My name is Trey Topper. I was born in 1996 in Plainview, Texas, to Keith and Teresa Topper. We lived in Plainview, until I was 6, when we moved out into the country, just across the county line into Floyd County - south of Aiken, southwest of Lockney, and 20 miles from Plainview. We still did most of our business in Plainview, but went over to Lockney occasionally to vote, grab a bite from one of the local restaurants or Allsups, or grab the occasional forgotten grocery from our last trip. We lived there until I was about a month or two shy of 20. We moved back into Plainview, when I was about halfway through my church music degree at Wayland Baptist University. We'd gone through some particularly difficult times as a family in 2013 which had continued to weigh hard on me and I fought this move with every ounce of my being, feeling like I needed to sort my issues before I could really move on properly. I didn't get the chance to, but I eventually realized that it was ok and at least while it still wasn't I could still be just as miserable but with a decent home internet connection, something I'd dreamed of for years. Having those experiences and that internet connection opened up some rather important doors later that I couldn't have forseen at the time.
My dad used to drive a Schwan's freezer truck when I was born, though he was near the end of his time there - he had worked there for nearly 10 years, and had a wide delivery area. It was fairly good money at the time for my family with my parents' lack of higher education, but management changes made it less and less comfortable. He was away from his family much more than he would have liked to have been, on the road. He had to miss a lot of important milestones with my older brother Tyler and was determined to find something better so that he didn't have to miss those events with me. So he switched to working for a local farmer's co-op, United Farm Industries in 1997, delivering fuel to farmers until 2013 or so. We had a lot go on that year, and with the crunch the economy felt in those years it became time to find something better again. So he worked for Suddenlink as a cable installer until 2020. He was one of many COVID layoffs. He found a new job as a prison guard, which will provide some nice retirement benefits when the time comes in a few years. He is a fan of anything and everything western, so I bought a used Xbox One S and bring it when I visit them and play Red Dead Redemption 2 so that they can experience the fantastic story - in my opinion the best piece of Western media ever produced.
When I was little, my mom was the director for the local Meals on Wheels. It was a lot of at-home office work, with a short 5 minute drive to the hospital every week morning to hand off the meals to the volunteers who delivered the meals to the recipients - local shut-ins, those below the poverty line, people with disabilities, etc. The hospital cafeteria donated the meals and packed them, so that was the pickup point. My mom made the routes for her volunteers to run, and filled in if the volunteers were ever not able to run their route. She got expense reports from the hospital and billed the state for it as it was a non-profit. She also handled client files. She did pretty much everything except for the actual financial accounting. She did this until 2004 or 2005, when she left due to growing disagreements between the board (specifically the person in charge of the finances) and herself. She also homeschooled me, and leaving her job made it a lot easier as I was getting older and required more involved attention. Since then, she has also had various side businesses, such as catering (she became a very good cook once we moved to the country!), dog grooming, and interior design. She graduated this past year from the New York Institute of Art and Design. She's also a fantastic artist - she had taken some courses after high school at Clarendon College in my parents' hometown of Clarendon, TX and has always been fanstastic at pencil drawings - primarily drawing birds of prey - but in the past few months has picked her artwork back up, and has become prolific in oil paints. Her work is fantastic!
My brother Tyler was born in 1982, so there was a 14 year gap between us. He was out of the house and in college at Wayland Baptist University in Plainview by the time I was 4, so we didn't actually live together very long - just when I was a toddler. We were able to completely avoid the sort of typical sibling rivalry/bickering stage due to the age gap, and have always gotten along very well. He graduated with a Business degree in 2005, and worked for a very short time at Edward Jones in the DFW area before realizing that that line of work was going to be a little too pushy towards customers for him to enjoy. He came home for about a week to think about things hard and get advice from our parents, and ultimately went back, quit, and worked as an assistant manager at a Walgreens for a year or two. After realizing that was setting the bar a bit too low, he decided he wanted to go to law school, and went to Baylor University in Waco, graduating and passing the state bar exam in 2009. He moved back to the area, settling in Amarillo where he'd taken a job at Burdett, Morgan, Williamson, and Boykin, LLP. He has since worked his way up and is a partner of the firm, which since has changed its name to Morgan Williamson, LLP. He got married to his wife Beth Anne in 2012, and they have three kids - Emily, Betsy, and Sam, who are an absolute joy.
