After nearly 15 years in Chicago, I moved to Seattle as an exploration, to be near the coast and the mountains, and to explore new avenues with my work. My mother had died the year before, and her passing felt like an untethering of many childhood constraints and taboos I hadn't been totally consciously aware of. In Chicago, I had worked nearly 4 years building datacenters at Google, gotten a bachelors degree in Computer Science in my 30s, and worked for a National Lab, filed some patents, and was a Communications Subject Matter Expert for the Department of Homeland Security. I had led a first of its kind study of the interactions of Internet and traditional critical infrastructure while working for the National Lab (the written report labeled For Official Use Only, so undistributable, unfortunately). I had seen, studied, or been a part of enough of the evolution of the modern Internet to know that I wanted to find different ways to look at how it was evolving and changing. and I've come to be fascinated by the physical assets that run the network which is increasingly ubiquitous and almost ephemeral for how little most people understand how it works.

I went back to the private sector working for a security tools vendor whose tools and data allowed for exploring the internet as a logical infrastructure in the present, but also with historical data going back to the Internet's beginnings – I was chasing waves in the sky (wireless and cellular), glass in the ocean (fiber optic cables), and pulses on the wire (copper telecom and ethernet cable). I took that first job hoping to continue research on the Internet, but got caught up in investigating the company's infrastructure, helping map and plan evolving them out of the technical debt that would have kept me from being effective there.

I took advantage of their flexibility with time off and and went to Africa. I had taught as a guest lecturer at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Mbour, Senegal the year before and they invited me back. The first trip was a life altering experience, as this one (and a third, later) would prove to be. Among the topics that I teach, I touch on my fascination with Internet infrastructure. After one of those lectures, near sundown, I was sitting on a trash strewn beach (there's no public sanitation in much of Senegal) staring at the Atlantic when I had a moment of clarity. I saw my life as in Seattle, in these jobs, with my girlfriend at the time, living in the kind of place I did, a part of the "tech community," and I couldn't see myself anywhere in it -- my true, authentic self – I wasn't doing the kind of work I wanted to do, had no connection with music, felt loved but unengaged and unseen by my partner, and Seattle still felt like other people's coast. I've been known to dive off a cliff and change everything at once...

I upended my life. I found a job on a privacy team at a big tech company, working on a subversive special project that involved deep diving into some of their infrastructure looking for things that shouldn't be there, and though I had significant reservations in working for such a company, the team I was going to work with and the project itself were a good fit, and I felt ready for the challenge of fighting for my values from inside the system.

In addition to the technical infrastructure spelunking, in order to make sure the subversive agenda could win the day, my job involved a lot of consensus building, which I learned to excel at and enjoy. It meant a lot of meetings, and when the pandemic hit I did not react well to my only human contact being mediated by these glowing rectangles. I came into this career via a distrust of computers, a need to understand how they work and be able to make them do what I wanted, instead of the other way around. A dislike and distrust and weariness of screens has stayed with me, even grown as the number of screens around us has. Having that be my only contact with others, and enduring the often tedious pace of meetings without any of the personal contact, touch, greetings, feeling the energy in the room got under my skin.

I spent the first pandemic winter isolated and depressed and found that there was little foundation under the meager spirituality I had been practicing since I was much younger. I'd learned transcendental meditation in my teenage years and for a time felt very spiritually connected to something larger than myself, grounded in the earth. When Spring came, determined that I not go through another dark Seattle winter that way, I endeavored on a journey I'd wanted to for a long time. Not unlike in my career, seeking to grow and discover in the intersection between spirituality and sexuality. Growing up in the midwest, sex had been a taboo subject, and I had lived in conflict with myself for many years, unable to articulate things I wanted, needed to explore. With my mother's passing had come a lifting of what I can now see were self imposed, if taught and modeled, constraints – trying to live up to who I thought she wanted me to be.

I found partners who were also seeking, and along with "experiential research," I studied Carl Jung, bringing new perspective to my childhood and adolescence, how I'd lost the spirituality of my youth, the factors that reinforced the constraints I felt… Jung's own passions led me to the studying the Gnostics and on to some darker spiritual material – some of it the sort of thing I'd dismissed for most of my life, but I saw kernels of truth if I was willing to do the work to read critically and understand, relate -- I don't believe everything, but the work calls me. The journey can be a dark one not sufficiently grounded in tradition or community, and for a time I was consumed by it, seduced by fate without faith, and I lost my way.

In the midst of all this exploring, I got covid, which took me out for a few weeks, and I had already been struggling to bounce back from severe burnout at work. I had continuing "long covid" symptoms and there was no way to be seen by a medical professional for them (the waitlist for an appointment was 6 months, and neither I nor my provider could get them to accept a referral) – the fatigue and occasional brain fog overwhelmed and seemed to collude with the meeting fatigue others were feeling such that my talent and enjoyment of the consensus building work fell off – I often wouldn't even try to schedule the meeting that might move a project along. I ended up going on partial disability leave for what would end up most of that year and the next.

In the darkest part of all this, when I didn't know how to proceed, A set of intense experiences happened in a single week that showed me that I needed to start searching for another path. I saw someone I could not have seen – felt as if I saw and communicated with my mother; felt a direct interaction with Jung's collective unconscious manifesting, and seemed to see and feel a spark – a connection to the spirituality of my youth in a way that suggested it could be a part of me again, if I were willing to work for it. Though I'd learned a great deal about myself on this journey, it was as if I was being told that it was a throughway, not somewhere to linger. I had a profound and random connection with a total stranger, and when I told her some of my story, how stuck I'd started to feel, she told me "go toward the music, everything else is total blackness." I took that advice, finishing what became the "Winters…" record which I had started in the depression of the winter before, and now, "Begin Again."

