Jeff Martz

1987 - Juggling, skiing, watching my high school class graduate from the bleachers, shorts, abstinence, egotistical avoidance of social activities to attract attention masking inner turmoil, Life of Brian, Star Trek, nervously gripping a front-seat folding chair in Josh Jackson's 120 mph death-van, Rush, laundromat dryer rides, chalk candy from Anderson's Pharmacy.

1991 - Songwriting, guitar, taking staged photographs of people looking forlorn, having slurpees thrown at me from truck windows by angry Mormons, snowboarding, table-top announcing my virginity to a crowded pizza parlor on my 21st birthday masking inner turmoil, Cocteau Twins, The Legendary Pink Dots, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, the pledge of allegiance backwards on a unicycle juggling torches in a fork suit, my best-friend Peabody the Chihuahua, stick-pounding music out of 3 a.m. Salt Lake City buildings.

1995 - High-School Teaching, heat-stroke pleading to a group of laughing Spaniards for water in 114 degree Toledo heat, Goya's black paintings, The Red House Painters, Low, cringing in movie theatres full of homophobic idiots, Wendell Berry, shovel-burying road-killed animals next to indifferent highways, pseudo-romance incapable of reciprocation due to years of inner turmoil, Rubin and Ed, What Happened Was, Chasing Amy, open-mic singing songs titled "The Puzzle of Flowers," "Anonymous," and "Monsters," memorizing Ren's ice-cream sandwich speech.

1999 - Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, car-honking on the streets of Greece wondering how my life ever got me here, an M.F.A. in Photography, The Seventh Seal, Magnolia, Happiness, diligently cataloguing, dating, and preserving my splinters, Will Oldham, Cancer, couch-crying during the N.P.R. news of Elliot Smith's suicide, throwing rocks at the mall, joining Ebay, recording the "Home" E.P., skritchin' Mr. Peabody's ears.

2003 - The No-Coasting Manifesto: You owe it to yourself to forget why you are interesting, Interpol, Cat Power, singing in tears alongside 300 New Model Army fans, falling asleep in therapy, graphomaniatic thought maps, leading my class in a plucky version of "Two-headed Boy," pinhole photography that actually doesn't embarrass me, Chuck and Buck, Before Sunset, Jacques Derrida, seriously negotiating how to live a life without quotation marks.

2007- Lightning-storm photographing the Cathedral of St. Francis in a straw field of darting black ravens, Django, Monk, Coltrane, slowly exploring Tuscany with the absolute love of my life Lori, mountain biking the hills above San Francisco, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano , gasping at the utter genius of Borat, watching my endlessly talented best-friend Cassidy Brown in lead-role after lead-role across the Bay Area, book-binding, 100 Years of Solitude, sour cherry-cola bottles on the streets of Berkeley. Utter joy a million miles from Los Alamos. Lori.