about

A quick note before sluicing my way through everything about me you may or may not care to know.  The Feds are after us bloggers, hunting us down like Moose from a helicopter.  Perhaps not that aggressively.  But, I will let you know within any blog if what I am preaching about is something I received as a payment or free.  It’s only fair to you.  Naturally, the Feds say they will go after “substantial” bloggers without defining the word. My blog, I believe, has substance.  Substantial?  Probably not at this moment.  I’ll let you know when I think it is substantial (and you too, Mr. Fed.  Love ya ).  Onward we trek into the land of me.

The Rockies.  Home to swirling September snows, Bighorn sheep, wandering elk and Alferd Packer.  This is my home, where I was born and raised.  Should it be custom here to let you know the little-known secret my days as a Huggies-clad tot began around Yellow-Bellied Marmots?  Perhaps not.  I won’t delve into this very short and sordid chapter of my childhood.  Let’s move on.
After being rescued from the maze of dens Marmots had tunneled together at the base of Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, I fell into the hands of suburbanites.  They were farmer’s offspring, Protestants who found a landing, one of the first couples to start the movement out of the city into the suburbs.
Naturally, being located just off the foothills in the northern center of the state surrounded by prairie and foothills, settled by English and Germans, the newly birthed city of Northglenn, Colorado decided to honor this tradition by calling their high school sports teams the Norsemen (now called The Norse because Norsepersons was too PC-moronic).  Eschewing a fine Norwegian tradition of each Norse village housing an Oly’s Lutefisk Drive-Thru, the good folks put in one of the first Taco Bells outside of California.
This is where I spent a large percentage of my teenage years, way back when a Taco Bell menu had pronunciations (buh-ree-toe).  My newly found human friends and I ate more Big Burritos, Enchiritos and Bellbeefers than any two-legged creatures in the fresh manicured lawns, carved evergreens, and left turn-only lanes of suburbia.  If we happen to get to Taco Bell past 2am, we’d simply mosey across Melody Lane (a street, not a girl), nuke a 7-11 frozen burrito and go about our loitering.
I’d like to say I lost my virginity at Taco Bell, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t (however, one of my first girlfriends did work at Taco Bell… oh the gastronomical benefits).
Wandering like an aimless camel in the desert, sucking up educational waters from the institutions of University of Colorado and Colorado Institute of Art (yes, the CIA), I found what I thought to be my calling – Art Direction and Design, moving to the land of hot nights and cold shoulders, Southern California.
Toiling nearly a half-decade at production houses, fashion publications and printers, more education became my mantra (or my then concubine’s mantra.  I’m fairly confident she just wanted to rid herself of me).
North I went.  University of California – Davis to finally finish my bachelor’s degree in design.  After the hard work put in at art school, this school was as close to permanent loafing as I ever found.  The hardest class I remember having was Geology and within its curriculum was a rafting trip.
Two years later I was through with school.  So I thought.  Walking to my job at the UC-Davis bookstore (Allison Nomura and I were the signage and ad department), I ran into a graduate school fair.  Northwestern talked to me, I applied and got in to the Medill School of Journalism, advertising division (now the IMC).  I do not regret it, but Northwestern might.
Slogging my portfolio around after graduate school from ad agencies in San Francisco and Chicago, I received 100 percent enthusiastically dour “no’s.”  I was not about to give in and apply to Taco Bell.  One fine day as my feet bled into new Italian dress shoes (a deep maroon – the shoes and the blood), an astute advertising angel told me “you know, you are a good art director, but I think you’re a better writer.”
Writer, Huh.  Next week, no changes to the portfolio, I got a job as a writer.
It’s been nearly 20 years since that unusually balmy February day in Chicago.  I’m still writing, still in Chicago.
Now it’s time for a change.  With the aid of many friends at the Wizard Academy, I now know I am destined – destined I tell you! – to become a writer of fiction.  Renowned? Yellow-Bellied Marmots nod their furry faces, but history holds that gavel.