Who is Jon Paine? Very certainly he is a hominid, although what particular flavor is another story. The last species in the hominid family has been chronicled as Homo sapiens sapiens, but this is, perhaps, incomplete. Jon Paine represents the next form of evolution in the human race: that which man does consciously and with premeditation, rather than by genetic happenstance as in evolution past.

Jon's early life was a chaotic one. Cast adrift by his parents, he docked at many different ports around the Midwest, usually in cities that started with "C," such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. Never in one place for long, Jon realized that change is inevitable. More than that, change is desirable. Change is what allows us to move on; to escape unhappy situations and seek a new horizon. Sometimes change was foisted upon Jon and sometimes he instigated it, but in either case, he used the malleable existence of his early life to his best advantage.

Perhaps it is inevitable, in a tale of a child who has moved from foster home to foster home, for him to end up working for the circus. Perhaps it is, rather, just one of those things that you might read in a novel. Perhaps Jon was drawn to the part-time traveling circus for the mere reason that it was indeed a laughable cliche. Jon toured with the troupe, based in Seaside Heights, NJ during the summer and the eastern seaboard during the winter, as a laborer, but found himself drawn towards performance itself.

Variously intriguing, repelling, and inspiring the circus crowds, Jon would perform piercings on himself live during his act. He was one of the early pioneers of this brand of entertainment and truly paved the way for future competition - and compete they did. Other performers quickly devised ways to up the ante. After watching his audience become less impressed with his own honest and devoted self-piercing because they had just seen some yahoo down the road hoist himself up by a hook in his back, Jon became disillusioned with the scene. The only way to keep pace, he decided, was to move to prosthetics, and so he began a very successful run using cleverly-designed and -disguised blood effects. Ever the consummate showman, Jon realized that the crowd wasn't necessarily there to see things go right, although they would dutifully applaud when it happened. What the crowd really wanted was to see something go horribly wrong. They wanted to see fingers get cut off and piercings go bad. Jon gave this to them in spades. By the time his act outgrew the touring circus in 2003, Jon was the top-billed star of the show.

During this time, body modification itself had experienced a full-blown renaissance worldwide, with people undergoing total body transformations with implants, piercings, tattoos, and scarification. However, the scene that Jon had helped develop had turned its back on its maker. After leaving the circus, Jon found other gigs difficult to come by. Once again, it seemed to be a matter of everyone doing the Next Big Thing to themselves, which, once again, caused Jon to have a crisis of faith. As he toured various shops around the country, Jon took a long, hard look at himself and imagined where he would like to go next. The answer, he decided, was not superficial embellishment. The answer was evolution. In September, 2003, he met your humble biographer in Pittsburgh and articulated, for the first time, his desire to enhance himself - a noble goal that I have grown to share.

Since then, Jon has continued to push the limits of both himself and the body modification scene at large with his continued experiments and advances in the field. Jon hopes that you will come to feel as he does: if you want to evolve, you must Enhance Yourself.

- Amie Adams