I’m a single white male in his 30s (wearing a black tee shirt and black Kings cap, last seen leaving the crime scene in a beige Fiat at 14:30 hours…) living in Sacramento, California. The same place I was born. Sad, I know. I have moved around some along the way. Did a couple of years in Phoenix, and about seven in San Diego, but have ended up back here again. Back here again AGAIN. Every time I think I’m out… Sac seems to have that kind of power. I was very content in San Diego (absolutely love that town), but it got a little too expensive, and I figured it was about time to come back home for a few years and be close to friends and family again, and live in a place where I could afford to live in the lifestyle that I’m accustomed to.
I live alone, which is pretty nice. Previous to this I did about ten years with roommates, and did have some really good experiences there. It was all with old friends of mine, so a lot of good times were had. But when my last roommate, my friend Aaron, moved off to Seattle, I figured it was about time to go solo again. I’d pretty much lived with everyone I’d want to live with, and felt I was getting a little old for roommates. That was another motivator to get me back to Sac, as I could afford to do that here. And I do. Got myself a great apartment in a great complex that’s a nice refuge to come home to after a long day (and they all seem to be long these days…).
Home sweet home
As for what I do with those long days, I’m in the auto insurance claims business, and have been for over ten years. How this became a career I have NO idea. I just thought it sounded like an interesting job and gave it a try. Next thing I knew, it was a decade later and I was working for my fourth insurance company. It’s all right, as work goes. Not what you call extremely rewarding work (I’m not curing herpes or anything…), but I do take satisfaction in helping people out who are in a tough spot (as in out of their vehicle) and working to hook them up as best I can. I’m really, really big on customer service, and I take pride in mine, so it feels good to be able to do that. Pays pretty good, and it’s definitely a job you can always find new work in. People are always going to smash up their cars. No such thing as up and down cycles in auto claims. People will always drive like idiots, and people like me will always be there to pick up the pieces (and write the checks).
Next time? Spring for the valet...
My life is (sadly) pretty tied up in work these days, and it seems like there’s room for little else. Many hours, weekends too. I used to have more of a life, and I’m hoping to get back to having one again. But I do manage to squeeze in SOME non-work related stuff in my spare time. I’m a HUGE movie fan, and I have a pretty massive DVD collection (I filled up my shelves long ago), but sadly, lack the time to watch any of them (much). I used to be a major film freak. During the college years, I was in the movie theater all the time, catching everything that came out. These days I’m lucky if I get to a ‘plex three times a year. At least I always do on my birthday. That’s an annual tradition with me. I take the day off work and spend it in the movie theater, catching three or four films, depending on if I have other birthday stuff going on and whether there’s actually four movies out there worth seeing at the time. I have a vast store of trivial movie, actor and director info in my brain, so I can sit down and talk movies with you for hours. As long as it’s not about something that came out in the past four of fives years since I started slacking. Ever play that “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game with your friends? The actor-linking thing? Again…for hours.
I was actually planning to get into film as a career, and was heading that way in college. Had some screenwriting training and was pretty sure that was my way in. But it didn’t turn out that way (at least not yet). I’ve been a movie fan since I started seeing things beyond shapes and colors as a baby. Love everything about them, the escapism, the emotional journey, the power to let people experience lives and worlds they may never have gotten to. But there’s more on my film feelings and experiences elsewhere on this site. Let’s just leave it here as “big movie guy”.
