If Ihad only one thing to say about Life, it would be that
Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.

When I was six years old, I took piano lessons with my best friend Solomon. When I was eight, I joined him with his older brother at his Taekwondo class. This started me down the path that led to my getting knocked out cold circa 1996, but it also led me to the Martial Arts program at Berkeley (but no, I'm not a student there).

The piano lessons also created a monster in their own right. Piano lessons became recorder lessons which became cello lessons which became bass lessons by the time I was eleven. For the last two years of its incarnation, I was fortunate to play bass for the Subterraneanz.

When I was nine, my dad gave me two books reprinting old comic strips: one was Pogo, and the other was the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. It defined my little imagination to such an extent that I'm still waitin on that ten dollars Moon Mullins owes me.

My oldest sister and I went to the same high school. Its band was for some reason modeled after the Coldstream Guards, and its auxiliary group was an all-male Colour Guard with real bearskin hats and real rifles (firing mechanism frozen) and a twelve-person Bagpipe Corps.

For some reason my sister told me to join the bagpipers. I did so (being allergic to taking a beating from my family), and was soon accepted in the MacKay Pipe Band, where I met the man who would define the lives of all he touched: Lee Lightle.

I went to school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where I joined the (then) Revenge Of the Nerds fraternity Sigma Tau Gamma. (not this kind of fraternity though).

After about three years, I ran out of money so I moved to Marin, found a job, and became a nerd. I met up with Tim Keanini, Jeremy Cooper, Andrew Storms, and a host of other slick people when I worked for Doug Carlston at Broderbund Software.

My time at Broderbund, interestingly enough, led me to work musically one way or another with Jay Alexander, Lee Press-On and the Nails, the Acme Swing Co., the Russell Brothers, and last but not least Officer Mushroom.

When I got laid off from Broderbund in 1998, I went travelling a little, ultimately winding up in Vancouver, BC. It was great up there and the beer and drugs were awesome, but it's a little psycho too. I spent a lot of time alone at home (for want of saner company). I got so bored I started recording music.

Shortly thereafter Tim Keanini called me back to work for him at Morgan Stanley. He cut soon after that to go work for nCircle, an Infosec product that seems pretty keen. After my division at MS was liquidated, I knocked around for a while before finally getting a nice spot at a very interesting company with even more interesting people: Oakland has been great to me in many ways, and I really do love my town, even if I'm not always proud of it.

 

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