At 14, I had already begun to feel like an outcast in both my personal and professional lives. My “professional” life was school, of course, and having recently turned the corner from matriculating lacrosse player into alienating BMX bike rider, it felt like I had disaligned with the prominent, acceptable political party. At the time, the two worlds did not cleanly overlap, and all but a few of my friends from one ran for the hills when I began to prioritize the other.

One carry-over was a popular kid, a sports stand-out, and the son of the football coach. He was a lifer in the conventional system, but had an affinity for the fringes where I now resided. He rode BMX with me whenever he could, and was good at it, and in my opinion him doing so was one of the only reasons that I wasn’t even more severely ostracized.

We got along well- causing trouble wherever we could find it, listening to Suicidal Tendencies on near-constant repeat, and riding bikes like we were being paid to do so. Being a sports kid in a sports family, I believed that things like football and lacrosse must have felt almost like jobs to him, and bike riding (especially with me) must have felt like a nearly-supreme rebellion.

Read On…

Always keep your tools sharp, whether you plan to use them that day or not…

When I was younger I had a few strange episodes that the doctors called “Complex Partial Seizures”. They would cause me to black out for a few moments, and for a short while after waking up, things were kind of blurry. Immediately prior to the blackout, I would see a strange picture in my mind, or flash back quickly to something from my past. Falling down the stairs of a hotel I was staying in with my parents and brother is what allowed them to learn I had been having them; I hadn’t shared the information because I was approaching 16 and knew that they would (justifiably) never give a driver’s license to someone that randomly went to sleep for a minute.

I was made to wait another year and a few months, which meant that I would be a little over 17 when I got my license. I had had one or two more blackouts in the time since falling down the stairs, but didn’t tell anyone because I was restless and felt I simply had to move my life forward. I had already been traveling extensively for both music and BMX bike riding, but I wanted to be able to do so independently and was unwilling to wait any longer.

Read On…

More decoration than obsession.