CURRENT MISSION

I am going to seize life by the balls and suck every sweet bit of delicious juice from it that I can. Living is an adventure for the taking, plain and simple. I intend to live one hell of a story.

ABOUT ME

Well I can be pretty wordy in the way I describe things so I should probably watch myself here.

The only label I really like to put on myself is human, but it would be disingenuous to say that there isn't anything more to say about me. I try to keep my life hopping with everything from random social outings to motorcycle rides and writing. I tinker on various things for hobbies (my motorcycle being the main one) and love to learn new things. I read a lot. I think a lot. I do a lot too. I have a tendency to pontificate on matters that I feel I have some authority on when asked for my opinion. To be honest, though, I'd usually rather be laughing or trying something stupid/awesome than talking because talking seems to lead to a lot of ego-stroking, self-stimulation these days. At least, it seems to do that when talking about serious subjects with a serious attitude (how dull is that?).

As you can see, I have a habit of rambling on when something strikes me as interesting, so again, I may fail at the brevity of this description. I really enjoy finding new places so I like hiking as much as I like driving down roads I have never been to before. I love music. I am a rocker at heart but have a soft spot for unique and energetic music as well. What can I say? I really do love Katy Perry. I play the drums when I want to piss my neighbors off. I can be a mischievous asshole or just mischievous, depending on whether or not I think you are a doofus.

Laughing is, in my opinion, a great past time. So anything that gets me laughing from youtube videos to movies to conversations and stand up is okay in my book.

I guess when it comes down to it my typing away on the intrwebz only shows the slightly introspective, mostly ridiculous side of me. If you want to meet me, take a vacation to Pismo beach, San Luis Obispo, or anywhere in California and send me an invite to coffee or something. I love meeting new people. In all honesty, I might be able to offer a bed to crash in as well, I would just have to clear it with my roomate first.

PHILOSOPHY

Well, life is a ride. We cannot make the assumption that we were born into a safe or friendly world. We weren't. Bad shit happens everywhere in the world but, frankly, that's a big part of what makes life so interesting. With every heartbreak comes a chance for a new relationship. With every death comes a strengthening of existing friendships. With every failure comes a lesson for future endeavors. With every loss comes victory of character. I don't mean to make the world sound black and white. It is neither. But I consider the beautiful thing about living to be the fact that we can love and turmoil and support and fight and grow and collapse in any given situation. The real thing that makes us humans stand out above the rest of the species on this planet is that we have the ability to abstract our own thoughts, feelings, and reality. We can consciously and objectively look at the world and process it before reacting to it. Because of this, we are afforded the beautiful gift of realizing and thinking about everything good and bad and in between on the face of this funny little blue planet. That's pretty damn cool!

So my personal philosophy is to enjoy it. I like to tear through life and see what enthusiasm and heartache it brings every day. I like riding the roller coaster of life with my eyes blindfolded and my hands in the air. There is so much in this universe to learn and know and see and understand that spending our time moping about some small misfortune or apathetically denying anything different than our comforts is just silly.

So I say sock it to me. Sock it to all of us. Life is one hell of a quest. The more tenaciously and enthusiastically we embrace it, the more we grow.

=D

(Also I like emoticons constructed from equals signs.... =P )

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Well, thus far my couchsurfing experience has involved surfing up and down the eastern coasts of both islands of New Zealand. Each person I met on my travels, through couchsurfing, was both respectful and friendly. I will admit to having become a cheerleader of this site, up-talking it every chance I get when someone asks me about my travel habits.

So far I have not been able to participate in any local CS events due to a busy schedule. Ideally, that is going to change in a week or so. I would love to do what I can to make the San Luis Obispo couchsurfing community quality.

I also must lament the fact that I do not have accommodations to share with strangers. My roomate is not the most trusting person and is convinced that anyone staying with us that he doesn't know will rob us blind or murder us in our sleep. Despite my best attempts to convince him otherwise, he remains stubborn on that mindset and, as such, I can only offer drinks and local tours/adventures for travelers to the area.

I do live only a mile from the pismo beach dunes. This is the one place in the entire state of California where you can take motor vehicles onto the beach. If you end up nearby riding a dirtbike or ATV or such, give me a holler and I will come join you.

Also, if you are interested in trying out a dirt bike on some sand dunes, give me a buzz and I will do what I can to get you riding in no time.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

So far I have couchsurfed on both the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Each of my hosts was enthusiastic and full of life. Each person had a unique mind and a lovely set of experiences and anecdotes with which to shower me. I had the time of my life wandering around, relatively aimlessly, in New Zealand knowing that I had safe and warm couches to return to at the end of the day.

I've never traveled abroad relying on hotels, it seems too superficial. I can't say I am ever interested in trying it either. Now that I am a legit couchsurfer, every one of my trips is going to, hopefully, involve the couch and stories of a friendly CS stranger.

Interests

Stories, laughs, philosophy, space, satellites, advanced control algorithms, theoretical physics, motorcycles, movies, Rock N Roll, coffee, fun people, good times, beer, whiskey, Star Wars, science fiction, swords, knives, piracy, the internet, time, technology of all sorts, and competence.

