A Young Man As The Artist of A Portrait

Here’s what I want you to know:

I was born in the Fall of 1986 near Chicago, in the center stripe of what they were starting to call Generation Y, with the alarming implication that we were almost at the end. Our stickier nickname, Millennials, carries its own grim halo of Biblical-sounding doom, a vague promise of lengthy tribulation. We arrived just in time for the end of history, and on our way to being grown up we witnessed terror attacks^[1], disasters natural^[2], military, and financial^[3]; we’ve been accused of killing previously beloved institutions like beer and cable tv; we’ve been called^[4] “america's only hope for survival.”^[5]

I went to school and people told me I could grow up to be anything; I never totally stopped believing that, and I suppose that’s at least partly why we’re here. I work in an office, but I also sometimes work on a stage or in a studio, and I worked in food service long enough to make me a generous tipper. I’ve driven trucks and climbed down manholes, and I can work a pressure washer or a soldering iron without injuring myself or anyone else. I learned pretty early that there are no straight lines to adulthood, so I’m still taking my time meandering in that direction. I used to write a lot, in journals both private and public (RIP Xanga, real heads know), and never stopped thinking of myself as a writer even when most of my prose was misspent in flowery work emails (and my poetry in tweets and iPhone notes).

Now I’m starting to write here. It’ll be some mixture of personal musing and cultural commentary (like music and movie reviews, not academic theses or anything^[6]), and if I keep at it I imagine I’ll end up covering a pretty broad range of things. If you know what it’s like to talk to me in real life, it’ll be pretty much like that, but a little better edited^[7]. If you haven’t had that experience, don’t let this scare you off.