self

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 which made it feel safe. near my grandparents, which made things feel comfortable. we didn't plan to stay, but we also didn't plan well enough to leave.

i was in public school there until 5th grade. 6th grade was the move up to an infamous junior high. my mom believed i needed to have a more enriched experience, a real challenge, so she got me interview-ready and into Princeton Day.

i remember sitting with my dad every morning waiting for the bus to come pick me up. once onboard, the Trenton crew would drift alongside industrial warehouses — long decommissioned with barely any windows still intact — and step-change to lush, preserved, and seemingly enchanted forest, manicured lawns, amphitheaters, and a fucking hockey rink. each day i would return to the hood that raised me.

culture shock, sure. but impermanent.

it helped that i was confident academically. school made sense. inputs, outputs, distinct rules. but socially, it was an entirely different story. awkward. not a damn thing 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. attention was paid. girls were leaning in and listening closely.

i remember thinking, you can do that?

it felt like a cheat code. like you could bypass whatever social wiring was missing and still connect.

so 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. it 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. now, everything had somewhere to go.

after Princeton Day, Rider U — the only college that offered my broke ass 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 history and philosophy at once. systems, incentives, how things are supposed to work. but the real world was messier than the models.

so when i graduated summa cum laude, i took my degree and went to work at Quakerbridge Mall. obviously.

climbed my way up to a Brookstone sales manager. for a time, i was slinging more personal massagers than anyone else at the company. is this peak success?

the irony of my store being shut down was that we may have been the only location to crush every sales goal they put in front of us.

luckily, i got some severance. after the unemployment hit my bank account, i used it all to buy equipment to start recording music. the parents were saints for putting up with my "dreams."

i was looking for beta-testers in my beat laboratory. ended up chatting with my college bud, Valerie, who instead of taking me up on my offer, 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. i'd seen enough dead bodies killed by drugs or bullets to feel like it wasn't a place where anything positive could happen.

but Valerie — who couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds — was so thrilled to go to this place she even offered me a ride.

so i went.

it was a small bar. normal enough when walking in: bartenders pouring perfectly foamed beers from the tap, decanting wine, concocting sangria. as we walked past the bar, a deep growl started to rattle my ribs. there was a velvet curtain. i walked through and into a different world.

i found 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 first 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 the room as keys echoed into the exposed rafters. pieces moving in every direction, but with some muse secretly threading it all together.

i remember just watching. trying to understand how it worked.

then i met Benny.

he was the reason the room felt like it did. no hesitation, no filtering. just fully himself. he could pick up any instrument by ear and riff — always in service of the song, never himself.

the open mic was his. he ran it with this philosophy — the list is sacred. you sign up, you get to play — though he'd effortlessly shuffle things around to keep the show tight for the room. 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 the first time i got called up. i knew my way around a stage but the energy here was special. i started playing one of my originals and about halfway through someone found the beat on a cajón while Benny hopped on bass. and by the end a saxophone was blaring, riffing a sonorous solo. no idea who was steering, but it wasn't me.

i was hooked after that. it didn't take long for Benny and me to buddy up and run the open mic together.

it cost more than we were paid to do it. but there were other ways for the Trenton Social to pay the bills.

i started washing dishes, then waiting tables, then figuring out how to balance the endless chatter of drunken government employees with the infinite pour of long islands while tending bar — not really a challenge because i was never alone.

every night after our shift at the bar, we'd go back to Benny's corner brickhouse in a weirdly beautiful 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 an 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. far from random, his stories would fall somewhere between standup and a pressure valve for life's curveballs.

those nights became the ritual.

music, bartending, late nights, building relationships.

the kid who didn't know what to say now wouldn't shut up. talking to women all day, 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."

corny as all hell. and not even true. more like blue eyes, sunrise-golden hair.

opening move: invite her to the open mic. very public, easy. unbeknownst to me, she showed up with her friend.

both of them wearing wigs.

wigs.

not that i could have noticed her in the darkness of that room, but at one point, we were three feet apart.

yes, she was out to creep but also see if i was a womanizer.

evidently, i passed her test. the next week we hung out, officially.

i was bartending and Deana brought two emotional-support friends, Alena and Taylor. safety in numbers.

the conversation was effortless, we all got to know each other. but i couldn't stop watching her. i wanted to lounge on the curve of her cheek bones, and let her stare freeze me in place.

