The LWKS Story

Stories

For as long as I can remember, there have been stories in here with me. Stories that I guess I’m responsible for finishing? I’m guessing because I’m not sure where they come from. I don’t try to create them. I’m not even sure if I’m the one starting them. All I know, is that if I don’t finish the story, it will only get so far playing in my head- and then it just starts over from the beginning. And it’ll keep replaying on that loop unless I do something with it. It happens with seemingly random phrases too. Or rhythms, little tunes. For decades. Not a joke. All of these beginnings without resolutions that just play on loops until I complete them somehow.

So, that’s what I know. That’s my experience. For as long as I can remember.

As I grew, I found art, music, even engineering as tools to help me resolve the stories in my head.

When I was 6 or 7, I built cities from tagboard for my stories and filled them with little rubber Monster in My Pocket figures. Not long after that, I poked holes through dark construction paper so I could fly a toy spaceship past it and make it look like space through the lens of an old 8mm reel-to-reel film camera I found in a collection of antiques belonging to my mom’s friend, a wonderful woman named Nancy who lived in the basement of my childhood home and who for a short time was very much a mother to me. I never had any real intention of developing the footage, or any clue as to how someone would do that. Later, I drew an enormous Mickey Mouse for an elementary school performance. A choir at Christmas or something. I just remember “a big deal” being made about that Mickey drawing. Around 9 or 10 I started making my first comic books. Just pencil on paper. The characters were all barely modified ripoffs of Black Panther and Sunfire and some guy from a Flash comic, I think, that had drills for hands. The final page is a cliffhanger. A silhouette of a werewolf joining the fight. Stick around for part 2!

In junior high and high school I found music; drumming mostly, but then guitar and singing. I never got too far with those then, but more on that to come.

And creative writing. My deepest friend and I joined a creative writing club. (I know what I said. It’s an inside joke, move on.) Or it was a creative writing class? I don’t know. I just remember that it was the first time I felt like I was doing what was normal, or natural, or right for me. You know how dolphins slip in and out of the water like they’re one and the same? Diving and twisting and spinning. Dolphins and their seas, a part of the same organism. Or a perfectly silent snowy owl gliding down from its perch to snatch a mouse from the snow with all the precision and stealth of a secret night ninja, hunting prey from the shadows. Writing was that for me. It was playing. It was the first real hint that I was on the right path. It was evidence that I did have a place or a purpose. A silent, lethal night ninja inside me. I had a reason to be.

Once high school ended, I was lost. I enrolled in a 4-year university I never attended, but still somehow owed money to. I worked night shifts and drove forklifts, stocked shelves and delivered packages and all the while, the stories kept writing in my head. But without 7-8 hours every day, trapped in a public school desk (and by the last few years generally left alone) to write or draw or create, I was lost. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. The stories were continuing in my head, but all on loops. Nothing could progress, nothing could advance to the next chapter. And I didn’t understand any of it.

Birth

At 21 I left a portfolio of my drawings at a tattoo shop in town where’d I’d been tattooed and pierced a few times. (It was the ’00s. Everyone was getting aerated and white people had just discovered what rich cultures and traditions around the world have known for centuries; skin is super stretchy.) Anyway, it was a 3-ring binder I’d stuffed with unorganized, unfinished pencil drawings from the past several months. I pretended I’d forgotten it, but that ruse wasn’t necessary and I’m sure, fooled no one. When I went back to get it, an artist named Lucky talked to me about it. To my astonishment, he liked what he saw. But even better than that, he didn’t like some stuff and he told me why and showed me how to fix it! No one had ever done anything like that for me before. No one had ever seen the mistakes that I saw and had ideas for how to make it better.

The only things I’d ever heard about my art were meaningless platitudes, “You drew that?! By hand?! From memory?!” Or ridiculous questions, “Where are his feet?” (I haven’t drawn them yet. This is a pencil, not a stamp, Ms. Garrison. Where’d you get your teaching license? Dumb Dumb University?)

