Who Am I?

       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 7^th/8^th 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 8^th 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.

Generally speaking, love can move mountains; and being enslaved, instead, to maya, the grand illusion, the world’s deception—is no way to live. After such a long, long slog, humanity is finally shedding its "snake skin," ascending to a higher plane of consciousness and “beingness.” No longer will we be defined by our jobs and scrambling to obtain one's piece of the pie in a world of artificially created scarcity and deceit. And the "voodoo law" propping it all up is going by the wayside too, thank goodness.

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.