even though our first time out was a subtle interrogation, i felt comfortable enough to handle the ambush and they felt comfortable enough to come back to Benny's basement studio after we closed down the bar — they listened to us sing songs into the night.

a good group. but the time i had with her that night was not nearly enough.

not the type to play hard-to-get, i knew she felt the same. we became inseparable, then official. still are.

packing tape

i remember the first time i met Deana's dad.

had to have been a Sunday afternoon. Deana, Alena, and i were lounging about on the floor of her living room, most likely stoned, when this 6'5 tower of a human walked through the door. based on her apparent panic, Andrey was home earlier than she expected. not only was he tall, but he had to have weighed more than double me, not at all chubby, every pound earned. his massive frame held up. he began introducing himself with subharmonics that absolutely shook the house, his broken English matching his Eastern European villain aesthetic. most startling was the size of the mitt he extended to shake my hand, each finger roughly the thickness of my wrist.

his smile was soft and his eyes were kind.

gracefully intimidated.

fun fact about Andrey Savchenko: he's a pastor for a Russian Baptist church, and presides over all of North America.

like the whole fucking continent.

me not being Christian or married to his daughter was tense. we didn't speak the same language but i could read the room.

Deana refused to care. a rebel, she pushed her parents' buttons and liked it.

tired of the back and forth between my house and hers, she asked me to move in. i was respectful, cooked well, and took out the trash without being asked. i also slept on the floor next to her bed. that helped. but only a little.

then we drove to Maryland to pick up a rambunctious, miniature Bernadoodle — black and white with beige patches. Koda ended up being anything but miniature. also, Deana's parents hated dogs. i was not overly enthused if i'm being honest. this goofy little bastard was stealing my spotlight.

one morning, it was beyond frigid in Philly and the windows — insulated with packing tape — were bleeding out the little warmth i had left on the floor. after using Koda as my personal space heater, i accepted his place in my life.

and apparently her parents accepted mine, when Deana's mom, Nina, insisted i sleep under the covers. even though i would come back from the bar at 2am smelling like some combination of bleach, alcohol, and stale second-hand cigarillos, not once did either of them ever ask me to leave.

though, did we really want to stay?

the comedown

one night after Benny and me wrapped up another night with the drunks, he mentioned that he had just acquired some golden teachers.

"what does that mean?"

found out: they're equal parts smooth and potent magic mushrooms.

ok.

this launched me into what must have felt like a speech i had meticulously planned for such an occasion.

i explained that while shrooms are probably safe, i'd only ever consider using them much later in life, in a decade, maybe, after i have a steady career, success, a family. after i'd already hit all the milestones.

Benny side-eyed me, said "sure man" and i never gave it a thought again.

until the next morning when Deana woke up and said "i wanna do some drugs"

when i asked what kind, she of course said "mushrooms"

this was so out of left field for her that i rolled my eyes at my own hypocrisy and called Benny to let him know i'd take an eighth.

"sure man"

Deana and i met Benny at a tent-filled meadow festival called Leaperland, where he was providing the entertainment. grills, grunge, and fireworks abound — we hung around long enough to receive some tips for effective use. then we were on our way to the Jersey shore.

we met at my friend's house in Beach Haven, 4 of us ready to face the unknown.

when the sun set, we portioned out 4 servings of the dried fungi and ate with bread and peanut butter because we clearly hated ourselves (advice: tea is a significant improvement).

nearly an hour in and the individual frames of our vision began to trail, color became more vivid, and the world was somehow more real.

we stepped out onto the beach and felt the billion-year-old starlight ripping through our faces.

the warm sand, the salty air misting from the waves — the cops patrolling the beach after curfew.

even though we were well above the age allowed to roam, nope.

we returned to the safety of the house and by some means of discourse decided to watch Planet Earth.

the sound of David Attenborough's voice is like a soothing hug, warm, though not enough to warm those penguins huddling during that goddamned blizzard.

turns out when the shivering horde breaks rank for even a second, that warmth bleeds out along the edges, they reshuffle to close the gap, and trample those too small and too inexperienced to move in step.

nope.

i left the horrors of that room in search of solitude anywhere else in the house.

