So I grew up in Santa Barbara County, California, met Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney when I was 13 (the video of "Say Say Say" was filmed in my hometown) and then moved to Berkeley in 1988.

Me, first grade, 1975

There I drank beer, smoked pot, read countless books and basically became the kind of person most parents warn their children to avoid (i.e. an intellectual). While there, my interest in photography, biking and the outdoors in general also emerged. My trusty bike, bought in 1992, has carried me thousands of miles since (it's seen in the photo below) and since 1993 I have shot hundreds of rolls of film with my Pentax K-1000, including 90% of the pictures on this site.

In 1993, with a bachelor's degree in hand (in history, from U.C. Berkeley), I headed north to Eugene, Oregon. In my two years there I got a master's degree in modern European history from the University of Oregon. I specialized in social and cultural history of Germany, with an emphasis on the intersection of class politics, cultural assumptions and the environment in the Weimar Republic (my thesis, "Paths to the Summit: Conflicting Notions of Class, Nature and Modernity in the Social Democratic Hiking Movement," is in the U of O library if you'd ever want to read it).

Me, grad school, 1995

From 1995 to 1997 I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I spent some time working toward a PhD in the University of Michigan history department until becoming convinced that the contemporary university is a bad place to be an intellectual. I have since returned to the Bay Area, the place which feels most like "home" to me.

This web site displays the constantly changing results of my lifelong prediliction for self-reflection. All the writing here is mine, as is almost all the photography. I do not claim to have revealed everything here; those who know me well will notice several glaringly major omissions (if one is judging by completeness), but I prefer to dwell on that which may be usefully explored rather than what would be pointlessly painful to dredge up.

Left: Me, climbing South Sister, the third highest mountain in Oregon, on my birthday in 1994. Right: At the summit of Tioga Pass, Yosemite National Park, during my big bike tour of summer 1994.