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I've wandered (and wondered) quite a bit since tossing my hat in May of 1995. Pepper and I met in 1996 and we've lived on all 4 borders of the U.S. and dabbled in several languages and cultures. Here's a short list of the craziness I found out in the wide world.
I did interrogation with the US Army for a few years, and I was nearly native fluency with Arabic. It's mostly faded now, but I can still order my favorite Gyro at my local Palestinian restaurant. I had a few deployments. One of which was as the cleanup crew for the Abu Graib interrogation scandal in 2004. That was fun. Don't worry, I arrived after the naked pyramids, but just before the news crews. The other deployment was as an intel courier and debriefer across the middle east. I got to stuff sealed envelopes in my jacket/briefcase and board planes to hand deliver them to people. Don't watch a spy movie with me. I also did weekly checks to make sure the Kuwaiti jet ski rental guy wasn't too shady and that the local hookahs were operational. :) They were.
In the midst of that I did a short stint at the Dept of Defense Polygraph institute. Then I taught interrogation for a while in Arizona for peeps heading to Guantanamo bay before realizing that my kids were getting older, I was gone a lot, and this shit is starting the get unbelievably weird.
Somewhere in 2008-2009 I hard rebooted my life, quit my job, sold my house, and brought my family and my toys back home to Hamburg.
I did construction for a bit while getting my masters in Ed Tech, and then launched into the nuclear R&D where I helped convert weapons grade plutonium to fuel rods. I got to travel to sites where I was able to hold uranium pellets and touch a cask of plutonium and pretend to remember how to speak French. After that we moved to Oklahoma to help take care of Pepper's grandparents, so I took a work from home position with GE Healthcare's Biopharma R&D for a decade or so and pioneered the adoption of virtual reality for building a vaccine production facility during the covid shut down. When everyone else was home just chilling, I was furiously coding and testing stuff until I burned out with that.
Then I revisited my military and career development stuff for a while as a corporate L&D lead for a startup company that helps military spouses maintain employment while they moved. I did that until I bailed on corporate and tech life.
You can hit a hard DASH in the "what have you been up to" line of stuff sometime in in 2021. Everything stopped, and I pretty much spent the better part of 2 years primitive tent camping off-and-on in south Florida with my wife and recalibrating what it means to be alive.
So now she and I run a massage and energetics shop on the Florida space coast where we massage people and chill all day long while rockets blast off overhead. A lot of meditation. A lot of just sitting with people and helping them relearn how to breath with their diaphragm. A lot of hot chocolate. It is magical. It is HANDS DOWN the most exciting thing I've ever done.
I'm currently hanging out in my hammock every morning/evening I can, hitting the beach once a week, going to every drum circle I can find, learning Peruvian shamanism (it's similar to Christianity in many regards but with different vocab and culturalisms). Pepper and I are planning a 10-day trip there in June to do some soul searching with the locals up in a mountain hideaway. I have NO IDEA what this will entail, and I'm not Googling it. I'm just going to show up with a backpack, a passport, some cash, and let my good luck take us wherever it takes us. I'm "excited" scared because I don't know the language, the culture, or really... anything about it other than it will be winter.. and I'll be way up in the mountains. This will be fun. I hope... It should be.
I've learned that living my life from an unplanned perspective is the wildest and most exciting thing I've ever done, and my family is amazingly supportive of the weirdness that is me.
