TJ Beitelman is a child of the Nineteen-Seventies, the Aquarian Age. He spent his unassuming formative years on the outskirts of the self-proclaimed Most Important City in the World, Washington, DC. His was the American boyhood: the endless pursuit of sporting contests, real or imagined. He was small but fast, and he could throw a football in a tight spiral. He disliked school. Etc.His father was an old man, a frustrated visual artist with a weak heart but abiding passions: the endless pursuit of sporting contests, real or imagined; Sunday morning political talk shows; atheism; a venomous hatred of Ronald Reagan and the so-called supply-side economics. These he passed on to his son -- or tried to. Some took root better than others. Even the ones that took have changed over time. Beitelman's mother was different. She took risks. She loved and lost. Crashed Harleys. Examined the wreckage through the bifocal lenses of the New Age and Pop Psychology.Mash all that together -- Art; God; America; Love; the accompanying wreckage, frustration, dreams, and visions associated therewith -- and transplant it in the fertile cultural soil of the American South at the dawn of the 21st Century. TJ Beitelman, the writer, crops up.