FROM medical at: tmsd (no, not the band, The Mix Stinkin Deal) About four years ago, I moved to California, after having sold almost all of my stuff and destroying most of the rest. I packed a carload of crap and blazed West. Two pull-overs, one huge traffic jam, the use of some lady’s cell phone at a gas station in Nevada, and I was there. The musicians I had met earlier that year had no idea I was coming. At first I just asked one of them to let me park my car in his driveway and I slept in my ride. On one unseasonably cold night, his roommates invited me in to sleep on their couch. It was like 30 degrees outside, when they woke me up I was shaking uncontrollably. Thank God they let me in. I remember waking up outside on another night and my entire leg was dead. It took fifteen minutes to get the blood back into it and to make it work again. I fell on the ground when I got out of the car to try to make it live. I quickly made friends with the roommates and they were down to party all the time. I stayed sober most of the time on purpose though. It kept me alert, ensuring nothing crazy would happen to me with these people I did not know better than the ingredients in a Taco Bell Burrito. Watching these guys, I realized they loved to get trashed like me, loved women like me, and loved music like me. There was little difference between all of us except that something started to change in my heart. I don’t know if it was seeing the musicians deal w**d to promoters and artists on tour with a stop in their city, the coc*ine they were blown on at times, or the extremely fast girls who would walk out of one of the musicians rooms and into mine ready to go. I questioned why these guys were so vile in their behavior, yet I was doing some of the same things they were. It was like watching myself act out life. It wasn’t until I got kicked out for some girls flying in from Japan for the weekend that I saw real change start to happen. By the grace of God I met a landlord, who I describe in “Take it from the Top,” a song on the Clean Up Your Act CD, who asked me if I wanted to go to church, if I wanted anything to eat, if I wanted to see the countryside, etc. This lady was phenomenal. She told me I should stick it out in the city of San Jose for a while to get my head together before heading back to Milwaukee because I had threatened to leave with looming thoughts of all the nonsense I had gone through. She was right. Had I taken off any earlier, things probably would have been squirrely mentally. I chilled out and started checking out her church and reading a book a lady from the YMCA had given me before I left to Cali filled with prayers to Jesus. It soothed my effervescent state. There was something liquid about it. I knew my experiences had impacted me when I got together with a hardcore band called Plans for Revenge. These dudes were doing the same thing every other musician was doing and I realized there was more to life than just getting drunk all the time and sleeping with girls. I moved back to Milwaukee sort of leaving behind California, but not my childish ways. I was trying to gain some excitement once back in the mil so I went into Miller Park as an extra while they shot the movie Mr. 3000 with Bernie Mac. I kept trying to holler at this beautiful girl who was one of the paid actresses, but she never stopped answering my questions with anything but Jesus. Clearly, this lady was mentally ill, I thought, until I got to know her a little better. We swapped stories and I can remember one poignant line she said close to the end of our conversation that day. She said, “Maybe God’s trying to talk to you.” All these people talking about God had to mean something so I started to explore local churches to see what “God” was all about. I heard the same old fire and brimstone approach that made me ill with anger as I would fumble through Bibles in the pews trying to disprove the speaker. It wasn’t until I tried out First Alliance Church in Germantown, WI. that I discovered a human being was actually speaking behind a pulpit, and he didn’t even have a pulpit, it was more like a paper stand. Jason Esposito was his name and his message was striking. It was real. He was real, and it hit me- “This is where I am supposed to be.” It was then that I discovered Christ in my life.