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About
Husband to Laura, Father of Gabriel and Isabella. Brother to Kristofer. I am a literature geek masked as an outdoor nut. I am enamored with the water, but scared of heights. Give me an icy 8 foot wave everyday of the week before you give me a razor knifed peak ascending into the clouds.
I got my start sailing a 13 foot Drake sailboat with my father. We would wait for terrible weather and sail the boat across our home lake at breakneck pace until we capsized. We would right it and start all over again. I fell in love with quiet sports from there. One of the biggest thrills in my life is getting somewhere under my own power. If I catch a ride on the wind and waves so much the better.
Tail Wind
While she sits mired in windless doldrums
in the castle of our domesticity,
like Penelope weaving an endless
blanket for our empty wedding bed,
I beat my blades like wings
in quick rhythmic loops
to catch the wind.
To paddle downwind
is to sail like shadows of cormorants
before a gale at twelve knots.
The kayak is carried
in the froth of whitecaps,
pushed onward with subtle tilts and leans
sliding forward until released to the next wave.
I know it’s easy to love a tail wind,
everything seems to go your way.
Gichigami glows green and blue
to the edge of the horizon.
Eventually all tailwinds end,
the tail of the kayak
skids along the surface, and
my bow points like a dowsing wand
towards Penelope.
The green and blue turns gunsmoke grey,
the sky darkens, the wind blows the tops of the waves
into blinding spray I catch on my lips.
Each blade digs into Mother Superior
like a steel rod into thickening concrete,
progress slows to four knots.
I find my love does not diminish
in the great effort spent climbing waves,
nor does it lack joy to knife
each blade deeply past exahaustion,
because every subtle stroke keeps
the bow pointed towards home.
Movies
Bladerunner, The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, Amelie, Down by Law, The Great Escape, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, La Vita e Bella, Fletch, Spies Like Us, Three Amigos, Snatch, Fight Club, Se7en, Master and Commander, Ushpizin, Paradise Now, Das Boot. This is the Sea, Big Lebowski, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Rear Window, North by Northwest, A Very Long Engagement, Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python the Life of Brian, Brazil, Time Bandits, Alien, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The House of Flying Daggers, Belle Epoque, Decameron, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket
Music
U2, Bonnie Prince Billy, Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Yo La Tengo, Slowdive, Ride, Sigur Ros, Tom Waits, Four Tet, The Creation, Broken Social Scene, Crooked Fingers, Sunset Rubdown, Camera Obscura, The Beatles, Nick Cave, Peter Gabriel, PJ Harvey, Joy Division, Morphine, Los Lobos, Wilco, Fugazi, Iggy and The Stooges, The Tear Garden, The Legendary Pink Dots, Goldspot, Cat Power, The Magnetic Fields, The Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen, Low, Codeine, The Sea and Cake, Archer Prewitt, Sam Prekopp, Girls vs Boys, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Goldspot, My Morning Jacket, Dead Can Dance, M. Ward, Marvin Gaye, The Starboard List,
Books
William Faulkner: The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay dying Intruders in the Dust, Absalom Absalom, The Town, The Hamlet, The Mansion, Light in August. Jose Saramago: Blindness, The Stone Raft, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, All the Names, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties, Pattern Recognition, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin Series. Paul Bowle's: The Sheltering Sky, Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame, The Days Run Away Like Horses over the Hills, WB Yeats, Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera. Italo Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Signor Palomar, The Baron in the Trees, and The Non-Existant Knight, Invisible Cities. Tolkein, Beowulf, The Illiad and the Odyssey. The Icelandic Sagas. James Joyce, Dubliners and Ulyssess. Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things, and other collected poems. Philip Roth's the Ghost Writer, Portnoy's Complaint, and Goodbye Columbus. Philip Levine, What Work Is etc. Dante, Boccacio, Kafka, ee cummings, and Harry Potter, RA Salvatore for trashy fantasy, and the Dragonlance Saga.