Originally Posted by
the-thought-police
Hmmm, a little bit about myself. OK. I like to write. There is your first tidbit. ;-D
I was born in California but only lived there briefly before moving to Ohio for a year, and then to Phoenix, Arizona where I was raised and around 99.999% of my childhood and early adulthood memories are from. I have no memory of California, and only flashes of Ohio.
In Phoenix, I was the middle child of 5, and had a not too shocking of a childhood. Nothing too horrible, but not perfect. My parents did their best, though money was always tight. From the earliest age I can remember my father having us helping him with his work as a low voltage communications technician. My parents got divorced just before my teen years, and I lived with my mother by choice.
I didn't do so well in high school. Got a lot of F's, and dropped out completely eventually, got my GED, and sought out work. I did do one thing exceptionally well though, music. I played guitar and bass back then, and I did so very well. Knowing that music wasn't going to pay any bills though, a fact that was hard to learn for me seeing as how I was on the verge of production with a famous person at one point, I worked anywhere I could, mostly in various restaurants as a cook. Music was my true dream back then. Glass was hardly even a thing. Most people were still smoking out of metal pipes and acrylic water pipes.
I was used to working, and though I loved learning new things, I hated the schools approach, so dropping out and finding work just seemed natural. Ever since I was a young boy my father had us kids helping him pull wire, do installs, and TV modifications for his job. My first outside of the family job was as a brick layers helper. A job that didn't even last a week, ending in an accident with me, my buddy who got me the job and who was driving, a ladies car being totaled, and 2 pallets of bricks all over a busy intersection. We saved the bosses truck at least, no damage to it. My first job that I got for myself, not through a buddy, was Dairy Queen. Over my teen and early 20's years I worked in all manners of floor covering, as a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman, the aforementioned various restaurants, where I learned to toss a mean pizza crust at a fancy pizza place that did pizza tossing as a performance art, that was a lot of fun, I met a lot of very interesting people in my travels around the Phoenix restaurant scene but I digress, back to the list; the aforementioned TV install jobs and other work my father had me doing, and my favorite, the Renaissance Festival, where I worked with the Elephants and Camels, and in games, rides, and entertainment. Boy do those people know how to party, let me tell you. Some of my favorite stories come straight from the Ren Fair. I used to enjoy watching the Phoenix Ren Fair glassblowers make their dragons and what not on my breaks from selling arrows and being a push monkey and a human target, way back when, long before I even knew glassblowing would end up being my long term career.
It was always music, music was my love. At the end of 1999, I took a greyhound bus from Phoenix to Florida to catch the 1999/2000 3 day New Years Phish festival. What a great time. I did a lot of road tripping back then but that was the road trip to end all road trips. In about a week and a half of my life I ended up with most of my favorite stories. It was there that I bought my first glass pipe. A really heady 4 part welded inside out with reversals, and marbles, the works. I was happy to pay $80 for it. Little did I know that it would eventually become my target piece. That piece that once I was able to imitate, I'd feel like a good glassblower.
When I returned to Phoenix, I decided the time for goofing off was over, and that it was time to start going to college, and trying to build myself a longer term life plan, and that's just what I did. By that time, I played several instruments, so I decided to try to become a music professor at a college somewhere with minors in psychology. A couple of months into the year 2000, I met a girl who worked at chameleon glass however. Her second job was a restaurant I worked at to pay my way through college. I eventually ended up doing the same with college as I had done with high school, hating it and dropping out, but this time, it was because I'd learned from this girl how to blow glass, and was starting a career in a less flooded market than music. Glassblowing seemed a quicker path to higher paying work, with less competition and less starting debt, especially back then when there weren't so many glass blowers, and the online sales of pipes wasn't so scary. Pre-Operation Pipe Dreams.
After that happened, Operation Pipe Dreams, which really didn't effect me much, I guess I hadn't had enough of being screwed with by the government, so I moved to Florida, where Jeb Bush was governor. I made good money there, but it had been one year of living there when old Jeb Bush decided to do a copycat version of his brothers Operation Pipe Dreams called Operation Pipe Works, where he had customs and immigration seize all of the head shops pieces on the notion that you're not supposed to import this stuff, and they couldn't tell the imports from the local stuff, so they just took it all. It was early one morning when the lady from Ellusions called me to warn me of the raids, bless her heart for that. Since all of my customers were effectively going to be closed for quite a while about a week later I moved to Colorado. My lease happened to be up anyways, and I had family here.
It was nice here, nobody was out to get the pipe guys. Glasscraft was here, which was cool because I didn't have to pay for shipping any more, and even cooler still because at that time the son of the people who owned the glassblowing stand in the Ren Fair in Phoenix worked the counter, and his parents were like celebrities to me. He was a way cool dude himself, though he no longer works there.
Now, now I have three kids, a son and two daughters. I'm divorced myself and have split custody of my kids with my ex. I am with a wonderful girl now, an astro-physicist working in the MJ trimming industry, who has learned a bit of the lamp working from yours truly as well. Glassblowing is my only job. I sell here and there locally, and I have an Etsy shop online, and I also give lessons. I still play music. Guitar, bass, banjo, harmonica, hand drums, keyboard, accordion, pseudo sax, and I sing, but that's just an old hobby now, my days of playing in bands and getting record deals are over. I have been a glassblower for the last 14 years, and it has never let me down this far.
I hope to have both something to offer and something to gain from this community. Hello all.
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