And TV as well. Always loved TV. Some film fans my scoff at it, but I still love it (when it’s done right), and there’s still nothing like episodic television, the way you can do so much more with a story and/or characters than you can when facing the two-hour constraints of film. I like my stories BIG. Like with novels. I don’t waste my time with 200 or 300 page novels. If I’m going to commit my time to reading a book (which I don’t do near enough of), I want it to mean something. Give me a thousand-page monster and I’m totally happy. With TV, you don’t have to focus on just a moment of a character’s life. You can actually explore that life, and follow along with it as a viewer. And your stories can be so much grander and detailed. Which is why TV can be so frustrating, I admit, because with all this possibility, so much of it is still crap. But there are shows that stand out, and I’ve had my share of favorites (again, discussed elsewhere on the site). Oh, and TV’s at its best, by the way, when you’re sharing it with others. When you and friends of yours are into the same show, and are either watching together each week or discussing the most recent episode during the period between eps? Nothing quite like that. I did a lot of this during the roommate days, when we all had shared shows. These days, I really don’t have as many shows as I used to. I’ve got the TiVo (thank God), and I let my handful of shows generally stack up until I have time to catch up on them all. I’m afraid the delicious “can’t wait until next week!” anticipation is leaving the equation for me, as I’m usually watching eps back to back, either on the TiVo or by buying shows on DVD (one of my favorites developments in entertainment in years). Man, I can still remember a time when you’d call your friends and says “Did you see last night’s blah-blah-blah?”. And they either did, or they missed it, and that was it. These days, when friends of mine are e-mailing about the latest ep of something, they first have to check and see if everyone on the list caught it. Some people may have watched it live, some (like me) probably TiVo’d it, others may be waiting for it to show up on a newsnet group so they can download it and watch it, or someone may have satellite and have gotten to see it three hours before anyone else did… Times do change. I think TV is a little slow in changing with those times (still tied to the old network prime-time standard of doing things), considering the way technology is changing the way we consume our media almost daily…but they’re starting to come around. Again, more TV thoughts elsewhere, but yeah, I’d have to say I’m a big TV fan, and it’s something I still enjoy chatting with friends of mine about. It’s a nice thing we all have in common.
So when I’m not enjoying media, you can usually find me working on projects. I have more projects going than I will ever get to. See, at the core of who I am is creativity. I am a manically creative person. I’ve always got to be creating stuff, be it writing, web design, songwriting, or things as varied as making fake CD covers out of photos of friends of mine in Photoshop. I just can’t stop. Ideas keep coming. I’ve got this massive list of uncompleted things I’ll get to SOMEday. This page took me a few years to finally get going, for example. Too many projects, very little time. But writing is one of the big ones. I pretty much define myself as a writer. Am I published? Well, yeah, kind of (getting to that). I tend to start things and not finish them a lot, so I’ve got beginnings of novels, stories and screenplays all over my hard drive, but I’m not a great finisher (I have kind of creative A.D.D….never quite get the first thing done before the idea for the second one comes and I just have to run with that one for a while…). I’ve been writing in some form or another as long as I can remember, back when I was writing and drawing (quite badly) my own comic books as a kid. In junior high I won my first award for an essay I wrote, and that really spun me off in the writing direction (and it was one teacher—Mrs. Grenberg—who made this all happen by encouraging me to write and entering my stuff in a local contest). I enjoy non-fiction writing a lot (and do a lot more of it since the web came into being and I could actually share it with people), but I am still a storyteller at heart. Love creating characters and seeing them come to life in the situations I put them into. Still been waiting for some kind of actual lucrative avenue to channel that into to come along, but I keep doing it anyway. One of these days I will get a screenplay or TV show or novel out there, if I can 1) finish something and 2) find the TIME to finish something.
