i grew up in Trenton, New Jersey.
not in a romantic way. just in it. my parents got a fixer upper in a nice area. it was near a nursing home. near my grandparents. it seemed safe enough. while we didn't intend to stay, life had other plans.
always heard you're supposed to stay present, but you wouldn't see a dying city if you lived moment to moment. it happens slow. and i lived mostly inside my house so i hardly noticed.
i was in public school there until 5th grade. my mom needed to give me all the options in life she felt she didn't have. so she got me interview ready and for 6th grade i got into Princeton Day — private school, manicured lawns, the whole thing. i remember sitting with my dad every morning waiting for the bus to come pick me up. it was weird going to this perfectly kept campus and then getting dropped off back in the inner-city neighborhood i grew up in.
culture shock that i eventually got used to. kids are so blank canvas they can adapt to seamingly anything.
i was always confident academically. school made sense. inputs, outputs, clear rules. but socially, it was different. i didn't feel like i had a way in. at least, nothing that felt natural.
when i was 16, i was at the beach and saw a guy playing guitar. can't remember what he was playing, if he was any good, but there was a circle around him. people paying attention. girls leaning in, listening closely.
i remember thinking, _you can do that?_
it felt like a cheat code. like you could bypass whatever social wiring you didn't have and still connect.
i went home and dug up the guitar i'd been given as a kid, but never got further than a few half-hearted attempts at twinkle twinkle little star.
i started playing. pretty quickly, it turned into writing.
that part came quite naturally and gave me a way to say things i wasn't too keen on saying to anyone, let alone myself. before that, i don't think i was really expressing much at all. after that, everything had somewhere to go.
after Princeton Day, Rider U -- the only college that offered me a full scholarship.
loved learning about all of everything — art, biology, ethics — but was told my grants would evaporate if i didn't pick a lane my junior year.
so i studied political science and global studies.
felt like a perfect synergy of history and philosophy. systems, incentives, how things are supposed to work. but the real-world version felt off. messy in a way that didn't match the models.
so when i graduated summa cum laude, i took my degree and went to work at Quakerbridge Mall. obviously.
Brookstone sales manager, where, for a time, i was the slinging more personal massagers than anyone else at the company. felt more surreal than like success.
the irony of my store being shut down despite it being one of the only ones to beat all of it's sales goal, was infuriating at the time.
luckily, i got some severance + unemployment and used it all to buy music equipment and started recording myself. my parents were saints for putting up with my "dreams."
i was looking for people to record when i talked to my college bud, Valerie, who instead of taking me up on my offer to record her, invited me to an open mic. in Trenton, of all places.
i almost didn't go. i'd spent a lot of time trying to get away from Trenton, not lean into it. i'd seen enough dead bodies killed by drugs and/or bullets to feel like it wasn't a place where anything positive could happen.
but Valerie -- a 90 pound girl -- seemed so thrilled to go to this place she even picked my carless ass up to get me there.
it was a small bar. normal enough when walking in: bartenders tapping kegs, uncorking wine bottles, concoting sangria. as we walked passed the bar, a deep growl started to rattle my ribs. there was a velvet curtain. i walked through and into a different world.
a room packed to the brim with every type of person i would never expect to see in my hometown. live music, but not in the usual way. no linear procession of bands. it was fluid. drummer stays, bassist rotates, a microphone used to amplify voices and then brass. a harmonica solo that lasts a bit too long. an unexpected distortion pedal at exactly the right time to cut through room as keys would echo into the rafters. pieces moving, but some muse secretly threading it all together.
i remember just watching, trying to understand how it worked.
then i met Benny.
he was one of the most immediately magnetic people i'd ever met. no hesitation, no filtering. just fully himself. an incredible musician who could pick up anything immediately by ear, with just about any instrument.
the open mic was his. he ran it with this philosophy — the list is sacred. you sign up, you get to play -- not that he didn't shuffle things around to keep the show tight for the room, but you had to try _really_ hard to get turned away.
he talked to every person who walked into the bar, snapped an impossible number of candids and posted the haul online every week. everyone was part of the experience.
i remember my first time on stage. i knew my way around a stage but this felt different. i started playing one of my originals and about halfway through someone jumped on cajón. i think Benny hopped on bass and figured out my song in real time. by the end a saxophone was blaring, riffing on the final chorus. i learned what "being in the moment" actually meant.
i was a fucking addicted after that. week after week, for years.
eventually i helped him run the open mic.
to make extra money, i started washing dishes, then waiting tables, then bartending.
every night after our shift at the bar, we'd go back to Benny's corner brickhouse in a weirdly beautful part of town, smoke a joint, and talk for hours.
usually about the dumb shit people do at a bar.
