So, I’m retired and figured, hey, why not write down some of the more colorful chapters of my past?

Tales from the Tracks and Beyond

I was born on May 17, 1959, and for the first eighteen years of my life, I lived in a beat-up little house on the SouthSide of St. Louis. Five of us were crammed into two bedrooms and a single bathroom, an arrangement where privacy was not so much rare as nonexistent. You could hear everything and smell everything everywhere. If my old man let one rip in the back room, you might as well evacuate the house.

Why he insisted on remaining in that suffocating box of a house remains a mystery—Maybe he liked the feeling of walls closing in, a kind of confinement fetish, more likely it was a refusal to change and in addition he just didn’t give a shit about anyone else. Regardless, those were my circumstances and we were forced to endure it. That was kind of his thing. Selfish. Mean. A guy who could turn a dinner into a disaster just by walking into the room. He was a petty, self-absorbed man whose presence poisoned the air more thoroughly than his flatulence ever could. ➡️ click for more

Summer of '82

In the scorching summer of 1982, I once again found myself jobless, ousted from my MoPac trainman job in St. Louis. Getting laid off had become a frustratingly familiar routine since I joined this freak show of a company at the tender young age of eighteen. For five long years, I tried to find my place as a brakeman and switchman, working across St. Louis, Jefferson City, and Kansas City. I must have spent half my time being forced to move or getting laid off. Why? Because that’s the way they railroad.   ➡️ click for more

The Dark Side of Television Production:
My Most Unethical Shoot Ever

I worked in television production for thirty long years, schlepping around audio equipment and hoisting camera gear as a lowly location audio mixer and cameraman. My knees had taken a beating over the years, and I finally decided to call it quits and retire from the game.

   ➡️ click for more