I graduated in 2019 with my Bachelor of Arts in Church Music from Wayland. By that time Tyler had gotten onto the board of trustees, so he was on the stage for my graduation and was able to be the one instead of the university president to hand me my diploma. Finally being done with school felt like I imagine having given birth is like, or like finally having passed a kidney stone. I didn't have much trouble to be honest compared to others I knew, for most classes. I mainly had issues with algebra, which I had to take 5 times before I passed (I'd just drop it mid semester if it wasn't going well and I didn't think I could get my grade up high enough by the end of the semester). I could drop before the halfway point of the semester with a W, which wouldn't affect my transcript, but if I dropped it after that I would have a WF if I was failing, or a WP if passing. A WF would hurt my transcript the same way an F would, and I wouldn't need to drop it if I were passing, so I was usually able to tell fairly early on whether or not it'd work out. I finally managed to barely pass. Other than that, time management was sometimes difficult as a music major but I managed it as well as any of the other music majors did, and didn't have any other real issues getting through. It was just an extreme amount of effort that seemed never ending most of the time. This was amplified because I worked at the local computer shop Epic Computer Solutions through my last year of high school and all through college, averaging around 20 hours a week in addition to my schoolwork. That came with its own issues but for the most part it was the right job at the right time for me, involving my other main interest other than music (tech), and providing a much more stable future career path than music probably ever would for me. By the time I left that job in 2020, I had 6 1/2 years of experience under my belt, being the only technician servicing the area my entire time there. This gave me a massive boost to be able to enter the IT industry as I had intended.
In 2017, I joined a Facebook group for single people who subscribed to Reformed theology. I wasn't looking for any sort of relationship at the time, as I was too busy with work and school to really do it justice unless it was going to be with someone at my school, which was rather bleak. I'd always been a bit of an outlier with my beliefs, interests, sense of humor, etc. I was always accepted at Wayland, but outside of a small group of my best friends there, there weren't many I clicked with. I've always been good at getting along with everyone and no one had anything bad to say about me there, but the list was fairly short of the people that did actually get me entirely, and that list didn't include any girls, lol. Not by exclusion, but that connection just wasn't there. There was one I thought maybe things could work out with, but it didn't and that's ok - I'm not owed anything by anyone. As I'm getting to, things worked out better for both of us anyway. Anyway, back to the Facebook group. I did make some friends there, some longer lasting than others. I ended up meeting my future wife, Flynn, there. She had her own things going on at the time, which I didn't really know any details of, but the school year started back and I got busy with that and she got busy experiencing family issues, so we'd made the initial connection but then didn't talk much other than the occasional meme until the next summer. Several of my friends and I had picked up Fortnite and started playing, and then as it turned out she and her siblings had as well. I said, hey, we should play some together, so we did. She ended up filling me in on what had happened, which was a nasty separation and later divorce between her parents - her birth mother had quite literally gone off the deep end and become hostile towards her dad and anyone who supported him, which, rightfully so was all of the kids except her older brother who helped his mom because he had his own unrelated chip on his shoulder against his dad. It's a long story that the details aren't too important for this ramble, but it wasn't pretty. Flynn had to essentially step in for a good while as a parent to her younger siblings because there wasn't anyone else really to look to - their dad was still having to work and otherwise was completely embroiled in all the drama and couldn't really do much, and as I said their birth mother was very clearly not a safe person to go to - they all have and continue to deal with a lot of trauma caused by her and her actions. I've had limited interactions with her, all of which have been fairly satisfying in giving her the cold shoulder. One time when she was harassing Flynn on her birthday over text, I put up a fake listing for a PS5 on Craigslist in her area at a cheaper but believable price not long after they came out and put her number on it, lol. I also signed her up for a Scientology mailing list because they're notoriously hard to get off of. Little things like that that don't hurt anyone but are extremely annoying. Anyway - after she told me what they were going through, we bonded over it because in 2013 my parents had gone through a lot of bad things themselves, and barely stayed together over them. My dad finally broke down and confessed that he'd been skimming the fuel at work and selling it off on the side for less - not enough to be noticed because of outside temp changes affecting the pressure inside the tanks - and that without doing that he couldn't pay the bills. He said he knew that he was wrong to do it and just couldn't anymore. We eventually got through it because he was convicted enough he confessed to his boss and surprisingly enough because the boss also was fairly shady and about to retire forgave him for it instead of pressing charges. Anyway, that's not why we ended up moving (we were going to have to but my grandma helped us out), but all that finally had a purpose other than to cause me pain - I could relate because of those experiences. We talked more and more, and got close. After I graduated, I flew out to Atlanta where she was living (having been kicked out by her birth mother, she ended up living with her grandparents) and spent the week there. That was the first time meeting in person and we were beyond excited, and oh man was it horrible when it was time for me to go back home. It was kinda at that point we knew, there was something there. I ended up being able to go out there again right before Christmas for another week and had the place to