featured footnotes

for the curious reader:

1. Like my fellow Virgo Charlie Parker, I was born in Kansas City, Kansas.

2. My career in words began with a newspaper I wrote, published, and sold when I was 10.

3. As a young student of politics, I shook hands with Bobby Kennedy at the Crossroads Mall in Omaha, during the Nebraska Presidential Primary in 1968.

4. I was a distance runner in high school (in hindsight, it might have been my way of running away from home, over and over again), which inspired me to run a marathon when I was 16. The course took us through the corn fields around Ames, Iowa in July, where heat and humidity are in constant competition for the higher number. I finished in a dehydrated 3 hours and 15 minutes.

5. Intoxicated with tales of the expatriate art and literary scene in Paris in the 1920s (‘Vous êtes tous une génération perdue.’), I waited tables to finance my first trip to Europe, when I was 20. My girlfriend Mari and I spent a memorable night in a train car with an Italian family whose young son Massimo kept all of us awake, from Milano into Roma.

6. The first time I tried long-distance hitchhiking, I caught a ride from a truck driver named Vinny, and rode with him all the way from Council Bluffs, Iowa to New York City (over 1,200 miles/2,000 km).

7. My review of a Steve Forbert concert led to my first freelance article, which I sold as a Journalism student at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

8. I financed my second trip to Europe with the sale of a Nolan Ryan rookie baseball card I had bought for a penny. (The keys to this investment strategy being dumb luck, followed by 23 years in a World’s Finest Chocolate box.)

9. During the (second) Iraq War, I wrote and recorded a protest song called Cardboard Country Boy. ‘Now some folks, they don’t like me, but I don’t really care…’

10. Highlights of my long-time passion for The Beatles include meeting three members of The Quarry Men who were on the stage with John Lennon the day he met Paul McCartney, and visiting the homes in Liverpool where John and Paul were living that day they met.

11. The things I’ve done to make a buck (see cab driving, below) include retail clothing sales (where I learned about football point spreads from an aspiring stock broker-colleague on one of our 12-hour holiday season shifts); construction labor; driving a cab (interesting, fun, and vaguely dangerous, but after the nightly payout, I was lucky to make $1 an hour); bar tending (keep in mind that no matter how many drinks you’ve had, few bartenders are as enchanted by your philosophical musings or the minute-by-minute account your life story as you are); bicycle messenger; syndicated travel writing; video production; writing and directing radio and television ads (it was actually quite fun at the time, though I might need all of those persuasive skills on the day I meet St. Peter); audio book production (did you know that at least two out of every three people you meet fantasize about narrating audio books?); screenwriting (including a sitcom pilot and an option on a film script); and instructional design/project management (which ultimately allowed me to make writing my day job).

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