Biography

I grew up with this drive…and sometimes it was a band (skynrd, molly hatchet, journey, REO, 38 special, Dead, Rush, YES)…it was an event, fast ride, beer cans, woods, a camaro…a house party, bon fire, south jersey shore and wooded county highways from the farms to the coast…springsteen and southside johnny…slipping down the crevice between baby boomers and xgeneration. Unconcerned, I kicked a discarded beer can whose consumer I’d disdain for ever throwing it out to begin with…an environmentalist, with a dead aim between a Genesee beer bottle launched at a yield sign somewhere along a straight road through jersey corn fields. I hated then the money that I wish I had now…that without, compels me to reminisce. I loathed killing then, as I took up arms to defend my country against other parents; I swore I’d shoot another man and thank God that I never had to pull that trigger to defend my country’s right be what others strive to be.

I wasn’t worried as I searched everywhere…I had no idea of the mistakes I’d make. I was 12 when I wrote about always searching but never trying to find. I saw beautiful girls and I tried to choreograph my life and its characters so that somehow, fate would land one in my arms…I fantasized of great athletic achievements…I never figured that I’d bring two beautiful children into this world through an act that I never trained for, have no skill in, and that sometimes shames me. God sees my spiraling life and for love of his chorus of angels, He shed a tear and transcended the most magical of imagination when my children burst into the light of our closest star. And they too will fail beautifully and be in the eyes of God when He gives life again into the world…I am in awe of my children, because in all my life, it will be the greatest creation of God that I’ll ever witness, until maybe I stand before His angels.

If I’d only known for sure where you were…I remember being that adolescent drinking just one more beer thinking it was necessary…either to swing that spotlight on the delayed frame movie strip of my life, or get me just a little bit higher. I never knew there was a worm at the bottom of the bottle…I didn’t realize what I would remember about those stolen beers was the thin tinny taste of the aluminum can. Meanwhile, you leaked into my heart; keeping me from a tragic dosage of wanting too much.

I didn’t know the writing would get better, and mean less. You were dancing, draped in flowing terry cloth on the other side of a lonely door hidden in the shadows of the corners of my cavernous mind. I’m not sure how I became half of who you are to me; who I am to you, considering the garden stone walls between us. Hewn rock, hoisted by Herculean men, stacked, thud into the rich soil…seared with moss, a cancer of roots. What gave us, you and me…these time encrusted borders so thick that we never heard each other scratching at the surface of the great divide. A divide that now paves the ground we tread…our dance floor.

I tripped and feared being alone; I fell into the dull pattern of searching for a face with the dream. And I forgot about the dream, but it didn’t forget me. I listened to the words I thought were meaning in the songs I never thought would come…and the music keeps playing and there is no end to the melody, no loose string in the harmony, yet the end is found in every new beginning.

I just know that I failed in everything I set out to do alone and had I not, I’d have never understood. I stand hear before you, wounded, faulted, jeered, less than perfect from all its angles…and I realize the miracle that cements all this together is that I indeed stand here before you. And all you want me to do is love the life I’m never expecting…I hope the unexpected, finds you.