When I started working on this record, I had a set of songs I'd started some of them near 20 years ago, when I was still playing music with old friends from Minnesota, where I grew up. I had envisioned this existential crisis record centered around the differences in how we think vs. how we behave – pitting nihilism portrayed as a belief that we do not exist, that our actions don't matter against a faith that our time and place are uniquely special and our belief in our existence giving the power to change the course of events. The subtext was always that the belief itself has the power to rob us of (or give us) agency and become self fulfilling. In getting stuck in what felt like a futile situation with my professional life while on this spiritual and sexual journey that was deeply connected with other people, but had become introspective, and shadowed with darkness, dancing with elemental fears and self destructive impulses; I had started to resemble the nihilistic prophesy I'd outlined all those years ago (and was now bringing to life in a way that would shift the meaning and help me find my new path)

One night I felt compelled to bring a new song to life, but it was too late for me to play the drums without bothering the neighbors, so I started pulling drum tracks from other songs, adjusting the tempos, riffing against myself in ways that I normally wouldn't do – it had always felt disingenuous to use loops and beats when I could play the instruments, even if they were my own beats. I was both stretching and surrendering to the circumstance, being playful with the tools – the more I started to play, the more I felt my perspective and relationship to what I was creating shift. I worked on that song for something like 3 days straight, with little to sleep or eat, creating the basic structure and arrangement of what would become "Chasing Waves," changing the album from the ambivalent tentatively (and pretentiously) titled "do we do not we exist," to what I knew would be the album title as soon as I sang it, "Begin Again." Some of the old songs changed, some were left behind, but I knew when I'd finished that fist pass that I was working on a different record than when I'd started. Instead of me writing a record, from then on, it's as if the record has been writing me.

The existential themes, motives, and melodies are still a thread that runs through the record, but no longer steeped in ambivalence, instead now pivoting on choice. Its what we choose that gives or deprives agency. Like the spark of that spiritual experience, the drive in creating this song showed me the was distance and work between where I was and where I wanted to be. The song started to act like a compass, helping me orient myself to where my journey had brought me so that I could set a course for where I wanted to be. If I had lost my way, the spiritual spark, and the playful, out of character creation of this song felt like I was being given tools to navigate uncertain waters.

I lost my job in March, some time after I'd had my spiritual "spark" showing me a second chance at a faith I'd lost, but also how far off course I was, but before the experience of creating "Chasing Waves." I took on the narrative of what felt like failure. Failure for losing my job, for not bouncing back better than I had, for not finding anything from my seeking. Too much of the seeking had become inwardly directed, and I was living as if I didn't exist. It would have been easy to let that narrative carry me into a different story. I've always written and recorded music first and foremost for myself, as a way to process my emotions, but there's always been a part of me that wants to share, not only to be heard and understood, but for the chance that someone else hears their story in what I've shared, even if it's not what I intended.

Continuing to work on this when I felt like it didn't matter was an act of faith. The part of me that seeks that connection had faith that to make it matter meant owning and leading with the risks, many that became mistakes. "I played with fire and I was burned, I loved recklessly and I was hurt, I faced the fears I was taught to hide, I welcomed my demons and I survived." Those lines came out on the first go at recording vocals, not long after losing my job, raw, and painful, and true. It's not exactly triumphant, but I'm still here to tell a story, and the story that I tell matters. Though there are scars that will never heal, I don't have to live in fear, I have experienced pain and loss and grief, I've faced suffering, darkness, and self destructive behavior. I have seen and come to understand, not fear, the evil that lives within me. I survived, I am still here. There is still road to be journeyed, and perhaps I do know what I've been seeking – connection.

Circumstances dictated that I be ready for change. Seattle had never really settled in as home, and though I have some important friendships and connections there, it kept feeling more like other peoples' coast. I wanted orient myself geographically as I was starting to be spiritually and emotionally. As I drew near to my lease ending, I could see the record wouldn't be finished. In uncertain moment I was frustrated, exhausted, demoralized – I wanted to give up in all the ways I could think of doing so, but none of them offered a solution. As the focus of the record was shifting to rebirth, to connection, to owning my experience and narrative, to accepting mistakes as a part of the path through risk to any potential reward, I transformed the impulse toward giving up into a willingness to surrender. I reached out to my connections and started to tell my story.

An old friend who I'd hardly seen in 20 years, Matt Limvere, invited me to come and work out of his studio. He and I mixed the record together and did the mastering at the Crows Club in Brainerd, MN. He invited me into his home and his life. Michael Sack, a close friend who has been involved in this record from the beginning, and is defacto producer for all the guidance and direction he's been gracious to give, he spoke to his landlord while away for work and they welcomed me into their home in Chicago. Devina Dhawan, a friend and colleague who I studied with in my undergrad found me a short term lease when I was ready to chase the waves through the air, light through the glass, pulses through the wire, back to Chicago. These things happened because I've always sought and fostered connection, but critically, because I owned where I was at, I shared my story, I asked for help, I chose to let myself matter to those people. I don't know where my seeking will take me next, I don't know where or when my next paycheck will come or who will sign it. I know I'm still only at the beginning of my journey. I know that I don't have to live a narrative that doesn't serve me, I don't have to live in fear of what's within or without. I know there are people to whom I matter, and I intend to show them the same. I know these things are true because I choose to exist, I'm willing to risk, to make mistakes, to begin again.

I left Seattle in July and moved into my place in Chicago in October. In the intervening months, I spent a good amount of time at the Crows Club, but also some time on the road and I have countless folks to thank for taking me in, showing me that I matter, and letting themselves matter to me, for choosing to continue to show up, for being willing to begin again, for choosing to exist, and having faith that it matters.

I hope that you enjoy the record. I hope that you hear some of your own story in it. I thank you for choosing to be a part of it by listening.