ourselves because her grandparents had gone on a cruise. Then she came to visit me in February 2020 and was going to stay one week but ended up staying two, and I asked and we became official. She went home for a few weeks back to her dad's (he had since had to move out as well and had a tiny rental house by then), and then COVID hit. She ended up coming back to stay with me and my parents after about a month. I got my first real, full time job, working as a Systems Service Desk Technician at Prosperity Bank, in Lubbock. It was a hard job because of the way Prosperity operates - I was with 3 others in a basement room with no cell service except in one corner, answering the helpdesk phone quite literally all day, but hey, I could actually make a living finally. We got an apartment in Lubbock and I moved out of my parents' house for the first time. This also was a particularly hard time, a lot was changing faster than I was comfortable with but couldn't do anything about, my parents were struggling as well with me moving out and with the COVID scare and all. And, we were then engaged and so we were trying to plan a wedding and figure out how to afford it, and bills were expensive, etc. A lot of things that are fairly normal, but all just compounded at once. Not to mention her family drama was still ongoing and she was having to deal with more of it than she should have had to deal with at that point. And COVID. COVID honestly was the least of it - in fact, it sort of was a catalyst for a lot of the change, which while uncomfortable for me, was important and needed to happen. Like me getting a job, moving out, having an actual plan for my life. Flynn moving to Texas. Our relationship got put on fast mode because of it and honestly dating wasn't really a thing during our time before engagement, because we already were in constant contact even before she was living with us, and then obviously continued after moving here. We already knew everything about each other, so it was more of a formality by then than anything. Fortunately none of us got sick early on, and by the time we did (my parents were the first to get it in January 2021 a month before our wedding - fortunately they were over it by then! - and then we got it in August) it really wasn't too hard on us. Which was good because there was plenty of other stuff that was. Literally the day after we got home from our honeymoon, my sister in law got engaged and their wedding was in June. Then my father in law remarried in August. Then a brother in law at the beginning of October. We barely were able to make it to all of them because of limited time off because I'd used it on our honeymoon, and also just not having that much money to fly back and forth to Alabama that much that close together. And probably the worst part of it all - one of our friends died from complications in part caused by COVID not allowing his immune system to respond to something else while we were away at that wedding in October. I think that was the single worst trip I've ever been on because of that. I've played violin for a lot of funerals, but that was by far the hardest. They used a song that we'd used in our wedding as well which didn't help. He'd known a lot of pain during his life as well - he was 30 and got married I think in 2013 or 2014, and was so happy, but his wife had severe mental health issues and killed herself in 2018. He had just gotten remarried 4 months before he died, and was in a medically induced coma for the last month or so. He had been so excited before our wedding and honestly was instrumental in getting it to happen - he rented a van that we gathered up our entire wedding party and drove from Lubbock to Montevallo, Alabama - about 1000 miles - to the wedding. He even was one of two that cooked about 100 burgers the night before for the reception (which ended up getting rained out, so we had a smaller group of people come to the AirBNB the wedding party was staying at and ate them then instead). Anyway, we eventually came to terms with it after several hard months. His family operates a vineyard (he also worked for them) and just recently they seeded a scholarship in his name and released a wine to help fund it, Blake Eddie Scholarship - of his favorite of their wines. We bought a bottle this past year as soon as it was available and will keep it and never open it. Maybe I'll buy another bottle to actually drink, because I've had the blend at another wedding that they served and it is great!
I'd finally had enough of Prosperity and their rigidness. As soon as we got back from our honeymoon, Texas got hit by the worst blizzard on record, and as most people heard on the news, much of the state was without power for a while. We fortunately never lost power! But it did make things difficult. We had a Saturday rotation at work where one of us here and one down south in Victoria would hold down the helpdesk fort for the half day that branches were open, and it or if you had COVID but felt good enough to still work were we allowed to work remote. That August, when we had COVID, I worked for 3 weeks at home and my completed ticket numbers were even higher than usual when I was in the office, because I wasn't constantly being sidetracked by helping my coworkers figure stuff out. At the end of October, my car broke down on a Sunday night and I texted my supervisor and explained it and asked if I could work from home the next day so I could arrange for tow and repair and all. It wasn't really up to him whether I could or not and they didn't have an answer but the answer for those sorts of situations was historically, no, but they could come pick me up, so they did. That, and they passed me over for a promotion for an external hire with the same experience level but some certs, who left a couple months later. I had just had enough, and applied where one of my coworkers had left to work for - American Bank of Commerce. They do hybrid with a couple weeks in office, a couple weeks at home, pay better, is a smaller bank so there's less to stay on top of, more PTO, and is just a better place to work in pretty much every imaginable way. There's no question if I have appointments I have to go to, that I can - they just said let us know and it's fine. I have more ability to shape the policies in a way that actually works for our department and the department isn't as siloed - we do everything, so it's a lot less of just endless password resets. I can actually use my problem solving brain again! I got the job and started January 2022.
