tl;dr

I’m a licensed civil engineer, artist, and father. My journey has zigzagged through jungles, fishing piers, jail cells & rehab centers, public radio DJ booths and underground goth nightclubs. I hold degrees in philosophy and urban planning, founded my own design firm, and am a self-taught engineer. My youth was spent variously intoxicated, and I worked in jobs ranging from cherry picking, cab driving, psychiatric orderly, and computer programmer, all the while romancing scores of creative, smart and beautiful women. Born in Kansas, raised in New Mexico, schooled in Iowa and Colorado, and educated by life, I was born a ramblin’ man. My memoir Salmon Popping captures just one vivid chapter in a life I’ve lived at full tilt.

Let’s dive deeper…

The long version…

Childhood

I was born in Kansas City, Kansas. My mom and dad were teenagers—still finishing high school, working night shifts, scraping by. We lived dirt poor while they finished high school while working night jobs. Thanks to my grandfather George Ragan’s job as a nuclear physicist in Los Alamos, they qualified for in-state tuition at New Mexico State University. That’s how I ended up in Las Cruces, the first time.

High school was marginally better, if only because I found my niche, a more effective escape: At 15 years old I discovered beer, marijuana, and lost my virginity. At school I took every advanced mathematics and physics course available, and I joined the state champion thespian club, becoming deeply immersed in acting and eventually directing in my senior year. My father eventually moved north, and I continued visiting him at his home in Grosse Pointe Park. After my first summer job as a clerk at the Detroit Medical Center, I bought a blue Ford Mustang and limped it back to New Mexico. Unfortunately my chick magnet spent most of its time broken down in the driveway. Outside of class, my time was filled with parties and chasing girls. I had one long high school relationship, several girlfriends, and many late weekend nights sneaking out to drink with adults by the banks of the Rio Grande after the bars closed at two in the morning.

College

Grinnell was heaven-sent. I’m certain that my time at Grinnell College was the single most influential experience of my life. From the moment I stepped onto that beautiful campus in rural Iowa—a moment I still remember vividly—to my reluctant departure four fantastical years later in a school bus I’d helped convert into a mobile kitchen, everything about Grinnell left a mark. The people I met, the knowledge I gained, and the experiences I lived were nothing short of profound. It was there I discovered analytic philosophy, Ultimate Frisbee, and the sounds of reggae, ska, and punk. I hosted a late-night show on KDIC, the campus radio station. Though I’d smoked herb and drank beer in high school, I discovered Everclear, and my peers introduced me to hallucinogens. That year they played Rocky Horror Picture Show at the ARH auditorium, and a keg was thrown into the screen during the riotous, alcohol-fueled atmosphere of the school, and the cancelled movies for several months. I’d lost interest in my original engineering track but found myself immersed in philosophy, literature, politics, kindred spirits, and beautiful women. By the end of my first year, my grades had slipped to a mediocre C-average, much to my father’s dismay. As the financier of my private college education, he refused to pay for another year at Grinnell.

I was devastated.

In the fall of 1982, I lived in the dorms at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The following spring, I moved in with my mother and stepfather in Cortland while attending Cornell University. I made the best of UNM, selling blood plasma to buy reggae vinyl and dime bags of bud, and getting drunk in dorms full of academically disinterested peers. Coursework at Cornell was amazing, and I even learned to develop film in a nonacademic photography class. I leaned into a punk attitude, which didn’t sit well at Cornell, and I made literally zero friends while I was there. That summer, I lived with my mother back in Las Cruces and took a few more classes at New Mexico State University. Leaving the idyllic Grinnell campus and community was a harsh reality check, but maybe it helped set the stage for a course correction. At UNM, Cornell, and NMSU, I earned straight A’s, which came easily since the academic rigor was nothing compared to Grinnell. That turnaround helped convince my father, after some lobbying from my mother and me, to resume paying for my education. Much relieved, I returned to Grinnell in the fall of 1983.

My junior and senior years at Grinnell were a blur of intense academics, acid trips, spinning reggae vinyl, political activism, and a lot of sex. I designed an Independent Major called the Philosophy of Cognition, advised by professors from both the philosophy and psychology departments, and reporting directly to the Faculty Dean. My coursework focused on philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary anthropology, all intended to prepare me for graduate studies in artificial intelligence.

