tl;dr

Writer, Blogger, Traveler. On the road, off the grid. Big Tech is Evil.

Quick Intro

Well, where to start? It's been awhile since I wrote one of these.

First off, welcome to my little home in Cyberspace- a bit of a homage to my first foray onto the interwebs, back when I staked a claim on Geocities back in the late 90s. I was going through some life changes and set about documenting them and connecting with similarly minded people. I was a much more consistent writer back in those days.

So, I'm building this site to:

1. Archive some of my very early diaries and some of the weird and cool stuff I've come across in the past twenty years. There's no search bar here- you actually need to explore and poke around a bit!

2. Give people a way to catch up with me and connect outside of the chains and bubbles of social media by restarting my blog and possibly posting additional media here.

Round these here parts you can call me Quiet, something people always called me while growing up, usually in the form of "Why are you so Quiet?"

So lets sum up the past couple of decades or so of adulthood: Moved to San Francisco shortly after the turn of the century dotcom bust to witness the birth of modern social media, 'Uber', and the 'Uber for Whatever/Everything' business model.

After barely struggling to survive in the service industry those first few years I fell into Hospitality Management. Passed some time doing that for awhile before I made a deal with the Devil and ended up going the startup route myself. Spent years on building a hardware based company which got me 15 minutes of internet fame and almost killed me. Around this time I also met the first, and so far only Love of my life.

Of course, the business and the relationship failed and I wound up bankrupt and alone and back in the service industry, moving boxes at night and slinging coffee during the day.

Easy come, easy go :D

Eventually got back into hospitality, though still working at two jobs 16 hours a day to make ends meet.

I've always been a bit cynical, to say the least, but most of the last decade has left me ever more disillusioned and distrustful of 'The System', especially the American version. The System that funnels you towards lifelong debt and forever longing for and chasing some fantasy of the American Dream, whatever that is.

90% of the population fancy themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires while gleefully serving and defending the billionaires that climbed the ladder and pulled it up behind them to leave us fighting for scraps in the muck of Peak Capitalism.

Hmm, this has started getting kind of heavy- Here's a cute cat picture!

So anyway, like a lot of people, I spent a lot of my life in this consumerism trap, getting the shiny new smartphone every other year, doing way too much online shopping and dining, and giving away my data to every fancy platform that came around.

I think it was the 2016 election that finally started to wake me up, as I saw the multiple ways our digitally connected lifestyle was being weaponized and used to divide us.

All this left me nostalgic for earlier times. Not really just because of their supposed simplicity, which is probably an illusion, but because of who I was. People grow and change, but I know that in some aspects I've been shaped by external forces into ways I don't like. My attention is shallower, my creativity dimmer. Age has something to do with it, but our multitasking culture with a search bar and a flood of distractions at our fingertips is at least partly blame, and I need to take more responsibility for my own health.

Just like any positive lifestyle habits like diet and exercise, I need to actively work to cleanse my mind. For me, that starts with stepping away from social media and the torrent of news and mindless distractions. This site is the first step of all that- back when I first started major life changes, I blogged my way through it which made for cheap therapy. And nowadays journaling and reflection is in vogue, so that's another plus, ha ;)

I expect to update this section as more of my story gets written, so check back again later.

I remain,

Quiet