An explination in a very brief history.

"the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior" - about.com, Interview Tips - Behavior Based Interviewing

I took this from the Brooklyn waterfront about October of 2000

I am a city boy and proud of it. There are no two ways around that.

I have lived in New York City for over ten years. I travel regularly to Paris and London and other great metropolises of the world. My friends and family are of all ilk: white, black, gay, straight, communist, capitalist. Christian, Muslim, Jew, few of whom believe in any deity of any sort by the by. Many of us are just simply silly and eccentric. Our most constant quality as a group is an abundance of education and a certain unspoken snobbery about it. And I would say generally speaking, we're comfortable with that.

I define myself many ways. An artist, an athlete, a writer, a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a man about town, an epicure, a cad at times, a devoted dad at others. Am I an agnostic or an atheist? I vacillate on that one, but there more than likely is no god and anyone who thinks otherwise should be put on display at Conney Island if you ask me.

I happily take mass-transit everyday and extol it's virtues to all, riding to and fro, from my little office job working in my shared office/cube, for a big, liberal leaning, corporation.

I play tennis as if it's interstellar warfare and if I could afford it, I'd like to take up squash.

My apartment, is somewhere just north of four hundred square feet, somewhere just inside Harlem, and at only fifteen hundred a month a steal. This is where I am. And as far as I can tell, it is as far from the edge of a fallow cornfield with grazing whitetail at dawn as you're likely to get in this world. Packed like a sardine from morning to night, and as snug as a bug in a rug being it.

Like I said, a city boy.



I however did grow up in the country. In southern Illinois near the Mississippi river and the far edges of West County, St. Louis. I grew up catching frogs and minnows in streams. Chasing water bugs and climbing the bluffs along the Mississippi that run just north of Alton, Il. My earliest memory is from 1973, "The Great Flood of '73". The water had reached our doorstep.
I was there
watching it lap up with our German Shepperd, Pepper. A guy my family knew, a neighbor I've long forgotten, in a bass boat drives up. He has caught a three foot long alligator gar. It was taller than I was and I was petrified.

Later, in my early adolescence, I found myself drawn as many boys are to the martial arts. We were living deep into a wooded West County. I had a 35# recurve bow, one of the arms slightly twisted. I spent a year or two burying bolts in a hay bale. Sometimes hunting around for a squirrel and very occasionally going deer hunting with a cousin. Loud, smelly, and untrained, I of course get nowhere near any real game.

But this past Christmas I took my two year old daughter, Junia, back to my father's house.

He again lives in a wooded area and with little else to do, we spent hours walking on a carpet of fallen leaves, under bare limbed oak and elm. The surrounding area is an old farm slowly converting to ex-urbia so there were deer tracks everywhere. At the edge of the woods, feeling that old cold, that very particular early morning wet chill, and in the dark and alluring emptiness. I could feel it.

I wanted to hunt again.