We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you differently - Vonnegut 

My very first business card printed from my father's  computer read: wanderer, scientist, terrible dancer.
Now only one of those words remains.

I grew up outside Lancaster, PA  in the heart of Amish country & saw what good religion can be at the local level. I worked as a carpenter & started a driveway sealing business to help pay for college. I traveled before school & then got a degree in biochemistry & molecular biology at Boston University where I studied the cochlear nucleus of gerbils & the actin binding functions for some isozymes of the aldolase protein. I spent summers on research, interning at Pfizer, road trips around the States & sealing driveways to pay the way.

Then to New York City for a wet-lab position studying stem cells at New York Medical College. My projects involved the senescence of bone marrow stem cells the renal effects of kidney stem cell apoptosis. I assisted in the discovery of a novel binding protein for the E2A protein using the Yeast II Hybrid system & co-authored three papers about this research & even defended a poster at the American Society of Nephrology meeting. 

I finally saved enough to fulfill my boyhood dream of going to India for a year & brought my kid sister Tessa along for the ride. We shared a little flat in the slums while she sister worked in Bollywood & I ended up as a writer on the March to Tibet: a four month protest march of Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople beginning in the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile of Dharamsala to New Delhi and then onto the border. I wrote biographies of the marchers, articles for Western publications and one obituary. Because of India's laws against foreigners participating in political protests, I was arrested twice and finally deported.

Back in NYC, I made some money bartending and wasted some time on an existential crisis. I spent the next year hitchhiking around the States. A nice pace of life with time to read in the woods and listen to stories from your rides. Hitchhiking helped me to find the weird and interesting around this country: a burned out old hippy who preached a quiet and powerful two minute sermon on the love of the Virgin Mary, an ex-Marine who creates beautiful pieces of jade jewelry & of course a Keouracian figure who shared his father's homemade sausage biscuit along with stories from a long life on the road.

Now it's been a few cycles of saving up a grubstake in NYC by science tutoring, moving and other gigs. Then hitting the road. I started writing my first book in Mexico but realized that it was too big for me at the time. I wound up in Brussels trying to do a graphic novel about the above March to Tibet & though that one hit the skids on the first try, I've always wanted to come back & finish her off.

Most recently, I spent four years on the road researching a graphic novel about cannabis that eventually came to be based on Moby Dick. I've completed two of the chapters finished but there's many to go because all 135 chapters from Melville gave the finest structure on which to hang all the glories of the anadamide molecule & all the horrors of the Amerikan Ahab's War on Weed.

Here's my first finished graphic novel, "SUNset"