I was born and raised in Augusta, where my childhood and teenage years were not totally unremarkable.  My first stint at college came after I graduated high school in 1991.  I wanted to get away from Augusta, so I took my first available opportunity, which happened to be at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, in Durant, Oklahoma, near where my mother was raised.  I didn’t finish school then, but I met and still keep several very good friends, and I also met the woman who was to become my wife.  She gave birth to a baby girl in 1993 (whom I actually delivered myself), and in 1994 we moved back to Augusta.  That all came abruptly to an end in 1997 (and that’s all I have to say about that).  What’s important now is that: I used to have a beautiful wife and daughter.  Today, I have neither.  In fact, the only things I have in my life before I was 25 are my parents, my brothers, my friends and my memories.  (The university system has managed to keep up with my bad grades from Oklahoma for me.) Nevertheless, I don’t see 1997 as being a good year for me.  I didn’t know what to do; I had no direction, and I began to grapple with my own spiritual convictions, and one day, I came across a passage in the Bible from the sixth chapter of Matthew, in which Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount:
“Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on…Behold the fowls of the air…Consider the lilies of the field…Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you”.
I now know that passage to be true.
Parts of that year are kind of a hazy blur, now, but not long after I read that passage, I found myself packing what I thought I needed into a backpack and walking out of Augusta for ‘God knows where.’  So, that’s how I ended up on the road for six years. 
I look at it now as an endeavor to overcome grief; though, at the time, I didn’t care whether I lived or died – as long as it wasn’t in Augusta.  During that time, I hitch-hiked around the country for a total of close to maybe a hundred weeks or so (on many separate occasions), I slept under dozens of bridges, rode in dozens of tractor-trailers, lived in a park in Seattle, been to Europe twice, found under-the-table work in Holland, Germany, and France, and over a dozen U.S. states, done just about every type of labor job thinkable from Atlanta to Indianapolis, Chicago, Fargo, and Seattle (to name a few), and I’ve been to 42 of our 50 states.
From that extended experience, I learned more than anyone could hope to learn in any book, but after a while, I began to realize that I didn’t want to live the life of a vagabond forever.  But, I think, the most important thing I learned is that exploration and discovery is not always in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
So, in 2003, I came back home to Augusta and enrolled in ASU to finish the education I had bailed on a decade earlier. I changed my more troublesome ways and settled in to my studies. As well, I came to ASU ultimately to get out of that field of work to try to pursue something different.  For about the past twenty years, since I’ve been fifteen years old, I’ve worked primarily in screenprinting and signmaking, both printing and doing graphic layouts for all sorts of products – before, during, and after my first attempt at higher education, and as well, anywhere I stayed any length of time when I was travelling, I usually managed to find my way to a screenprinting or sign shop.

I now find myself on the threshold of a new age and I am excited and optimistic about the future.