My father’s parents were Christians from
Lebanon who emigrated here in the late 1800s. In law school my father befriended
Larry O’Brien, JFK’s future campaign manager. He then worked as a lawyer in DC and
our family led a comfortable middle class existence. My mother’s parents had
grown up on farms in Pennsylvania. Her father, my grandfather, left the farm,
got an education and went into business. He did very well, and retired when he
was about 50 and did nothing but manage his stocks after retirement. He left a
respectable estate behind.
I was born and grew up
in Chevy Chase just outside the Washington, D.C. area. I was the third-born of
eight, with two brothers—one older and one younger—and five sisters—one older
and four younger (one of whom died of cancer in 2008). My aunt (mother’s
sister) lived with us to help take care of us and I became her favorite. We
were brought up Roman Catholic and attended private schools. I was an altar boy
and sang in the choir. At age seven I began taking piano lessons and continued doing
so for the next seven years. Eventually playing by ear, I learned to play blues
piano and to sing from listening to old blues records (and would soon be
hanging out with some legendary bluesmen). By then, the Aquarian Conspiracy (“sex,
drugs and rock ‘n’ roll”) had come along and was in full swing.
The 1960s and early ‘70s were years of social
upheaval. In the mid-’60s my older brother and I formed a rock ‘n’ roll band.
We would soon play at junior high school parties (and I would continue to play
solo, or in bands, ever after).
I didn’t come from money, though I never wanted for
much and I didn’t worry about money. I started working when I was 13, wherever
I could: cleaning the pin setting machines at a bowling alley, working in a
7/11, a gas station—all this while I was still in the 7th/8th
grade. I liked working and earning money. I even worked long before this with
my older brother. We had had a paper route in our old neighborhood.
My older brother and I traveled to Europe
in the summer of 1971, where we met up with our aunt. I was a restless lad. A
few years later, when I was 19-years old, I hitchhiked across the country and
back. Those were years of riding motorcycles, going to bars, hanging out at the
beach whenever I could, and generally living in the fast lane.
After I finished high school in 1972 I
learned the roofing trade and would have my own solo business for a few years. It
took me until 1981 to finish my undergraduate studies in business, down in New
Orleans, where I played piano in the French Quarter, and I finally began
settling down some.
I had a weird tendency to improve upon my
weaknesses instead of honing my natural strengths. I had girlfriends along the
way. And though a few were “hall of famers” I was not that settled down and women usually seek steady rollers who “bring
home the bacon”— I was a ‘free spirited kinda guy.’ Thus, with a few deliriously
intense and beautiful exceptions, those relationships, never got too terribly
serious.
By the mid-‘70s my family had moved to
Albany, New York where my father would retire as a judge, but I remained in the
DC area.
In 1982 my mother died of complications
from Alzheimer’s.
My family put great emphasis on education.
I ended up studying law in Baltimore, got engaged during law school but broke
it off, and after graduating in 1989 I decided to drive to California in my
1969 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a British girlfriend (whom I had first met in
childhood, the daughter of a longtime MI6 operative). We ended up in Berkeley
near an old college buddy’s Franciscan Friars’ House, where we hung out (while
I studied for the California bar exam, just for kicks, toward the possibility of
perhaps practicing there sometime in the future). After taking the bar exam there, I sold the Caddy
and we flew to Brazil for a good long getaway.
That Fall I went into the U.S. Army JAG
Corps. I was then in my mid-to-late 30s. I would be stationed in Korea at what
was then the U.S. Army’s largest air base in the world, and also with 8th
Army in Seoul. But shortly thereafter I returned to the DC area, finishing out
my time as a JAGC officer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Ever restless, in very early 1992 I
decided to get a fresh start and moved out near Santa Fe, New Mexico into a
cabin all by my lonesome, a few miles up a dirt road in the mountains not far
from Pecos. I brought a small sailboat on a trailer with me which I docked at a
nearby Indian reservation. While there, I made an effort to begin a Master’s
degree in the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, but I was too
outspoken and got on the wrong end of the politics there, so they pushed me out
(memorializing that truncated odyssey in a poem).
