MY LIFE

I was born in Kirkland, WA 1976 next to a cat. Remained next to cats for a long time.

There are hardly any memories of the first big chunk of my childhood. Just a few hazy frames in a movie that is likely lost forever. My brother, five years older than me, can fill in some blanks but not many.

Dad was a race car driver, mom was a homemaker. It seemed to work. They seemed to love each other a lot and there has never been any reason to doubt that. We moved from Kirkland, WA to Renton, WA in the early eighties.

In 1984, at the age of 7, I lost my mom to brain cancer and with her went any semblance of emotional support and mentorship. Not that I remember any emotional support when she was alive, but I’m told she was a good mom in many ways. Not that dad was a “bad father” in a macro sense, but through no fault of his own he lacked any tools to be available and present outside of providing our basic material needs. According to my brother there was a morning where dad made us breakfast, dished it up and said “Your mother died in the hospital this morning. Anyway here’s breakfast then get ready for school.” There’s stoic and there’s “Hall stoic.” Don’t be Hall-stoic.

The main things I remember after that mostly revolve around whatever bombastic eighties action or sci-fi movie was out at the moment. We were a Star Wars house. We were a Rambo house. We were a Jason Voorhees house. We were definitely a god damn ninja house. This all sparked my imagination in so many ways and I got interested in drawing, making up stories in my head and imagining worlds that don’t yet exist. Dad loved the setup because taking us to the movies or paying for cable was a convenient way to avoid talking about anything important. Touché, pops. Touché. To us this felt normal, a perfectly standard middle class childhood and a perfectly standard family dynamic. Only later in life did we realize that families generally talk to each other and not just about cleaning the bathroom or whatever. Dad was also patently awful with money and we were always one minor hiccup away from living in a van. Again, not a bad father in many ways! But in some other ways… Oof. Luckily for him we were relatively good kids and didn’t cause a lot of problems.

Way too soon after the death of my mother we were thrust into a step-family situation with perhaps the last people we should ever have been grouped up with at that time. But we all crammed into a house in Issaquah, WA and in hindsight I think everybody involved, including the cats who are now long dead, would agree that it was the worst environment for grieving kids with no idea how to grieve. Endless conflict with step-siblings, conflict between children and step-parents, exasperation from the real parents, etc etc. It was a failed experiment from day 1 but it limped along for four or five years before dissolving completely.

Became a longhair skateboarder and started playing guitar around age 14. Taught myself by playing Metallica and Slayer songs. This is also around the time I graduated from drawing to painting.

Essentially I started focusing all of my thoughts on creative projects instead of learning how to be a human.

Not long after this is when I stopped painting to focus on music and film. From my late teens through early forties I was in four serious bands and a bunch of random jokey ones, made seven feature films and a bunch of shorts and various other creative endeavors until complete and utter burnout during the Covid pandemic.

Here we are.