Deana found me later. we curled up in a blanket like children in the womb. the darkness consumed us — until we'd peek out and experience light as multi-colored photons bouncing off of breathing walls.

she was sage enough to show me my stupidity without making me feel stupid:

"don't try and control it, just let it happen."

delivered playfully, her words eased me into a comedown where i felt like i understood myself, my place in the universe, here and now, the purpose of love — all with absolute conviction.

am i spiritual now? maybe. call it a work in progress.

am i hopelessly in love? definitely.

her parents kept asking when we'd get married.

but they should have been asking if she was pregnant.

her skin tinged yellow from some combination of hormones; her appetite impossible to satiate without an entire jar of Brooklyn-made dill pickles; and, eventually, not even her oversized hoodies could hide that cute little bump.

we didn't tell them until it was impossible to hide it, and they were devastated she was too fearful to tell them sooner.

even though it was no question that she was my person, Deana started to joke about our unborn kid taking her last name since she was doing all the work.

immediately after scraping together enough extra cash to stroll into the mall and snag a perfect Alex + Ani ring, i proposed in the car in rush hour traffic. she said yes anyway. we had a Quaker wedding on a grass-covered rooftop in the city of Philadelphia a month before Phoenix was born.

us, her parents, and a dog they didn't approve of but tolerated, all under one roof.

then Phoenix came and changed everything.

less time out, more time home. Deana went back to work after three months — only half paid.

she wanted to breastfeed but pumping during shifts is harder than it should be. the stress mounts when you're the breadwinner, and eventually the supply dries up.

i had built big routines around my art and that community in Trenton. but being a dad pulled me into a smaller orbit. the two lives didn't share a clock.

even if it was far from stable and even further from ideal, it was our life.

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 gone five months into me being a dad.

when i found out he died, it was unexpected but not surprising.

he didn't have much family, and those who showed up weren't familiar with the person i knew — the godfather to my kid. they only knew the addict.

hollow leg

i went back to work at 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 poorly imitating myself.

everything got tight. time, money, attention — all of it compressed. we had enough to survive but not enough to breathe.

if i stayed on that path, we'd always be under pressure.

i needed a new obsession. one that didn't depend on being in a room at 1am.

over the years i've had a hard time placing what led me to code. but one moment stands out.

in 2017, before we were parents, Deana got me tickets to see the Gorillaz at Penns Landing. truly, she always knew what i wanted before i did. it was an outdoor venue on one of those days where the sky explained in plain English that you were gonna get wet. it did nothing to stop the swell of humanz into Festival Pier.

from the first sound check, to Vince Staples opening the show, to Damon Albarn bellowing megaphonic haunts in every direction, good vibes crushed the crowd into a mass of meat sacks, puppeteered in lock step to the beat. behind the sound was a wall of sights. a graphic onslaught that made the music corporeal enough to punch me in between my ears.

i left that pier hungry for the power i had just witnessed.

so i scoured the internet and happened upon Processing. immediately began trying to make pixels dance across the screen. then, i needed to show anyone else the birth of my digital monstrosity but had no idea how to share a computer screen with the world wide web.

that curiosity turned into a rabbit hole.

i committed hard.

5am every day before the house was up. tutorials, docs, forums, braving the cesspool of reddit threads where i found Danny — a senior designer/engineer out of Colorado who'd been offering to mentor strangers. apparently almost nobody ever took him up on it. i did, for both design and development. he helped me see that all of my efforts were in good spirit but poor form. my shitty portfolio, resume, skillset — he tore it apart. i rebuilt. he tore it apart again.

but the mornings weren't enough. so i walked. four hours a day, every day, rain or shine, pushing a stroller and listening to podcasts. it was the only way i could absorb anything while responsibility was awake. i wore holes in the bottoms of my flip flops while Deana wore a hazmat suit to work. COVID.

i needed a job.

at some point, we had Juniper. and Deana went through it all again — the same impossible math under the same roof.

i had my first interview in the hospital on the day Juniper was born. over the phone. no zoom, no visual. the guy kept talking about nodes. traversing the node. deleting the node. inserting into the node. i didn't know what a node was. i bombed it.

and kept bombing — hundreds of applications, dozens of interviews. but at that point, sunk costs kept me afloat.

my father-in-law thought i was a "forever student" and, while i refused to agree, he just wanted to know his daughter and grandkids would be taken care of.

when Juniper was five months old we got accepted into rent-controlled housing. separately, so did Deana's parents.

we were finally free to live our own lives.

and make our own luck.

chatting with Isaac, the director of tech at Rhone, was different. we were supposed to be talking about a job. but we also talked about 3d printers, and lasers, and an app he had built for his buddy's company. i liked him immediately. the brutal conversations that had come before this one — easy to forget.

i remember getting through the tech assessment, meeting the team, and being asked by Sally, the director of ecom, if i was comfortable with a senior role — the first time i realized the role required it.

regardless of what my imposter syndrome wanted to say, i said yes.

then Juniper turned one and i started my first job. making way more money than i felt i deserved.

foundation

day one: they asked me to decrypt a 30,000-person email list. i had no idea how. barely knew what encryption meant in this context. when i finally figured it out, wrote some code, and solved my first real-world problem — i might have cried.

