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1.0 We’re A Lot Alike

We probably have a bunch in common…

In fact, I’ll bet:

• You LOVE water sports and have a “carpe diem” attitude… 
• A rush of adrenaline washes over you when exercise and water are combined…
• You’re hooked on the freedom and exhilaration of aquatic activities…

But you may be wondering:

“Who’s this David Rowell guy?” or “Why should I listen to him?” 

Fair enough!

A little backstory will help…

1.1 Peaks & Valleys

I’ve had highs and lows…

But one thing has always been a constant source of peace for me…

The water!

I’ve looked down on the city lights below when I lived high in the hills…

But I’ve also known what it’s like to choose between putting gas in my car or feeding myself and my dog. I’ve been homeless and dug through trash cans for food! ☹️

1.2 Why?

Sometimes, I’ve even asked myself: “What’s the point of it all?”

• My lows have often seemed VERY low…
• The high moments have been incredibly high…
• In the best of times, it felt like I had it all!

Three simple words can describe my life:

“Highs and lows.”

But the water has always been there for me…

(It’ll all make sense soon…)

2.0 Ordinary People

I was just another middle-class kid…

We moved a lot when I was younger… or at least I thought so!

No.

I wasn’t an “Army brat” who was constantly dragged to a new post… but for years it felt like we couldn’t stay put for very long.

Both of my parents were pretty simple people…

Highly educated.

But simple…

2.1 Mom

My mom Vera was an elementary school teacher…

Her parents were hard-working honest people. My mother’s dad Glenn was an electrician and her mom Pearl a schoolteacher.

Then Vera became a mom and wife…

She doted on her kids and was loyal to my dad… ❤️

Vera cared about herself of course… but how others were doing ALWAYS came first to her!

(Mom got her Master’s Degree in education after my brother and I got older.)

Everyone else’s needs were her biggest priority!

And she always put her own second…

2.2 Dad

My dad entered college at the age of 16…

His name was Cy.

He was a skinny, bright geeky little kid who’d worn glasses most of his life…

Dad grew up in Evansville, Indiana during WW2.

His father Cyrill was a salesman and pharmacist while his mother Mary was a homemaker.

Although a bit socially awkward he loved our family…

(He seldom used words to express it though.)

My dad started college at 16, worked hard and received an undergraduate degree. Next came a Master’s degree… and finally a Ph.D.

Then he became a professor!

He placed a high value on “book smarts”.

My dad didn’t really understand the attraction my brother and I’ve always had for the “squishier” things in life. Stuff like talking to strangers… the sales process… coloring “outside the lines”…

But that didn’t make him any less of a father.

We all loved him regardless…

3.0 Getting Started

I was taught to love learning at an early age…

As I said earlier, both of my parents were educators. Whenever I wanted an answer, they wouldn’t give it to me directly…

Instead, I had to go look it up in books 📚 (Google didn’t exist yet).

That gave me a lot of confidence to find my own answers!

People today are surrounded by information… even drowning in it… but those early lessons have stuck with me for a lifetime.

Let’s talk a little about how I came to be…

3.1 My Beginning

I was born in Trenton, New Jersey…

I don’t really remember anything that happened back then:

I’ve been told by family that:

• I went to my first county fair still inside my pregnant mom…
• A 102-degree fever hit me the day I left the hospital as a newborn…
• My grandparents helped my parents buy their first house…

(Photographs are the only memories I have of this time.)

But apparently, I was happy when I lived in Trenton!

Then I started to grow up…

3.2 Flowers & Bees

It’s the first place I have actual memories of…

Des Moines, Iowa.

We lived in a modest house…

And my dad was looking forward to his first teaching gig!

I have a few happy memories of this time, mostly in our house or on the neighbor’s porch swing…

Except for one day…

In front of our house, I was stung by my first bee! 😢

(Of course, my dad took a photograph.)

Enough of that… what about happier times?

I mentioned that porch swing:

I used to sit on it at night with my adopted relatives “Aunt” Olive and “Uncle” Farrow. We watched a nearby radio tower and its blinking red light on top…

They said it was MY light: “David’s light” they called it.

(But it didn’t last long! My family was finished in Des Moines almost as fast as I was getting comfortable…)

My father’s first “real” job ended before the school year started. The college where he was supposed to work shuttered its doors…

Ends up they didn’t get enough enrollment!

But there was some good really news coming…

3.3 Four

My brother Steven was born!

This little person…

A living, breathing part of my mom and dad was in our home!

I felt pride. I felt love. I felt responsibility…

And yes.

I felt a LITTLE bit of jealousy…

Steven grew into a close friend… a wonderful father in his own right… and the person who was there for me later in life when things were at their lowest…

I love him 💖 in ways words can never express!

3.4 Try Again

My parents were forced to move on after the college shutdown…

So we packed up a U-Haul again!

This time we landed in a little Missouri town…

4.0 Middle America

It was a picture postcard community…

A creaky iron bridge led our new hometown of Canton, Missouri to nearby Quincy, Illinois.

Crossing over the Mississippi river, we could look down and see people and their houses that would be flooded in the coming years…

TWICE!

I quickly learned the Mississippi could bring flooding and devastation!

Water could also be the source of endless fun…

4.1 Discovering Water

What’d we do for fun in this little town?

That’s where water first came into my life… 🌊

As ships traveled up & down the river, we watched the lock and dam system!

I stared in amazement as each boat floated in…

The iron door slowly closed behind then a steady flow of water rose higher and higher…

Moments later, massive steel water gates creaked and groaned, and soon the ships continued navigating down the Mississippi…

I was mesmerized!

4.2 Look Before You Cross

Learning to ride a bike was an adventure… 😬

A new bike was waiting for me on Christmas day under the tree!

I was impatient…

Not willing to wait for adult-supervised riding lessons, I decided I’d teach myself.

It didn’t take long…

As I wobbled along the side of the road (we lived on a fairly busy street), I swerved my bicycle in front of a vehicle and I almost got hit…

My mother was distraught!

Sobbing but relieved, mom hugged me tighter than ever!

It was my first time seeing her like that…

4.3 More Small-Town Fun

There was lots more to do…

Our family went to a lakeside summer camp where my parents spent hours playing board games with friends.

Steven and I rode an old pony named Candy… 🐴

And when we were back at home?

• Matchbox cars and Slinkies went down the basement stairs…
• We sledded down the white hills on snowy days…
• The propane tank in the backyard stained our clothes as we sat on top…

On the 4th of July, Steven and I sat in the driveway and lit fireworks under the watchful eyes of our parents. 

(The “fireworks” were kid-friendly sparklers and “snakes”.)

4.4 A Tough Lesson

One time I borrowed a plastic toy M-16 from a friend down the street…

I got in BIG trouble!

My parents said kids not a lot older than me were being killed in a war I’d never heard of…

I just shook my head because I didn’t understand:

• Nobody bothered to tell me the Vietnam War was raging…
• That war was not a regular thing in America…
• I DID discover my mom and dad were NOT fans of toy guns…

(They especially didn’t like them in wartime…)

Lesson learned! 😕

4.5 A Pretty Decent Start

Things were about to change…

Up until then, life had seemed pretty good. But now it was goodbye to small-town life!