So, I did fail to mention - my wife Flynn is a fantastic artist as well. Her primary medium is pyrography, but she does all sorts of things. She's currently working on some massive cross stitch pieces as well. At that point (end of 2021, beginning of 2022) because of all the stress of everything else had hit a wall with her art and was struggling to find any creativity, so we did something new - we set her up on Twitch and she started livestreaming it. It really opened up our world and we've made so many great friends through Twitch who all also do all sorts of fantastic art in all sorts of mediums. I joined the stream after the first year and we do it together now and it's been great for me as well. This did wonders and she is constantly producing pieces now. This past February we did our first real in person event since she moved here - we got a vendor booth at Lubbock-Con (one of the two main comic cons in the city) and did very well - we broke even on the expenses including buying some ways to display the bigger pieces, which is about all we could hope for the first time. We have a plan for doing even better next time we are able to do it! Even when people weren't able to buy, we had almost everyone that came through stop and really look at some of the big eyecatching pieces and everyone was astounded at the quality level and that it was all done by hand. She's had some health issues that we were able to finally address properly now that I'm at my current job, and as a result has improved enough to be able to work as well - she started as a seasonal hire at 2nd and Charles, a chain bookstore that actually started back in Alabama and her family used to frequent, and that is within walking distance of where we live. She loved it and was kept on and made a permanent employee, and just 2 months ago was made Buyback Manager, and may continue to climb higher! I am so proud of her and what she has been able to do despite bad circumstances, and how far she has come from those circumstances to be where she is now. I am fairly tenacious myself but she helps me push on when things are difficult and I on my own would struggle to continue, just by being there and by example.
So, what do I do in my spare time?
I like to tinker around with tech stuff. One of my favorite ongoing projects is I set up a NAS, which I have since virtualized and put in Proxmox on a home server, that I also run some other services from. I've been a pirate for many years now and I set up some nice automated ways to grab movies and TV shows that we want to watch but aren't on a streaming service that we are willing to pay for, to where I can send a command over Discord, it will search and find what I am looking for, download it, put it where it needs to go for a Plex server on the same machine to see it, and I can access it from anywhere. I also used to run a couple fairly successful Minecraft servers, and currently host two private ones - one for my coworkers, and one for my wife's coworkers.
I also make music! I've played violin since I was 4, and was my ticket through college with minimal debt. I also learned a little piano, and really picked up guitar and has been my favorite instrument to play since I was 14. In college, there weren't really enough string players left going to the school to have chamber strings as one of my two required ensembles most of the time I was there, so I got put into choir and found I really enjoyed that. I was in the non-audition one for a semester, and liked it enough and there were enough really good seniors graduating that I auditioned and made it into the International Choir, one of Wayland's flagship ensembles. They haven't traveled internationally in a good while now, but they have previously gone a lot of places, and we did have one fairly significant tour while I was there. We went all over Texas and into eastern New Mexico. We ended up near Carlsbad during one of the two free weekends for the Caverns and didn't have anything scheduled for that day (it was a Saturday) so we all went and got to see the caverns, which was awesome - except the elevator at the end that goes back up was broken so we had to hike the mile back up to the surface, which was rough. The tour culminated downtown San Antonio, where we sang for the annual Texas Baptist Church Music Conference, and absolutely blew them away. We made a room full of stodgy old Baptist men actually cry, like, ugly cry. Other highlights of my time in choir were every 3 years there was a collaborative concert between the combined Wayland choirs and the combined choirs of Lubbock Christian University, performing some large scale works. In my time I got to participate in two of these. We did two longer pieces both times, but one stood out from each. One of them, we did Dark Night of the Soul and Luminous Night of the Soul by Ola Gjeilo, which are some of my favorite choral pieces. The other time, one we did was all of Requiem for the Living by Dan Forrest, which, apart from just being one of the highest watermarks for choral music in general, is so profound when translated, and, as intended, I have been able to find meaning in at different times in my life since. We even used the Sanctus movement of it as the precessional in our wedding! My last semester before graduating, I got the James D Cram Outstanding Choir Member award, which they only award to two graduating seniors every year, one male and one female. As a result, we were seated on the stage during the whole graduation ceremony and conducted the audience and accompanying brass ensemble. She conducted the hymn and I conducted the Alma Mater.
I'd recorded songs and made albums since high school, most of which are rather cringy. I leaned hard into it being not good and made it funny, culminating in 2018's Clickbait, a beautifully horrid album. Then I had writers block and couldn't come up with much. Especially during all the aforementioned stresses. I finally broke it by altering directions entirely by just playing around with software synths and in the course of 3 weeks in November 2022 I had a new album - Neon Cactus Collective - something I'd wanted to explore and do since 2018. I since have made something I think is even better, an album called Nexus Prime, that combines guitar and synths to instrumentally tell the story of a utopia-cyberpunk type city and its massive megatower Nexus Prime turn into a dystopia-cyberpunk type city after Nexus Prime is destroyed and its society collapses. I just released this last month, July 2024!