About

Ben is just your run-of-the-mill Catholic man that was raised Methodist – for a while – who then tried to sell his soul to Satan, who then was an angry atheist, who then was a Wiccan magick practitioner, who then became a Baptist, who then became a Catholic. During that time, he played a lot of role-playing games, played in some bands, joined the Army to become a paratrooper, fought in Afghanistan, got married, had a boat-load of children, worked a bunch of different jobs (some of which made him cry on the way into work every morning), and eventually became a competitive strength athlete, personal trainer, and strength coach. His wife, Beth, is utterly amazed at how cool he is, too. So there’s that.

How about a quick biography?

I was baptized in a Methodist church as a child. Went to Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, the whole enchilada. But my parents seemingly always fought. And sometimes physically fought. Sometimes it scared me, but I didn’t think much of it day-to-day. We moved up and down the East Coast of the US, following my dad’s naval career. So putting down roots and making/maintaining deep friendships was not a thing I ever got good at.

And then we moved in with my grandparents.

Towards the end of elementary school, my dad found out he was being retired early, but only after one more change of duty station. Rather than move, and then move quickly again, my mom took the three of us kids to live with her parents while we built our house on a piece of land adjacent to their house. To this day, for better or worse, my grandpa remains the lodestone of manliness in my life.

Darkness and despair…cool beans.

When I was 10 and 11, I started to dig into some crazy ideologies. I thought Hitler was largely misunderstood, I read books on witchcraft, black magick and how people had historically made pacts with Satan. And then I did so. I can clearly remember standing at the bottom of my grandparents’ driveway (we lived with them at the time) and looking up at the fields of milkweed and black-eyed-Susans while praying to Satan. I won’t repost the words because I don’t want some other lost child to come across them and think it is a good idea. Suffice it to say that I offered my life, my future my children and my soul to the service of Satan if he would grant me certain things. It was almost the inverse of the temptations of Christ.

My mom continued to bring us to church. But I would sit in the pew and attempt to carve upside-down crosses, swastikas and pentagrams into the wood. At school, I’d draw those three all over my arms, my desk, everything I could. I got into a lot of fights. I punched a teacher. I was suspended so often that I was almost expelled. My mom would occasionally catch me with these things written and drawn on my body and she would chide me. But I just got better at hiding them.

Then, all inside my 13th year, my grandfather died suddenly and young, my uncle committed suicide, I jumped across the table and punched my dad in the face on his birthday, he left us for what seems like months (I’m not exactly sure how long) and we stopped going to church. I stopped believing in anything. Christ was obviously not important to my mom. My dad wasn’t around. My grandmother didn’t go to church anymore. Why should I care? Even Satan had abandoned me, obviously, if I was in this much pain, unpopular, poor and alone.

Atheism is cool, too.

I launched into a stretch of my life that can be best described as undirected directed atheism. I searched for every opportunity to make fun of believers in Christ, thinking that was atheism. Now I realize that I was angry and probably demonically influenced against Christ. Buddhists were cool, pagans were cool, people practicing Voodoo were wicked cool. But believers in that goody-two-shoes? Neeeerp.