I’ve been blessed in life, with good health, the ability to achieve a decent income working in good jobs. I try to be thankful and aware of that; so many people out there are not so fortunate, struggling every day in many ways to just get by. I make it a point to be decent to all; I never know what people are going through.
In my 30s I volunteered a couple of years answering: the LA County Suicide Hotline, the National Suicide Hotline 1-800-suicide, and the Trevor-line. They asked me what days of the week I could volunteer, I asked them what days they needed people the most. They said Friday nights and Saturday nights. I traded many shifts at the Fire Dept to keep that promise to volunteer eight hours a week, for a year; I kept that promise while also working more than fulltime as a firefighter. The first year I reached my goal volunteering eight hours a week, every week that year. At the time of volunteering, I didn’t know about the Certificate in Crisis Management that they give to the volunteers who have put in enough hours. It was a surprise to me when they gave me the LA County Crisis Management Certificate, for all the time I had put in.
That experience answering those phone lines on my days off taught me how close many people are to the edge of their emotional abilities, and how bad situations can happen to anyone; no one is invulnerable, everyone has room for improvement, and that:
“Time is the currency of truth; how Time is spent describes the truth of an individual, an organization, or society at large.”
Robert Senger
As a little kid, as young as five years old, sometimes I would be with my dad as he did repairs and maintenance on rental properties. I was fortunate to have a father that was patient and showed me how to do things like paint baseboards on a wall; how to hold the brush, how to wet the brush with paint, and paint in a way that would be a skill that would one day become a list of skills as he later taught me how to do repairs on a seemingly endless number of things. As the years passed, I learned countless handyman lessons. As I accumulated more abilities my dad would have me do greater and greater amounts of work, by the time I was a teenager I could work without supervision; whether it was cleaning a filthy oven, or fixing a toilet, I would do the tasks to get apartments ready to rent. People would rent these clean apartments and talk about how great they were compared to the bad ones they had seen. In my heart I knew I was competing with adults and I was winning; it may be one of the reasons why I was never really interested in sports, I had already found my area of competition.
When I was in junior high school, I had a weekly 315 house paper-route, it took me most of the week to drop off this free paper. I would carry large bags of them with me to school so I could deliver the ones that were on the opposite side of the school without having to repeat the walking distance to the opposite side of the school from my home. The only tips I received was, “keep that away from me.” from the people who didn’t want what was affectively a bundle of advertisements. Nowadays I get a similar bundle in the mail each week, it used to be hand-delivered, I remember doing it. I also did yardwork for five people on the weekends when I wasn’t helping my dad. In my family we didn’t do sports, we did work.
During my high school years, I worked in the, Shops of Maintenance Area F, of the Los Angeles Unified School District as a student worker every summer helping the journeymen maintenance people who did repairs to schools. I would effectively be a second pair of hands to people working. I remember running a jackhammer in the sun on a hot summer day; it was almost as heavy as I was, but I was eager to do it, as a teenager I thought it was cool to be the center of the activity doing adult work. Most of the time the work I did was boring, simple, and repetitious, running a jackhammer was a rare treat at that job. I did this while simultaneously working with my dad fixing/maintaining rental properties regularly on weekends throughout the year.
The second summer of doing this, my boss at, Maintenance Area F, received a notice that because I also had a second paid job working for the Los Angeles Unified School District as a student worker maintaining animals and grounds at an agricultural area at my high school, I was working too many hours and child labor laws required that I quit one of the two jobs. So, I quit the agricultural job maintaining the animals, while secretly continuing to work there throughout the summer for free so I would have that job year-round when the summer only Central Shops job ended. I did both jobs while simultaneously working for my dad painting, maintaining, and doing minor repairs on rental properties. Often doing long hours, nearly 7 days a week, it just was my normal rhythm to be working all the time.
I was born in Los Angeles and spent my childhood in Woodland Hills, California.
The first time I attended college I dropped out, but it wasn’t a big deal because I was still in high school at the time. I made the mistake of trying to figure out everything myself. I should’ve sought out adult help. I could have probably salvaged that situation, but I was just too ignorant of how things worked on a college campus.
After high school I went back to college full time and worked full time at a job at a combination gas station liquor store. Yes, they hired someone who was under the legal age to drink to sell liquor and gas. I often worked by myself at night, where I sometimes worked double shifts of sixteen hours back-to-back when someone called in sick for the graveyard shift. If I worked at 2:00am I would close the rolling overhead doors that shut off the liquor store from the gas station due state laws on selling alcohol after 2 AM and before 6 AM. It was not fun to deal with screaming people as you shut the overhead door and they want to buy booze, lots of bad behavior when that happens.