“Uh…Hmm-”

No! You shush! Sorry, sorry. Back to the story.

The few bits of real instruction I’d gotten, I pulled from books. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way! I went to comic book conventions as a 15 year-old and sat through lectures I didn’t understand and even once mustered up the insane courage to raise my hand and squeak out an embarrassing question in to a microphone that I still feel a tinge of horror watching as it replays in my head. “Um…I, uh…how do you draw tears?” I’m also only now realizing what a hilariously appropriate question that was since I’m sure I cried for a month after that, listening helplessly as each word escapes my lips. “How do you draw tears?” Someone in the crowd laughed and told me to get out, that I didn’t belong there with the real artists. Everyone in the crowd agreed and a team of armed security goons dragged me out of the auditorium as the crowd jeered, hissed, and threw gray kneaded erasers at me. Okay, that last bit didn’t happen, but I’m telling you, if I don’t make up a story to process this memory, it’s just going to keep bouncing around in here.

I started an apprenticeship at the tattoo shop. It was incredible. I was surrounded by tattoo artists who were cool and talked like rock stars and smoked cigarettes and only used cash. And piercers who snorted things in the basement and suspended themselves from hooks in their backs like slabs of meat. (I’m telling you…skin is suuuuuuper stretchy.)

I was ten years younger than them, but felt almost like I fit in somehow. Not fit really, but this was as comfortable a spot as I imagined existed for someone like me.

My time as a tattoo apprentice was short, chaotic, painful. And none of that had to do with Lucky, my mentor. It was the undeniable realization of what I’d been fearing for years. I didn’t have what it takes. Not specific to tattooing, but I didn’t have what it takes to be an artist. Or to be anything, for that matter.

You see, I’d found by this point that I could get pretty good at a lot of things without much effort. I could understand a concept and its fundamentals pretty quickly and easily. Enough to put in to practice and compete with others. And I found that with most things, I’d compete pretty well. Even at stuff I’d barely tried. When I was a senior in high school, I joined the school’s first ever rugby team and was made one of two captains. I didn’t know the rules. I still don’t, really. And I hadn’t played an organized sport since my family moved across the state after fourth grade and I was too embarrassed to wear a nutcup for baseball. I knew I wasn’t qualified to be a captain, but that’s just always the way things happened with me. Was it white, male privilege? Absolutely. A lot of it. But I was also outcompeting the other white, male dorks, so there was something else going on too. In the end, what I knew to be true was that I didn’t really earn it. It didn’t belong to me. And if it didn’t belong to me, then it’s not mine and I don’t want it.

And that’s sort of the way things had always gone. Great grades without trying, without doing the homework even. Lieutenant at the fire department, senior manager of several product design teams at a Fortune 50 company. All stuff that I did, all stuff I didn’t really care about. I didn’t earn that stuff, really. It didn’t belong to me.

Death

The problem I’d inevitably face with all of these things is that everything I did, everything I was competing and “succeeding” at, was all done with only having learned the fundamentals. Because once I had those; once I knew enough to play, I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t force myself to study or practice through even the smallest roadblock or barrier. Unless it’s the unresolved story bouncing around in my head, it’s never going to get my full attention. At best, I’ll be interested enough to learn the basics, then I’ll combine that with all the other stuff I’ve learned in my life, and what comes out will just have to suffice because the fucking stories and rhythms and phrases in my head are too loud and too always there and I don’t understand what’s going on, so can everyone please just stop talking for a minute and let me rest?!

So, the story I started to tell myself, about myself, was that I was broken. Doomed to failure. Lazy. Unserious.

The tattoo apprenticeship, though. Oof. That, I cared about. That, I wanted. I still had a sneaking suspicion somewhere in me that it wasn’t the exact right fit, but it was close enough. So, when I had that opportunity and still couldn’t figure out how to push through the fundamentals and give it everything I had, I was crushed. Annihilated. I gave up. I died. The little weird kid took his last breath.

