The punch line of a cruel joke, Francis Leo Lynch III was born on April Fool's Day 1959, in a nondescript square brick building(1) in Passaic, New Jersey. He potty trained quickly and his first word was "excrementitious." He attended elementary school in a utilitarian square brick building(2). Leo graduated third in the Passaic High School (functional rectangular brick(3)) class of 1977 and fulfilled every East Coast kid's dream by going to college in Boston, attending Tufts University during the relaxed social climate that characterized the Carter administration. He studied geology in a practical brick building(4) and received his B.S. in 1981. Tired of higher education, Leo took a series of jobs in an amusement park, a Fotomat booth, and a mafia-run trucking company. Unsatisfied, unmade, and longing for the familiar confines of brick, he returned to school at Dartmouth College and received his M.S. in 1985.

At Mouth Leo met Professor Bob Reynolds, who taught him about clays, took him to The Dike, and showed him how to do science and how to be a scientist. Even more importantly, it was Bob who managed to salvage Leo's future and reel him back to New Hampshire after he ran away from school. Many long days in the lab concluded with motorcycle rides through the hills and beer with the Boston Celtics at night. Even so, Leo really didn't like Mouth. It was too damned cold. He migrated south.

Leo's short-lived dalliance with bourgeois elitism occurred in Houston when he worked for Exxon. He learned a lot of geology at the DoubleCross. He also learned that in The Collective resistance is futile, but more importantly, he learned that he hated bosses and that money isn't everything. Deciding it was "time to get the hobnailed boot of management off of the throat of the workers," Leo bid farewell to industry, though he still has a couple of shares of Exxon stock, and that mightily pisses off his friend Tim.

The next 12 years were spent in Austin at the University of Texas. Leo has very mixed feelings about his time at UT. He had the opportunity to work with great geologists like Luigi Folk, Lynton Land, Earle McBride, and Kitty Milliken, but the psychic debt of that long a stay in such a soulless wasteland (not to mention any particular department head by name) was hard to bear. Nevertheless, he's proud of his contribution to important research on clastic diagenesis and nannobacteria, and prouder still that he managed to finally get out with at least a bit of his integrity intact and unsullied.

Now he's in Mississippi. Again surrounded by cozy, sheltering, bricks, he and Brenda Kirkland, another refuge from Austin, and Maggie, Billiejean, Anthony, and Fang, seem to have finally gotten it together. Who'd have thunk it?