Like many, I grew up in an unstable emotionally and verbally violent household. Like less many, once I was old enough to successfully rebel I sought refuge in drugs and the bowels of the rotten.com version of the 90’s.
In 1995 I was a social fixture of the hacking community, spending most of my adolescence dumping online, buying nirvana bootlegs on USEnet, venting slurs on IRC, attending DEFCON, and spending a short stint directing operations of a retail computer store in my home town of Sacramento. I first began selling my artwork as a freelance web designer in 1996 while exploring self photography as I ran one in the first wave of internet sadgirl webcams on the internet.
In 1998, I relocated to break software and run test labs in Seattle, transitioning client-based chat service networks to what would eventually become the centralized web-based social media fuckshow we have today. In my tech era’s death rattle, I worked a bit on burgeoning smartphones as well.
Somewhere in between obsessively documenting my personhood and wildly oscillating between being a sagelike armchair therapist and an aggressive verbose asshole, I was active in the first waves of the digital music era at the turn of the century, recording, mixing, and releasing independent ambient electronic music at mp3.com under the moniker “Not Applicable”. The contrast between my ranting swear-filled commentaries and the vulnerable, tender music I was making developed a small but mighty international fanbase of gen-x geeks and weirdos.
Discovering circus in 2001 was my gateway to reconciling communication with my alienated body, eventually combining performance, emotional expression, mindfulness, exercise, and teaching others. By 2003 I had left the tech industry in a characteristic self righteous huff, had figured out my behavior and origins were abusive and that I could do something about that, thus the holistic healing journey I am still on began. By 2005 various forms of therapy to various levels of affect had followed, transforming the content and overall timbre of my online presence as well as my artwork.
By 2007 I was a resident aerialist and ensemble troupe member at a Seattle underground theater, working full time administrating a medical office, and attending massage school at night. Over the next few years I directed three stage shows Obsidian, HASML, and Embodied, and beging in 2009 I served three years as the board president, co-founder and creative director of Vita Arts, a 501(c)(3) as part of my first wobbly and problematic forays into activism.
In 2008 I went into massage business as Artful Touch where I eventually integrated the work of Karen Clay’s Somatic Unwinding and became certified to teach The Grief Recovery Method in 2014. That same year the murder of Michael Brown fully radicalized me, and I began the long process of ultimately shedding what had become my life.
In 2015 I moved into a van and traveled the country while sustained by odd jobs and a small group of Patreon supporters. I returned to Seattle in the summers to work with DirtCorps restoring wetlands, installing green water infrastructure ala Rainwise, and working to support the White Center Food Bank with fresh food grown at Citysoil urban farm. In 2018, after multiple years on the road, I settled for a time in Tacoma, WA re-establishing Artful Touch mainly to have an office and art studio to periodically live out of and participating in climate activism with 350 Tacoma.
In 2020, COVID-19 invited me to finish off the final iteration of my healing practice, as well as most of my faith in the working class to confederate against the rise of fascism. I genuinely expected the proletariat would collectively rise up against 9-5’s, the systematic murder of a planet that showed an immediate self mending improvement the moment we all stopped going to work, and use our precious moment of real economic leverage to push for public transportation, UBI, child and health care, and the return of free third spaces and commons. I thought we would stick together.
Turns out, we as collective can’t even take mildly inconvenient precautions to protect one another from preventable death and disability via viral pandemic we’d all been hearing about being on the brink of experiencing for decades. I revisited those dark teenage years of near total isolation as “society” doubled and tripled down on excluding disabled and immunocompromised people from participating in life. Then, in 2023, what little faith I had left in so-called “civilization” was crushed along with Gaza.
It is now 2025, thirty years after embarking upon, eventually reaching escape velocity, and subsequently returning to an excessively isolated existence of impotently criticizing society and actualizing myself creatively online. As was the case the first time, I emerged from that experience fundamentally changed, now sick to death of staring at my own pixelated smirky face, broadcasting a dramatized post-produced fantasy version of a magnetic personality that has been impossible to genuinely connect with.
In my mid 40’s, I’ve committed to a relative obscurity in terms of what used to be a very public persona based in a fantasy of having influence over cycles of the greater world, in favor of coming to an accord with the quiet, tangible, mundane one that actually fucking exists. For now.
May God forgive us all.