I used my key to go to the shop early in the morning before anyone else would be there. I gathered up my stuff and just ghosted them. I ghosted Lucky, my mentor, the one artist who cared enough to give me a shot. I felt awful, but I was dead after all, so what did it really matter?

If I couldn’t figure out how to push through for tattooing? For art? Then it was hopeless. Truly.

I spent the next 22 years drinking myself nearly to death while working as a graphic designer, then web designer, then senior manager of user experience with 7 direct reports across- who- gives- a- fuck.

I liked “managing” people, because it was really just talking and helping people and caring about them. Since I was dead and I didn’t earn this anyway, I might as well help the people who care about this shit. But outside of that, the corporate life was not for me.

For seven and a half of those years, I was also a firefighter and EMT with our town’s fire department. A weird little example of America’s capitalism paradox where even middle class suburbs can’t find the money to fund a full career fire department to keep them from dying in a smoke-filled nightmare from the depths of hell, but the indoor hockey rink is getting a third sheet of ice installed to accommodate our population of 36,000 people.

The fire department was a part-time job where I spent my nights, evenings, weekends, and very early mornings responding to 911 calls in my city and our neighboring cities. I fought tons of fires in houses and garages, businesses, and even once narrowly escaped falling through a collapsing kitchen floor in to a fully-involved basement. I climbed 100’ ladders and roofs despite being a 6’3” tall, not-terribly-surefooted guy even during the rare moments I wasn’t either drunk or hungover. I did CPR on more people than I could count or dare to recall. A couple of them even lived. (Which I know sounds flippant, but that’s a win. The success rates on CPR are extremely low.) A kindergarten teacher and an overdose of some unknown substance are the two survivors I recall. And I once helped keep a suicide victim alive long enough to donate his organs, if that counts. I tore cars apart and helped people out. I saw death and mutilation and suicide and sorrow and loss, all in the neighborhoods we lived in. And I held doors for medics. Boy, did I ever hold doors for medics. At 3am. “Hey.” “Thanks. Garrison again?” “Tell her hi for me.” I joined, I’d said, to make a difference and do something important with my life. Bullshit. I died years before that. I was passing time until the rest of my body followed suit and, fuck it- why not drive an 85,000lb Ladder Truck or crawl around in a burning attic at two in the morning? The things I did and the things I saw, they didn’t affect me. Not, really. I’d been dead for a decade or more by then.

And all the while I was pouring alcohol into myself to speed along the process. Shut off the body. Shut off the brain. Shut off the voice that keeps giving me stories to tell, but won’t let me tell them.

In 2023, I quit drinking. It was like flipping a light switch. I’d been working really hard at cutting back, then quitting for years, but still drinking every day, all hours of the day. By then, I was married with 5 children. I’d spent the past 20 years forcing a corpse through the tasks of daily life to earn money for our family. A family I loved. I knew that if I didn’t figure out how to stop drinking, it was going to end very badly and probably soon. And then the flip switched (or so it felt) and I was done. We’ll talk more about that in the future. (See what I mean about frustratingly skipping past some big stories?)

In February of 2025, I was laid off from my job of 12 years with Best Buy. I’d watched so many of these “reorganizations” happen during my time there that I knew my ticket would get called eventually. Still, it was devastating. I’d spent the past few years getting clear of alcohol. I was getting healthier, I’d been talking to a therapist (for real this time, like actually talking about real shit and trying to solve my problems like an adult.) It was a real tilt-a-whirl-nut-punch after having worked so hard to become healthier, more responsible. In reality, it was perfect timing. I sometimes think about how things would have been different if I’d still been drinking when I got laid off. If I hadn’t been talking to a therapist. I dodged a bullet there.