We were moving to Texas…

5.0 Cowtown

Now I was in Fort Worth…

First grade was at an elementary school several blocks away from home.

I walked those two blocks alone every schoolday…

Yes.

Kids walked unchaperoned when I was younger!

Friends and I even walked to strangers’ houses on Halloween night… at least until the razor blades in apples started to appear…

(They kinda ruined everything)!

5.1 Different

I used to pass a farmhouse on the way to school.

It was in a big field surrounded by a sea of houses. As I walked by staring at the surrounding farmland, I wondered:

“What’s a farm doing in the middle of my neighborhood?”

Years later a “lightbulb” went off in my head:

It had been here before all of our houses!

(Duh! 🤬)

That was my first lesson in real estate…

5.2 The Beginning

At my Fort Worth elementary school, I saw and did a lot of things for the first time:

• I won the first-grade summer reading contest…
• Cafeteria food almost ruined eating vegetables for me…
• On the playground, I heard my first “curse words”…
• I met my first Black kids from the “other side” of the freeway…
• And some of my classmates wore black armbands…

Remember Canton where I got in trouble playing with that toy M-16?

Now I’d learn why…

5.3 Out In The Open

Fort Worth was more of a “military town” than the places I’d lived before…

There was Carswell Air Force base, one of the largest US nuclear weapon bases in the world at the time.

General Dynamics (aka “GD”), creators of the F-16 fighter jet was near my home…

Bell Helicopter was in northeast Fort Worth too.

People here were more willing to talk about this place called Vietnam.

5.4 Missing

Apparently, there was a war there… ⚔️

At the time, I thought if your father was a firefighter, he fought fires. If your mommy or daddy was a doctor, they fixed sick people.

Logically, I thought if your father was a soldier, he went off and fought wars!

(At least it made sense to my little elementary-school brain at the time…) 

Little did I realize that warfare was rare…

And THAT’S what all the black armbands at school were about!

I started to hear one phrase a lot:

“MIA”.

I quickly learned that MIA stood for “missing in action”. Sadly, some of the soldiers had gone over to fight but now nobody could find them…

And the kids wearing armbands at my school?

They didn’t have daddies coming home at night (maybe even ever) like I did…

5.5 Exploring

I bought my first record (“The Theme From SWAT” 🚨) …

I got sugar highs from Pixie Sticks … saw a Yo-Yo demo in front of a local store… went to the shopping mall (in the days before the rise of Amazon etc.)

There were other adventures:

• Learning to swim in a neighbor’s pool…
• Having my first crush on a girl across the street…
• Fishing with my Dad in Glen Rose…
• Riding banana-seat bikes…
• Shooting BB guns…
• Showing off on skateboards…
• Going to the S&H Green Stamps center…

I remember the neighborhood “Mott’s 5 & Dime” store… the Fotomat booth sitting in a shopping center parking lot… a Sears catalog as thick as a phone book…

This one older neighborhood kid loved to surf! But he lived in north Texas so skateboards were the closest he could get:

His parents had a plywood halfpipe built in his backyard!

(He’s chillin’ in Davis, CA now… 🤙)

5.6 Hearing “Those” Words

I’ll never forget this one winter day…

I was playing outside with a friend in our “snow fort.” We were making snowmen… building ice tunnels… throwing snowballs! ⛄

(Snow in North Texas was a rare thing kids celebrated!)

I saw my father driving down the street…

There was one thing I didn’t know then…

A few minutes earlier he’d been in a car accident! A snowball had been thrown into the car in front of him, causing my dad’s car to slide into theirs…

What happened next I THOUGHT would be funny.

“Watch this!” as I grinned at my friend. “I’m gonna hit my dad’s car with a snowball!

I made the throw and heard a loud smash on the car’s rooftop…

His car screeched into our driveway! Immediately my dad stormed out of the car and violently slammed the door behind him…

Next thing I knew?

He was screaming at me across the street using curse words I’d never heard before in my short life!

My friend turned to me and said calmly, “Uh… I think your dad is pissed!”.

Not my best moment… 🤥

5.7 The Sub Captain

I fondly remember Sunday nights…

After dinner, my brother and I sat in front of the family’s black-and-white TV.

We eagerly awaited the Wide World of Disney and the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom shows. We watched Tinkerbell wave her magic wand and saw a young Jack Hannah talk about lions and tigers.

(Pretty cool stuff for two young kids!)

This is where I first saw the Disney film “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”.

I was introduced to Captain Nemo…

He cruised under the waves in his submarine…

Through the sub’s glass windows, I saw a world of firsts:

The captain and his crew went deep ocean diving… spearfishing… enjoyed a wealth of seafood! I’m still a fan of those things to this day!

I was hooked!

And I’ll never forget that first glimpse…

5.8 Stuck In The Middle

I was faced with a terrible choice…

The public middle school I was supposed to attend starting in 5th grade was NOT a good place: 👮

• Violence…
• Drugs…
• Crime…

(Yes… it was a middle school!)

My parents could send me to that hellhole place or enroll me in a rather pricy “college prep” private school on a financial scholarship.

I went the college prep school route…

5.9 My New Normal

The private school was unlike anything I’d seen before…

(In a good way!)

• All kinds of kids attended…
• My classmate’s parents were doctors, lawyers, business people…
• The Cowboys had donated their old weight room stuff to us…

I was totally out of my element at the beginning…

The school was a grade 1-12 college preparatory school with only 40 students per grade: 20 boys and 20 girls.

The reality was very clear:

• There were VERY high expectations from the adults…
• Two hours plus of homework per night…
• Starting the day early, taking a full load of classes, going home late…
• Choosing French or Spanish to take in every grade…
• Playing multiple sports like football, soccer, track or tennis…
• Alternating weeks of music and art instruction…
• Taking Latin classes in grades 5-8 too…

Every night I collapsed…

All there was time to do was eat… do homework… then fall into bed!

The next day I repeated the process…

But I loved it!

Remember the Mississippi River back in Canton?

Now I learned the history of the Mississippi River: Mark Twain… Huckleberry Finn… Tom Sawyer and their river rafting adventures.

I read “The Iliad”… “The Odyssey”… other classic books… including Plato (more on him in a bit)…

There were also sports:

• Football…
• Track…
• Soccer…

I played ’em all!

5.10 Not So Fast!

There was only one problem…

My parents were forced to liquidate stocks left for me by my grandfather to afford the school tuition.

Dad always said, “David, you want champagne spending on a beer budget”!

Guess he was right… 😮

The money ran out by the end of 8th grade.

It was back to public school for my high school years…

5.11 Trying To Fit In

In public high school, there were lots of new things:

• Weekend keg parties at the lake…
• Smoking pot for the first time…
• 1-meter & 5-meter diving lessons…
• Seeing porn films with my buddies…
• Water skiing behind my friend’s boat…

I had a group of tight-knit friends…

Some from elementary school… some from middle school… some new.

