SPACE Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Patrick Deese. I was born in Nurnberg, West Germany on March 15th, 1968. That makes me a Pisces, if you keep tabs on that kind of thing. My mother is a German citizen, and my father was an American soldier stationed there during the Vietnam War (luckily enough). I am a United States citizen.
SPACE When I was two and a half years old, we moved from Germany to Central Florida. My family lived in Orlando, and later in Melbourne. In fourth grade, around age nine, my father was hired by the Arabian American Oil Company, now known as Saudi Aramco. This is the national oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for whom my father still works to this day.
SPACE I lived in Saudi Arabia from December 1977 until August of 1984, when I moved to Marion, Massachusetts to attend Tabor Academy, a co-ed college prep boarding school on Buzzard's Bay. I have mixed feelings about my stay there, mainly because the majority of my classmates more or less snubbed me, since I had neither money, good looks, or outstanding athletic ability. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the academic environment, and for the first time in my life felt challenged. Don't get me wrong, I made friends there, but like any high school environment, the cliques ruled with an iron fist. It was at Tabor, however, that I first began to write fiction seriously, and served as a co-editor for the school's literary publication Bowsprit for two years.
SPACE In the Fall of 1986, I began college at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. UT and I were not a good match. With over 48,000 students, I was lost in the bureaucratic swamp of incoming freshmen. Ironically, though I arrived at the University with 57 college hours due to placement tests and AP exam scores, I was forced to enroll in optional 'elective' classes, because the student "advisors" assigned to assist us had no idea what classification a freshman 3 credits shy of junior standing would fall into, and I had placed out of all the entry level classes.
SPACE Basically, all my classes were blow-off jokes, and all but one of them in lecture halls with 500+ students. This was not the academic environment that I had been trained to expect. Quite shortly, my first semester consisted chiefly of me improving my social skills and experimenting with various sorts drugs and alcohol and having lots of sex.
SPACE I am not embarrassed to admit that I failed all five of my classes my first semester at UT, and maintained a 3.87 overall GPA as a result of my 57 hours of college placement credit.
SPACE I don't especially blame UT for disillusioning me, and temporarily turning an honors student into a hard drinking social player. I never really wanted to go to UT, having been accepted at Carnegie-Mellon, Swarthmore, Tufts, Tulane (a real party school, what a nightmare that would have been) and the University of Florida at Gainesville. My parents were disappointed that I wanted to study English literature instead of pursuing a more financially viable option such as 'Business'. (Always with the business, my mom is, still to this day-- insisting that a few 'business' courses would look good on my resume). They therefore limited my choice to the two least expensive colleges- University of Florida (I was technically a state citizen) or University of Texas.
SPACE Nor do I blame my parents, though they just admitted to me this past Christmas, thirteen years later, that their greatest regret was that they didn't allow me to go to the school of my choice. I don't know if you've ever been to Florida, but let's just say that the sooner a hurricaine comes and washes the whole thing into the sea, the better. Therefore, it was not a difficult choice to enroll at UT which had Austin to offer, a cosmopolitan oasis in the middle of cowboy n' cadillac Texas.
SPACE After several years of going to UT on again off again, most of the time working part time jobs of one sort or another, I began to work in bookstores. These jobs culminated with my employment at Europa Books in the Fall of 1993, an independent bookstore on the main 'drag' right across from the University.
SPACE It was at Europa that I first met Scot Casey, Angel Polachek, Tori Bunker, Paco Nathan, Michelle and Justin Hurzeler and a host of other people who have figured largely in my life, one way or another. Europa was also the start of my interest in graphic design, having designed countless adverts, bookmarks, flyers for them, several of which appeared in nationally circulated magazines, as well as several zines and chapbooks of my own. Of all the ads I did for Europa, my favorite is still the text ad I co-wrote with Scot Casey for the Austin Chronicle back page classifieds section:
SPACE I think that the folks at the Chronicle liked it too, because though we only paid for it to run for 4 issues, it stayed in for about 20.
SPACE My second favorite was a series that were an inside joke between Scot and I, something I started to cheer him up when he was going through a difficult period in his life. I started putting the word "trugoy" somewhere in every ad that we ran for Europa. Someday, I hope he reads this, and this makes him smile.
SPACE I left Europa in the Fall of 1995 to join with Paco to start the FringeWare Store, which was an arm of the cyberculture zine FringeWare Review and the FringeWare Website. When I joined FringeWare, the 'Internet' was still a new thing. I am not referring to the actual networking of computers which has been around since the 60's in various incarnations. I am referring to the commercial / entertainment / information / communication tool that we know and love today. I remember how the media had just barely started to getting their mouths around words like "information superhighway" and "world wide web". I also remember using Mosaic, and then later, this new program called Netscape 1.0 and using it for the first time.
SPACE While at FringeWare, I designed display ads, contributed to the magazine, copyedited when needed, learned website design and wrote literally hundreds of reviews and descriptions for products that were featured in our online catalog. I really enjoyed the time I spent at FringeWare, but by January of 1998, working 60 - 70 hours managing the FringeWare bookstore, I had had enough. Austin had changed considerably since 1986. The population had nearly doubled, and all the things that I loved about Austin, the quirkiness, the unique restaurants, bars and stores, and reasonably rental prices were all falling victim to the empire building of the national corporate chains.
SPACE In March of 1998, I moved to San Miguel de Allende, and you can read about some of my early experiences in the Mexico Journal. Since moving here, I have continued to contribute to a variety of small magazines and online projects, I am working on a novel, and I also have started a website design firm called * electron * design.