BORN IN 1955 UNDER ANOTHER NAME, it's hardly bombast, but mere statement of fact to suggest that I've struggled with my own peculiar challenges as a creative artist. From the earliest episodes of my life, I was always sure to be found reading, writing, doodling, organizing, goofing, interrogating, readying, doubting, resisting and preparing the way for an artistic life not so much of grandiose deeds, but of exiled suppositions washing up against the keen but jagged shore of internal contradictions an authentic American life seems to require.

Since I had no talent for drawing, or singing, or painting, or writing for that matter, I thus fixated on the fountain of ideas from which I drew inspiration and occasional comfort.

In highschool creative writing class, I was always accused of and penalized for straying from the topic...

THERE WAS ALWAYS THE QUESTION of 1) purported priorities, 2) suspect qualifications and 3) undulating distortions of the gear grinding social machine that disrupted my urgency for creative expression. Nevertheless, this trinity of "doubts about delivery systems" stitching the social fabric wooly to bully, served to compel my artistic inertia.

THIS STRUGGLE WITH DESTINY, dislodging my place among those carbon products and ideas which incline us to feats and fancies of wonderment, has not been enviable, given my rather unfortunate but repatriating family dynamic and significant latter day punk rock roots, neither from which I've ever recovered, but in my fifthieth year, as promised earlier from my own self-styled catechism of wows and vows, I decided it was high time to exit the philosophical closet and go public, naked, raving, hysterical once more, this time armed with a more comprehensive accounting, so I finally embraced the paintbrush.

STROLLING THE EARLY LIFE, I dabbled in art but kept my distance. Jobs akimbo. Cruising that unbiquitous dollar bill binge, faint, and vomit. Brains without direction, my mind strapped to a secret gnawing sense that I was an artist in search of a demonstrable art, that TIME was my enemy, but conversely, my only defense against public and private irrelevance, while I navigated first one set of discovery bearings, then another.

THERE WAS NO UNIVERSITY LIFE—although it had always been presumed that I would work hard to slave my way through the schools of higher learning as befitted my regressed socio-economic status banked against a painfully raw but energetic aptitude and fair grades, but I had been cultivating other ideas aimed to bolster my liberty and foster my escape from who knows what. Stinging with poverty and a fierce independence, after highschool, I decided to dive right into the world available to me right then. After a series of loosely calculated misadventures including a rather spurious and short-lived early first marriage, I worked briefly as a construction laborer, a steelworker, a roofer, a cab driver, a retail clerk, a signmaker, a fry cook, in pizza delivery, a chicken farmer, a telemarketer, a bookstore clerk, and a photolab technician, all less than a year each.

And let's not forget that controversial role you foisted upon the public as lead singer in an imaginary punk rock band. Which was a very strange thing for me to do since I usually hide behind words.

THESE JOBS WERE INVESTIGATIVE ROLES, exercises in diversity and flamboyant necessity, and quite frankly, I was always an excellent employee. To live life as an artist, as a bold citizen in trust to an ideal, even as my talents have declined with age and circumstance, is not about any particular special skill or talent, but is a reminder that life should be considered as a whole. Of course, this principle is not meant to apotheosize the pastoral by any stretch, but merely to emphasize the veracity of nature in the same sense that perhaps the painter Jackson Pollack meant when he blurted, "I am nature."

LIVING UP TO ONE'S POTENTIAL is always a tricky business in a culture where there is ample liberty to satisfy one's one personal calculus with the freedom to succeed as well as the freedom to fail. In the reality-fixed buckled down world where I felt obliged to set the bar at a certain level long enough to make a difference to the bankers, the household fund, my loving wife, and my own general well-being, I also spent a decade as a rightfully skilled surveyor and site engineer for several construction and civil engineering firms. But the notion of having a shot of self-awareness through writing still stalked me. In brief, I was always something I was not. Unfortunately, the intellectual life in the 9-5 world is rather like being told to go stand alone with one's nose in the corner....

Born to be a man of faceless words and fierce self-expression, I still ached to strive higher, to strike a different mark. I still cried out for academic redemption, leaving me no choice but to challenge myself to a gutsy duel, where no matter the price, the urge to muster everything I could possibly muster in manifesting a strategic and personal artistic counter-revolution burned inside me. I imagined that in a storm of no single interpretation, this strategic and personal art would no longer be called post-modernism, but something else less negationist, something else taken from those very same struggles the imperative next self must take, something else I had been predicting, or perhaps even resisting, all along...

I'D SMUGGLED A STRING OF GONZO cameras into the nooks and crannies of urban resolve during the The Yellow Years, accumulating show footage and snapshots of sudden underground punk bands and other fine deliberations keeping the netherworld in sack with the rest of the real and the unused sentimentality that reigned over small places and large egos we loved and loathed among competing strands of mental encroachment I aimed to study in its own element and time. But for the most part, I shot it with a little help from my friends, and stored it away. The empty gestures of stupid underground antics stoked with alcohol and other sad jests had driven me to recoil into my own insignificance. Fabulous food and lots of it soon replaced alcohol dependency, becoming just as harsh a weakness as a consolation prize for walking awy from the wild life.