The gang from "The Nice Guy", the comic I write
I did finally have some success along the way with something called “The Nice Guy”. My best friend Tim—a very talented artist—was sharing a house with me back in about ’95. We had talked for years about working together on some kind of comic, with me writing and him drawing. We were both big into comics when we were growing up together, and both assumed we’d team up and make it big in the business together. We came up with this idea for a comic strip when we were sitting around talking about the whole “nice guy syndrome” (we were both recently single again and whining about meeting women like sad single men do…). We decided to take that concept and encapsulate it in one guy…and tell man/woman frustration tales from his life, as well as giving him a couple of best friends/roommates that we could have fun with doing social commentary. And it then took us several years to actually get around to making it happen, but we did, and “The Nice Guy” became a pretty popular online comic and ended up a print comic as well. We managed to even achieve a little limited fame off it, and have done autograph signings and appearances, and even a TV interview. We get fan mail from around the world, and I even managed to get to go to my first Hollywood movie premiere thanks to one of our fans. It’s a great creative outlet for the both of us (and something I’m actually finishing and keeping up with regularly…for a change), and a lot of fun to work on. Oh, and you can check it out at:
…if you please. I think people really misunderstand and under-appreciate the comic medium. To me, it’s very much like filmmaking with no budget. It’s still visual storytelling, with constraints of panels and pages instead of trying to keep to a 2-hour limit and a three-act structure. There’s a lot of really great stuff out there now, created by people with a very indie film sensibility and unique outlooks on people, relationships and the world. And thanks to the new emergence of web comics, a lot of folks who never made it through the gauntlet of industry publishing (or the heartache of small press publishing…) are now able to share their creations and ideas with the world. If you haven’t looked into this stuff, I’d do so, and leave the pre-conceived comic stigma behind. You might find yourself surprised.
Me and Tim being famous guys at Comic-Con International in San Diego
So, yeah, I’m a very creative person. I’m also very qualified to write something called “The Nice Guy” because I am in many ways a personification of that particular idea. Personality-wise, I am very laid back, very passive, and very non-confrontational. Your interpretation of this is up to you. Some think that makes me a sap. I like to think it means I have manners. But hey…both views may be right. I actually believe in that whole “do unto others” thing, and do my best to treat others I would like to be treated, and treat them with the respect they deserve (or sometimes don’t deserve, but I do it anyway). I actually do care about other people’s feeling a lot (did I just hear someone yell “homo!”?), and deal with people accordingly. I believe that every society needs rules, and I believe in following them. One of my biggest pet peeves is people who don’t think the rules apply to them (I just LOVE people proudly telling stories of how they run the red lights at freeway entrances. You REBEL, you!). I believe in fairness and equity. This is why I probably shouldn’t be in the claims business. My idea of what’s fair to a person who’s suffered a loss don’t necessarily line up with what an insurance company thinks, but I do what I can (without getting myself fired…) to give people what they’re due, because fair is fair. I pay for the MP3s that I download (thanks, Itunes!) because I believe it’s only fair the musicians actually make money off their music, even though I could be swiping it for free. I like to think I have a pretty active sense of humor. Love to laugh, love to make people laugh (really is the best medicine, don’tcha know?). I’m also very pragmatic and very logical. Logic is a big thing to me. I believe in things that make sense. Also being a very spiritual person, I’ve found a lot of interesting roadblocks due to this, but I just can’t believe in something without asking questions and getting answers that make sense. “Shut up and believe it” doesn’t work with me. Just not who I am.
As for politics...it's really not something you'll find me talking about much. And that's not because I don't care about politics. I do very much. What I don't like about politics is what it does to people. When it comes to politics, Americans tend to shut off their brains (at least the logic centers) when the topic comes up. Otherwise reasonable, intelligent adults will, at the drop of a politically charged word, become raving lunatics. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that can discuss their differing views in a calm, polite and reasonable manner. I just don't meet a lot of those people. I don't care for the way that mentioning your political beliefs--or as little as your party affiliation--will cause others to draw an immediate conclusion on everything about you. If you tell someone you're a Democrat, then you must be a communist. A Republican? Ah, then you're a nazi. Neither? Oh, then you're one of those fringe weirdos, probably trying to overthrow the government. Seriously, have you seen this happen? Two people are getting along just fine, and one brings up his or her political stance on something, and boom...there's a murderous rage in the eyes of the other person. The brain shuts down. Sound bites from favorite like-minded talk show hosts or columnists or whatever their favorite celebrity said on T.R.L. last week start to spew out, thrown like accusations instead of insights. Never goes well. And I just don't care to be a part of it. Might just be my usual penchant for conflict avoidance--a side effect of being the kid in three divorces--but whatever it is, I'm just not having any.