but often Benny would tell me the most insane, terrifying, hilarious story from his days as an addict. the next day a story equally as insane -- the man lived more lives than seemed possible at 40. despite the trauma, he always was looking for a laugh and had hardly any issue pulling it from you.
those nights became the ritual.
that period of my life was messy and alive.
music, bartending, late nights, building relationships.
finally hitting my stride in a thriving music community, i was holding court — talking to women all day and hitting the apps every night.
but after i started talking to Deana, i didn't want to talk to anyone else.
the first thing i said to my future wife was "hey, Blondie."
i invited her to the open mic. very public, easy. she showed up with her friend, both of them wearing wigs. not that i would have necessarily noticed in that dark room — she wanted to see if i was a player. Benny, the shutterbug that he was, snapped a pic that showed we were three feet apart at one point and i didn't even notice.
the next week we hung out officially. i was bartending and Deana brought two friends with her, so i was basically on a date with three women our first time out. they felt comfortable enough to come back to Benny's house after the shift — our ritual — and listen as Benny and i brought them down into the basement studio, built some loops, and sang songs into the night. her friends were pretty and fun, but i knew i loved this girl from basically the first time i saw her. she was funny and had this cold Russian persona that i needed to crack. it didn't take long. we became inseparable, then official, and never looked back.
i remember the first time i met Deana's dad. he came home earlier than she expected. Deana, her friend, and i were just hanging out and this 6'5 tower of a human walked through the door and gracefully shook my hand. tense, but he was also okay. he's a pastor for a Russian Baptist church, presides over all of North America. me not being Christian and not married to his daughter was an obvious tension point. but he let me move in. looking back, that was significant grace when he didn't have to give it. we didn't speak the same language — i navigated mostly non-verbally. i'm respectful, i cook well, and i clean. that helped.
her parents kept asking when we'd get married. we had a Quaker wedding a month before Phoenix was born.
us, her parents, and a dog they didn't approve of but tolerated, all under one roof. it was cramped.
it all blurred together in a way that felt real, even if it was far from stable and even further from ideal.
Phoenix changed everything, even if it took me a while to admit it. less time out, more time home. me trying to balance being present with still holding onto the life i had built around music and that scene.
i was already feeling the tension. like i was straddling two paths that didn’t quite line up.
then Benny relapsed.
he’d given me all the leeway to become a dad, hooked me up with easy money. but secretly he was struggling. i only saw him a few times after Phoenix was born. i remember going to his house and he didn’t need to tell me — it was obvious. he was a shell of the person who had become my best friend, though underneath the struggle i could still see him in there.
he was gone five months into me being a dad.
when i found out he died, it was unexpected but not surprising. i had lost my role model, my friend, my business partner, the godfather to my kid.
he didn’t have much family, and the ones he did have weren’t as familiar with the person i knew. they knew the addict he had been and returned to. my business relationship allowed me to keep many of his namesakes — his art, his instruments. specifically his acoustic guitars, the Taylors that he would put out every open mic so that even if people didn’t have the means to own a guitar, they had the option to play one. his legacy came to me.
and whatever balance i thought i had just disappeared.
it didn’t fade or taper off. it dropped out from under me.
i went back to the same bar, but it wasn’t the same place. same walls, same stage, same songs. but hollow.
writing music felt contrived. like i was imitating something that had already ended. i remember thinking, what’s the point?
i had built my whole life around that room, those people, that rhythm. take it away and i didn’t know what was left.
Deana was hit hard too. we were all pseudo-family. this wasn’t just my loss.
but we had each other. and we had Phoenix. that didn’t fix anything, but it meant i couldn’t just disappear into it.
everything got tight after that. time, money, attention — all of it compressed.
Deana went back to work after three months — only half paid. she wanted to breastfeed but pumping during shifts is hard, the stress mounts when you're the breadwinner, and eventually the supply dries up. we had enough to survive but not enough to breathe.
then we had Juniper. Deana went through it all again — three months, half paid, the same impossible math. when Juniper was five months old we got accepted into rent-controlled housing — so did Deana's parents — and that was when things finally started to loosen. less tension, more space, the relationship with her parents getting better.
i was home more. bartending and music didn't map cleanly to the life my growing family needed.
it became obvious pretty quickly that if i stayed on that path, we'd always be under pressure.
i needed something different. something that didn't depend on being in a room at 1am.
i had already touched code a bit through generative art. playing with [Processing](processing.org), trying to make groovy visuals for shows. at some point, i wanted to put them onto a website so other people could see them.
that curiosity turned into a rabbit hole.
web development, JavaScript, frameworks, everything i could get my hands on.
i committed hard.