One thing was different for me at that school…

5.12 Private School Pussy

No…

PSP aka “private school pussy” wasn’t a crude way to talk about females…

It was an insult hurled at private school transfers like me!

PSP was a taunt… a pejorative… a “cutdown”…

A cruel way some people in my new public high school labeled people like me (I’d heard about PSP before my 1st day).

The harassment began without mercy…

Even a few of the coaches (one in particular who later became the city’s public school superintendent) participated!

But then I discovered weightlifting… 💪

5.13 Getting Big

I had several choices at the time:

• By some miracle transfer out (it wasn’t gonna happen)…
• Endure four years of hell, getting harassed and beaten up, or…
• Get so friggin’ big because of weightlifting the bullies were scared of me…

I chose weightlifting.

They divided us into groups of four based on our cumulative weight lifted…

In my first semester, I could bench press a whopping 75 pounds!

By the end of my freshman year, those 75 pounds had become 200! I was assigned to the strongest lifting group, consisting of me and 3 seniors… 

Before long?

I got so big no one picked on me anymore… 🖕

5.14 The Club

I was introduced to “private clubs”…

Some of my old middle school friend’s parents had a membership in a local yacht club…

(Most working-class families like mine headed up by college professors and elementary school teachers didn’t even know about these!)

I was invited to come to a 4th of July club event!

That evening I watched fireworks launched from a barge as we sat on the shoreline.

The club’s private restaurant had its own chef…

Coolest of all?

A fleet of “J” sailboats was available for rent, and the docks were filled with swaying masts as the boats rocked in the waves.

Hello, sailing! ⛵

5.15 River Fun

On hot days we were drawn to the water…

My friends and I loved tubing down the Trinity River in the summertime.

Floating on tire inner tubes we’d bought from a local auto shop we got sunburns… drank too much beer… peed ourselves silently in the water…

Plus there was always an extra tube…

Why?

For the adult beverages of course!

To the south in the little town of New Braunfels, there was a white water river chute too…

The waterside pavilion had a corrugated tin roof with mounted water sprinklers to keep the sun’s heat to a minimum. Gorging on junk food 🌭 followed by floats in our tubes was the pattern…

It was the same basic idea as the Trinity River trips: sunburn… overdrink… relax.

Those were good times…

5.16 Across The Pond

Then I saw a completely different world…

During the summer of my senior year, I spent seven weeks backpacking through Europe with a good friend.

The trip changed my perspective on life forever…

The Nudge

My skeptical parents had to be convinced first…

Fortunately, my friend’s father persuaded them to let me go on the trip.

Their family was British…

My buddy’s dad traveled the world for work, and as a kid in the UK, he’d ventured to many places.

I had a blast!

The backpacking trip reminded me of the “classics” I read in middle school:

One story especially came to mind:

Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”: it’s about the world as people think it is and NOT the world as it is. 👀

Europe did this for me!

I found myself away from everything I knew…

And got to try a ton of new things:

• Tastes…
• Smells…
• Places…

I got to experience them all for the first time here.

I had a new understanding of other places and I came home with a newfound respect for home!

My world was expanding…

Salty Air

We went ocean sailing…

My friend and I were with four Belgian high school students. I was amazed they all fluently spoke three, four, or even five languages!

(I also discovered that size-wise, most European nations are like US states.)

We sailed the North Sea… ⛵

It took me a little while to get my “sea legs”, but I was hooked on sailing after the cruise.

My passion for the open water and using the power of the wind to travel was cemented off the Belgian coast:

• The smells of the salty ocean air…
• Wide open spaces as far as I could see…
• A feeling of complete freedom…

Not a bad way to spend the day…

Perspective

I mentioned perspective…

During the trip, my friend and I visited six different countries: Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, England, and Wales. 🗺️

That friend?

I met him in that private school I mentioned before…

During our trip we learned that things could be different:

• There were no ice cubes in soft drinks…
• We traded music cassette tapes with local teenagers…
• There were currency exchange rates to figure out…
• Europeans seemed more open about sexuality…
• Belgians often drank beer with their morning breakfast…

We discovered that teenagers everywhere are pretty much the same everywhere…

Maniacs

Something horrible happened next…

The Hyde Park bombing 💣 occurred while we were in London. On TV there were images of dead and dying bodies everywhere…

And we were supposed to be there.

(The whole thing seemed utterly senseless to two teenagers from Texas.)

We’d traveled from France to England the day before during a train and bus driver strike. As a result, the trip took us all day long…

We were exhausted.

The following morning we slept in and missed going to the Hyde Park parade as originally planned…

When we came downstairs that morning, we saw our host Mrs. Wallner sobbing uncontrollably.

My friend asked her, “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

Fighting back tears she replied:

“They’ve bombed Hyde Park.”

That day I learned the “they” she was referring to was the IRA. I saw what real terrorists could do…

Fucking cowards! 🖕

36,000 Feet

7 weeks after we started our trek, we flew home and returned to our familiar world.

A year later I was off to college…

6.0 My 7-Year “Plan”

I stayed out way too late…

The night before the SAT, my friends and I decided to party. 🍺

We were typical 18-year-old idiots: obnoxious, loud and drunk (the legal drinking age was still 18 back then).

Despite a throbbing hangover, I scored pretty well on my SAT.

6.1 Good Enough

I had gotten pretty good at just getting by…

Putting in just enough effort to get decent grades… but not REALLY trying.

“My SAT score is good enough,” I said to myself…

The score got me into the university where my dad taught.

“Works for me!” I thought!

(At least I told myself at the time…)

6.2 A Rough Start

During my 1st year in college, I was only going through the paces…

Computer science was my first major.

Right away I almost got kicked out of school for sending and receiving porn emails (nudes in text format)!

(In hindsight, maybe I should have taken things a bit more seriously back then.)

Great start, David! 👍

But there was some good news too:

6.3 Stubborn

With the help of tests like the Myers-Briggs, I discovered that questioning is hard-wired into me…

(Call it having a personality open to “playing the Devil’s advocate”.)

Apparently, I’m driven to question:

• Anyone…
• Anything…
• Anywhere…

Sounds like a recipe for disaster right?

Unchecked? Maybe…

But those personality tests showed me to be stubborn (in a good way)… persistent… determined!

So I transferred and tried again…

6.4 Non-Regs

I landed at Texas A&M in College Station…

(Uh… what’s that title above mean by “non-regs”? You’ll see…)

I got a little more serious this time:

• I switched my major to aerospace engineering…
• Was part of a BIG student population (40K back then)…
• Got pretty good grades in some tough classes…
• Learned to stand for entire football games…
• Experienced great traditions like Elephant Walk…

I met people from everywhere…

People from small towns I’ve never heard of… students from countries all over the globe…  I heard multiple languages being spoken constantly… 🌍

In hindsight, it prepared me for several of my post-college moves!

But I had to deal with some hard truths…

A growing problem could derail all my newfound progress and future plans!

(I almost forgot: a “non-reg” student is NOT in the Corps Of Cadets. Most of the Texas A&M student body while I attended and nowadays is “non-reg”.)

6.5 Those Little Demons

Anxiety started to make life difficult…

I couldn’t switch off all the ideas in my head (medical people call these “racing thoughts”).