After class, my friends and I would gather at the old ARH auditorium for what we called a “4-fifteener,” a weed-smoking ritual that oddly prefigured the cultural emergence of 4:20. This was the era of our Alice-in-Wonderland parties, where dozens of us would eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and drift into shared surreality. Most weekends were psychedelic—witnessing walls melt, seeing prisms of sound, dancing unbalanced, and loving unrestrained.

Despite the chaos, I earned straight A’s for two years and applied to several top doctoral programs in cognitive psychology, only to be rejected by all of them. Following graduation, I tried living in Minneapolis for about 6 weeks, squatting in a warehouse and attempting to start a photography studio, but mostly just stayed drunk on 50-cent bottles of cheap, strong beer. Eventually, I returned to Grinnell and into the arms of the woman who, a decade later, would become my wife. I still remember riding my friend’s chopper, girlfriend straddling the back, cruising through the rural highways of Iowa, without a helmet, tripping on acid, drunk on Boone’s Farm, with my girlfriend holding her hands over my face, blocking the rain from my eyes.

I joined a few fellow graduates to convert a school bus into a restaurant and continued living near campus, no longer a student but still hanging around as if I were. I loved Grinnell and couldn’t bear to leave. Somehow I knew my life would never again reach such heights of learning, pleasure, wonder and happiness. Finally, as winter approached, we drove the bus to New Mexico and into the next chapter of my life.

My 20s

Nominally, my undergraduate degree was (at least partly) in psychology. I was a big guy, soft-spoken and sensitive, which made it easy to find work as a mental health counselor in psychiatric hospitals. The role was essentially that of an orderly, leading group therapy sessions with troubled youth, but also trained to restrain violent patients when necessary. I worked in three hospitals: one in New Mexico shortly after leaving Grinnell, another in a medical psychiatric ward in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and finally at an adolescent facility in Aurora, Colorado that specialized in deep behavioral reprogramming.

At one point, two college friends kidnapped me in Denver and I ended up on a four-month odyssey through southern Mexico and Guatemala. I stayed sober the entire time, became fluent in Spanish, and only returned to the States after a brutal case of giardia nearly killed me. When I got back, my girlfriend and I moved into a mountain cabin outside Boulder. It had electricity but no plumbing. We heated with a wood stove and used an outhouse. I dabbled in Aikido, learned to meditate, and brewed my own beer I labeled “Three Cat Freedom Ale”. We lived there for two years, though our relationship was strained by my solo journey to Central America. Eventually, we broke up, freeing me to explore new relationships.

I enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Colorado Denver, but soon switched to the architecture program. I moved into an apartment in Boulder, and after a hellacious whiskey-fueled acid trip in the mountains—where I was found by the police, face down in a ditch, beaten badly, but not a victim of the serial killer who was active at the time—I quit drinking for a full year. Around then, I started dating a Southern belle from Mississippi who was studying architecture. In the spring, that fiery redhead, the one with whom I'd once rode on my first chopper through the rolling hills of Grinnell, passed though town, and we connected strong, but not intimately as I had a fiancé. I earned a Master’s Degree in Land Use and Urban Planning from the University of Colorado and was named the "1992 Student of the Year" by the School of Architecture and Planning, and published my first document, a bibliography on pedestrian and street life planning.

Fatherhood: The Part I Got Right

We lived in Lacey briefly when my first son, Ben, was an infant. Soon after, we bought a house that I owned for the next 18 years. It became the foundation of our family life—where our second son, Theo, was born, and where both of them grew up. I was very involved in parenting: changing diapers, feeding, teaching, taking them wherever I went, fully immersed in their infancy.

But then every Wednesday and alternating weekends, I was fully in father mode. I spent time with my sons building Lego sets and playing video games-they learned to use a computer mouse before they were out of diapers. We played frisbee, enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons campaigns on the go, and built a magnificent three-level treehouse in the front yard. I still remember 9/11 clearly: I was finishing up my volunteer shift in Theo’s classroom, heading back to my car, when someone mentioned the Twin Towers had been bombed. We took trips to the Pacific Ocean beaches and the train up to Seattle for a day trip to Pike Place Market. There were flights to visit their grandparents, an amazing road trip to Legoland California, and a few Caribbean voyages aboard my father’s yacht. I remained consistently present and emotionally connected to my sons. They were (and still are) a central part of my life.