I had also begun gigging solo around Santa
Fe as a blues piano player and singer, and found a job as a journalist covering
the New Mexico legislative session. Soon I met a German abstract painter, who
moved in with me, and who convinced me to help her get her artwork accepted into
galleries. That would lead to some traveling, a grand tour in fact. We loaded
up her artwork in the trunk of my ’87 Buick Riviera and headed to Chicago, then
to NYC/Brooklyn, the DC area, Philadelphia, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, then looped
back down to New Orleans, and then continued thru with a stop in Houston for
some days, and finally back to Santa Fe.
However, by then, the magic of being in the
SouthWest had worn off. She flew back to Germany and I drove back to the DC
area and stayed temporarily at my aunt’s home in Chevy Chase. I took a job as a
rental agent at an apartment complex, just to keep busy. Soon, however, that
old wanderlust beckoned me once again and I found a job back in Korea at a
university teaching ESL. I stayed on that kick for about three-four years,
ultimately teaching for short periods in Istanbul and Saudi Arabia. By the way,
through all of this bouncing around I was always writing—poems, mostly, but
also recounting my activities in essays and some articles published as editorials
in newspapers. And when I could I would hustle down to Queensland, Australia
(twice actually) to play and sing each night in a restaurant/bar in Port
Douglas as Stubby Knuckles.
Around this time, 1995-1998, I would meet
a Korean woman, almost divorced, two kids, and it seemed to be getting serious.
By then I was in my early-to-mid-40s. The idea of marriage came to the fore,
and I thought, “Now there’s something I’ve never done before, why not see where
that takes me…” So, in 1998, not long
before I left to go back to the states, I flew to Seoul and married that gal in
a paperwork shuffle at City Hall.
But also toward the end of my time as an
ESL professor, I had developed a strong interest in consciousness studies. I
was able to enroll in online courses at the California Institute of Integral
Studies (CIIS) (which would eventually turn into a doctorate in Humanities,
conferred in 2006). By 1998 I had grown weary of teaching and online studies,
and felt I’d rather take actual classes. And so, I would transition to San
Francisco, where CIIS was located, while diddling with immigration to get my
new wife to join me there.
Married life was not a bed of roses; this old bachelor didn’t “domesticate” easily. I
worked and studied in San Francisco over a three year period. We struggled. I
finally finished my required classes and only had to write up my dissertation.
In mid-2001 I decided to come back to the DC area once again, where I had
friends and family for support while I researched and wrote my dissertation. I
got another teaching position at JobCorps teaching at-risk youth. Then 9-11
happened.
I was writing again, essay and articles,
along with my doctoral dissertation. My wife joined me in DC and eventually
brought her son and daughter over here to live with us. They were obedient,
deferent Korean kids, one finishing high school and the other beginning
university studies. We all got along. Yet I wasn’t happy with married life, at
least not to this head-strong, nit-picking Korean woman. We stuck it out but
with difficulties. I would buy a pickup truck and a run-down house in N. E.
Washington, D.C. and worked to rehab it. And, as luck would have it, the real
estate market started booming and I made a handsome profit selling it.
I had threatened to leave my wife as
things had gotten pretty uncomfortable between us. She had said you can’t leave
me unless you give me $10,000. Well, now I had $10,000 to spare after selling
my investment property. So I left her a check and a note, rented a van and
moved out to a sailboat docked in an island harbor in Alameda, California that
I had arranged to buy from a friend, again with the proceeds from the sale of that
investment property.
I never cheated on my wife, and after I
got situated in my sailboat, things got a bit boring. I had a friend or two out
there from previous times, but no woman in my life. On that island I had my
sailboat and a bicycle to get around on and that was it. To make a long story
very short, gradually I weakened, sold the sailboat and returned with my tail
between my legs. And soon, my wife was back at me again, nagging and being
difficult.
In 2003 we bought an old single family
house on about one acre of land in the DC suburban hinterlands. That kept me
busy making improvements as I toiled away working, writing and before long,
gigging again as Stubby Knuckles with my younger brother, Fast Fingers Freddy,
on drums. I buckled down and took a job as a real estate title attorney,
conducting remote closings for refinance or purchase deals, and was by then
publishing articles fairly regularly online.
