Jay's a writer by trade. By choice, too, by gum. Four books on the shelves, all non-fiction, and several more still captive in the wordprocessor. Some fiction, some not - and sometimes hard to tell which is which. Former newspaper editor, reporter, commercial photographer, former store clerk, former printer's devil, former sweeper of hallways, former homeless person (twice!), former garbage removal engineer. Stand-up cynic. Proud of it, too. We cover this "hats" ground nearabouts the beginning of this work, to satisfy the human tendency to categorize people by what they "do." People aren't happy talking to someone unless we find out up front what he "does," so we can inflict on him whatever stereotype applies to his trade or profession and deprive his utterances of respect accordingly. In social situations Jay has often withheld information on hat(s) he wears or not, to rebel against this human tendency, for all the good it does him. Might as well fess up here, though. The power of the Internet makes it difficult to hide for long.

Lover of cats, of classical music, ballet, typography, and photography, of theatre, humor, and art. Graphic artist, videographer, web programmer - slash - designer, electronic publisher, magazine editor, multimedia designer, author and editor, publisher of books and magazines. Takes out the trash when the can gets full.

Much of what Jay knows how to do - for a living or whatever else - is now obsolete. He can, for example, set letterpress type with a composing stick, use quoins, and print stuff with a Kelsey, Kluge, Chandler & Price or similar printing presses. Useless skills completely, but once quite valuable. Benjamin Franklin could, too, and did, and got famous. And rich. Jay can do skilful cold-type pasteup, too, and once did for money. Then there are the skills of the photographic darkroom, including color C-22, C-41, E-4, E-6 and Cibachrome processes. All by hand, all pretty much last century.

To say the least, it's been a festive life, perhaps even worth some of the digital ink it'll take to record it here. On the other hand, it's taken a long time to live enough to make it worth this rime, and some of the living can hardly be called living at all. Even so, from here sometimes it looks like much of this had, or perhaps has, some purpose - like all this so far was a peculiar set of experiences building up to who knows what that either hasn't happened yet, or didn't happen and was supposed to, or might not happen, but ought to have.