Long ago, back in… August of 2009, I posted consistently to this blog. The world was such a different place then that it’s hard to even remember how we lived. Conan O’Brien had job security, $100 bills were burned for their heat, and I was at the tail end of my recovery, trying to figure out where I wanted to go next (I may or may not have made up the $100 bill part, it was too long ago to remember). For one reason or another, obviously I stopped writing on here for a while. A lot has happened since then and even more will hopefully be happening soon, so let’s fill in the blanks and get this damn blog going again. I’m guessing that one person out there just might have checked the blog at some point. This is for you, random cat walking on somebody’s keyboard.  Read 

“You know this is how you’ll die,” I thought to myself. I was lying flat on my back on the carpet just outside of my bathroom, sweating and starting to worry. It was getting so hot that I would momentarily lose vision before shaking my head furiously to restore my sight. My stomach was a boiling vat of acid and I wanted nothing more than to curl up into a ball, but I knew that would only make the overheating worse. I tried to calm myself, but when things start to scare me I breathe faster and shorter, I panic. I started gulping for air and once again I was doing the mental life checklist I had done so many times before. This was ten minutes ago.  Read 

My parents have had a lakehouse south of Bakersfield, CA since before I was born. I’ve grown up there as much as I did in my hometown. I started skiing up there when I was 1½ years old, wakeboarding when I was 8, and I’ve been blowing things up for as long as I can remember. I’ve grown up with most of the kids there since we were all born and everyone is like family. With all of us getting older, going off to college, and generally becoming adults, we don’t see each other as often as we used to. One weekend, however, almost guarantees that we’ll all be at the lake at the same time, the 4th of July.  Read 

I’ve thought that I might die on more than one occasion in my life. The first time I can remember was when I was 8 years old and I crashed into a barbed wire fence on a quad runner. The most vivid time was when I was on a bike ride from Santa Monica to San Diego. We stopped at some beach near Camp Pendleton and I went swimming by myself. The riptide pulled me under and spit me out a minute and a half later, a quarter mile from the shore. I had almost blacked out and barely made it back to shore. Most recently, my disease made me lose almost 50 pounds and it started really scaring me into a Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson type situation at 22 years old. I thought about all of the things that I had done and all of the things that I wanted to do and it bothered me that I could think of so many things on the “haven’t done” list.  Read 

Where the hell have I been? I feel like this is a bi-annual question I pose to myself and subsequently decide to explain to the world. I disappeared from this site once again for a few months and a lot has happened both in my life and on this blog.  Read