At 23 I was living with five of my friends in Chicago’s south Loop in a loft converted from what had once been a used car dealership. The car dealership had relocated into the buildings next to and across the street from ours, leaving the building at 2255 S. Michigan open for musicians, artists, and thespians who needed a cheap live/work space in which to practice their respective crafts. Our space was about 50' x 50' with 20' ceilings. Part of it had been lofted out, so a laundry room and a row of five bedrooms formed an L along one wall with the kitchen and living-room above. The space itself was cinderblock and concrete, and the living spaces were rendered in bare lumber. Thinking we’d spice the place up when we moved in, we decided to paint the whole thing maroon with the hulking support columns hunter green. That turned out to be a little overwhelming. Three of us had saved some money and bought some recording equipment, with the help of about $10,000 in insurance settlement money from when I’d been hit by a car while riding my bicycle on a long straight country highway at dusk. Diode Recording Studio were we, though Kevin and Adam never really liked that name.

At the time, the folks from Atavistic/Truckstop Records lived on the fourth floor, and a whole bunch of theater kids lived right above us. They always complained about the noise. (At least three bands regularly practiced there, not to mention the bands who came in to record in the studio. Kevin’s band Traluma liked to practice at 9:00 Saturday mornings. I always wondered, and never really got a good answer: What the hell kind of rock band practices in the morning?) We had built the most soundproof room possible on our budget, a freestanding room with double layers of drywall and a raised floor, covered on the outside with pink remnant hotel carpeting we bought at the used hotel furniture store down the block. The loft cats, “Crazy Legs” Lloyd and Mara (and later Diablo), loved to chase each other up, down, and around that oversized kitty playland. Have you ever seen a cat scale a nine-foot carpeted wall, stop halfway up to defend its rear flank from attack, and then continue up? It’s an impressive sight. Picture the Globe of Death turned inside-out. Well, until Lloyd got too fat to make it up in one try. Then it was like Marlon Brando trying to remake A Streetcar named Desire after he looked like Don Corleone.

I sound nostalgic, but I should point out that not all was lustrous in the loft days. We were all flat broke. Adam was working as a courier (driving a Chrysler minivan while it still ran, transitioning to bike messenger after the van died). Scott, Ian, and Jason worked in record stores. Kate worked at Starbucks. Kevin delivered groceries for Peapod, and his occasional freelance graphic design made him the most solvent of the lot. I worked for lengths of time up to—but never more than—four months as an apprentice woodworker, convenience store clerk, bike messenger, van courier, record store clerk, and driver for a fly-by-night asbestos removal and demolition company. Everything else hovered in the $5.50–$6.50 range, but that last one actually started at $11 an hour for 60-hour weeks. In order to avoid paying time-and-a-half for all those extra hours, the owner had set up three companies (ACES Maintenance, ACES Environmental, and ACES Asbestos), so employees usually got, for instance, a 40-hour paycheck from ACES Maintenance and a 20-hour paycheck from ACES Environmental, until someone finally turned them in to the Illinois Labor Board and we all got two-year retroactive overtime back-pay checks. Unlike many of my paychecks, that one didn’t even bounce. My savings from a year at that job, in combination with the money I got from selling the recording equipment, financed my first two years at St. John’s College (with the help of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that will finally be paid off in 2022).

The Harold Ickes Homes were three blocks west of us, and that meant that I walked outside every month or so to find my van window smashed and some inconsequential thing of little value stolen. Once they stole nothing but some dubbed cassettes. Not much pawn value in those, maybe one rock at most, but about $100 in auto glass replacement costs (more than three days’ take-home pay in those days) for me, not to mention losing my only copies of several irreplaceable indie rock records on now-defunct labels. (But just now, while trying to remember the name of Shudder to Think’s first album on Sammich Records, I discovered that Curses, Spells, Voodoo, Mooses has been reissued after being out of print for 10 years! My copy should arrive in 3–5 business days, they say.)

So anyway, those days in Chicago were fine times. I played in a couple of bands, recorded a couple of records, played shows at the Empty Bottle, the now-defunct Lounge Ax, and the Fireside Bowl, went on tour a couple of times, lived the whole indie-rock life. It was great, despite having zero buffer between me and poverty, facing the choice at the end of every month whether I more urgently needed food or gas. But soon I owned up to the fact that I was at best a mediocre musician, and it became clear that the recording studio would never earn enough to support itself. When the Borders Books in Lincoln Park went union in 1996, it inspired Jason and me to try to unionize the Tower Records where we worked. We contacted the UFCW and held secret meetings once a week at a coffee shop a mile or so from the store. It soon became clear that few of our coworkers were interested in changing the status quo, and as the long gray miserable frigid winter of 1997 dragged itself through February’s slush—much as every long gray miserable frigid Chicago winter does—I got tired of kicking that same dead, dead horse and got the idea in my head to get the hell out.

I decided to move to the southwest, where I assumed the winters would be less long, gray, miserable, and frigid than those I knew. I’d never been there, knew nothing about the area, but figured it was probably better than where I was. And I decided to try school one more time (having had three majors and dropping out of the University of Illinois twice before living in the loft). Using my mom’s Mac Performa and dial-up connection, I looked for schools in the southwest and stumbled upon references to a tiny liberal arts college nestled in the mountains above Santa Fe, NM called St. John’s. When I read about their seminar-style great-books curriculum and education-for-education’s-sake approach, I knew I’d found my new home. Months later, in the fall of 1998, after the application essays had been written and accepted and the plans made and the arrangements arranged, I loaded all my crap into my 1985 GMC Vandura 2500 (which I’d painted black with semi-gloss acrylic house paint and a brush), filled my 44-oz. trucker mug full of Amoco coffee, and hit the road.

The sky is always blue in Santa Fe, NM. I’m not making this up. On average, there are over 300 sunny days per year. Average annual precipitation is less than 10 inches. I just went back in January for a visit, thinking I’d take a break from Washington, DC’s winter for a couple of days to bask in the blue skies and warm winter days of Santa Fe. C. had arrived a few days before me, and told me over the phone about the 60-degree afternoons and the walking around town in a sweatshirt. But the morning after I arrived, we got several inches of snow. It looked like this (click for larger picture).

Later that day, from my vantage point on C.’s parents’ front porch, it looked like this.

But the next evening, from the same vantage point, looked like this.

And later, somewhere else, it looked like this.