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.

after three weeks of employment, i convinced Deana to quit her job. since she was 14, working was her identity. her only form of freedom. until it wasn't.

we reorganized within our tiny apartment. new routine, new roles, new growth.

when Azalea was on the way, i started reading. a lot. forty books my first year. personal development, masculinity, responsibility, wealth. the kind of stuff i probably needed years earlier but wasn't ready for.

i grew up with a lot of love, but not a lot of extravagance. the first time i took Deana 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 at a stoplight without blinking. and i remembered Benny — who gave away damn near everything he made.

scale or fail

Azalea was born while i was still at Rhone. before she was two months old, i was poached by Austin's own Made In Cookware.

i went from selling pants to selling pans.

Dan, the lead engineer there, spoke in obscure — yet somehow familiar — pop culture, alphabetized everything, and was self-taught like me. after one conversation, the job was mine, no technical assessment. risky for them but i made sure it wasn't a mistake. i learned twice as fast watching him work and my confidence grew.

but Dan eventually left and i spent an entire year proving i could lead before they officially let me.

the work kept getting bigger. harder problems. i got obsessed with doing things right — performance, accessibility, architecture.

i needed to understand every layer. every decision. if something broke, i wanted to know why before anyone else did.

but there was a big world outside of my little corner of remote work, and i wanted to explore it.

so we started traveling because we could. our families were sad to see us go but, for the most part, cheering us on toward adventure.

a month at a time in different cities — the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, then Joshua Tree in the middle of summer. while i didn't see family as often, facetime is a thing, and we probably had more deep conversations on the road than in person. i talked to my Dad almost every day.

then we drove up the Coastal Highway of California to Portland, Oregon.

there's something about the Pacific Northwest. the redwoods, impossibly large, ancient. boulders the size of buildings burst just beyond the break. bonfires stretched along the shoreline, each generating its own gravity. every fire had its own conversation.

we had many facetimes back home, showing off the new planet we were exploring, and made plans to see Deana's very pregnant friend a few hours north in Washington.

we ate pizza and ice cream at Lovely's damn near every night. we even happened upon our favorite strain of weed, perfectly, legally prerolled and ready for us after the kids fell asleep.

i watched my growing family breathe into this place and relax, Deana and me returning to ourselves before things got hard.

we'd been trying for a fourth. we knew the night it happened.

the next morning, Deana got a call that her friend just had her baby. while they celebrated, my mom and sister called.

i took it in another room.

they let me know my Dad had died.

two days before, we were all on facetime at the beach from the Goonies. Dad was watching the kids wade through ankle-deep streams into the salty foam. i didn't know it would be the last time.

we came back to Pennsylvania.

Orion was written in stars, our first boy on the way.

we hosted family often. we made new friends. but Pennsylvania wasn't home anymore, and we weren't done moving.

so we moved to Austin.

we had our yearly onsite in January. i attempted the in-office visit without letting my company know that i'd moved. when i did my civic duty and updated my address to the beautifully tax-free state of Texas, i learned that moving is actually a big enough deal to trigger notifications.

anyway, proximity led to new opportunities. we had a lunch and learn at work. some guy who'd evolved his whole consulting firm to leverage AI.

his demo was about as casual as the breakfast tacos strewn about the conference table. he was just sitting there, switching between tools, prompting, generating, iterating. not even thinking that hard about it.

it was fast. loose. and it worked.

you can do that?

i felt friction watching it.

i'd built my identity around control. understanding the code deeply, making deliberate decisions, keeping things tight.

this was not that, at all.

but the results were undeniable.

and i realized he didn't care about the code, even though he was extremely capable of writing it. he cared way more about the person using the code.

fine.

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.

my brain broke the first time i caught myself talking to a terminal. 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 chatting up our data right now?

the longer i sat with it, the clearer the answer: 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.

work in progress

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. when someone has an idea, i help them get it out of their head and into the world.

i'm still figuring that out. but i've been here before.