I thought EVERYONE struggled as I did in college!

Before I finished the first semester of my senior year several years later?

I quit…

7.0 1 Step Forward, 2 Back

I returned to Fort Worth ashamed…

Aimless, I took several menial jobs and did essentially nothing:

• I was a “therapy tech” at a psych hospital…
• Viewed late-night TV shows until I passed out…
• Got a job as a bartender at a local restaurant…
• Bought a motorcycle 🏍️ (my mom was NOT happy)…
• Worked in a “high-end” liquor store…

To top off my attempts to excel in mediocrity, I lived at my parents’ home.

I had zero ideas what I was going to do with my life!

Then… SLOWLY… things started to change…

7.1 Zilch

As I said, for two years I did basically nothing…

I FINALLY got my shit together and returned to an area university where I got a BFA.

Back when I was at Texas A&M, I’d been an engineering major, so I’d taken lots of math…

Now I was getting a degree in graphic design.

Because of those old classes, I was the only art grad that year with a minor in math!

(A BFA with a minor in math?)

Yep.

My mix of art and engineering actually paid off… 💰

7.2 Little Fish

That combination of creativity and hard science was about to come in handy…

(But for now, I was still trying to figure it all out.)

I DID know one thing:

What I’d been doing up until now wasn’t working!

A conversation I was told about helped me gain focus:

My friend (the guy I’d gone to Europe with) had a talk with one of his younger brothers and later told me about it…

His brother said he aspired to be a “big fish in a little pond.”

The brother didn’t want big city life… traffic jams… the other problems that can come from living in a large metropolitan area…

But my friend wanted the opposite…

He dreamed of being “a little fish in a BIG pond”!

We both did.

Right then and there I decided that what I needed was a big pond…

I’ll tell you about diving into it in a bit…

But before that big pond?

7.3 Granny Unit

She and I met…

While working one of my part-time jobs in Fort Worth, I was introduced to my future wife.

She graduated from another school while I was finishing my degree. Pretty soon, a design job was hers in nearby Dallas…

The Good

A short time later, we got married and I joined her to live in Big D:

• We snorkeled on our honeymoon in Cancun, Mexico…
• Had a wonderful Siberian Husky named Niki…
• Our new home 🏠 in Dallas was a tiny “granny unit”…

I mention Niki for a good reason…

When we were dating, my future wife asked what I thought about her getting a new dog.

(I knew then she was “serious”…)

Niki required training and patience from both of us!

Me?

The Bad

Old habits came rushing back to me…

At first, I renewed my commitment to being a “jack of all trades… master of none.”

I worked for our landlord in his pest control company…  crunched numbers for a property tax control firm… even tried (and failed) at my own model building company for courtroom use…

Psychiatric hospitals were sources of part-time employment. I even tried my hand at graduate school!

Nothing seemed to capture my enthusiasm though.

7.4 Hitting The Fan

Then the dam really broke…

It happened!

A fight… a BIG fight…

No…

It wasn’t a physical fight…

I had a verbal fight with my father. 😡

I’ll spare you the details…

But when it was over my wife and I were “done” with life near my dad!

We were ready to move…

8.0 Heading West

My wife and I started a new chapter in our lives…

(Little did the two of us know we were about to enter a fire of sorts.)

We were a naive wide-eyed young couple who’d just begun life in the “big city”… and L.A. was ENORMOUS…

Over 12 million+ people lived there at the time!

(Whisky Tango Foxtrot?!?)

This wasn’t like the hometowns we’d left behind.

The city didn’t care who you thought you were… the dreams you had… what you’d done before…

For the first time, we had to make it all on our own…

But there was one lurking problem about to explode! The shockwaves changed our lives and that of the city’s people forever…

And we were heading right towards it…

8.1 City On Fire

In hindsight, our timing couldn’t have been much worse…

We’d arrived in L.A. a week earlier.

Then the Rodney King verdict happened!

Not good. 🚒

People freaked out! Fires and smoke crept closer daily from the riots in the city:

• Neighborhoods posted “Keep Out” signs…
• Shop owners carried guns and slept at their stores…
• Race relations were at an all-time low…

It was a dangerous and uncertain time…

The chaos tested the fabric of the culture we’d just become a part of.

Eventually, both we and the city survived…

A Weird Feeling

An idea stuck up in my mind as things began to settle down…

I worked at a small computer rental company in the shadow of the “Marlboro Man” billboard on Sunset Boulevard.

The owner Monty (RIP) was a chain-smoking David Crosby look-alike (think long-haired burnt-out hippie). He was a little crazy 🤪 but also wicked smart!

I learned an enormous amount about life and business from Monty.

A customer was working on this new thing called the World Wide Web… and I asked him tons of questions…

I’d finally found it!

The web was a perfect fit for my “left brain”/”right brain” mix…

I devoured every book I could get my hands on about image optimization… browser standards… automation!

I hatched a plan: I was gonna become a master of this new “web thing”!

FINALLY, I was on the leading edge of something I loved…

An Old Friend

L.A. had its perks…

There was one thing I was attracted to more than anything else:

Water! 🌊

• I loved bodysurfing in the Pacific ocean (even though it’s REALLY cold)…
• My wife and I discovered a great beach named Zuma south of Malibu…
• We fell in love with Neptune’s Net restaurant near a great surfing spot…

Yes…

Los Angeles was expensive… and crowded… AND polluted… but is also had a TON of water everywhere!

Water sports were my mental health “lifeline”.

When I got in the water, everything else just fell away…

More Firsts

There were other things I did there too:

• Got PG&E utility bills printed in 20 or 30 languages…
• Visited Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown…
• Ate fantastic food from everywhere in the world…

Spent my first-ever Christmas wearing shorts and a t-shirt, surrounded by palm trees 🌴 and the sounds and smells of the ocean.

I learned what bad traffic REALLY is…

(There wasn’t a “rush hour”… there were “rush days”!)

But the food…

I mentioned all of the wonderful food I sampled, right?

There were places I absolutely LOVED to eat:

• “El Coyote Restaurant” on Beverly Blvd…
• “Pink’s Hot Dogs” on La Brea…
• “Yamashiro Restaurant” near the Hollywood Bowl…
• “Neptune’s Net” on the coast near awesome surfing…
• All of the authentic Russian delis…

I saw (and ate) so many incredible things during my time in Los Angeles.

But most of all?

I finally found the motivation I’d never had before!

8.2 Then It Happened

I’d decided my future would be different…

Remember that buddy from middle school and our Europe trip?

He invited my wife and me to a party in San Francisco being thrown by a company called Silicon Reef…

(The company my friend worked for was one of their clients.)

At the party, the music was blasting… the alcohol was flowing… the dance floor seemed almost alive! 🥳

My wife said she didn’t know anyone and wanted to leave almost immediately…

But my reaction was the opposite.

I was finally where I felt I was meant to be!

“In a year, I’m gonna know people like this! This web thing is my world now!” I said…

She just stared at me.

Just a few months later my dream came true!

