Personal Blog
The Year I Sat Next to My Hero 1969 was one of those years that just bends culture in a new direction. In the span of about a month, we landed on the moon, the Manson killings shook California to its core, and a few Read more
I've been lucky throughout my life. More times than I can count, I've ended up in the right place at the right time. If I have one real skill, it's spotting an opportunity and grabbing it before it passes by. As a teenager, I banged Read more
People sometimes use the word "backward" to describe something that's just not quite right. I once lived in a house like that — literally backward. It sat in a field behind an industrial strip of shops. The story goes that the city of Hayward, California Read more
Finishing my undergraduate degree is one of my greatest accomplishments, but it almost didn’t happen. Being the first in my family expected to graduate, the pressure was on. Yet, in my rush to kickstart my adulthood, I nearly threw it all away—and learned a brutal Read more
There’s a lot of political talk these days about welfare and being “on the dole.” Well, I have a welfare mother at my door every single day. She’s bold enough to walk right up to the patio door, even interrupting Thanksgiving dinner by begging from Read more
My senior year of high school was when I decided I wanted to be a professional athletic trainer. Back then, trainers weren’t really a thing at the high school level, but I had a knack for it. And since my knees were already a mess, Read more
Since moving to Wyoming, I’ve developed some interesting friendships—one of the first happened completely by accident. The “accident” was a young crow that got stuck in my window well and couldn’t get out. He flapped and flailed with everything he had but just couldn’t gSince Read more
Celebrity endorsements have been around forever, but I’ve always had this lingering question: do the celebrities actually use the products they endorse? And how hard do they work to avoid using the competition? Back in the 1980s, I saw a master of marketing pull off Read more
I was the new kid a lot growing up. Ft. Logan, Harder Rd., Sunset, Allen, Harrington, and Vivian—those were all the elementary schools I attended. Making friends and feeling like part of the school community? That was tough. Like most kids, I just wanted to Read more
Traveling along I-70 through Denver is a bit of a sensory adventure. To the west, you’ve got the majesty of the Rockies; to the east, the sweeping openness of the Great Plains. The highway winds through a patchwork of neighborhoods—diverse, storied, and full of character, Read more
Neighborhood used to mean something powerful in a lot of cultures. For a while in the late sixties, I lived near Harrington Elementary in Denver. There’s a new Harrington now, but back then it was this beautiful, three-story brick building at 38th and Steele Street. Read more
Relationships are complicated, and sometimes changes happen so gradually that we don’t even notice them. I had this experience with a friend at Rangeview. Bobby was a custodian at Rangeview and had been there almost since the beginning in 1982. He was a fixture, the Read more