How I Came to Be ...

Got a note from Eli, The WFA, to post something about how I came to write here.

Here it goes.

I guess I was in some oblique way at the forefront of digital art. I did ASCII art on typewriters in elementary school. I had dipped my toe in digital art as soon as the medium was available when PC's were first available in junior high school and the resolution max was 40 by 40. I wrote angsty poetry before it was even remotely popular and before Emo was even a guy who had a nerdy stand up act.

I went to school at Oklahoma State University. I majored in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology.

I dipped farther into digital art here on the first computer network that I ever got to see. I checked out a key for the computer lab and didn't bother turning it in for about three years. I did my first 'cut up' experiments more than a decade before I read William Burroughs.

Top jobs back in the day were for the oil companies and I landed one.

At Mobil Oil in Torrance, California, in 1991 I had a graphics workstation that I used for a few hours a week publishing newsletters, training materials and slide presentations. It had a dye sublimation printer, a scanner, a slide and polaroid film printer, Aldus Pagemaker and pre-Adobe Photoshop. I spent many a night drawing cartoons and photoshopping people with extra heads and limbs and turning photos of employees posing with lingeree models from Texas Lucy's into nudes for extortion material.

I was laid off and thought it a freak occurance that I ever landed in California in the first place. Five months later I wound up there again and working as a safety professional for The Disneyland Resort. At Mobil there were kindred spirits. Many of the people in my office were from the same university. At Disneyland however I was a really big fish out of water and one night flipped through the yellow pages for a game store in hopes to find what I could find.

I had been reasonably big into gaming before college and bought and read a lot of stuff during college but gaming in college was limited to board games and the Commodore 64 in my RA's room.

I first met Al Forest at the game annex that he ran in the old high school off of Foothill Blvd. It was like the Prince taming the fox in 'The Little Prince'. I think I hung out there for about a month before I got three words out of him. When the little shop closed and merged with his dad's shop to become The Dark Forest, it was aobut three months before I had an apartment across the street. Two months after that I moved in with Al and Dee. I had found the kindred that I had been looking for since junior high.

In 1997 I left Disney. I was tired of the 90 hour weeks. I was tired of the bullshit that 'cast members' had to eat if they were hired from outside and didn't come up through the system. My father was also very ill and needed looking after. My parents also had a small business that needed some help. I will always miss Dark Forest and though I miss Disneyland, I don't miss being a salaried cast member.

Over the next three years I did my best to re-create Dark Forest Games. I think I succeeded with providing the enviornment but it didn't have the soul, the people, who were the heart of the operation. The creative and intellectual or just plain weird collection of folks that made it a fun place to be. Eventually Blue Horse Trading Company, my mirror of The Dark Forest, curled up in the corner and died.

Since then I have tried to be placed in the local job market. I am over qualified and too experienced for anything entry level and 10 years behind on my reading and legislation to get back into the safety gig. I have settled on being a curmudgeon who exists everywhere and nowhere due to the internet and playing Johnny Appleseed dropping my seedlings of prose, poetry and visual art in several places around the internet.

I am quite grateful that Eli invited me back to The Dark Forest. I hope to grow and have a hell of a lot of fun under its leafy boughs again.

Joel