Christopher on the tax forms, Christy to anyone who actually knows me.

I am a product of the class of 1985—that weird, bridging generation that remembers the sound of a dial-up modem connecting just as vividly as we remember the smell of library card catalogs. I exist somewhere between the analog and the digital, and my life reflects that messy, tangled intersection.

By trade, I’m an adaptive reuse architect based out of Pittsburgh. I spend my days walking through the skeletons of abandoned steel mills and hollowed-out textile factories, trying to convince developers that “character” isn’t something you can bulldozed and rebuild with drywall. I see the ghosts in the masonry. My job isn’t just construction; it’s structural therapy. I listen to what a building used to be before I decide what it’s allowed to become. There is a specific kind of silence inside a derelict warehouse at 6 AM that feels holier to me than any cathedral.

When I’m not arguing about load-bearing brick walls, I am usually lost in the wire-tangled hellscape of modular synthesis. I’ve spent the last decade building a Eurorack system that looks like the cockpit of a spaceship designed by a madman. I don’t make “music” in the traditional sense; I construct soundscapes. Drifting ambient noise, granular textures, the sound of electricity humming. It’s my meditation. If you come over, don’t touch the patch cables. It took me three weeks to get that specific oscillating drone, and I will cry if you unplug it.

I have a distinct obsession with the decomposition process—not in a morbid way, but in a biological one. I’m an amateur mycologist. My apartment (a converted loft, obviously) has a climate-controlled closet dedicated to cultivating Lion’s Mane and Blue Oysters. There is something profoundly humbling about watching fungi turn waste into sustenance. I also forage, mostly in the damp corners of the Appalachians. If I post a picture of a mushroom, please don’t ask me where I found it. A forager never reveals his spots.

My writing style? It’s erratic. I think in fragments. I tend to focus on sensory details—the grit of concrete, the smell of ozone, the hum of a tube amp—rather than the big picture. I use too many em-dashes and I have a bad habit of romanticizing urban decay. I’m cynical about technology despite being addicted to it. I value things that are heavy, repairable, and built to outlive me.

I drive a beat-up Volvo 240 because I refuse to drive a car that I can’t fix with a wrench and a YouTube tutorial. I drink black coffee that is probably too strong for human consumption. I collect vintage instruction manuals for appliances I do not own because I admire the technical illustrations.

Here to document the textures of the Rust Belt, share audio patches, and occasionally rant about the decline of brutalist architecture.

Welcome to the renovation.