• writing
• books
• design
• dining
• beer
• coffee
• drinking
• motorcycles
• paintball
• technology
• movies
• reading
• traveling
• cars
• music
• drums
• cycling
• hiking
• paintballing
• surfing
• cheerleading
• physics
• science
• tours
• beaches

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: The Unlovables, MC Lars, Shaman, MxPx, Rock N Roll

Books:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
The Scarlet Letter - Nathanial Hawthorne
McBeth - Shakespeare
The Halo Series
Post-trilogy Star Wars novels

Movies:
Any comedies that make me laugh.
Any dramas that move me.
Any action movies that portray real men kicking ass and taking names (God bless you Bruce Willis).
Star Wars
...
Also, romantic comedies are a guilty pleasure.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I wrote a novel. Most people find that to be amazing. I haven't published it yet so its still little more than a hobby to me. I also crafted a sword for a school project, that was pretty sweet. But let's be honest, that kind of stuff only gets you so far. You want a really amazing story? Here we go:

So one day my friends and I were paintballing at a friend's ranch. We decided we were tired of hiding behind the paltry rocks and trees that mother nature had decided to bestow upon us. We decided to build a paintball fort. Our design involved sawing the frame to a trampoline in half and partially balancing/suspending it on a rock face. The rock was cut in such a way that it had a very nice shelf on it so really all we had to do was hold the frame on the shelf until someone tied it off to keep it up. We then lined the face of the frame, which overlooked our paintball area, with chicken wire to help deter paintballs from getting inside. The idea was, of course, that we could worm our way onto the ledge, behind the half-circle frame of the trampoline, and shoot at people from said ledge safely. Unfortunately, we found out the hard way that paintballs go through chicken wire pretty easily. So we started weaving sticks and vines through the chicken wire to provide even more cover.

Well that wasn't enough. I noticed that a nearby oak tree had been struck by lightning recently and half of it was toppled over. Its weight was supported by its own branches still so it was mostly erect (snicker). The trunk was split where the lightning had struck. The partially fallen portion of the tree, we decided, somehow had to be added to our epic paintball fort. So, my friends and I ran to the tree to topple what was left of it. The highly thought out procedure we were going to use involved myself and one other kid twisting the tree using the branches supporting most of its weight, while a third friend climbed the partially fallen trunk and jumped up and down to crack what was left of it. Well our genius level deconstruction worked incredibly efficiently. With a thunderous crack the rest of the tree trunk gave way. This put the equivalent of about three tons (I know, none of you metric users have any idea what that is) of force onto the four or five branches my other friend and I were twisting.

The result?

Well those three tons had to go somewhere and the torsion force we were putting on those lower branches forced that somewhere to be my face. Nearly the entire weight of the mighty old oak twisted violently and smacked me square in the head. The force was so great, in fact, that I was literally lifted from the ground and launched backwards (think uppercut style blow).

Of course, I did what any self respecting man would do and started laughing hilariously because, let's face it, it's not an adventure until someone gets a concussion. I thought I had escaped with little more than a headache. However, when I opened my eyes, it became apparent that there was a massive pressure cut across the bridge of my nose, from which blood squirted every time I opened my eyes wide. I had a built in water gun =).

Well, after chasing my friends around trying to squirt them with my new found blood fountain, I became lightheaded. We hiked a quarter of a mile back to the house where, upon seeing the damage to my face (which has healed quite nicely thank you very much) I passed out. They say you don't dream when you pass out, but I disagree. I distinctly remember being chased by dinosaurs in jet fighter planes before coming back to the real world.

So that was one day in my high school life. If you ask me, surviving a full grown tree falling on you is pretty amazing (though to be fair, it's happened again since then).

Teach, Learn, Share

You can never have too much Duct tape.
Always carry a knife or a multi-tool.
If you cut yourself shaving a lot, try reversing the direction of your shaving stroke.
pi = 3.1459, you never know when you will need that.
The Earth has a radius of 6378 km...or something close to that.
Google knows more than I ever will.
Reading the manual really can, and does, save a lot of heartache and stress.

Interesting thought: When we refer to a person, or a person's personality, or a person's soul, we usually aren't referring to a bag of meat and bones. An interesting idea is that we are referring to a very particular set of patterns that come bundled together. This set of patterns displays itself as an entity in this world through a vehicle known as a body. This set of patterns includes everything from communication styles to tastes in food and music. When we refer to the death of a person, we are not referring to the rotting of a corpse in the ground. We are referring to a particular bundle of patterns no longer existing in a single entity in the world. The patterns, of course, do live on in other folks. One person may speak like the lost one, while another person may have the same attitude towards adversity. In the end, the real loss of death comes not from losing the material body which we are so familiar with seeing, but in losing the easy accessibility to the single set of patterns we have come to associate with that body. Take heart, however, for those patterns, and that person, therefore, live on . They are simply dispersed to different places in the world. You will find them again.

So, what patterns are you?

Countries I’ve Visited

New Zealand

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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