From then on, I became fixated on electronics. If I wasn't surfing or being a troublemaker, I was hanging out in Radio Shack, Rent-A-Center, or Circuit City. Tinkering with the functions of musical instruments, computers, stereos, and home theater systems was how I discovered the general grammar of digital technics. Studying visual cues as sound design traveled in sync all around me while viewing display movies until store closings were my film lectures. Watching films on big screens with surround sound was lightyears away from the experience of seeing broadcasts out of a round box knob-turning tinfoil antennae machine that caught four channels. Scrambled snowy sitcoms, westerns, and the evening news of a society synced into the same programming was the analog experience. Any TV sets or speakers people threw out, or car stereos I could wrench from a scrap yard, I'd collect, strip down, and put back together. I'd nerd out on circuit boards and connect anything with wires, sometimes tripping the circuit breakers. I would create my home theatres with a daisy-chained wall of 6x9s and 15-inch subwoofers. For fun, I'd power my systems with car batteries, a 1000-watt Pioneer amp, and a Clarion car stereo tape deck that I'd Jerry-Rigged with a CD Walkman. I would bump everything from Bone Thugs to Metallica on that setup. It rocked the neighborhood, and it was awesome!   

Eventually, I was able to create decent home theatre systems from scraps. One day, my uncle Thomas, a salty fisherman, was throwing out his family's Commodore 64, and I had to have it. For younger millennials who don't know what that is, it's a computer. Until then, I'd yet to come into much contact with computers. Aside from the ones in stores, at a friend's house, library class, or my aunty Patty's techy husband's Acer Aspire. "Hackers" had come out on VHS at this point, and I had a dubbed bootleg version from one of my childhood friend's mom who'd rent movies and (tape) them for her kids and neighbors. 'Angelina Jolie' convinced me that "The Net" was the future, so I couldn't wait to plug in my hand-me-down Commodore 64 and start hacking "The Net." Of course, that's not how the internet worked back then, but I did get to play some Pac-Man.

Not really knowing how computers worked or how films got made, I imagined that someday I'd make a movie come out of such a thing. I went on to become an Oregon Trailblazer, Scorched Earther, DOS Gamer, and a pretty decent Napster user. Y2K didn't happen, and a few more years passed until I finally started thinking about filmmaking. I remember one day after football practice, my sisters had to go to Walmart, and this was back when there used to be Borders Bookstores. I'd hang out and read for hours or listen to music while the girls did their thing. I searched the photography and film section of the store and looked for books on screenwriting. At the head or tail of a TV show or film, I'd see script by, screenplay by, or written by, in the credits, and it stood alone like a director's credit. Things start on paper, so I thought that writers made movies. I found a book that seemed like it would make me into a Hollywood buff and bought it. I don't remember who the author was, but his book was about to change my life. It was in the preface of the book, the very first paragraph, that the writer said, "If you want any control over what a film looks like, don't be a writer. Be an Editor." I put the book down and never read another page.