“you may ask yourself,…………”
letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…”
(sorry, got the song stuck in my head now from the thread title 
)
I am the ultimate fly-on-the-wall! 
let’s see… hard to explain… in ’98 or so, met Ezra at Oberlin(that’s another story… with Peter Blasser, Stefan Tcherepnin, and some others… actually, funny side-blurb- Stefan, one year, lived in a house where Chelsea Clinton’s boyfriend-at-the-time stayed, he said the secret-service made things pretty awkward for everyone there every time she visited)…
then in 2002, Brian and I lived in the same dorm-flat first year of grad at CalArts so i met him there, and Ezra also started there at the same time: i remember one of the first days, had to go to the music-school office for registration of some kind, saw Ezra there and i introduced the two to each other 
…but they would’ve met without me, no matter what 
i just like to falsely take that credit 
we all took many classes together and played many games of John Zorn’s Cobra(one time even with visiting-artist-in-residence William Winant)…
me and Brian, in fact, attended one of the very first meeting/rehearsals of Ezra’s band from back then, “The Mae Shi”(still got a lyric stuck in my head from that night: “The Machiiiiine, It Cries For Its Mother!!”)
also around then, i saw the first prototype of Brian’s grid(a cigar box with 8-buttons in a row and leds located near them…), and then i met Daedelus when he came to that same flat to pick up his first 256, and around same time, saw Brian performing with his own grid and started to realize: the leds would go under the buttons! and that it would remain open-ended!… so around the beginning I bought a 40h kit, then got obsessed with grids for awhile: spread my nonsensical and wordy ramblings all over the old monome forums til everyone was nicely traumatized… along the way, helped a few there with max patches(i did some contract for cycling74 which gave me an upper-hand in Max starting around Max5 and that got me even more obsessed with monomes…), eventually as i was growing old and tired, thought i’d step back for a bit, but then Rodrigo came along and pulled me right back in asking me to dev karma~, and long story made not-short-enough-at-this-point:
no matter how often i fall out of existence, i keep coming back to check out what Ezra, Brian, Rodrigo, Glia, Edison, and all you other crazy creatives here do… and i can honestly say this has been the best full-circle fly-on-the-wall flight of my life! 
