My Home Town

I was born and raised in West Chester, Ohio (suburbs of Cincinnati), and had a wonderful upbringing in a working middle class family. i have a wonderful friend back home that i've known since i was about 6, we'll call her "Jewel-ET-Garden" to protect her real identity. She heard that i caught a bunch of nominations this year, and offered to do some PR for me (PR is slick talk for getting me some press, and that she did). So, if you happen to be a friend of mine from back in Ohio, and you are now reading my blog because you read something about me in the paper, I have "Jewel-ET-Garden" to thank for that. I think another old friend helped as well, we'll code name him "Johnboy-L". I've already had a few friends i have not heard from in forever who've contacted me now. I cannot tell you how cool that is. I've always felt strong ties to home, as well as Cincinnati, and i come back as often as i can. Every year i come back for Midpoint Music Festival, which for those of you who don't know, is a really well run 3 day festival downtown every year that draws about 40,000 people. Midpoint brings me back every year to do professional speaking panels, and musician mentoring. stuff like that. Then i get to check out some of the hundreds of bands that are playing each night all around main street. Its something to see.

Anyway, so, if your reading this because somehow we know each other and havent spoken in forever, by all means, drop me a hello.

My old elementary school gym teacher dropped me a line the other day. It was awesome to hear from him. I dont think i ever told him that his son almost killed me when i was 17 years old. (we'll call his son "ttocS" to protect his identity) It was my first day on the job delivering pizza (i've done ALOT of crap jobs), and "ttocS" had worked for this place for a while, and took me out on the first few pizza runs to show me the ropes. "ttocS" is driving, I'm in the passenger seat with 2 pizza's on my lap. Its dusk and we're in a Ford Escort with bald tires, flying down a back road on slightly wet pavement. Couple hundred yards ahead a car begins backing out of a driveway. We both thought they saw us and would stop. Well, they didnt, they pulled right into the middle of the street and stayed there. We were doing 70MPH right at them and "ttocS" locked up the brakes. We didnt even slow down, we just skidded right toward their back bumper. At the last possible second, "ttocS" unlocks the breaks, pulls the car hard right, and screams at the top of his lungs (i'm not kidding) "WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!", and at that moment we went flying thru a ditch towards an intersection, barely missed a huge brick structure that would have killed us, missed a telphone pole that would have killed us, then we came flying up into the middle of the intersection and skidded all the way across it, coming to a stop about 6 inches from an enormous wooden sign that would have also killed us. We sat there for about a minute in silence, but miraculously unharmed. We were alive.
-Ken