I speak with my vote. I remember being a kid back during the Carter/Ford election, and pestering my father, when he got home from the booth, about who he voted for. He just smiled, and wouldn't tell me. He was actually imparting an important lesson to me there. This is why, as a rule, I don't discuss my vote with people. This way, I know I'm voting for someone or something because of my beliefs, not because of what's fashionable, or because I'm afraid of what people might think. I know what I believe on issues--after looking at all sides--and I vote my conscience. And I do try to see all sides. I've been both Democrat and Republican in my life. There's a reason for that. I'm not the kind of person who can assume "my side" must be completely right about everything, and the other, conversely, all wrong. I wonder sometimes, seeing what it's done to us, if the two-party system is a hindrance or help. Party loyalty tends to shut down any chance of discussion, of everyone working together for the common good. But of course, that's a very simplistic view, I know. It's all very complicated. Which is why people talking about it like it's not drive me crazy. Regardless--I do have my political beliefs, and I do follow politics pretty closely to keep up on everything that's happening, and I do get out there and vote. Just don't expect me to start up a conversation with you about it over lunch. That’s pretty much true of the “big five” for me—politics, religion, money, sex, medical. Things I’d just rather not discuss are my choice of candidate, my theological beliefs, how much I make a year, if I “hit that”, or what happened at my doctor’s appointment. These are all kind of personal things to me, and not really topics for polite conversation. Sue me, I’m a polite guy. Hey, we can still talk movies, right?
I mentioned medical. Did I mention at this point about the Muscular Dystrophy? Yeah, I’m in a wheelchair. That’s something I forget to mention at moments like this because I think it’s not as big a part of who I am. But, in reality, I know that it is, and affects who I am and the life I lead. I just choose to ignore it as best I can, and do my best to be a “normal” person, though it’s not always easy when most people don’t see you that way due to the chair. There’s another page after this one that gets into that, so I won’t repeat the details here, but yes, I am a single white disabled male in his thirties. Read more about it in the “M.D. in M.D.O.” area. All the facts be there.
As I said, “single” male. Yeah, still unattached. Got pretty close to marriage there for a while, but it didn’t take, and there’s currently no other fish on the hook. Which really doesn’t bother me all that much (most of the time) to tell you the truth. I’m actually not the kind of person that really “needs” someone else to complete me. I’m pretty self-contained. Loneliness doesn’t pop up as an issue that often. Which is good, because I’m also, when it comes to relationships, EXTREMELY picky. So I’m not in any hurry to rush into anything (like so many people I’ve seen do, and regret it) just to not be alone. I can wait for the right person. Who, I hope, is out there. I’ve been chastised for not trying harder to find someone (by female friends, mainly), and it’s true. I’m definitely not a social predator. A lot of reasons for that, many of them wheelchair related. I really just don’t ask women out. It’s kind of one of the rules of the wheelchair thing, actually. I wait to be asked out, and then the fun (or disaster) starts from there. Not the most pro-active way to find true love, true…but my life is a lot more complicated than the average person’s, so that’s just kind of the way it has to be (and you can feel free to disagree. Many have). And besides, there’s a certain need to have some TIME available in your life to get into a relationship, and that’s standing in the way right now, too, so I’m not really thinking about it much until that aspect changes. I can wait. I think one songwriter mentioned that true love does that…
The Mission Park boys! Tim, A.T., Chris, Kevin, Jon, Scott, me
“Alone” pretty good, but no man is an island. You need other people in your life, and thankfully, I’ve got a lot of amazing ones. As you can probably see from all the photos and such on this site, the people in my life mean a lot to me, and I’ve got a lot of fantastic friends that I’ve collected over the years, and a wonderful family. As for the friends, they’re mainly made up of a pretty tight group that came together just as I got out of high school. You’ll see mention in here of the “Mission Park Gang”. Mission Park is a small park in Carmichael (suburb of Sac) that this group of us hung out at with many of our wasted nights back when we all first started connecting. It became kind of a symbol of identification for us (that, and the Lyon’s all-night restaurant we used to frequent, too). We were all basically kids back then (some were still in high school, though I was just out of it), and somehow this group formed that’s still together to this day…though we’re a bit spread out, now. That’s sort of the core, like I said, but of course I’ve added many new friends along the way (either into the Mission circle or friends just my own), and I’ve got people I’m trying to keep touch with that are all over the country. Not as easy as the old days when everyone used to just show up at my house to figure out what we were up to that night. But thankfully, with the modern advent of e-mail and online stuff like MySpace (and the old-fashioned telephone), we do our best to keep up with each other’s lives. Thinking about it now, I think I’ve got about five different distinct groups of friends (with overlap between them)—Mission, C.T. (they know what that stands for), San Diego, work (and different groups depending on which workplace…I tend to keep friends from old jobs) and high school. Funny, I’d never thought about it that way before. But with that many groups and that many people within them, that’s a lot of folks to keep connected with. I’m not always great at it, but I try.