It was time to jump into another pond…

8.3 Deadheads & Patchouli Oil

We arrived in San Francisco…

The two of us thought we’d arrived in the “Promised Land”!

Unlike the “City Of Angels” we’d just left behind:

• San Francisco had abundant smog-free air…
• You could swim in crystal clear blue ocean water…
• Enjoy weather 🌞 like Walt Disney would have designed…

The moving trip up there?

The relocation was an extremely painful and tedious experience I NEVER want to endure again.

Ever…

The All-Night Trip

My wife & I rented a U-Haul for our move from Los Angeles…

Ends up that the moving van had a “speed governor” on it (i.e. “a max speed limit”):

We couldn’t drive over about 45 miles an hour!

What we’d figured would be a 7 or 8-hour trip ended up taking all night long! We arrived exhausted the next morning shortly before my wife had to be on her first day at her new job.

We backed our car off the U-Haul trailer… 🚗

She put on a brave face and got ready to meet her new coworkers.

But first?

We make the slow drive up the hill to our new rental house. To our relief, there was a surprise waiting for us:

Our new neighbors from across the street brought us bagels and coffee! 

The four of us quickly became friends.

Before long, they also provided us with one of the biggest joys in our lives:

A German Shepherd Dog puppy named Nemo!

(More on him in a bit…)

1350 Square Feet

Our 1950s house was pretty small…

But it was high in the hills looking across the Bay onto San Francisco!

And that made it perfect as far as we were concerned!

It hadn’t been remodeled since the 1970s so we made the landlord a deal. We’d remodel the place if he paid for the materials!

My wife and I absolutely loved remodeling. The job was less of a hassle than it was something we used to decompress from job pressures and life in general…

Speaking of jobs:

I started my first job soon…

Big City Life

Remember that party at Silicon Reef?

I landed my first San Francisco gig with Silicon Reef who’d thrown that party!

My new office was a happening place at the time…

We had freshly made fish tacos 🌮 and Sony PlayStation competitions at our insane Friday night company parties!

The hottest web companies were there… brand new tech startups… venture capitalists… it seemed like EVERYBODY was at company parties on Friday:

• Staff from Adobe and Macromedia…
• The people who created the first Webby Awards…
• Craig Newmark of Craigslist…
• Employees of LookSmart (a Google precursor)…
• Friendly competitors from other web firms…

We bragged about the “burn rates” of our companies and just plain had fun!

Life was good…

California Dreamin’

I was standing there taking it all in…

We’d just recently moved to San Francisco: a new house… new neighbors… new jobs…

And now?

I was in a coworker’s Bernal Heights backyard filled with party guests.

We were all eating, laughing and drinking… looking at the downtown skyline…

Nobody cared about the things that worry so many others…

At the party there were:

• Straights and gays…
• Christians, Jews and Agnostics…
• Married, single and divorced…
• Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and Asians…
• Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians…

None of that mattered!

We were just people together sharing a happy moment… 😊

The reality of the “California Dream” I’d seen on TV and in films seemed so alive back then!

And now I lived in the middle of it all…

A Harken Furling

Remember our bagel and coffee neighbor across the street?

He was a sailor.

He grew up near Lake Merritt in Oakland and he LOVED sailing!

Years later, my neighbor, his wife, and one of their friends bought a 50-foot racing yacht together (his friend owned a San Francisco sailing school)

They were always looking for a crew on sailing days… and I lived across the street.

So guess what?

Crewing was often my responsibility!

I learned a ton: the ins and outs of running a sailboat, how to tie various knots and hoist up the mainsail by grinding away:

• We competed in a variety of yacht racing events…
• Celebrated at various marinas when we were done…
• Passed giant container ships in the waters of Alameda…
• Ate hamburgers at the Richmond Yacht Club…
• Floated off Alcatraz as the Blue Angels flew by…

(BTW: For those who don’t know, a “Harken Furling” device helps roll up a sailboat’s spinnaker sail.)

Those are memories I’ll never forget…

Double The Fun

My wife and I had some great water experiences together…

• We learned to windsurf in the waters of the Berkeley Marina…
• Watched a parasailing event with competitors whizzing overhead…
• Saw sea lions basking in the sun near the water’s edge…

People also came to visit us over the years.

We took them to the usual “tourist spots” like Alcatraz… the SF street trolleys… the Golden Gate bridge… Hawk Hill… Muir Woods 🌲!

They also got to see places like Point Isabel dog park… walked Solano Avenue during festivals… visited Berkeley Potters Guild studios…

And we also ate well too…

Full Stomachs

Remember “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”?

The idea of dining on ocean seafood seemed almost magical when I was a kid. Seafood is my favorite type of food to this day!

Some of the places I loved going to:

• “The Dead Fish” in the nearby town of Rodeo…
• “The Nantucket” (closed) near the Rodeo C&C sugar factory…
• “Alioto’s” in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge…
• The street-side cauldrons of oyster soup in the city…
• The “Seabreeze Market And Deli” near the Berkeley Marina…

There were hamburgers galore, too: “Red’s Java House” in the city, “Hamburgers” in Sausalito and “The Red Onion”.

(Plus every other food you can imagine.)

It was all great to have after a day touring… enjoying the water… or for ANY reason…

Great food and great friends are a great combination…

Ocean Sounds

I often camped at Ocean Cove…

It was along the shoreline about an hour north of town.

Fishermen stuck poles in the sand while they waited for salmon to bite… we cooked fresh oysters over a campfire… divers hunted for abalone…

I used to go to the Ocean Cove convenience store every night!

That’s when a pickup truck filled with fresh oysters 🦪 arrived! Local fishermen brought them to the store…

I was ALWAYS there to buy my share! 

One night, we sat in front of the fire cooking our oysters in an iron skillet. We’d invited a father and son who were camping nearby to eat with us.

The teenager winced as he swallowed his first…

(He was probably throwing up in his mouth on that first one.)

One day I met a businessman who’d moved away from the S.F. area years before. I saw him dressed in full scuba gear heading out from his campsite…

He was going diving.

The man told me every time he’d have a business trip to the area Ocean Cove was on the schedule. He loved scuba diving here…

This time he carved out only for him! Ocean Cove was his “special place”.

That’s why I went there too…

The sounds of the ocean waves… the time sitting with friends around a fire 🔥… the serenity…

I always left here feeling at peace…

What’s A GSD?

We decided to get a new dog…

Shortly after moving into the new home, my wife and I got our first German Shepherd Dog puppy from our neighbors.

(They were the ones who’d greeted us with coffee and bagels that first morning.)

The puppy?

We named him Nemo…

(He was named after the Disney sub-captain… NOT the fish. 🐠)

I’d heard that German Shepherds were really smart…

(But Nemo was EXTRA special!)

He quickly excelled in training classes… Nemo showed a massive amount of power combined with a gentle spirit… and everyone seemed to know who HE was..

My name?

It was usually just “Nemo’s dad” or something like that.

The two of us took long walks on Point Isabel Dog Park’s waterfront… watched windsurfers off the point… I threw Nemo’s tennis ball more times than I can count…

He also loved the ocean and Dillon Beach in particular!

