Sometimes I wonder if I'm really a product of this generation or something that combines past lives. I often speculate that Benjamin Franklin and I are actually kinderd spirits and might have been buds, had I the fortune to have been born 250 years earlier than I was this time around. I like to believe that we were in a past life. This time through though, my dad was a cop in Chicago during the 1950s and 1960s and I'm pretty sure that I used to be a hippie. Although life was simply not as label oriented back then and many of us weren't as sure of what they actually were as they seem to be now. However, in retrospect, I believe that I would have been happier as a beatnik; the philosophy was much better and I really like espresso! Also I felt a kinship with beat philosophy when I discovered that my grandfather was the basis for a character in Nelson Algrin's work, The Man With The Golden Arm (Sinatra really wore a really cool hat in the movie version.. plus he got to make it with Kim Novak, which was the dream of many a young man in the late 50s... myself included). Before that I was simply another self-destructive product of the post-WWII "baby boom" who, while waiting for the Commie devil dogs to drop "the big one," embraced the joys, and associated demons, of alcohol and smoke shortly after my eighth birthday. This could have been an attempt to hide the budding sensitivity that was growing within my disjointed personna... I don't know for sure. Then, as a wayward teen, I hung out a lot in the Old Town district of Chicago and seriously overindulged in music (and more really erotic fantasies about Kim Novak). I found inner peace in The Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Them and The Buffalo Springfield in addition to half pints of Seagrams that were aptly supplied by an early mentor that we simply knew as Joe the wino and the enlightenment of Debbie Pilch (who was the second woman that I was in love with in my initial sixteen years). I grew up wanting to develop my own religion (based on the principled model of Jim Baaker's tranquil, and extremely profitable, PTL empire) or to become the next Bob Dylan (shit, everyone wanted that!). After drinking my way out of college, I spent several really chaotic years in the Coast Guard, which successfully kept me away from crap that was going on in Viet-Nam (or extended incarceration in a federal penitentiary), initiated me into a lot of my off-kilter personality fundamentals, released a barrage of political (and personal) confusion and lite the spark that eventually flamed into what shrinks labeled as serious drug and alcohol problems. In my mind I never considered these sociological excursions to be diversions from excessive reality at its worst. But, in order to survive in the crap that my generation has deemed responsible, I had to cut back. I made a name for myself by getting kicked off of a couple ships for being an advocate of basic human (at times, constitutional) rights or, as the CG brass liked to put it, a fuckin' pain in the ass. Somewhere in those years I foolishly let Judy (from NYC) and Betty (from Baltimore) slip out of my life (despite the fact that I can't remember their last names, they were the fourth and fifth women that I loved in my life), discovered left-wing politics and was exposed to new sounds that I really never experienced before. I developed my attraction to folk music past the folk-rock level in addition to a developing facination with the noise that was being created by pickers like Kris Kristofferson, Gordon Lightfoot, The Allman Brothers and Poco. Most important.. I found Pete Seeger, who facinated me with his anti-war stance during The VietNam period an earlier taking a stand against Joe McCarthy's HUAC hearings! Upon my discharge from the CG, I became devoted to the anti-military and anti-war movement, which was not popular with the USCG lifers who were attempting to destroy me. My claim to fame in the movement came when I was detained, for distributing an anti-military newspaper, at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. The lawyers from CAMP (Chicago Area Military Project) successfully defended the blatent violation of my First Amendment rights, but also ate up the rather minimal damages in fees and expenses. So much for constitutional rights, I guess. Then, completely lacking any social ambition, I wasted a scads of time in college.. returned to Old Town... became totally addicted to the acoustic guitar and folk music... got a Jones for bluegrass.... continued to over-indulge on numerous intoxicants that were oft prohibited in polite society and even tried to learn how to play the banjo before surrendering to the warm and supple breast of Korporate Amerika for my spiritual guidance in life. From that point I ventured deep into the nightmarish living hell of pressed collars, dirty gray cubicles, morally stained and demented kosher Zebras and electric toothbrushes (OK, I still have the toothbrush!!). Now, so many worlds have passed.. a breakdown (number 3), depression, therapy, reentering reality, the execution of John Lennon and the passing of Jerry... I can't indulge as I used to and I work a lot; although, as I got older, mother Korporate Amerika, the bitch that she is, has lost interest and cast me adrift in the vast uncharted waters of the great unwashed. So I make ends meet and have found that teaching music is far more satisfying than anything in my pitiful past existence deep in the bowels of the straight. I've always dabbled in songwriting and hope to put an ensemble together, that will perform my songs and exist on any of the extreme borders of bizare (I refuse to accept the road to the bizarre as a single path!!), and aimlessly wander and perform in the saloons and brothels of Amerika. I'd like to compose an opera for the contemporary urban dweller before I start my next life.