In 1993 I was a manager at the military dining hall for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade MD, The House of Four Hats. Yup...I was chef to the spies. It was the coolest job and I loved it then and its memories now. We took third in the international Hennessy Award competition (we likely would have won were it not for a rather injudicious feat of stupidity performed by an Air Force officer I will forever remember as Major Buttknuckle Tweedbottom. His real name was long ago wiped from my memory as a result of the professional trauma he induced).
Alas through the labyrinth that is government contracting and some shady midnight deals my company lost the contract and I was unceremoniously dumped from the funnest job I ever had. A short stint in fast food management quickly soured me on the industry and I opened computer store in Columbus, Ohio putting my hobby to money making use. After three years my bank and I discovered that while I was a bang up technician and could get along well with almost everyone professionally speaking (Buttknuckle never came to my store) my business acumen did not attain to the same heights as my nerdiness and geekhood. The operation ended in failure and I sold the business for pennies then moved home to Alaska where I worked a series of odd jobs from carpenter, to pc technician, to mess hall cook for the Alaska Smoke Jumpers to EMT and explosives packer at a dynamite plant (that job was a blast).
Eventually I ended up with a government IT job that sounded challenging on paper but turned out to be veeeeery booooooooring. With long hours of screen staring time I started writing stories for my kid's bedtimes. Then a few poems. Then a couple of shorts. Then some one read one of my shorts and asked me what happens next, and I got curious. Yeah...what does happen next?
And, Blamo! A novel appears. Then I podcast it and people like it then I join The KillZone and send my cousin Leonard back and forth in the time machine and learn that in the future in another dimension I am famous on Planet Fluxinerstationiousis, especially in its capital city of Fluxinerstationiousisville. But Leonard would not tell me how I did here on earth. He just smiled a silly grin and said “Oh, you'll find out soon enough,” then showed me a picture of his alien Fluxi-chick girlfriend who looked surprisingly like a young Lindsay Wagner with a few differences and he said, gazing dreamily off to some far away place, “I'm in love.”
So now here I am. Had I not lost that multi-million dollar contract at Ft. Meade and not failed miserably at being a business man, and not spent a year packing dynamite until my wife begged me to do anything else I would probably not have written, audiobookified and epublished three novels, with a fourth on the way and a bunch of short stories!
by the way did you know those Fluxi-chicks have an extra .... uh … and there's a....on her …. how does that even work?
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May Santa be nice to you and may Viking Raiders not invade your suburbs and smash your favourite china or rape your chickens and steal your lawn gnomes or eat your dog's food and drink the cat's milk or sing ancient Viking drinking songs while hefting their mighty battle axes and legendary war blades to carve your nicely trimmed shrubberies into the shape of little goats and ponies frollicking about to the tunes of the Warrior Poet "Hlefrundthendun The Rather Interesting and Fearsome Yet Somewhat Effeminate and mostly Inappropriately Behaved of the North."
After Christmas I'm going on a week vacation with a hundred and fifty teens and college kids in the mountains of South-Central Alaska. It's the perfect place to be in January rather than joining those wimpy throngs in "hot" and "sunny" places, playing on the "beach" and "surfing", and "drinking" things with umbrellas" that get "stuck" in one's "nostrils". That's simply not for us Alaskan's, because we know how to have "fun"... at thirty below.
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