When I was 19 years old, I did not understand at the time that many people who teach at community colleges are totally incompetent and part of the process of going to college is just taking the classes and getting credit, not actually learning much from instructors. The actual process was primarily a self-taught in a classroom setting. My ignorance of how this system of learning from the incompetent at a community college caused me to become disillusioned with college in general and I dropped out for the second time. I would learn, years later, that there are actually many good instructors in community colleges, I just had the misfortune of being mostly in the classes of the incompetent at that time.
Not happy with my dead-end job at the combination gas station liquor store, or my life living by myself at a trailer park in Topanga, CA., I enlisted in United States Air Force at 19 with a guaranteed job in the Fire Department. I would have to wait six months for the scheduled date of entrance.
United States Air Force was a break from a hard schedule. There was so much free time compared to my work schedule prior to joining the Air Force. In the Air Force I was working 50-to-60-hour weeks, an easy schedule compared to what I was working prior to join the Air Force. The majority of the other people entering the USAF seemed to be adjusting to a serious work schedule; to me it seemed almost like a free money vacation, the work was easy and there was not that much of it.
By the time I was 20 years old, I was stationed at RAF Upper Heyford in the United Kingdom, but lived in several different cities in the surrounding area while serving in the U. S. A. F. in England. My job in the Air Force was Crash Rescue Firefighter; a job I loved, working with people I liked. I was really blessed fall into such a good situation; my assignment in the UK was for two years. I extended the assignment to stay 4 years. When they had something that needed to be done where under no circumstances was someone to screwup, they consistently asked me to do the job, even though there were plenty of people of higher rank and more experience. On occasion when there was something very important the Fire Chief would tell people with more rank than me that they were in charge, but he wanted me to run/do everything. Example: this photo of me running a Crash-Rescue standby for a VIP international helicopter event, 1980’s UK. Looking back on my Air Force years, with my knowledge of the military today, I was profoundly trusted by upper management, with many things, receiving work opportunities far beyond my years and rank.
When I was just an Airman First Class I had achieved 17 different commercial licenses on fire fighting vehicles and other commercial vehicles. There was nothing else for me to get a license on as a Firefighter. When the Fire Chief found out, he told the Assistant Chief to make me a trainer. I then was training people often NCOs with considerably more rank and years in the military than I had. I did this training for a number of hours every shift while working as a firefighter.
During this time in the U.S.A.F., I took many classes toward my degree in Fire Science. I had taken so many night school college classes in the Air Force I was only a little short, plus some general classes, of what I needed for an Associates degree in Fire Science. At the time of fulfilling my enlistment, I was a Non-Commissioned Officer in the grade of Sergeant, a rank that no longer exhists today. Today the ranking goes directly from Senior Airman to Staff Sergeant, skipping Sergeant altogether.
I received the Air Force Achievement Medal for hard work and accomplishments. The entire time I was in the Air Force I received straight nines on all of my performance reports, the highest possible score, every time, in every category.
After my enlistment was up, I returned to United States and enrolled in community college again, now for the fourth time. The classes I needed for my Fire Science degree was not available, so, I went for a degree in Liberal Arts taking primarily business classes, this time graduating with an Associates degree in Liberal Arts. This time at least half of the instructors I had were good and I learned quite a bit from them, only half the instructors were incompetent and their classes were basically self-taught, it was obvious those instructors had no depth of understanding of their subjects any more than a casual exposure; but now I knew how the system worked, rather than be disillusioned by useless instructors, I would quit the class the first week if they were not able to teach me something, or I would just grind through the incompetence of the instructor and achieve my grade, check the requirement box, and move on to the next class. I worked more than full-time while taking full-time classes. In retrospect that was a mistake, my college years were not enjoyable, I should have moderated working with having at least a little social life and had a more enjoyable experience, as I look back it was a mistake to be working too much in college.
Within a year of graduating college, I was hired by the Burbank Airport Fire Department in Burbank, California, as a Crash Rescue Firefighter, the very first fire department job I ever applied for. They had pre-qualified 309 applicants out of a much larger number of applicants, they had so many applicants they required 4 years of experience driving firetrucks and working in a fire department to get the interview. I was up against those 309 for the nine available positions.
