War of Attrition is a project I’ve worked on since 1999.

There was a brief period in, I believe, 2002 when I pulled the website down for a bit, because I had done some grassroots promotion in California (stickers in different strategic places, little flyers in other notable ones) and it had gained more traction than I was comfortable with.

Shortly after, I got my head straight and it has been up, since.

In 2019, I turned many of what I believe to be the stand-out stories and pieces of writing into an actual book; As vain and odd as it is to see yourself drawn, and significant chapters of your life in illustration, I asked two of my talented friends- Paul Waggener and Michael Childers- to bring an element of the stories to “life”. Pictured above and below are two piece of Paul’s artwork.

There was a period of about five years- maybe 1992 until 1997- where things were just… Too fucking much.
I believe at any point during, I could have ended up somewhere bad, nowhere at all, or completely gone.
Many of the significant stories from that period are featured on this site and in the book; Many others are not.

I had my tires slashed at a weird apartment I lived in downtown (that we had shows in, had a full-sized trampoline in, and also had a wedge ramp for riding and skating… that year could be a book of its own… ), and the cutter sent me a postcard about it.
It said ‘Two flat tires and no girlfriend.’

At that same location, I hit a restaurant owner with a frying pan that he had thrown at my friend Curly, because he didn’t like that we lived upstairs, and also threw a treacherously drunk metalhead down a steep flight of stairs while his – 95% naked – girlfriend screamed bloody murder (he was trying to get into our place, thinking it was the party location that was actually one level up… ).

I was robbed at knifepoint at a gas station two blocks from another sketchy apartment, almost fought back, and then three other people stepped into the light from alongside the dark building, I saw a man being beaten with a hammer while on a bike ride just few blocks from home, three out of every four shows we played or booked ended up in some sort of non-minor melee, and I channeled all of it into every time we played a show and every time I rode my bike. It was exorcism. Catharsis. Without those two outlets, I would have been, doomed.

Somehow each weird job I had (health food store (2), pool supply center, skate/ snowboard shop, show booking, running a band… ) was more dysfunctional than the last, and almost as if they were in some sort of competition with each other to be so.

We learned that the proprietors of the pool supply center (a part-time job that a friend had gotten me) were selling significant amounts of cocaine out of it, often even while we were there; Especially considering my sensibilities at the time, that discovery did not go particularly well. We came back at night, and destroyed anything we could- from their vans, to the awnings and signage, and so on- both for putting me at risk, and for having such lack of character that they’d unknowingly put a bunch of teenagers around that type of corrupt venture.

I loved every minute of the skate shop I worked at and helped run; I was brought in to add a BMX line to it, and did just that.

But.

The ’90’s in action sports and such, were not like now. It was not docile and accepted and assimilated in some gross way by every store in the mall. We had people attempt to steal that we would catch and simply lock the doors on, we had others offering anything and everything for anything and everything, there were more soft drugs moving through that place than on the first Bad Brains tour, and there was no less than five fights per week, either in our tiny lot or inside the store itself. It was the still-dysfunctional-but-positive counterpart to the past several places I had worked, and I couldn’t have been enthralled by it all.

Booking shows in the early ’90’s here in Rochester should have come with a Surgeon General’s warning. I was stolen from, threatened (a lot), tricked by clubowners, more frequently than not lost money, even more frequently than that, didn’t make any, hit from behind (several times), I beat the fuck out of people that deserved it and hated every minute of it, and I put on some of the very best shows the city has, and ever will, see.

It was the Witching Hour; Powerful, dangerous, and magical. The bands we had access to, were the ones that made it all happen. Or, at very least, the ones at the tail end of the first to EVER make it happen.

The fact that many of the shows are now storied, fictionalized, and still discussed, is because we were ready to let them be the madhouses they aspired to; We didn’t want them to be peaceful, or clean, or simple. We wanted them to be insanity. We wanted to be able to either control it, or destroy everything. And we did; Both.
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It didn’t take long to figure out that if I was going to retain any amount of sanity and virtue amidst these trials and tribulations that made me feel like a freak, a monster, and a coward, a killer, a victim and an attacker, and a success, a maniac, and a failure, I was going to have to do some deep-digging and soul searching, and earn it.