Becoming is weird. I have theories: how I got here, what lead me, what pushed me out of one interest and into the next. I don’t get too high on rethinking and visiting past paths, which, if I had to guess, is a big reason why I’m happy most of the time. I’m not that interested in my past, not as reportage, not as history. If anything, consider this post the memoir for the time being. That black space with the electricity below it above is it. That’s it.

From when I was little I frequently made stuff. Stories, goofs. I was really into drawing, and even sent off one of those applications to a sort of Drawing School (in which I had to draw a weird turtle boy’s face, or a pirate face, and include some mom money, to be evaluated). My mom and dad, ever the best ever, obliged and encouraged me. Throughout this entire post, remember that thread of encouragement. I’ve never lacked it from those close to me. If I’m not lucky I’m not anything else. Art class in school fed me, kept me wanting to draw. I remember getting into a shoving match with a kid, maybe Kurt?, in second grade over who had drawn the better Star Wars TIE fighter. I fake hyperventilated when the teacher came over to break it up, feigning not defeat but something more urgent in health, and was made to stand against a wall and breathe slow. Kurt or whoever got punished. Maybe spanked. I don’t know. It was Texas.

Eventually, maybe blaming art class, my interest in drawing waned or just became more ambient. This was around middle school. One of the teachers was the dad of a nice girl, and he got cancer. He died, eventually. Part of me wants to say kids shaved their heads with the teacher, before he died, but I may be filling that in, a piece from some movie. I lucked out again and was able to get in the GT class (Gifted & Talented, bad name, good class) taught by Kim Cheek. We did logic puzzles and built alien languages, cultures (pre-Wittgenstein). We performed, aped, laughed. I don’t remember any specific tests or graded papers in GT. It seemed like grade was based on intensity of enthusiasm. This eventually rolled into DI (Destination(s?) Imagination(s?)). DI consisted of challenges: build a set that has a certain function, do a performance in parameters, create something on the fly and go through it. Our team made a giant book out of PVC, huge paper, and paint. Each set of pages was a new set. We had another book, on a pillar, in glass, that was controlled exclusively by clear fishing wire. It magically lifted and shook. Pages turned. We travelled through time. I acted with three or four others. Dry ice was a thrill. We travelled because we qualified to go to the state competition and performed there. Matt, a redhead, and I went down to the river behind the regional hosting school and drank from it. Matt got really sick. That creek, less a river, was one of the most beautiful things I can hope to remember.

My older brother. I looked up to him so much. He went through a few phases: skater to punk to anarcho-punk to raver. I feel like the last transition happens a lot. I remember altered states, beating him in Super Smash Brothers. He was and still is brilliant with computers, coding. He showed me my first pornographic picture by drawing up a screen in DOS littered with green and asked me to pick a number one through thirteen. I forget which number I picked, but I remember the girl. She was nude except for a cowboy hat, boots, and a belt with holstered guns. Redhead. (Privy to this.)

My brother’s influence was deep, and had me listening to 311, Sublime, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, eventually ATB electronica mixes that you could by from Walmart and Sam Goody (Sam Goody had a HOUSE section). I skateboarded, and was okay. I could never kickflip, but I enjoyed ollying immensely. A memorable near fight: in the skate park. My skateboard kept skidding underneath a biker’s bike. It did nothing to it; the skateboard got chewed and spit out, okay but scuffed in places. He yelled. I kept quiet and nodded. It happened again. He got off his bike, came over, kept one foot away, and told me he was Irish. If this had been around the time I was obsessed with Goodfellas, the mechanics of the Mafia, Italian America, I probably would’ve spit in his face. Which would’ve been okay: I probably would’ve traded a black eye for my dad emerging from his truck and beating the kid. I regret, I regret.

I read, from the earliest time I can think. Fantasy novels were a first big slew. I read the Redwall series (the violent badgers were indelible), the Eye of the World series, the Shannara series, Harry Potter. I also read a shitload of Hardy Boys, for the points. Accelerated Reading was the program. Hardy Boys were easy, the computer tests were easy and objective, and they were five points a pop. I felt really competitive towards Hilary, who seemed to read these yellow-dotted and too-thick books about horses, maybe. Prairies. She wore horse shirts, too. I wanted more class pizza parties. Maybe this, more than anything, lead to me picking up the bigger, more challenging books. Dracula and Frankenstein. A Confederacy of Dunces. That was the book. I remember feeling totally mystified and entertained. Before this, when I was 8 or 9 or 10ish, I started writing a fantasy novel called The Stronghold. It was about a boy wizard who’s parents are killed by an evil wizard and he has a scar on his face and goes to a wizardry school. No shit. Harry Potter. I was so pissed. I felt that the collective consciousness was stealing from me. I thought a Gundam Wing card game would be good. Then it appeared. A Pokemon Monopoly. (I even called and pitched that to the Hasbro corporate line). That came, too. Anyway: throughout this time I had access. The school libraries were good and full. I had time to read at home, and at school. I made little bound books that charted my path as a skateboard dragon-slaying superstar, etc. Encouraged. Acquiring.

