ones who tried casting shade on me begrudgingly respected me. truth be told, and this is maybe a very valid unpopular opinion: anybody can be an artist in a matter of mere minutes. there’s no real differentiators. it’s a doing + feeling thing, and maybe 5% thinking. if you want to make ass imprints on canvas boom, you’re an artist. or some idiotic chicken scratch art like rupi kaur’s horrid volume Milk & Honey. now getting credible, and recognized is another matter entirely. you have American Idol type ‘judges’ to convince. the pretentiousness + corruption of Art is well known. Just look at the talentless, artless hack Banksy for instance. the epitome of a poser faking it and making it. if that idiot can make it so can anybody.