5am every day before the house was up. tutorials, docs, forums, reddit threads. i found a mentor online, a senior designer/engineer, and took everything he gave me seriously.
but the mornings weren't enough. so i walked. four hours a day, every day, rain or shine, pushing the kids in the stroller and listening to podcasts and courses. it was the only way i could absorb anything while they were awake. i wore holes in the bottoms of my flip flops.
my father-in-law thought i was a forever student. he was asking his friends if i could work with them. he just wanted to know his daughter and grandkids would be taken care of. i get that now.
six months of that.
the day after Juniper turned one, i started my first job. Deana tried to keep working too, but after three weeks i convinced her to stay home. she resisted hard — her identity had been wrapped up in working since before she knew me. it was her only form of freedom. it took time for her to realize that staying home didn't mean losing that.
first day, they asked me to decrypt a 30,000-person email list. i had no idea how. didn't know what it was encrypted with. asked around — nobody else knew either. eventually we figured out it was Base64. i wrote a script that decoded the whole thing and felt the biggest rush i'd had in years. addicted.
i said yes to everything after that, especially the things i didn't know how to do. same thing i was learning at home with the kids — you don't get to opt out of the hard parts. you just sit in them until something gives.
my father-in-law apologized. our relationship has never been better.
my first job was at Rhone. my manager Isaac took a chance on me — one of the kindest people i'd ever met, completely in love with the work he was doing. he changed my life. he's not with us anymore, which is a travesty. more loss i've had to deal with.
when Azalea was on the way, i started reading. a lot. forty books my first year. personal development, masculinity, responsibility, money. the kind of stuff i probably needed years earlier but wasn't ready for.
one idea stuck: money is technology. it's energy. if you treat it like a friend, it acts like one. if you walk around saying your "friend" is the root of all evil, that friend is going to want nothing to do with you.
i grew up with a lot of love but not a lot of extravagance. so when i got a real job and took my wife out to a nice dinner, i felt guilty. like i didn't deserve it. like it somehow betrayed where i came from.
but then i noticed the other side. i could hand a five to someone on the street without blinking. and i remembered Benny — who gave away damn near everything he made and received it all back tenfold.
money isn't the thing. it's what lets you not think about the thing, so you can think about everything else.
Azalea was born while i was still at Rhone. before she was two months old, i switched to Made In Cookware — sizable bump in salary that my growing family needed. sleepless nights with a newborn while ramping up to a new job. i met Dan, our lead engineer, self-taught like me and brilliant. i learned so much from watching him work.
Dan eventually left and i spent a year trying to prove i could lead. the work kept getting bigger. harder problems. i got obsessed with doing things right — performance, accessibility, architecture. the kind of stuff most people skip over.
i wanted to understand every layer. every decision. if something broke, i wanted to know why before anyone else did.
somewhere in there, we started traveling. a month at a time in different cities — Asheville, Joshua Tree, Portland, Midway. the world got bigger. we realized we wanted to keep exploring.
but during our stay in Portland, we got pregnant with Orion. and my dad died.
we came back to Pennsylvania to have the baby and be with family. after a year, we decided to move to Austin — which happens to be Made In's headquarters.
that worked for a long time.
we had a lunch and learn at work. some guy who'd built his whole business on AI.
he was just sitting there, switching between tools, prompting, generating, iterating. not even thinking that hard about it.
it was fast. loose. almost casual.
and it worked.
i felt friction watching it.
i'd built my identity around control. understanding the code deeply, making deliberate decisions, keeping things tight.
this looked like the opposite.
but the results were undeniable.
and i realized he didn't care about the code. not like i did. he cared about what it got him.
so i started letting go of the code. not the thinking — the grip.
less writing every line. more shaping what came out. it felt wrong at first. like i was cheating on something i'd earned the hard way.
i remember the first real moment my brain broke was when i caught myself talking to our data. out loud. like it was a person.
we'd lost access to some important dashboards. i sat down, asked the right questions, and rebuilt something better than what we'd had. in about an hour.
am i really talking to data right now?
the more i sat with it, the answer was yes. me and the machines were working together.
after two weeks i realized i'd cleared about a year's worth of nice-to-haves. things i'd always talked about doing someday but never had time for. done. no hit to my current workload.
then my CEO started writing code. designers started shipping. people who had never built anything were building things. and i wasn't the bottleneck anymore.
it reminded me of that room behind the velvet curtain. you don't have to play every instrument. you just have to know when to come in and when to let someone else take it.
i don't know what's next exactly.
i know it's less about doing everything myself. more about being useful to the people around me. not in a self-help way. in a practical way — someone has an idea, i can help them get it out of their head and into the world.
i'm still figuring that out. but i've been here before. the part where you can't see the shape yet but you know you're supposed to be walking toward it.
so that's what i'm doing.