For years, maybe four, my mom and I would drive to Dallas and back up to 5 days a week so I could do print modeling jobs and audition for toy commercials. We had a box TV with a VHS player, and we’d watch 2-4 movies per trip. Any movie was on the menu. (Terminator, or T2, was my favorite movie when I was 4 or 5). Profanity was not an issue and was familiar in my house; my dad can cuss with the best of them. Never at us, always descriptive. He’s a mechanic, ex-racecar driver who quit because he took a top-fuel motorcycle down on himself to avoid plowing through a crowd and the machine was open in a place that then ate the inside of his leg, which is now brown, mangled, and stiff. Hardest working person I know. Him and my mom were the keys to any sort of ethical concerns I concern myself with; they are good and they consider others beautifully, dedicatedly. So we’d watch these movies. I loved film. I still loved writing (by now I was deep into the next fantasy novel project, this one including multiple maps, codexes, individuated character realms and breakdowns, huge history, etc.). Drawing had waned.

Collecting hadn’t. Throughout my short life I’ve collected coins, rocks, arrowheads, sword & dragon figurines & shit, actual swords, knives, Gundam series models, car models, comics, Spawn comics & toys & posters (Spawn was big), books, fedoras, DVDs, Pokemon cards, Magic cards, baseball & basketball cards (through inheritance). I look back at the collection of collections and feel a little gross, but also made rich. Spoiling parents. Young collector of things.

Online communities, once that portal was unlocked in my brother’s upstairs bedroom, became the next ultimate thing. As with other behaviors (voracious reading, gathering, competing, performing), I was now communing in a more gaping way. I was big into Tactics Arena Online for awhile, and played and strategized and purchased new options when later they made it a monetized thing, away from the source. The forums were open. Last night, exhausted, I drew up all the profiles attached to my old favorite avatar and name. I mined. Over 2000 posts in the TAO forums. At the end there I was promoting an endeavor, a webcomic. Walrus and Plato with Feet. I was making that and trying to make an audience. Before that I had The Wizard of Dill, another comic I put into the internet. I would draw the comics and then scan them in the behemoth scanner every other day. Because of the Internet Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to see the old freewebs.com based WAPWF site. And forums are functional archives. I relooked at myself profiling and blasting out links to the comic on all sorts of compendiums, linked up the wazoo, promoting heavily. Hustling. If I only had a Cutlass trunk.

Eventually I moved on from comics and just went WTF, playing the troll (albeit in troll-only forums; as games). This I had forgotten until last night. The troll was a character, stemming from the at-first-half-arbitrarily-picked avatar name. He had an accent, was of a provocative mode. I felt I had gotten enough into it from the movies and books and that one TV series. To play. The trolling is so weird. Online teen posturing. Writing violence (which I have enjoyed as long as I have written). Spread throughout various forums are attempts at fiction. Past-fantasy-novel fiction. What I took as adult or serious. Some of the language is salvageable, I thought last night. Just all the fundament is bleh.

To my mind, there are the books and cultural and living experiences that serve as monuments. The map is what this is all about, and the monuments are easy enough to define if they are to truly be rendered monumental. Like, for me: A Confederacy of Dunces, The Gunslinger, The Stranger, Eeee Eee Eeeee, Blake & Tao’s blog, Chronic 2001, my dad’s cars, trying to act and model professionally in NYC at 10, the Oakwood apartments, narrow fist fights, first kisses, sneaking and drinking and organizing. I tried to get forty five kids to play capture the flag in an Ikea. We had played successfully a handful of times, big numbers, in big spaces. Guerilla Capture the Flag is what I called it. I did all the design work for banners and posters online, set up a site, a forum. Got emails from kids taking the idea and playing in France, Canada. Another weird thrill. Although: I look back at this catalogue of monuments, and if I’m invested in a darker part of me all I see is more toys. More stones in a box. Neutrally, it could all be that. That’s okay.

I also was obsessed with Alternate Reality Gaming, which has since been co-opted into marketing schemes, sometimes in a cool way. I wanted to play them, crack the codes, research DNS shit, go to places and pick up packages, chart locations. I eventually started one. I have the bare outlines of myth saved on this drive, somewhere. I peeked at a few of the old documents last night. I got people following. Then more collectors noticed. (It helped having a close friend embedded in the search to help drive along the myth.) Ultimately, my problem was that I relied on codes that were too hard to crack. And I didn’t have a closing in mind for the myth. Call it the Lost problem. But that sort of play and fiction seems to me still a viable study for writers. People were making weird shit, myth, art realms online and in personal quest space, that was all fictive, dreamed. Interactive. It strung people along & out. Worth thinking about.

Under various lost names, I wrote a lot of semi-fan fiction. Not straight FF in that we didn’t use the characters in the books (the Wheel of Time universe was the big community and time chunk), but created our own stuff within the system of the works. It all happened well. I made online friends. Collaborated on stories. Past the Wheel of Time forums, I tried to create a community that would work in the Dark Tower universe. Managed to group about four interested and very kind friends in, but then it went dead.

Overall: I see the past as a collection of attempts, games, admirations and apings. A path mainly molded by my brain or hardware/software (seemingly set to consume a lot of info, and cultural kinds), familial encouragement and favoring of the arts, access, and chance. If I hadn’t picked up The Stranger in that airport bookstore, alone and wandering, I wouldn’t have googled Existentialism (funny), wouldn’t have found Tao’s blog through his essay about the Virginia Tech killer/murders, wouldn’t have found Blake’s blog in which he recommended and enthused on a much wider range of materials, and wouldn’t eventually be here. Doing what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, but maybe in a bigger or more invested way: just hanging, looking for friends and conversation, making stories, collecting, giving out.

So I’m here.

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