I started writing short stories at age 14, and after two years got serious about a novel. Ford's Prize, it was called -- a big paranoid space adventure that took five years to write. It's not that great, but it felt good to actually complete a novel.

My second novel was a psychotically bleak crime novel called Nora. I started it the summer before going off to college, got 160 pages in, and abandoned it in favor of beer and sex, those staples of American university life.

After college I got work as a journalist for a weekly paper called the Owego News making the frankly disappointing sum of $1000/month (this is 1995). That led to another journalist job in Hamilton, NY. Hamilton is home of Colgate University (spawning ground of Broken Lizard) where my father and grandfather went to school. The students are for the most part rich kids (as my Dad was), and my class-resentment was stoked by making so little money that I couldn't even afford an apartment in town -- I lived in the newspaper office's darkroom for months before "moving on up" -- into a 1973 Volkswagen Transporter with rust like an advanced case of skin cancer. These were the Black Days of which I will not speak further.

Disaster upon disaster led, as it somehow does, to success of sorts. I got back together with my girlfriend, ditched the piece of shit car and career, and moved to Portland, Oregon just for the fun of it.

IIn 1998, after reading Scott McCloud's utterly fantastic Understanding Comics (thank you, Multnomah County Library) I decided to write and draw Roughage No. 1, a comic about (not surprisingly, if you know me) two losers fighting zombies and drowning in shit. I put it on sale at a local bookstore called Reading Frenzy and, after 8 months, it sold zero copies. At 50 cents per! Probably a record of some kind. But a Portland-based publisher called Alarming Press discovered the book and is printing a nicer edition (at a higher price, but it's worth it). You can buy it here. It's really pretty damn funny.

Alarming Press also publishes a once-every-three weeks comic strip of mine called Lumpy Discharge -- and a bunch of other cool stuff by various artists from the greater Pacific Northwest.

(Stay tuned for more in future days or weeks, including The Homeless Days, First Christmas, A Fortuitous Encounter, The Brooklyn House, and much, much more!)