I hung in there doing this, finally
finishing my dissertation that explored the connection between law and
consciousness. I earned my PhD (in Humanities), graduated in 2006, and started
my own blog in 2007.
NOTE:
But 2006 also was a milestone year for me; for it was in this year that I truly
began to wake up to how the world really worked—the year I became fully
red-pilled. Back then, normies called people like me “conspiracy theorists” (a
term foisted on us after 1963 by the CIA to label and discredit any “kook” who
questioned the findings of the Warren Commission Report on JFK’s assassination)—These
days I refer to myself as a “conspiracy therapist,” thank you, but I
digress....
Around this same period of time, before I shifted into this new role, I managed to find a job doing law in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. My wife was not interested in moving there with me, so I went there solo to give it a whirl. Well, it didn’t work out and I came back. But by then the title biz was getting old.
Instead,
around 2008, I decided I would represent homeowners in court who were being
foreclosed upon by their mortgagor banks. But I would make more forays—to
Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Panama over the course of those years, always
looking for who-knows-what, but needing the stimulus of new places to develop
new ideas, plans, visions and dreams. Still, I always remained true to my wife.
It was never about looking for another woman, just about being on the lookout
for new opportunities and new, life-enhancing horizons.
Representing clients in court before
“banker judges” got old after about two or three years. I could delay
foreclosure, but never win a case for
the homeowner. So I let that go.
By this time, my step-daughter had
finished her college studies (my wife too) at the University of Maryland. She
was living with us in our house, got pregnant, had a baby girl, Faith, then
broke up with her husband and just stayed on with us. She found a well-paying
job and paid half the mortgage and other bills each month. The wife worked as
well. Neither were all that great at being homemakers and diligent
housekeepers.
As I grew closer to early retirement age
and more disenchanted with society and the working world, things felt awkward
and a bit stressed. My wife kept nagging me to be a truck driver. Tired of
being nagged to death, I finally took a course, got a Commercial Driver’s
License (CDL), and found work driving an eighteen wheeler cross-country,
leasing the truck for one year.
Of course I was always writing and
continued to blog and write poems as I traversed throughout the states, from
Vermont to Florida, all around the heartland, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and out
to LA a few times. I did like
traveling around like a gypsy, pulling over to rest stops or wherever, crashing
out in my truck‘s sleeper and waking up to new places each day. Of course all
of that sitting during truck driving takes a toll on the body and my blood
pressure started going up. In short, one year was plenty of that.
I came back home and took various
keep-busy jobs, doing three seasons working at a golf course among other
oddball occupations. All the while I was writing my first novel and in fact it
was self-published in 2016. Ten more books would follow through 2022.
In early 2022, my aunt died. She was the
keeper of that side of my family’s small fortune. By then I was ready for a new
adventure and visited safari country in Tanzania for about seven weeks (which
culminated in a book, Forever Safari.)
Of course my wife took no notice of whatever I wrote—ever—she just could care
less. So, as for the relationship with my wife, the thrill was gone, and much was seriously lacking in our relationship.
What had been sadly dwindling for many years was now all but defunct.
I got back from Africa, ultimately
received my inheritance, and the weeks droned on while a senseless nagging grew
in intensity, rising to ever new levels of disrespect, and—knowing that I now
had options—I began to lose faith altogether in my wife and considered how I
might change my life for the better.
I
began to think how nice it might be to live in some exotic locale, among the
palm trees, and crank out my writing as, when, and how I pleased, and to have
some nice, supportive gal by my side, maybe bringing me occasional piña
coladas. And when I ran this by an old friend who had retired to Thailand years
ago, he suggested that I get on a dating site wherein “some of my buddies have
found good luck.” <= That was the worst advice I could have followed. I put
up an honest profile of myself and immediately women came at me from every
corner of the universe, each with her own “sales pitch”; and there I was, with
one of the most vivid imaginations in the world, immediately going gaga, drooling—and
the fantasies flew.