The test was an oral test before the board of three captains. They would ask questions and expect an explanation for each answer, if you didn’t know an answer you had to tell them you did not know; if you tried to answer and you answered incorrectly it was going to be held against you in much bigger way. The test was tough, rapid fire questions, they were hiring a professional, and they wanted someone who could answer aspects of knowledge not just something out of a book. Any question a captain asked another might jump in and try to get more specific to circumstance and use, there was no way to: B.S./luck your way into that job, or just be good at taking tests, if you didn’t know the information and also have a working understanding of the subject they would know.
I answered every question correctly, even the trick questions at the end. Then they asked me to talk about myself, I noticed it was a little bit before lunch and all of them were large guys, so I talked about how I liked the camaraderie of the fire department, and then I told them I knew how to cook and described in detail some of my cooking. Years later on the job I heard from one of those captains that after they selected the nine winning candidates, as they were picking from those nine whom would be on each of their three shifts, the three captains argued amongst themselves who would get me on their shift.
During the early years at this job was when I started telling my friends science fiction stories I had thought up. My friends told me to start writing those stories down.
I was also reading everything I could on physics, and gradually realized that there must be more than what I can learn in school and logically the universe could not come about in the way we were being taught. As I verbalized my own theory to people of different educational backgrounds. I was told by many, they found it interesting.
One person who had a degree in that area told me it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and as a friend, I should just not tell anybody my theory, because I would sound like an idiot. For years after I didn’t, then one day watching a show about one of NASA’s new research projects, they were talking about an idea I had also discussed almost 20 years earlier, it turns out my idea was not original, others had thought about it.
It was one of the many concepts the friend with the degree years earlier said was so stupid and ignorant I shouldn’t tell anybody. Then and there on that couch watching NASA talk about how they were building a large vacuum chamber to do experiments I decided to pick up my theory again and continue to work on it.
It is called Neutral Theory, and it is now available on Amazon. For everything currently in the Neutral Theory book, I have even more notes explaining, expanding, and adding additional information not yet in the book. I hired an artist to create from my original drawings over 100 illustrations to make it easy for anybody to get an understanding of Neutral Theory without needing to have a background in physics.
Around 1999
I worked at the Burbank Airport Fire Department for thirteen years. For two years of that, I also started a business being the Lead Partner with four other business partners in a web-based business that had a lot of forward-thinking ideas on how to sell things on the Internet. We were able to get ScoreItNow.com up and running and have 10,000+ products featured at a time. (Please Note: scoreitnow is now connected to a completely different business that has nothing to do with me or the earlier business.) This was at a time when people had to build out almost everything on a website from scratch. It took almost 2 years, just as things were about to get really innovative and venture capital could be found, the business was suddenly crushed when Amazon announced it was going to start doing many of the same business inventory relationships with the same ideas/goals I had been working on for two years to create a comprehensive implementation process/plan to do. The company was losing money and all partners agreed to shut the business down while we could still get all the bills paid and end with a tiny surplus, but the original investment was lost. It all ended as well as it could, but it was basically two years of work for nothing plus the loss of the original investment. It was highly possible that the business could’ve been sold for a substantial profit six months earlier, but that opportunity came and went.
Continuing to work full-time as a Crash Rescue Firefighter/EMT, I started another business in Dec 2002 doing real estate renovation. I sold my condo and bought an apartment building. By my 13th year at the Burbank Airport Fire Department, I was making more money in real estate than as a firefighter; when the Burbank Airport made it clear they were not going to provide its fire department with a pension, I gave them my two week notice, they asked me to stay, so I agreed to work one more month then quit to go full time with real estate in December 2003.
While doing all of these things I was also developing a physics theory of how the universe began, Neutral Theory. It is an explanation of the process of an evolving force derived from the vacuum in the large, empty volume of pre-universe space/Neutral, how energy was derived from this effect long before there was any mass in our universe, how that energy would knot-up and become the building blocks that would later combine into the particles that eventually become mass; how the ramifications of that event are still controlling the speed of light today, and how we could possibly accelerate the speed of light in future space travel. It is for sale on Amazon, and outsells my Hard Science Fiction.
Additionally, I have an economics theory called, "Justice Economics," on how the implementation of it and the simultaneous implementation of sovereign wealth trusts, as well as pollution taxes, along with corresponding reduction of income taxes, could become part of global trade deals that save our planet and finance our governments with an overall decrease in income taxes and yet an increase in revenue for the federal and state governments.
I currently live in Los Angeles, California, continuing to work in the rental housing industry. As well, I continue to expand my ideas on Neutral Theory, Pollution Tax Economics/US sovereign wealth trusts, and writing hard science fiction. Both of my parents are in their 90s, and I have been spending a great deal of time helping them in recent years.