When I moved to Hawaii – I had $100. I booked a dorm bed into the Polynesian Beach Club Hostel in Waikiki for seven nights and bought some rice and cheap veggies in Chinatown. During the next week, I ate rice and beat the streets looking for a job. I found a job painting houses…
Category: Places I’ve Lived
Places I’ve Lived #16 – Florence, Oregon
I first went to Florence, Oregon in 1999 just before the excitement of the World Trade Organization Protests in Seattle. My hippie aunt and uncle had a cabin on a remote lake there. It was summer, the weather was perfect, and I stayed in the little boat house at the end of their dock. It…
Places I’ve Lived #15 – Parapat, Sumatra, Indonesia
In the year 2001, after wandering around China, traipsing through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia and then wandering over to the massive island of Sumatra in Indonesia – I somehow found myself in the tiny little town of Parapat on the shores of Glorious Lake Toba drinking coconut wine with a guitar wielding Batak freedom fighter….
Places I’ve Lived #14 – Seattle, Washington
I loved living in Seattle. I had been there for the protests that shut down the WTO in 1999. Seattle has great art, music, food, museums, and is surrounded by some of the most epic nature of any city in the world. I probably would have stayed there if the start up I was working…
Places I’ve Lived #13 – London, England
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in London – but the only time I lived there was a brief stint at the end of 1998. I showed up at the invitation of my friend Danny, who had been my assistant and rowdy drinking companion while working on John Sayles film LIMBO in Juneau, Alaska….
Places I’ve Lived #12 – Juneau, Alaska
As I mentioned, things in Bellingham were going pretty well for me in 1998 and life was good. I had traded my TV and VCR for a broken down VW bus through a thing we did at 92.9 FM called Tradio… I got the bus running and outfitted it for an adventure. I moved out…
Places I’ve Lived #11 – Bellingham, Washington
Thinking of Bellingham, Washington always makes me happy. I’m not going to lie and tell you that my life there was always happy, but for me, Bellingham was a magical place. I rolled in during the worst blizzard in decades. I wasn’t worried, I had a huge 4×4 and had first learned to drive on…
Places I’ve Lived #10 – Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina was the first place in my life that I ever chose to live. Everywhere before had been chosen by my parents or chosen by the Marine Corps. When I ended my active duty in 1994, I looked around the USA for where I wanted to live. It was scary. I thought about…
Places I’ve Lived #9 – Jacksonville, North Carolina
I joined the Marines to see the world and escape Redding, California – unfortunately, they only showed me bootcamp in San Diego, California – Marine Combat Training in San Onofre, Californi – Air Traffic Control School in Millington Tennessee – and then they shuffled me to Jacksonville, North Carolina. The good news is I never…
Places I’ve Lived #8 – Millington, Tennessee
I would love to say that I had lived in San Diego, but Marine Corps Boot Camp and Marine Corps Combat Training don’t really classify as living – and that was all the experience I had in San Diego and San Onofre. I’d left Redding by joining the Marines (which again, for the record, was…