(Deets on Dillon in a bit…)

Over the years I met several people who’d adopted Nemo‘s brothers and sisters. One of those dog sisters had puppies, and we adopted one more puppy…

Her name was Emma!

Life was really good until one day when I got a rude reminder…

Constant Motion

I finally left Silicon Reef…

Afterward, I worked for a company called Human Code. Their HQ was in Austin, TX, but a small branch office was nearby in San Rafael.

We designed CD-ROMs and websites…

Every day around 4 PM we fired up the Quake server and our team of programmers and artists proceeded to do a lot of digital killing…

(We called those sessions “game research” on our timesheets…)

Neat Little Boxes

Then a big San Francisco company acquired us…

The first order of business was to have a “meet and greet” event.

While almost everyone was trying to get to know each other, one group of the big company’s employees wasn’t mingling!

We were curious and approached them.

They loudly complained about the recent presidential election and this ”idiot” George W. Bush…

We watched in disbelief. 😲

Sure…

Some of us voted one way while others another. But we all knew there are two things you don’t talk about at family gatherings and company events:

Religion and politics.

Despite that, one woman and her group of sycophants who parrotted her every word were bleating things like:

• “Texans are so stupid! I don’t know anyone who voted for that fool!”
• “I can’t believe that moron got elected to the Presidency!”
• “Bush is just a stupid Texas redneck like they all are down there!”

Wow.

Their group was in full gear!

We waited patiently until their circlejerk died down, and they finally noticed us. Our small group of former Human Coders stood by in silence…

They finally greeted us.

The woman who’d been wildly ranting just minutes before turned to me with an artificial smile and asked, “Hi… what’s your name? Where are you from?” 

I reached out my hand to shake hers…

With silent satisfaction, I calmly said, “My name is David. I’m from Texas.”

(She kept her mouth shut after that.)

I’ve had my share of their kind of condescension over the years:

• On the sidewalks of “liberal” New York…
• In small Southern towns…
• In the smug streets of Berkeley…

Those times remind me of the old Rush lyrics, “Quick to anger. Slow to understand.”

As Rodney King once (in)famously said:

“Can’t we all just get along?”

Gray Area

Warning: The following rant may piss some people off… skip this if you’re “sensitive”.

(OK… here goes.)

<rant>

For some, there’s only black and white…

No gray.

In my experience, some people stereotype those who see the world differently…

They don’t seem to care whose feelings they trample on in the process. In their self-righteous world, they don’t simply have another opinion, they’re “right.”

The rest of us?

We’re fine letting those opinionated asshats idiots run their sideshow… 🤡

Why?

Because most of us live by an unspoken code: “It’s OK when we agree to disagree.”

We want to enjoy being around others and experiencing what everyone is passionate about…

And the stereotype lovers?

Go ahead.

Live in your bitter little world…

</rant>

8.4 My World Crumbles

It couldn’t get much better than this…

(Or so I thought.)

I was about to own the house I’d been renting with my wife for years.

I had panoramic views of the city… a beautiful spouse… 2 dogs I adored… wonderful neighbors… a dream job…

I felt like I was living at the top of the world!

(Sometimes I could even see the tips of the Golden Gate Bridge poking through the clouds or fog. Really!)

Then an earthquake came…

It wasn’t a real earthquake…

But it utterly destroyed the world I was living in. ⚠️

First thing?

8.5 Little Hill

I got laid off with a thousand other people…

(Remember the “bad timing” of that L.A. move just in time for the Rodney King verdict?)

It was March of 2002 (9/11 had happened a few months earlier)…

Just one week after that I was fired with 1100 others.

Talk about timing…

But it gets better!

My wife and I had just purchased the tiny home we’d rented for years. It was a small 1350-square-foot house built in the 1950s…

We paid $439,000. 💸

Four hundred thirty-nine thousand dollars. In 2002!?!

Yep…

The world felt upside down. For that and many other reasons.

Then things got worse…

8.6 Cracks

Everything seemed to have changed (for the worse).

After 9/11 people started talking about war and politics more than ever:

• Family members were shunned based on their political views…
• The radio waves were filled with opinionated talkers…
• Television news focused less on facts and more on opinion…

Cracks were beginning to show across the entire country.

(Cracks were starting to form in my life too!)

Taking on the purchase of the rental house had been too much… but I didn’t want to deal with the feelings I had inside.

Soon after our marriage crumbled…

My wife and I went to pastoral counseling for two-plus years. We tried to fix the problems chipping away at our relationship…

But it was too late!

We sold the house and lived apart for over a year.

Then we divorced…

9.0 On My Own

I wanted to be as far away as possible…

My solution?

Head north of the Golden Gate Bridge to “wine country”…

9.1 Egg Town

They called it “Two Rock”…

It’s a small rural area of west Petaluma named after a rock outcropping.

Nemo and I rented a room in a Victorian house built in the 1800s with two women. It had an English horse 🐴 training facility attached and several hundred acres of pasture land!

I discovered the mortgage industry and was in it for about 5 years.

Things were pretty good for a while!

But then my income slowly shrank as the mortgage bubble of 2008 approached!

My life had one bright thing in it though…

A Silver Lining

Weekend excursions with Nemo were my one joy…

(My ex-wife kept Emma and I got Nemo.)

He and I had some incredible adventures…

I didn’t have a lot except for my car, a copy of the “California Dog Lover’s Companion” book guidebook, and my trusted canine companion.

We saw many of the small towns dotting northern California…

Cities that were initially built in the 1800s for railroad workers from all over the globe:

• China…
• Italy…
• Germany…
• Korea…
• Czechoslovakia…

When I was a boy in North Texas there were T.V. shows like “4 Country Reporter” I loved to watch!

They were designed to get viewers to visit a wide range of Texas towns…

California had the same thing.

There was a show host, Huell Howser (RIP), who encouraged locals to get in their cars and visit the many communities around the state…

Nemo and I simply created our own version…

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

I even got Nemo to love rowboats!

He wasn’t too sure at first… the boat rocked back and forth as it floated in the water…

But after some tentative steps (and the fact I was already in the rowboat) telling Nemo it’d be OK he cautiously stepped off the pier…

He gained confidence and lay in the front while I rowed the oars!

Life was simple and good.

We spent hours enjoying the peace and quiet of the water…

Cow Camping

I used to camp at the top of a tall hill…

Nemo and I would pile into my pickup truck on Friday afternoons and build our campsite far above where we lived.

At night we were surrounded by the hills, a flickering fire and sometimes?

Curious eyes.

After Nemo and I had gone to sleep one night we were awakened by sounds outside the tent…

I stumbled outside and as my eyes adjusted in the light of the dying campfire, then I saw something rather odd…

We’d been surrounded by a ring of curious cattle. 🐮

I could imagine them thinking: “What the F are the two of them doing in the middle of our pasture?!?!”

Soon after I moved on…

9.2 Hippie Hideaway

Oysters… in the town known for a certain apple variety?

(Yep! This was where Sebastopol apples got their name.)

This place was attractive to me because Sebastopol was very close to the ocean…

And fresh oysters!

