Joseph Pucci was born and raised in New York City in the borough of the Bronx. The youngest of four siblings, separated by seven years from his next oldest brother, he grew up essentially an only child. He was well suited for this, even as a young child, he was a loner in many respects. Preferring, often, to observe the world around him, rather than participate in it. He often spent months at a time developing imaginary worlds. Within those imaginary worlds, adventures sprung to life, which filled his days and nights with wonder about what would happen next in those worlds.
He had few close friends growing up, but was always well liked and many would say had a naturally charismatic personality, that exuded leadership qualities. In public, some would even mistake his temperament for outgoing.
This was far from the truth, as he was never really comfortable around people and explained this conundrum to simply be his public persona. This might explain his gravitation to the sport of bicycling. He has said, “Cycling not only invigorates the body, but it clears my mind and fills it with new solutions and ideas. Whether on my road bike, gliding through the streets and speeding around curves or on my mountain bike, navigating the woods, rocks and dirt, it always lifts my spirits.”
The Early Years:
His school years were difficult as he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia. As is often the case with dyslexia, Joseph excelled at exploring all things mechanical while ferreting the inner patterns hidden from others. His first car was more a vehicle for learning than a vehicle for traveling. The result was a transformation of a streetcar into a muscle car. Learning auto body repair, fabrication, automotive electronics, engine rebuilding, engine tuning, and many other aspects of building a high-performance vehicle that could provide itself on a road course. It wasn’t until he began college that his dyslexia was identified by an English professor at LaGuardia Community College, where Joseph was studying Computer Programming. Discouraged by this news, but undaunted, he increased his efforts.
It was not long after this discovery of his dyslexia that he was stricken with walking pneumonia. He had stretched himself too thin. While holding down a full-time job and running his own Automotive Alarm Installation business, going to college took its toll. At the age of twenty, his right lung filled with fluid and collapsed. This should have been a wake-up call, but youth often blinds you to mortality. After three hours of writhing in pain on his couch, the lung re-inflated on its own, but this reprieve would not last, and his refusal to heed his condition would alter the path of his life forever. Soon his coughing would become continuous, preventing him from holding food down and sleeping. Finally, three weeks after the searing pain of the collapsed lung, he would find himself at two doors. The first was the doors of Saint Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. The other was death’s door. He had lost over fifty pounds and passed out moments after being admitted to the ER. The admitting doctor later commented after seeing Joseph’s chest x-rays, “It’s astonishing he was walking at all!” He remained in the hospital for three months while demanding of his, then, first wife that nobody but his business partner knows of his condition. After his release from the hospital, he could no longer keep his illness a complete secrete.
He informed his parents that he had been sick but omitted the graveness of his condition. It took another nine months to recover enough that he could return to his job at an international bank at Two World Trade Center in Manhattan. Two months after he returned, he was let go with a generous severance package, with a year extension of his health insurance and six months’ salary. The reality was finally setting in that he needed to reassess his decisions. He wasn’t truly healthy enough to work. His body needed more time to recover. He took in completes in all his classes and closed his Automotive Alarm Business.
He pondered his path forward. Like a forest after a fire, new life would spring forth. After six months of contemplation, he decided this was an opportunity to start over. He would not return to college, but instead attend a technical school to study electrical theory and computer hardware. This landed him a job in a large tech firm in New York City as a field rep. After a year, he was quickly promoted, collecting many accolades in the years to come. But, he felt his life was still incomplete. So, while trying to find what would make him feel complete, he would change many things in his life, including his marital status, home, friends, and hobbies.
Now at the age of thirty-two, he again found himself amid a transformation. He had found something he had somehow lost, his passion for cycling. Instead of returning to road riding, mountain biking became his obsession. So much so that he became very knowledgeable in everything having to do with the activity. Before Google, finding information was like an Easter egg hunt in the early days of the internet. If the wind blew in the right direction, you might find what you were looking for, and it might be accurate. Joseph taught himself HTML coding and assembled his own website to share what he had learned and found, which led to an offer to write content for a startup company with a novel idea. A digital magazine that presented articles about product reviews, advice, and information on various subjects. Joseph saw it as the perfect opportunity to share his passion, but was unsure whether he could take on the task of writing content due to his dyslexia. After reassurances from his girlfriend, he decided it was a risk worth taking. From 1996 to 2000, he was the Contributing Editor for Mountain Biking at Suite 101.com. Towards the later part of his tenure, he discovered an appetite for writing fiction.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
OCCUPATION:
Writer
Retired Technical Manager for Xerox
FAVORITE SUBJECTS:
Science, Writing, Science Fiction, Biology, Space Exploration
FAVORITE WRITER
Dennis Lehane
MUSIC I LOVE TO WRITE TO
Mostly Movie themes. Different tunes for different scenes.
Jazz, Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, Classical, it’s good.
FAVORITE VACATION SPOTS:
Sub-Space envelop
Altered State
Inner Dimensional Travel
The Realm
PERSONAL MOTTO:
He who thinks they know, does not.
He, who knows that he does not know, knows.
FAVORITE QUOTE
from Brother Theodore –
Only when you have drank from the
River of Darkness shall you truly see!
Only when your legs have rotted off
shall you truly dance!
Where there is Death, there is hope!
All of our great spiritual leaders are
dead. Moses is dead, Mohammed is dead, Buddha is dead, the Reverend Jim Jones is dead, and I am not feeling so hot myself.
A few words from the Writer:
As far back as I can recall, I have had memories that seemed like they were not mine, yet I always felt that they were my own. My parents, in many ways, bore witness to my recall as a child. I was a peculiar child by many accounts, who had a hyper empathy towards the world around me, becoming upset about the cutting of plants, insisting that they were feeling pain. There seemed no limit to these things which would anthropomorphize. By age four, I preferred to wear dress shoes and button-up shirts. I once expressed outrage at the offering of milk in a plastic cup, to which I told my parents, “I’m not used to this type of treatment. Where I was before, I was treated much better,” and walked out of the kitchen.
According to my mother, I was known to sleepwalk and talk, making statements about “science sounding stuffed.” I do not recall any of those events. However, many years later, as an adult, I had awoken many times, standing in different locations within my home, usually positioned as if I was looking out a window. It was a bit disturbing, but I was glad I never found myself outside my house. As far as I know, I know longer sleepwalk.
It’s not unusual for me to have vivid dreams. I developed a knack for recalling my dreams and returning to or continuing the same dream. Rarely do I have nightmares. In most of my dreams, I tend to be the observer being given or shown something, which I often feel compelled to respond to in my waking life.
The only nightmares I have had are reoccurring in nature. The most prominent is one where a group of people appears to be chasing me, and in an attempt to escape them, I take a hidden tunnel. The tunnel is narrow and has a lower ceiling, forcing me to crawl. As I scamper along the path, I sense that I’m inside a house or building of some sort. As I travel, I’m moving higher, giving me a view from above of my pursers. Eventually, it opens up to a chamber with no visible walls, just the beams, and framework against a white background that I perceive to be a room.
There is a platform that I climb onto quickly. I can hear something coming. I feel a presence drawing closer when a ghostly hand up from below the edge of the platform grabs my ankle and tries to pull me off.
This nightmare reoccurred dozens of times for many years. Each time it would start the same, but I found I could alter the ending. Eventually, the dream went away after I decided to fight back against what I could only define as a dark evil.
Joe Pucci