From here things went downhill rather
quickly for me. I soon had narrowed things down to a handful of “finalists” and
felt it was time to move out of the house, which had become the ‘home for the bewildered me.’ And so, I looked for and
found my new bachelor pad. But try as I might, I got no grindin’—only what
turned out to be lots of empty promises from gals half my age who were somewhere
over the rainbow. I made a fool of myself, lost a bunch of money. BUT…I became
all the wiser by this hard-won experience. That
journey began in late 2023. It has not yet ended, though I disregarded those
opportunists who had deceived and thieved me and I got off that sordid dating
site, for sure; I started to find some peace of mind, recovered my senses, and
began taking my time. I returned to my own personal writing and what I refer to
as being “a weird task specialist” doing part-time, occasional work from
various sources that now support me, along with my monthly Social Security
augmentation.
And although I slowly got back up on my
feet again, it just so happened that I got on Telegram last November for the
purpose of joining a health group. Shortly thereafter, an unanticipated
avalanche of women began materializing again out of nowhere it seemed. All the
wiser now, and being a romantic who is always up for a bit of fun, I began to
scrutinize candidates—but very carefully this time.
For me, faith in the Trinitarian God who created
heaven and earth and all of the creatures who inhabit it, both here and
throughout the cosmos, is most essential to a proper perspective on how to go
forth properly in one's life. I identify with my immortal soul that inhabits a
physical body for a time, but will move on and never die. We all lay down this
bag o' bones eventually. Yet I’d say
the trick in life is both to live well and
then to die well,
don't you think? And the love we spread around among others while we’re here in
this incarnation, especially those to whom we are very close, is such a precious
and ennobling thing—for both giver and receiver—that one must invest a lot of
foresight when seriously hooking up with the opposite sex.
I've learned to love words, to arrange them in my own ways to produce sounds, frequencies that heal, or at least expose and heighten the life experience so as to inform, comfort, and create those Platonic forms (Truth, Goodness & Beauty) and that foster some sacred space that's so constructive and instructive. That's what a writer is—a word juggler, a spell caster, a rogue who brings to life what others sense and feel but have difficulty articulating.
I'll go my own way, the life of my choice, always realizing in the same instant that, if worthy, it is a life guided by the grace of that Holy Spirit which, if warmly welcomed, dwells here in our hearts and souls.
All this to say, that each of us must follow his or her own star, instead of living in entrained fear and debility. I enjoy the game of life, being playful while not hurting others. After all, God made this world to be enjoyed and if you can't go through life with a sense of humor and a good laugh every so often, what's the point of living?
The only passive income I have is my social security
payment of about $1000/mo. However, I’m a millionaire on paper. I currently own
about 160,000 American Federation Dollars on account at the Global Family Bank.
Each of those dollars is worth 1/10 the value of an ounce of gold. Right now
gold is nearing $5,000 per ounce. At that value, each AFD is worth $500,
resulting in my account being worth about $7 million. That account is slated to
‘come online’ very soon, perhaps in a new form of currency: the American
Heritage Dollar. “Prosperity cards” have recently been issued and will soon be
activated.
Also, I am waiting for a chunk of money owed to me by a
friend whom I helped with his severely disabled son. That amount will be at
least $16K, most of which is already designated to be invested. I also have big
plans to turn my books into $$ and these plans are presently in motion.
No woman wants a poor man who can’t
support her properly. And so I am reluctant to speak about my somewhat
attenuated position at the moment. I bring up my family and earlier days just
to let any such prospects know that I come from an honorable background and
that I’m a hard worker who can do law, music, writing, teaching—and even
roofing and a bit of carpentry (and “I’m an excellent driver”)—so I’m not short
on talent, just more fixated on creativity than I am on financial matters as much as I probably should be. I’m well aware that work doesn’t make money, but
managing money makes money.
It is with this hope in my heart and soul that I went forward looking for a more compatible soul-mate with whom I could find endless love and joy, in order to live out our lives in the mutual dreams that both of us wish to come true.
