25, err, 30 Facts About Yours Truly

A goofy picture of me I took in fall 2020 for an on-line company teaching English. (Photo: Author)

On the eve of November 27, 2021, I’m listening to a cover by my favorite band, Phish, of one of my favorite artists, Jimi Hendrix, on what would have been his 81st birthday as I compose a list of facts about me that, on some future eve, well, may have changed. But for now, here they are:

• I was born on January 4, 1973.
• That day had a solar eclipse, but it couldn’t be seen from where I was born, which was in Tacoma, Washington, USA.
• I lived in a suburb of Tacoma until I was 18 years old. My childhood was, for the most part, rather idyllic.
• I was crazy about sports back then, played baseball and tennis and loved watching football, too.
• From an early age, people told me, “You are a writer.”
• So I went to college at the University of Southern California to study print journalism and political science. I dreamed of becoming either a sportswriter or a politics writer.
• I fulfilled both dreams over the next few years, working at the Los Angeles Daily News as a sportswriter and then at The Tacoma Reporter, an alternative weekly, as a political and cultural writer.
• I realized dreams are meant to be experienced and then to wake up from. I’m still dreaming … and waking up.
• One of my issues in my 20s was I always seemed to work for companies that were run by people who weren’t honest. On September 11, 2001, I was working for a company that represented truck drivers with legal issues. The owners were not honest. I realized on that day that life was too short for bullshit. I quit several days later, went to a forest, and asked the Universe to guide me to a job where the owner was honest. I wrote about those weeks here.
• The next day, I was working at a used bookstore, another lifelong dream, and I stayed there until summer 2004 when I moved to Japan.
• In January 2002 I met a girl. She was the girl next door from halfway across the world. In short, she was the niece of my parent’s next-door neighbor but she was from Japan.
• So I moved to Japan, not only to marry her, but to experience life in a foreign culture and to get out of a culture I thought was on the wrong track.