the story.
Seven tabs, one person. Here's how they stack.
ch. 01 — the shoebox
Westchester, New York. A kid runs a single storyline across a shoebox of action figures for months at a time — plots, recastings, season finales. Then the realization that rewires everything: the shows he was borrowing from were made up by people, on purpose, as a job. Making things up was allowed. He never got over it.
ch. 02 — the stage
Age 12: a band, The Blasted Teenagers. For a long while "musician" is the whole identity. Twenty years of NYC blues, rock & roll, and hip-hop production later, it relaxes into something more useful — a person who makes music, among other things. The music stayed. The "whole identity" part didn't.
ch. 03 — the degree
CUNY City College. Philosophy — ethics and epistemology. One assignment asks the class to name something they know is wrong and stop doing it. He picks eating meat. The assignment ends. The decision doesn't.
ch. 04 — the kitchen
He'd learned to cook from his sister, a vegetarian, so flavor never got to lean on meat. The ethics-class decision turns a skill into a discipline: kitchens across five states, a seasonal galley in King Salmon, Alaska, then the Las Vegas Strip — Giada, and now Vdara, Aria/Bellagio, MGM Resorts. The style that comes out the other side: American comfort food, rebuilt vegan and vegetarian. Familiar, done differently.
ch. 05 — the books
The philosophy and the food collide on paper. The Book of the Fed: an occult cookbook whose spooky dressing is the hook and whose advice about actually living with food is completely sincere. It sells out its first printing. Then a novel, The World's Greatest Cookie: a "solved" future that still can't tell one girl what she's for. Different shelves, same trick — serious ideas, delivered smiling.
ch. 06 — the collaborator
The one resource that never scaled was time. Now, building with Claude, the backlog is finally in motion — this site, an interactive way into the books, an AI-integrated food business, and an L.L.C. quietly forming to hold all of it under one roof.
ch. 07 — now
None of these chapters replaced the one before it. They stack — the small early ones turn out to be the load-bearing pieces. Every one of them is still running.