My first lifelong love was Godzilla. As a little kid I would scan the TV guides on the weekends to make sure I didn't miss a single movie featuring Godzilla (or any other giant monster). I wanted to be Godzilla. I wanted to stomp on the world, make the bullies pay, then leave and be left alone.

My second lifelong love was the Transformers. Giant warring robots from another planet really spoke to me. We didn't have much money, so I typically had to wait for birthdays or holidays to acquire a new Transformer. At the age of thirteen I got my first after-school job in order to buy my own Autobots and Decepticons. (And comic books, especially Hulk comics, for which I have a lifelong like, if not love.)

My third lifelong love was music. At first it was mostly hard rock (Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin), but discovering Black Sabbath spawned a life-long love of heavy metal, while Mr. Bungle proved there really are no rules when it comes to music and genres. Once I picked up a guitar, my Transformers went into stasis in a large cardboard box in the basement.

I spent my high school years writing eclectic songs and playing guitar for my first band, Crayola Death. All I wanted was to play rock music, but attending college is what was expected of me. Circumstances and contrarianism conspired to send me to a Catholic unversity (despite my lifelong adamant atheism) to study musicology, but it disagreed with me, so I switched to studying math, then philosophy, then theology, etc. I was aimless.

My fourth lifelong love was New York City. My best friend was attending NYU, and when I visited him, I fell in love with the chaos, sleeplessness, and freedom of New York. I transferred to NYU, and while I continued to put in the minimum attention to school, I immersed myself in city life. When I absent-mindedly failed to secure funding for my fourth year of college, I happily dropped out to work odd jobs from "fire guard" to managing an ice cream store.

During this time I formed Brompton's Cocktail, an experimental rock quartet, and in addition to songwriting and guitar-playing, I took on the role of singer for the first time. I later helped form The Invincible Doctor Psyclops Invasion, a cinematic spy-rock outfit, wherein I switched from guitar to keyboards, theremins, samples and avant-garde vocalizations. In the wake of both of those bands, I founded The Monster Project, a rock/jazz septet that performed Godzilla and other monster movie soundtrack selections. (I played bass for that project, occasionally with a bow, and conducted.)

My fifth lifelong love was the internet, whereby I rediscovered my love of Autobots and Decepticons. At first it was a happenstance encounter of some classic Transformers box art online. This burst of nostalgia led to the unearthing of the afore-mentioned large cardboard box. I had already built a website for Brompton's Cocktail; I simultaneously started building an online archive of whatever Transformers box art I could find under the moniker "Botch". More importantly, I finally found a lifelong career that interested me, front-end web development. Meanwhile, Botch's Transformers Box Art Archive (this site) has showcased Transformers box art online since 1998.

My sixth lifelong love is Heather, who I met in 1999 at a Brompton's Cocktail show. We courted, fell in love, moved in together, and after six years of romancing we finally got married in a private ceremony on Po'olenana Beach in Maui. She loves horror, cats, bookstores, restaurants, and me.

In 2007, we packed up our cats and toys and moved across the country to Portland, Oregon. (I really like Portland, but it's not a love.) For a couple years I sang for an alternative rock band called I Disagree, but eventually I formed Die Like Gentlemen, a rock/metal/sludge group that feels like my purest musical distillation of all the heavy, groovy, and progressive music that I enjoy and want to also embody.

Heather has four cats -- they're hers, not mine -- and has found her calling as a bookseller at Powell's Books. I continue to work as a web developer, collect toys, and when there isn't a pandemic, spend a lot of time playing and seeing live music.

... and my collection of Transformers continues to grow.

Last updated March 2021