Redemption

That was eleven years ago. I slowed down, way, way down, took inventory, and eventually returned to the one steady job I was really good at: civil engineering. My work life had a rocky and unfocused beginning, to say the least, and I knew I had to persevere to achieve a stable career and pay the bills. 17 years after receiving my Engineer-In-Training certificate, after five tries, I passed the engineering licensing exam — without any collegiate or formal training — and became a self-taught, licensed Professional Engineer. I’ve since carefully and diligently worked my craft, and as a result, my career has skyrocketed forward by leaps and bounds.

Simultaneously, after somewhere in the range of 45 brief and not-so-brief relationships, I spent four long years alone, reassessing what I needed from love, trying to figure out how to end my serial monogamy addiction. On a whim, I tried one more dating website, this time an international venue, where I met a stunning, vegan yoga enthusiast from mainland China. After three 10-day visits to China over the course of 18 months, my wife came to America and we’ve been happily married ever since.

Jagged_xtc Redux

Good-bye absinthe, hello Crown Royal.

Juggling three lives had, surprisingly, been manageable. I was spending quality time with my sons, my work had evolved beyond drafting, and I was gaining valuable experience in transportation engineering and design software across multiple platforms and at multiple firms. My personal time was a blur of booze, sex, and music. But burning the candle at both ends always catches up with you. My second goth partner had gained considerable weight, and I was growing increasingly frustrated with our polyamorous setup. To put it bluntly, she was getting far more action than I was, and the imbalance gnawed at me. At least my drinking found a rhythm. Most evenings at 4:30, I’d hit happy hour at The Brotherhood, where double whiskey and Cokes (mostly whiskey) ran just $3. After half a dozen, I’d head home by 7 or 8, often with a bottle of vodka in tow.

At The Brotherhood, my pattern was simple: a few drinks, a booth, a journal, and a clear view of the near-empty bar. She was always there — tight jeans, hips that could start wars, bleach-blonde hair like a threat. Always alone. Cigarette lit. Laugh like broken glass. That’s where I met my rock-and-roll princess: California-born, ex-Playmate, ex-junkie, and the siren who nearly destroyed me. My goth phase faded, and with her exhaustive knowledge of glam-rock and heavy metal, she ushered in a classic rock revival. In between her quiet moods and kind spirit, she drank relentlessly, and often became vicious and almost psychotic. I struggled to keep pace, or did she struggle to keep up with me? We switched to Crown Royal, stopped going out, and I picked up smoking. Every other weekend, we drank ourselves into blackout oblivion: We connected intellectually, comically, politically, and the sex frequent, intense, and as addictive as the booze

Salmon Popping

After a short time back down in Las Cruces with my mother, I moved to Olympia, and lived out of my spray-painted truck in the driveway of my girlfriend’s house. It was at this time that I went on the fishing voyage I chronicled in the book Salmon Popping, which was likely how you got to this webpage biography. After the fishing trip, I got married.

Today, I live quietly in San Diego with my wife, pursuing health, wealth and happiness, the three pillars of good life according to Chinese wisdom. First thing every single morning I studiously hand-write, and then recite out loud, a gratitude list and an affirmation list. I zealously play RPG video games every resting hour (I’m Brandi Bloodwine on numerous Conan Exiles servers). There are more projects to come. More art. More music. More writing. Maybe another book. The future is certainly unwritten. I’ve lived a life worth writing about — and I’m not done yet.

When I was a child, my mother told me to live my life as though it were fodder for a book. My memoir Salmonpopping captures one unforgettable summer at sea — a raw and vivid chapter in a life still unfolding. I’ve spent the decades since chasing experience with the zeal of a man who knew he’d one day have to explain it all. I hope my story inspires others to embrace their own wild chapters and live life to the fullest they possibly can. You only die once, you live every single day!