Disclaimer

Disclaimer:

You have stumbled onto the blog of just another white guy who needs to get laid.

{Blatant personal content meant to discourage my oddly growing readership}

When I was a kid, I was a science-geek who was always making strange smells in the garage. Some of them nearly killed me, like making mustard gas and turning a half-horsepower motor into a spin painting machine. Okay, so the machine wasn’t the problem. It was the 220-volt shock that knocked me half-way across the garage.

When I got to high school, at first I was a math geek who won lots of awards in an event called “leap-frog” where if you couldn’t solve a problem, you could pass it to a partner. My partner was a tall girl named Marilyn who was much smarter than I was. No sports trophies on the mantelpiece for me, mine were all in math. I also hung out with the theater crowd because of my newly developed affinity for electricity (and smoking dope on the roof of the building). I was a lighting technician. Though I was often asked to read lines, I never tried to act. I loved to watch and I also loved crawling around narrow passages in high places, plugging things in. I loved to watch so much that I became a photographer. I had a job filming football games in 16mm and I never bothered to tell them that the letter on my jacket was for theater. My writing was so poor that I couldn’t take literature classes. I cheated by getting my photography teacher to help me understand Blake and Milton.

In community college, I was sucked into the Art department. Poor writing skills made the study of literature impossible; they actually wouldn’t let me in. The real lesson to be learned in any art department is: “Why are you wasting your time here when you could be out making art?” So, rather than becoming a productive well-paid geek, I became a starving geek. I took their lessons to heart and dropped out.

Fast-forward through twenty years of making photographs and studying art history. Loving and losing, living in my car and doing lots of drugs, getting married, raising a teen-age instant family, and then flirting briefly with becoming a computer-geek long before there was an Internet, but then going back to what I thought I did best— making photographs. Then the big mistake: I started reading literature again. Fast-forward through life-changing cataclysm where the loving and losing part takes over again. Slow-motion through my entry into a medium-sized university with an amazingly dedicated English department. Fast-forward through a fairly chaotic Rhetoric program which improved my writing skills enough to make me feel confident, so confident in fact that I ended up in the master’s program standing on the other side of the room trying to improve other people’s writing.

So much for a monolithic notion of self. How do you put those pieces together (and there are many more, actually) into a picture of a rather eclectic person who scrawls out barely readable prose out on a wide variety of topics each day?

I’m thinking that the mustard gas and shock treatment had as much to do with it as anything.