Blog
Tedium – Waiting for The Cat in the Hat to Show Up
When the bottom of bottles clink in the trash, the dirt on the bottom of your shoes refuses to fall off, and your head wakes up every day with throbbing pain, you know you’ve lost your innocence. But was it there in the first place? Is losing innocence a rite of...
You can travel anywhere, anytime, because you have a mind and an imagination.
I'm fascinated when people say they get bored because I don't understand how. Our minds are vast, incredible places where we can create anything. You can sit right where you are and have adventures. Why? Because you can think and you have an imagination. You have a...
My Birth Defect Changed Me: From Innocent to Misfit and Victim to Hero
My mom, dad, and I were all in a patient waiting room in Minneapolis. A small room in an area of the children's hospital. I was cold, wearing nothing but a thin, paper hospital gown. It was the late 80s and I had turned 15 the day before. Half my head was shaved and I...
The Joy of Being a Surfer — One Morning on the Big Island
Nothing compares to riding a wave. One of the greatest joys in my life has been surfing. It’s the most difficult and rewarding thing I ever learned to do. I learned to surf late in life at the age of 25. Because I was living in San Francisco, I taught myself to surf...
If you live well, your life will feel like an incredible novel.
I was talking to my girlfriend, Whitney, recently about writing and a particular period of my life, and I said to her, "I knew right in the middle of that time it would make a great story." That's what living your life well means to me. When you're right in the middle...
Key West Taught Me How to Be a Bartender, a Lover, and a Scoundrel
I learned to bartend from a handsome, pepper-bearded, and self-described “old queen” named Daisy in Key West, Florida when I was 19. It was at a restaurant called Mangoes off Duval Street, and I was the youngest and only straight bartender. During that time, I lived...
Fart Blossom! School Bus Rides of Arctic Dread
The end of the quarter-mile driveway from our farmhouse in the winter was the most desolate place on earth, and I stood there every weekday waiting for the school bus. A little boy in my blue snowmobile suit listening to the wind blow hard against the telephone wires....
Transition isn’t always easy but it’s filled with possibilities.
I sit at the Pontchartrain Lakefront near my home in New Orleans and meditate there often. It reminds me that everything is constantly, beautifully changing. Transitioning from one thing to another is hard and it's scary, but the more we do it, the easier it is. I...
We Thrived in Ruins and Looked for Mermaids on the Aegean Sea
When I was 23, I spent two months traveling throughout Turkey. I was called Indiana Jones during a party of belly dancers on the Black Sea and nearly died of food poisoning on the Syrian border. I was shown secret underground caves in Cappadocia for a bottle of raki...
The Day I Killed 69 Chickens in Alaska
The day I killed and skinned 69 chickens in a ship's graveyard on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula is why I stopped eating birds when I was 18. It was late May and my friend Jeff and I flew from Seattle to Anchorage to “go fishin’”. Jeff was a very smart, 19-year-old poet and...