Several miles from home a fisherman had a tin shack and a bunch of big blue coolers. He stayed behind after he and the other fisherman finished their night haul…

He sold fresh oysters and seafood for about half of what the grocery store did!

I ate a LOT of seafood in Sebastopol…

Hot Bread

Remember that Victorian in Two Rock?

Back in the 1970s, some residents needed a way to make money (legally)…

The residents, a group of hippies, started selling bread 🥖 in front of the house under a roadside tree.

Ultimately, that little bread-selling idea evolved into a full-fledged fresh bread store down the hill from where I lived!

I loved being hit in the face by the smell of baking bread during visits…

(Their “cinnamon roll” bread was one of my faves…)

Beach Town

Dillon Beach was a little-known secret…

Dillon Beach is a tiny oceanside town with one of the last private beaches in California…

The small downtown has a phenomenal restaurant, a well-stocked supply shop, and entered some of the best beachfront camping I’ve ever experienced.

(Because it was private, their beach allowed adult beverages and, best of all, DOGS!)

I saw scores of surfers 🏄, scuba divers, snorkelers, jet skiers, windsurfers, paddleboarders, beachgoers and plain old-fashioned swimmers there!

I spent a lot of time here:

• Sitting with Nemo or girlfriends watching the sunset…
• Getting soaked playing in the waves of the Pacific…
• Camping with the sounds of the surf in the background.

Dillon Beach served as my escape from reality for years…

9.3 Hombre

Next, I moved inland to Santa Rosa…

I shared a condo I found on Craiglist.org. My condo-mate was a part-time schoolteacher…a dog lover… and a poker player…

Soon I was introduced to a neighbor named Dave (RIP).

Dave (RIP) had survived cancer back then and LOVED Nemo. He didn’t refer to me as “David” but as “Nemo’s dad”.

We built a great relationship, and soon he bestowed me with a rare honor:

He nicknamed me “Hombre”.

On especially hot summer days Nemo and I would cool off by swimming in the creek out back. Plus, there was a lakeside park near my condo:

• It had a train my young nephew loved to ride…
• Splashy water attractions…
• Crazy-good food like hot dogs and cotton candy…
• There were walking trails around the lake…
• You could rent paddleboats on the shoreline…

There was plenty to do here in the summer…

Hometown Heroes

Charles Schultz lived in Santa Rosa…

I had the chance to see his simple little house where he created the Peanuts comic strip and the character Charlie Brown…

It sometimes felt like EVERYTHING was named after him:

• There was the Charles M. Schultz Airport…
• “Snoopy’s Home Ice” skating center…
• A Charles M. Schulz Museum…

Luther Burbank was another name that was used a lot in the area. He’d become famous for revolutionizing the genetic hybridizing of plants.

Guy Fieri created multiple restaurants in and around town… and was spotted in his convertible more than once!

So much for a sleepy little rural town…

Volunteering

Nemo and I did animal therapy…

We volunteered at retirement homes, schools and hospitals with a nurse-run group.

The visits seemed almost magical…

I was told that one of the main points of animal therapy is to stimulate the sense of touch.

Residents in retirement homes and hospitals tend to be older. With age people’s senses get less powerful:

• The sense of sight diminishes…
• Hearing tends to get worse with age…
• Tastebuds can’t sense flavors as well…
• Noses don’t detect smells like they used to…

But touch?

That doesn’t diminish…

Petting an animal like a dog or cat creates a rush of stimulus. Animal therapy is touch therapy.

And Nemo was great at it…

Special Access

I had a co-worker named Dave…

He was as White looking as me, but a small part of his heritage was American Indian.

(A TINY part… maybe 1/16 or 1/32.)

As a result, Dave could get access to restricted Indian-only fishing lands…

And he LOVED to fish! 🎣

In the office, Dave would tell us when he was fishing that weekend. He’d ask his coworkers if they wanted any fish to eat…

On Monday, Dave would show up with coolers filled with fish! Freshly caught salmon, trout or bass filleted by hand…

He refused to accept any money for the cooler contents. Dave just loved to fish!

But soon?

None of that mattered…

9.4 Water Everywhere

Later I headed south down the road to Novato…

Located halfway between Santa Rosa and San Francisco, Novato was really unique because of one area:

Bel Marin Keys.

Shiny & New

I moved to help open a new mortgage office…

A loan officer I knew had asked for my help establishing a new location for his business.

I was broke at the time…

But being eternally optimistic I thought THIS was when I’d make big bucks and win the freedom I craved! ✨

Each day I walked to the office daily and put on my “sales guy mask”… 

There were few sales commissions (the “Mortgage Bubble” was fast approaching).

But I persevered.

Occasionally though I did get paid…

The Keys

With a little cash, I rented a room on the water in Bel Marin Keys…

The U.S. Corps Of Engineers built the waterfront Novato neighborhood back in the 1970s. Connected by a waterway to San Francisco Bay it was a VERY special place…

Nemo and I both LOVED it here!

• Every house had a boat dock behind it…
• You could swim, kayak or motorboat from your backyard…
• The smell of the Bay’s ocean breeze filled the air…

It was one of my favorite places to live…

EVER!

But then the good times ended abruptly…

Broke

I couldn’t afford the rent anymore…

At the real estate office, we were unknowingly heading for the housing bubble of 2008. Soon that “bubble” popped and there was no money to go around… 

Suddenly I had nowhere to live. 😟

A coworker knew of a contractor with storage space within walking distance…

Before he was married, the contractor had converted the upstairs area of the storage space into a tiny “crash pad.”

That’s where my dog and I lived for more than two years…

And now as a result?

I was officially homeless.

No…

I wasn’t living on the street, but I was told that anyone in CA who “resides in a space not officially designed for human habitation” is considered homeless.

But then it got even worse…

Goodbye

Old age and disease were catching up with Nemo…

I was finished:

• I had no money.
• I had no local friends.
• I had no children.
• I had no home.
• I had no vehicle.

Now Nemo was acting sickly.

The vet who saw Nemo told me he’d had a good life and it was time to say goodbye…

Then the doc said it…

Euthanasia.

That was my rock bottom…

10.0 Decision Time

When “the deed” was done I didn’t know what to do… my mind was blank…

There was nothing there.

I had no idea what to do next until I had a conversation with my brother Steven…

10.1 Choice

Steven saved my life…

He’d flown out from Pennsylvania to be with me and several other close friends. They’d all joined me for the euthanasia at Point Isabel (Nemo’s favorite dog park).

I took a long silent walk with Nemo and my ex-wife Elizabeth. Then a mobile veterinarian was to do his thankless deed:

When the vet was done, I was devastated.

Frantic. Shaking. Thinking about suicide.

This moment was my bottom. I was at my lowest point ever… emotions swirled in my head…

All that mattered then?

My best friend was gone.

All those times Nemo and I took walks, played with a dog toy, made dog park trips, volunteered, visited friends, and “spooned” together as we slept…

All I had now were memories…

10.2 Reframe

In my mind, I thought I had one of two options:

1. Suicide…
2. Starting over from scratch…

Steven stepped in and “reframed” my situation.

