bio

through the facilities of facebook, i’ve been put back in touch with people from all the periods of my life, with the inevitable “what have you been doing?” that follows. i decided to post this skeletal outline of the highlights for anyone who wants to catch up — jump in wherever you lost track of me!

i was born in 1971 and grew up in mannington, west virginia, the youngest of two brothers and three sisters. there was a lot of disco and bell bottoms, so the quicker we skip by this time, the better.

i went off to high school for two years in parkersburg, west virginia, then two in princeton, new jersey. i enrolled at saint john’s college, annapolis, maryland in 1989 and spent two years reading “the great books” before deciding to pursue a music degree. i transferred to umbc, where my guitar teacher taught, beginning a couple of decades of hanging around baltimore.

i met my first partner, dan callahan in the fall of 1993, and began practicing with a zen buddhist community that winter.

joining the music program extended my college years as i caught up the required courses and prepared for my recitals, and i graduated with the class of 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in classical guitar performance. i gave my senior recital that spring, and dan died of a heart attack a few weeks later.

this was the beginning of five dark years for me. i stayed on in our home in west baltimore. i taught music for a couple of years, but drifted away from it for a number of reasons. in part, i couldn’t muster enthusiasm out of my depression, and couldn’t face an apparent future of teaching unmotivated students and playing wedding receptions. ¹ i drifted for quite a while.

a bright spot in this time was discovering the linux operating system and helping to found a linux users group back at my alma mater. through the lug, i met robin miller as he was looking for people to work with him in his new job as editor for andover.net. i took a copy editing position and moved to the staff of freshmeat.net soon after it was acquired in 1999. i’ve worked there ever since, managing a crew which keeps the site updated around the clock.

i only started to come out of my grief over dan in 2001. like 1996, this was a year when big events lined up together, this time three of them. within two months, i bought a house in catonsville and moved out of the city, met my second partner, glenn peters, and went to my first zen retreat, beginning a relationship with my zen teacher. i took lay vows in 2002, making a formal commitment to trying to live as a buddhist.

in 2003, glenn suffered a stroke. i moved in to take care of him and have lived with him in glen burnie ever since. (i rented the house in catonsville for a few years before selling it.)

sometime around 2004, i took up tai chi and trained in it fairly heavily. it and music are my main hobbies these days. i hope to get back into music on an amateur basis when circumstances permit, and to study the piano and cello.

recently, most of my time has been devoted to glenn. his health sharply declined in the fall of 2008, and i eventually had to drop my other engagements and take care of him fulltime. he spent four months in a hospital and rehabilitation center that winter, and has been in and out of the hospital ever since. life for now is a matter of doing what we can while we’re able, while waiting for the next crisis to slip up on us.

i hope that fills you in from wherever we parted ways. i’m glad to be back in touch. what have you been doing?

1. in this vein, i’d like to recommend glenn kurtz’s memoir, “practicing“. it’s a short and touching read so eerily familiar that i could have ghostwritten it. [↩]