I began to loathe everything I couldn't write down. Decadence for its own sake was no friend of mine, but took aim and took measurement of a sulking and immature poet, flashing dystopian nightmares against the backdrop of parody, as life had for me during this period become only a method of killing time, that ancient nemesis back to haunt me for leading what seemed to be an isolated and unimpressive life yet again.

HAVING ALWAYS CONSIDERED MYSELF—first and foremost a scribe in love with the entire process of print and publications, in due time, I finally landed a coveted managing editor's position at a bi-weekly newspaper for senior citizens. This experience soon led to several publishing ventures in my Capitol Hill community in the early 1990s. Summarily, I won election to a city office seat on the ANC Commission, and a year later was elected to its chairmanship. For a brief stint, I represented approximately 24,000 citizens of Ward Six. I also founded the short-lived but critically acclaimed Independent Ward Sixer community newspaper around the same time.

ENTER THE EARLIEST DAYS of the nebbish Internet where I quickly found a writing forum of like prodigies where email and bulletin boards were king until a few years later when the World Wide Web was invented. Without missing a beat, I immediately exploited the early technology in designing and building websites for myself and a few paying clients for several years and counting before running out of the same steam that had created the new economy bubble which put me out of business. But even now, I am profoundly satisfied and grateful for the grit it took in running my own Macintosh web, mail, and DNS servers from 1998-2004 on early transmission technologies in-house, right there in my own studio, until circumstances changed, and thus also the hand that feeds them.

DURING THESE TRANSFORMING YEARS an international group consisting of two staunch capitalists and three neo-Marxists did battle around the literary and philosophical consideration I'd founded several years earlier called the Scenewash Project. We concentrated our efforts around the works of French philosopher Guy Debord and the Situationists, another dubious drama-rich but strategic investigation that finally ran aground after three of us met in person for the first time in Paris a few months before the WTC attacks stunned us all. In restrospect, the timing of these events had been crucial to my comprehension of human motives. I knew I had earned my political stripes the old-fashioned way, and with the certainty of the feral genius I have never looked back even as I chagrin the steady erosion of my beloved constitutional America giving way to an ineffective unsustainable globalism with warm fuzzy ideas that are plainly false constructions.

ON JULY 2, 2003, I ENTHUSIASTICALLY launched the inimitable Radio Scenewash, online radio station, a project which combined a childhood fantasy and my mature quest to expose this new media as a dual micro-macrocosm, or yet another battleground of competing ideas, just as my wife and I were headed out the door in pilgrimage to the Thomas Paine and Jack Kerouac shrines in New England. The Radio Scenewash stream, dubbed Music for the New American patriot, has been available 24-7-365 since its inception, but its days may be numbered given the expense of time and treasure it takes to operate in tough budgetary times. Punk, industrial, electronica, classic rock, folk, blues, even some twang. The sometimes harsh but eloquently arranged mix, says this critic, philosophically considered, is as profound as any poem or painting..

BUT AFTER A LIFETIME OF IGNORING the impulse, I finally turned to painting in February, 2005, still quarreling with the pace and pocket of my life, but amply inspired after reading the recently published biographies of two 20th Century painters—abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and seminal pop provacateur Larry Rivers I had always kept a keen eye on the lives of the painters, although to this point in my life I still considered myself foremost a writer and poet, despite having not made a penny writing, and the fact that my politics seemingly were still at war with my artistic sensibilities.

AT LONG LAST, LIFE AS I KNEW IT seemed to hint at promise again. Painting with literary purpose, so to speak, the painter in me stormed and tossed with each new amazing picture, but I was also determined to locate a publisher for my first full-length book—

The Silent Cull And Other Mechanical Ideas
Collected Poems 1980-2005

AFTER A RATHER SHORT diasterous stint in Wheeling, WV in the spring of 2006, where I painted a 70'x11' wall mural in a local music venue, my health began to be of increasing concern, so I hauled my entire studio back to again reside in Washington, DC with my wife of twenty-five years. After thirty months of keeping a workspace at the notable 52 O Street Studios in the city, prevailing urbanomics convinced me once again to relocate the studio out near the Blue Ridge Mountains, this time in the beautiful horse country of NW Virginia.

AS I PONDER WITH DUE diligence what indeed is really important about a person's life, I realize that we cannot know. The whole refuses to reject the flaw. The unimpressive fails to deny the perfected note of joy. Win, loss, draw succumbs to rock, paper, scissors. As I exclaimed to someone recently in some context or another, "Don't expect me to shut you up, but one must wonder if art is not the last refuge of scoundrels, after all."