He helped me understand the freedom I had despite all of the pain…

My brother said millions of people might be envious of me now! Steven helped me realize that I was actually free…

Yes… I was hurting.

But I was also free! Free because I had:

• No connections…
• No partner…
• No children…
• No pets…
• No job…
• No house…
• No car…

I had none of those things…

At that moment I had the opportunity to choose what I was going to do with the rest of my life:

To end it…

Or continue to fight.

Steven helped me decide to continue…

To start over.

I chose to make my life whatever I wanted! And the first thing I had to do?

Return to what I knew…

10.3 Déjà Vu

I took a detour on the way back to Texas… 

I moved to rural Pennsylvania. I lived there for a few months in a farmhouse about 20 miles west of Steven’s home.

His family and my parents supported me financially during my time there…

Mostly I sat alone in my room.

Occasionally Steven and I’d go to a lake near his house. We rented canoes… paddle boats… kayaks… 🚤

We explored the surrounding waters… and just relaxed…

That time was great for me.

I slowly started to see there was a future for me…

11.0 Moving Back

I returned to Fort Worth…

The town where I did most of my growing up was where I started my life over…

I was embarrassed and humiliated…

Then I realized what happened before didn’t matter. All that DID matter was what I chose to do moving forward!

Yes…

• I’d had a house in the hills…
• Worked at some of the top Bay Area companies…
• Had an amazing wonderful dog and friend…
• Owned a BMW 540i…
• I was able to “eat my way around the world”…

All of it was gone.

Now, this?

But I realized this “do-over” was necessary…

There was no looking back!

Only forward…

11.1 The Condo

To start, I lived in a room in my parent’s condo…

Things were rather bleak then:

• I had no job and no money…
• Most of the time, I stayed inside…
• I watched lots of television…
• Wasted time on the internet…
• Occasionally I did some “dogsitting”…

My pity party was in full swing. 🤯

But then things started to look up…

11.2 Life At The Lake

I got a part-time job as a receptionist at a local church…

It wasn’t much but it forced me to be around people, talk and interact with others…

(In hindsight that job was a blessing in disguise!)

With a meager but steady income, I eventually rented a place in the north of town. The house had a pool and was next to a big lake (Eagle Mountain).

Ahh… water!

Worked for me… 🤙

Ultimately I returned to the thing I truly loved.

I helped others succeed on the world wide web…

12.0 Surprises

Things were starting to go pretty well again…

I landed a remote web job and a pretty good salary. But sometimes it felt like a score was being kept somewhere though…

Every time things were looking good something came along! My life was no exception either…

I had a choice (again):

I could cower and wilt away…

Or I could endure and keep going!

Some things that happened next were downright painful… even cruel… but as the old saying goes:

“That’s life…”

12.1 She Fought

There was one fight my mother couldn’t win…

Pancreatic cancer. ☠️

She was diagnosed and then had several procedures done but the condition had already done horrific damage…

The whole process took six long months.

In the end, I sat on the hospital oncology floor holding her hands as the last breath left her body…

I put on a brave face.

Her memorial service filled the sanctuary and my young nephew gave an especially moving tribute in front of the church members.

She was cremated and interred with others who’d gone before…

Friends, family and strangers reached out to offer their condolences and personal stories of her generosity.

Weeks later the chaos of it subsided and I finally gave myself permission:

I cried like a baby.

I love my mom and miss her every day!

Soon it was me…

12.2 My Turn

I had a major stroke…

(And I wasn’t that old!)

I was the “young one” in the stroke rehab facility. I was surrounded by patients in their 70s… 80s… 90s…

One day a thought came to me.

(It had come to me before when I knew Nemo had to be euthanized…)

Now it came roaring back again…

The Question

Should I commit suicide?

Or fight?

I didn’t share these feelings with anyone at the time:

• My dad…
• The rehab staff…
• My brother…

I was determined to answer the question by myself…

My weightlifting experiences came to mind. In the weight room, it was about setting goals… improving every day… growing my confidence… ⭐

So what next?

I made a decision:

I decided to fight, scratch, and do whatever it took to save my life!

Sure…

I was mad for a short time…

And I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to recover…

Then a powerful way to look at my situation hit me. My stroke was like a random driving accident…

It wasn’t anyone’s fault!

There was no one to blame. It was just a nasty combination of lifestyle choices, genetics, and bad luck…

There was absolutely zero I could do about the past!

It was time to move on…

Relocation

After rehab, my dad and brother moved me to a new place…

They got me into the rear rental unit of a small duplex near my old place.

(My dad especially said he didn’t want me living in a 2-story apartment as I had before. This new place was on the ground floor.)

It took patience and time, but I recovered bit by bit.

After a few months, I went from being in a wheelchair to walking 1200 steps to the grocery store and back!

Every day I counted my footsteps: 1, 3, 10, 50…

One day a woman introduced herself to say she’d been watching me for months. It ended up she’d once had a stroke too!

For months my neighbor had peered at me through her window, seeing what she labeled my single-minded determination.

(I probably blushed at the time.)

Her encouragement is one of the things that kept me going!

I felt hope…

Determination

My improvement continued…

Finally, I moved back to my old location, where I rented the smallest unit in the building.

The interior was about the size of a Catalina sailboat!

I’d struck up a friendship years earlier with the landlord partly because of our shared experience of attending Texas A&M. 🎖️

He’d been a “CT” (in the Corps Of Cadets) and I was a “non-reg” but all of that was in the past…

He apologized before I moved in about how small the place was.

I told him, “The size is great! No worries!”

I continued “When I got divorced back in SF, one of my first thoughts was calling a liveaboard sailboat my home!”

“Small is good!” I said…

12.3 Lunch

Next, it was my dad’s turn…

He was with a friend at a local restaurant waiting for a table.

Then it happened…

The Slip

He fell, smacking his head on the concrete…

Hard!

Months later, after a hospitalization followed by two rehab stays the effects of T.B.I. (Traumatic Brain Injury) took him from us.

He was gone. 💀

Just like my mom…

I didn’t really understand what a Traumatic Brain Injury was at the time. I was told that T.B.I. can occur any time your head gets hit hard…

Many kinds of people suffer from T.B.I.:

• Football players…
• Boxers…
• Soldiers…
• Robbery victims…
• People who fall…

Falling and hitting his head on the pavement is what happened to Cy…

A Good Life

My dad lived a long life…

His memories of all the birthdays… holidays… promotions… dinners… laughter… tears… births… marriages… deaths…

In just a few seconds all of it was taken away.

Gone.

I miss you, Dad…

13.0 Right Now

Life can be tough…

Now let’s focus on what really matters right now.

You…

We all have limited time. There’s nothing to guarantee we’ll be here tomorrow…

So what is the only thing that matters?

Today.

All any of us can do is enjoy being alive right now!

We can’t change the past… and the future isn’t here to control yet…

What will you do with your time?

14.0 Your Move!

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Imagine feeling this good all the time!

It’s possible when you choose water sports as your go-to activity. You’ll be thrilled with the results – both physically and emotionally…

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Wishing you fair winds and following seas,

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