At first, I dedicated myself to getting a new job in UX, in Product Design. I spent a month working hard on putting together a resume and portfolio of my work, a website with case studies for all the incredible things I did over my career with Best Buy. It was awful. I’d never had trouble putting together one of these things before, but I just could not force it this time. It was hollow, inauthentic, mirthless and…weird. I did a couple of interviews and get-to-know-yous. They all went terribly, also for the first time. I’d always been excellent in job interviews. But this time, something was different. People didn’t like me. And I didn’t want to spend any more time with them either.

I’d been learning 3D modeling in bits here and there for the prior 12-18 months or so, but I was just above a complete novice still. I knew I couldn’t switch careers like that, but I did suddenly have no employer for the first time since I was 14 years old and a 6-month severance package that I argued could keep us in our house long enough for me to see what I could learn, what I could create, and find a better path for myself. Call it a midlife crisis or an investment in a self-designed adult college curriculum.

It’s now getting very close to a year since I was laid off from Best Buy and I closed the book on my career in corporate Product and UX Design.

I’ve dedicated myself to this like nothing before. I cashed out the 401K and the clock is ticking. But the other chunk of this story that I’m going to frustratingly skip over is:

I’m back from the dead.

Rebirth

Somewhere amidst (amongst?) the therapy, getting the alcohol out of my brain, and being finally diagnosed and medicated for things like ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety (and some other stuff rootin around in here), I figured out how to push through the fundamentals to the part where I get to learn the real stuff. I can 3D model now. I can animate and paint and draw and play several instruments. In addition to the fundamentals, I have executive function for the first time in my life.

I’m not about to tell you that I’m amazing at any of these things. I’m learning. Every day. But I can keep coming back to it now and pick up where I left off. I have consistency. I can push through the challenges like I never could before. The certainty that I would fail is now replaced by evidence that I’ll show up in my enclosure tomorrow and the day after that too. The last year hasn’t been smooth or easy by any stretch. But I have evidence now that I can and will rebound from losses. And I trust that I’ll continue to improve. I trust myself now. Through all of this, the greatest gift I’ve received, what I’m most grateful for, is the trust I now have in myself. Someone I was raised and taught to fight and hide away.

So, one thing I learned by having to make due with just the fundamentals is that: The fundamentals are really powerful. So, maybe I don’t need to be the best illustrator, painter, animator, musician, editor. Maybe what I do best is a little bit of everything. What I can do is all of those things juuuuust well enough to get the stories out of my head.

So, not only am I back from the dead, but I’ve got some fancy new ways to poke holes in dark construction paper and this time I’m developing the film and sharing it with all of you.

A Little Weird Welcome

After 44 years of these stories living in my head, tormenting me, making me laugh, confusing me, mystifying me, breaking my heart, and giving me reason to live, they’re getting let out. And they’re yours to deal with now. If they break your heart, I’m sorry. If they make you laugh or hug your loved one tighter, you’re welcome. If they give you some hope or reason to keep going like they did for me, I see you. And you’re going to be okay. And if they in some small way inspire you to find a safe space for your little weird kid to come out, that’s the real reason I’m sharing any of this in the first place.

Welcome. This is a place for the Blerds and cosplayers, the comic book shop backroom dungeon masters and bedroom hip-hop producers, the spicy faerie soft-doms, marching band dorks, astrophysics nerds, wiccans, witches and basketball dweebs who break down every game on YouTube; and everyone else who has a little weird kid inside.

The first story I’m sharing is called Collector 626. It’s not an old one. It’s brand new, actually. But it had to be the first and I’m excited for you to get to know it like I have. It’s about life and death. And rebirth. And redeath.

“Ugh! Redeath? Boooo! You’re why they say writers shouldn’t be their own editors, bro. That’s some cornball, fuckin- uh, nice try with the Great Value Brand duct tape, by the way. I chewed right through that shit. Maybe next time-”

Hey! I did pretty good keeping him quiet for this.