Me, Tony, Russ and Aaron
I’ve never believed that friends are something you choose. I think friends happen. At least to me. I don’t recall ever consciously saying “I choose to make this person my friend, based on this list of reasons and qualities”. You meet people, you click, you hang out, you keep doing it. You take the good and bad that comes with them (some friends can be more high-maintenance than others (hey, look how every friend of mine reading this is sitting there wondering if I think they fall into that group…)), but what do you do? They’re your friends, and we’ve all got our upsides and our challenging qualities that, hopefully, we have good enough friends to put up with. I think my friends are all remarkable people. And I think the world of all of them. Which, I think, shows, in things like my “Friends” page on here, all the pictures and video I’ve taken and collected over the years of them, etc. I am damned lucky to have them all in my life, and each of them have changed me in subtle ways (for the better, I think) just by knowing me and letting me see the world through their eyes. Friends do more than just provide us with enjoyable company. They teach us. They enlighten us. They open new avenues to the world for us. And if you’re lucky enough to find the right ones, they can keep doing that for the rest of your life.
Renee, Juan, me and Summer
And I’ve got a great family. A big family. My nuclear family? Okay, not that big. It started with Dad, Mom, me and my sister, Shelley. Dad is, unfortunately, not with us anymore. But Mom got married to an amazing guy named Jack, and I inherited his family—stepsisters and stepbrothers, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts and cousins, oh my)—to go with my already expansive extended families on both Mom’s and Dad’s sides. I am JAMMED with relations. I think I said elsewhere here that family is one of the reasons I moved back to Sac. This is where most of the extended family is at these days, and being in San Diego was making it tough to see them all, at least on a regular basis. It’s great being part of their lives again, something that’s made the whole move back worthwhile. I love all three sides of my family for all different reasons. Each family has its own history and traditions and norms and personalities. And a lot of kids, too…and watching them all grow up into the people they’re going to be is amazing. Christmases and Thanksgivings and July 4ths and birthday parties and graduations and weddings…always memorable and heartwarming times, no matter which family I end up with on a particular one (that’s a challenge sometimes, too, scheduling accordingly). And my nuclear family has finally started to grow now that my sister brought my extraordinary niece into the world and into my life. Watching her grow, seeing new photos of her and hearing her enthusiastic tales over the phone brings a very big smile to my life. I think family is very, very important, and I really feel bad for the people who haven’t had a chance to have the big family experience like I have. There’s a richness it brings to your world that really makes you whole, and somehow bigger, in soul, than you can be on your own. I’m very grateful for mine. All of them.
Man, what else? I love basketball (I’m from Sac-Town! Come on!), Stephen King novels (sort of a love-hate relationship there), watching old camcorder tapes of mine from all different periods of my life, catching a big movie premiere with the gang, discovering new music, getting back to San Diego whenever possible (my favorite place in the world), impulse buying on eBay or Amazon, finding a really good cigar bar, keeping up on world events, and generally trying to enjoy life as I know it. Want to know more? Guess you’ll just have to jump around this site some more, won’t ya?
Tell Me All Your Thoughts On God
