When writing goes back four or five generations in your family, it’s pretty much a dead cert you’ll end up writing, too. You only get one gene pool to swim in.
Still, I did my best to avoid the inevitable. After college, I worked as a musician for a while, which was not nearly as romantic as the brochures made it out to be.
Eventually, I figured it was time to try the family trade. So I moved to Greenfield, Iowa (pop. 2,008) to work on the newspaper my great-grandfather started, the Adair County Free Press. It was a complete three-year course in journalism, civics and ground-floor American history. Plus, I learned how to distinguish the three major manure groups by smell alone.
Since moving back to the East Coast, I’ve worked at a variety of advertising and marketing agencies, sticking words on everything that didn’t run away. In recent years, I’ve gone almost completely digital, and learned a bunch of impressive-sounding acronyms and abbreviations in the process.
Once a member of no less than eight bands at once, I’m now appallingly suburban. I live in Maryland with my wife, little girl, slightly littler boy, and big, fuzzy dog.
I am functionally bald.