If you want to understand this woman? You can’t start with the marriage. You can’t start with the divorce. You have to go back. Back to the source code, the original sin. You have to understand that she wasn’t born…

You look back, twenty-eight years gone. A lifetime. The man I was then is a stranger to me now, a ghost. I’ve done my share of soul-searching since then, I guess, or maybe just a lot of staring at the…

You have to understand where I was at twenty-eight. No college degree, no pedigree, no silver spoon lodged in my ass. Just a blue-collar, white-trash Cailfornia kid who worked himself to the bone. And it paid off. I got the…

The marriage was already a corpse, of course, just twitching now and then for old time’s sake. The illusion was still standing, propped up in the corner of the living room like a cheap mannequin, but illusions don’t do a…

The reek of capitalism, stale ambition, and cheap Tiger beer. It clung to everything like a bad hangover. That’s what Systematic Asia was built on, a Marriott hotel room in Singapore, twenty-sixth floor, 2608. Original? Nah. But effective. Three hundred…

Out in our overpriced yuppie farm in Tumalo, Oregon—where everyone plays cowboy but still drives a Subaru—I had two dogs: a black lab and a basset hound named Corky. Corky was stubborn and dumb as a sack of hammers, and…

I was still married, still chained to the corpse of a marriage that smelled worse every time I dragged it out in public, and there I was, sitting at the tequila bar, pretending life hadn’t already slipped through my fingers.…

I threw some cash at 107.1, thinking maybe it’d turn into something, thinking maybe anything could still be built out of the wreckage. Mostly it meant getting dragged to concerts and pathetic little meetups full of aging radio hacks and…

I got off the plane from Singapore fat, sweaty, liver-pickled, and half-dead, dragging the stench of three weeks of bad decisions and half-hearted victories behind me like a dead rat tied to a string. I’d been gone almost a month,…

Let’s talk about cheating—not the movie kind, not the lipstick-on-the-collar kind. Not the loud, scandalous kind that ends with shouting and broken plates. No. I’m talking about the quiet kind. The kind that creeps in through the cracks. The kind…

I walked into marriage like a man clocking in for a long shift—thinking if I didn’t cheat, didn’t hit her, and brought home enough bacon, I’d bought myself a lifetime contract. Figured that was the formula: be decent, be loyal,…

I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in nine years. Nine years of putting my soul into learning everything I could about Jesus Christ and the Church of Latter-day Saints, trying to redefine myself in a place where everything felt…

Now, these blue rings, which were basically hybrids of the VLCT ring for Texas Instruments, would play a huge role in the next phase of my business. Texas Instruments told me, in that classic “corporate” way, that I should start…

I was riding a natural high. I paid back the money I’d borrowed from family members for the last big order, and I was getting buried in work, drowning in orders from Lucent Technologies, Texas Instruments, and Dallas Semi. Decisions…

You don’t wake up one day and just decide you need to escape your life. It’s a slow burn, a creeping realization that you’ve built something you can’t live in. That’s what my father and I had in common—our houses…

The thing about marriage is that it always starts with good intentions, like a dog you bring home from the shelter thinking it just needs a little love, a little patience, a little training, but before long, it’s pissing on…

Scott Wicklund was the kind of guy who had a framed shirtless photo of himself from his USC days, an artifact of a time when he believed his own hype. A douchebag at best, but tolerable in the right settings.…

There are men who walk into a bar, order their drink, and fade into the background, content to enjoy their whiskey in peace. Then there was Scott Wicklund, the human hurricane, a man who entered a room like a goddamn…

Scott Wicklund was a changed man. After his wife put him on house arrest, after she had forced him onto those pills that made drinking a vomit-inducing hellscape, after she tightened her Jesus-loving grip around his throat, he was a…

Scott Wicklund wasn’t supposed to be this kind of guy. He was a clean-cut, church-going, Bible-study-leading, mortgage-paying, family-man kind of guy. The kind of man who believed in firm handshakes and mutual funds. The kind of man who mowed his…

Portland was our undoing. It had started so simply. A boys’ night out. A business trip with just the right amount of bad decisions sprinkled in. Scott Wicklund and I weren’t supposed to be here. He had a Bible-study wife,…

Singapore was where men went to forget. I had a storage unit full of inventory, a distribution deal with ZMC, and a life that revolved around hotel rooms, conference calls, and meetings over overpriced whiskey. My main office? Marriott, room…

Walking Out of TSK and Burning Bridges I had the warehouse set up exactly the way I wanted it. Every tool had its place, every part stored in its proper bin, every document filed so that I could retrieve it…

I was sitting at home, in that cramped little house on Oetkin Rd, Milwaukie Oregon, watching my life stall out in real time. My resume was out there, floating in the void, and I was waiting for a call that…

There are things a man does to escape his life. Some drink, some chase women, some pretend everything is fine until they drop dead in a recliner watching the news. My organic father and I? We took off to Mexico.…

I was 21, freshly booted from the United States Navy, my “thank you for your service” coming in the form of a bad conduct discharge. Honorable men got medals; I got a boot to the ass. That was fine. I…

San Diego was starting to wear thin. The shipyard grind, the endless cycle of welding, cutting, grinding, and inhaling enough toxic fumes to qualify for early retirement in a cancer ward—it was all getting old. Sure, I was a lead…

White Utopia. The kind of place where people bring their shopping carts back to the corral and wave as you drive by. A far cry from the hood in San Diego where we clawed our way out. Now here I…

They showed up unannounced, the way bad news always does. My brother and his wife had moved into my town, close enough to be neighbors, far enough for me to ignore them. I didn’t know much about how they were…

I hadn’t been back to Colorado in years, but there I was, rolling through the Rockies with my daughter, heading to some kind of family event—my sister’s wedding, I think. Or maybe it was something else. Everything in Colorado has…

The first one to finally grow a pair was my organic father’s firstborn—a kid who got passed around like a bad penny, from house to house, school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, getting kicked, drugged, and emotionally bled dry by…

The USS New Orleans was an amphibious attack ship, which is just a fancy way of saying it was a floating steel beast with a boiler room that went seven goddamn levels down into hell. You had boilermates down there,…

I came back from the Persian Gulf War with an honorable discharge in one hand and a head full of bad ideas in the other. Twenty-one. Old enough to have seen some shit, young enough to still be a complete…

Oregon, when I first got there, was a goddamn utopia for a guy like me. A land of fresh air, oversized burgers, and the kind of gun laws that made a man feel like a fucking cowboy again. I’d just…

I’ve always had a thing for the blue-collar guys—the ones who keep their heads down, don’t say much, just clock in, clock out, and let the world forget about them. Maybe it’s because I came from that same stock. Maybe…

The drive south was a ritual, a pilgrimage of love, or maybe guilt—depending on the mood. The Suburban packed tight with the family, racing toward the border of memory and obligation. Sometimes, it wasn’t even about them. Sometimes, I just…

It was 1990. I was twenty-two, already married, and drowning myself in Bacardi and Coke like it was my goddamn job. Not just a casual drinker. I was the kind of professional who measured consumption by the gallon, the kind…

They say silence grows louder with time. I never understood that as a kid, but I do now. It’s been years since I last saw my mother, and even longer since I let myself feel anything about it. Time has…