I saw no reason to be writer as a child as it seemed a cheap substitute for hitting the elderly in the head with snowballs from behind on early winter evenings or putting trip wire across the steps of elementary schools before recess. However, at 17, when I was myself tripping on LSD, I happened to open a book of Jack Kerouac's and saw the words, "...motel, motel, motel loneliness..." and kept reading.

When I went to Evergreen it was to escape into what I could afford of the Counter-Culture prevalent at the time. I had grown up in a pile of mountains (called Poconos) about an hour west of NYC where my dad taught badminton and golf professionally at a state school. I considered Bennington, St. John's, and some other schools, but it looked like I would spend the rest of my life paying back the tuition so when the Evergreen offer came through I went west on a train with a green duffle bag and the Kerouac book.

At Evergreen, my first course was with Thad Curtz. I liked him immensely -- he had clarity, and laughed at my jokes and liked my papers well enough. I was so grateful to have had him as my first teacher. I took courses from a few unnameable goofballs at Evergreen, but I don't remember these -- instead I remember Peter Elbow's writing seminars, and Leo Daugherty's excellent Shakespeare class, and spending hours in the now-sealed underground tunnels beneath Evergreen pretending to be a surrealist, or walking down to Cooper Point at four in the morning by myself and thinking that certain trees were incredibly scary in the half-light of the moon.

After Evergreen I goofed around in Seattle for a decade until it got expensive after an article in a national magazine touted it as the nation's most liveable city. That article ruined my life. I had been writing articles for the local papers and for art magazines and making a good living, and suddenly my rent tripled. I went back to grad school, and tried to understand what was happening in the arts. I was especially incensed at the Maoism which was another facet of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s -- and which was only beginning to be present at Evergreen at the time in certain very feminist seminars.

In Seattle, this was a full-time industry, and to my mind it left out the only thing that makes life worth living which is humor. So I studied ludic surrealism at graduate school. After I got my first job at a large university in Finland I worked on a book called Comedy After Postmodernism which attempted to knock the Cultural Revolution on its ear and introduce the lopsided, the ugly, the stupid, and the baffling as a new kind of philosophy that would make Maoism outmoded and instead of a hundred flowers there would be a hundred kinds of guffaw and chortle.

Laughter has always seemed to me the only phenomenon worthy of my time but because I don't really have a natural sense of humor I have had to work at this day and night with great ardor.

I wanted to appreciate the humorists, especially surrealist humorists, that had been the best part of the 60s Cultural Revolution: Andrei Codrescu, Gregory Corso, and surrealists beforehand such as Philippe Soupault. I wrote another book on Gregory Corso and am currently teaching philosophy, French, and literature at State University of New York at Delhi.

The center shifted when I married a Finnish woman named Riikka Lahdensuo. We have had two kids, and are increasingly interested in things like church, and worried about our children's safety, and conceptualize kindness as an avant-garde activity.