What is the best way to begin writing a story?
Shit… Where to start… Goddam, this one is long…
Ok, I had just married my wife and we were on our honeymoon driving up the coast of California. I was mostly raised there so I wanted to show her some of the places I’d lived. Anyway, we went to Disneyland, staying at the Grand Californian (awesome hotel), and from there, just winged it.
Quick aside: We stayed a few nights in Hollywood, one of my favorite places in the world, but we found a hotel called the Renaissance that was right downtown. That place is my 2nd favorite hotel, so we were doing the whole tourist thing, wandering around, when we noticed a huge crowd. We went to see what was going on and it was the 2nd Star Wars movie. Well, I’m a massive Star Wars fan, so we had to go watch. The stars were pulling up in limos, the fans were going wild, and from down the block, Darth Vader and a bunch of Stormtroopers were coming toward us. Anyway, I started talking to this guy and turned out he was working there. It was the premiere of Episode 2 but it was for charity, so not the normal type of premiere. The tickets were 500 bucks each, so it would have been 1000 and there were still a couple left that we could have bought. I obviously wanted to go, considering it was freakin’ STAR WARS, with the director (in whom I still had faith) and all the stars, but my wife vetoed. She said it was too much money for a movie. Since we had only been married a week and her mom had died 3 weeks prior, I gave in. Later, I was bumming and explained how much Star Wars had been a part of my youth and how missing it was just crushing. She was really sorry and said that if ever anything else came up that was that important to me, just say Star Wars and she’d give in. Haven’t played that card, but it’s nice knowing it’s there.
So we got back from our honeymoon and about a month later my VP told me that I had resigned. WTF? This is another long story, but basically we got a new VP, she hated me and wanted a crony to have my job. She won, I lost. Anyway, I spent the next few years licking my wounded ego and doing project management for various Fortune 50 companies. The reason I’m bringing this up is that right after I “resigned”, my wife said she wanted to buy a house. I told her she was crazy, but her rationale was that if we bought a house and needed to borrow money from our folks, the money wouldn’t be thrown away, it would go toward a mortgage, not rent. So we did. That was the beginning of our real estate acquisition.
We lived there a few years, then bought a house in a pretty ritzy area. We bought at a good time and paid 1k over the asking price of 435k. Real estate was booming and our house had increased by 200k in value, so we took out a HELOC and bought a computer store. Everything was going swimmingly until the market crashed. We were in desperate straits, losing 10k a month, but managed to turn everything around in the space of about 6 months.
This is where the book comes in and thanks for your patience. My wife took notes on everything we did to fix our broken business. I said, “Hey, you should write a book about this. I think other people could benefit from the shit we just went through.” Well, she’s nuts, so she threw together a few chapters and showed it to me.
It was awful. Oh sure, the information was there but no one would ever read it. Fortunately, she’d was married to me 
I took her chapters and re-wrote them to be fun to read. Then I bought a book on how to get published. It’s called “The Writers Market” and tells you exactly what to do. So we did that. We wrote up an introduction, targeted the publishing houses, did our market research and sent off our chapters. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So we said, Fuck it, it was worth a try. Flash forward 7 months. I got a call on my cell from some very polite woman:
VPW: Hi, my name is Eileen from XXX. I’m the managing editor and we want to publish your book. Me: HAHAHA. Aw, that’s so cute. How much is it going to cost us for you to publish us? VPW: Oh no sir, this isn’t a vanity publishing house. We’re a real publisher. If you’re interested, I’ll overnight the contracts.
Well, fuck me. Yep, it was real. She sent over the contracts, we had our lawyer look them over and we signed. Book came out in March and we’ve been doing interviews (mostly radio) ever since.
TL:DR Get a good wife.
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You mentioned that you like to “check boxes”. I’m 23 and of the same mentality at the moment. Would you recommend it? What boxes do you think everyone should check?
Ok, let’s see if we can deal with this one:
I’m ridiculously competitive. Check boxes are a way of keeping score. At least it starts out that way. Then you start looking at strange experiences as a way of seeing that you’re living life, not just existing in it. Let me see if I can give you an example… Ok. I think with me it all started when I was a little kid. My family had gone to a fair and I was given a couple bucks and allowed to wander freely. I had a splendid time, saw all sorts of fun things, got some cotton candy, ate a hot-dog, etc. At the end of the day we all met back up. When we got in the car, my mom asked how I’d enjoyed the day. I babbled on about the cool stuff I’d seen and at the end she asked, “What did you think of all the little ponies?” Well fuck me. I hadn’t seen any ponies. She brought up a few other things I hadn’t seen that were epic and I was in tears. I was really little, maybe 6 or 7 years old and I begged to go back so I could see the ponies. But it was too late. We were already driving down the road and the ponies had already been put away. I was heartbroken. So at that age, I vowed I’d never again miss the ponies. That attitude has driven my life. I may not always do the right thing, hell, I’m not even sure I ever do the right thing, but it seems to work out and I have a lot of adventures. So back to the idea of check boxes… I’d say they are great, but don’t get overwhelmed by them. Like banging twins. Is it cool? I imagine so. Would it be fun? Hell yeah. Would it be something to brag to your buddies about? Unquestionably. But would you sacrifice your education or your family for it? It depends on how hot they are. No, I’m joking, of course you wouldn’t. But setting up a long list of checkboxes takes away the worry that you’re missing out. Because you compare with your buddies, you compare with your family, you compare with your co-workers, and in the end, you don’t miss out on the ponies.
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What’s the best way to check if a gun is loaded?
Run up to the President and hand it to him so he can check it out for you.
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So as far as military Intelligence goes, is it true that it is just glorified supply management? It is a job i am currently interested in if i join up.
Nope. I was in a CEWI Battalion. That’s combat electronic warfare. Basically, back then, people communicated via radio. There were multiple aspects of my job. One was direction finding. What that means is you get 5 vehicles with big antenna on them, each of which has 4 poles, mounted horizontally out from the main pole. Viewed from above on a clock, there would be a center pole in the middle, then another 4 poles at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock. When a radio signal hits the antenna, it first hits the outermost pole, then the center one and one of the other outer poles, then the other two. The computer measures the time it takes to hit each pole and from that you get a LOB (Line of bearing). It’s not very accurate, but you can tell within a few degrees the direction the signal came from. The cool part is that all 5 vehicles are linked together and the LOB from each is calculated so that where they all intersect is the source of the signal. Then you bomb it. Anyway, that’s DF’ing. Next you have Interdiction. That means you try to break into the bad guys’ net and pretend to be one of them to get more information. This is done in conjunction with Jammers, the 3rd piece. Basically, imagine you have someone in New York talking to someone in LA. Just pretend, this isn’t to scale. You listen to them talk until you can imitate the person in NY, then you jam them. You blow them out with 20000 watts of white noise. Then you have another person in Chicago who pretends to be NY and they give false information designed to fuck up the enemy. That’s fun too. The bad part about jammers is they have a life expectancy that’s total shit. Anything with a gigantic signal like that doesn’t survive. There are other pieces of Intel, natch, but that was what I did. It was a blast. You get a voyeuristic thrill listening into East German communications… it rocks. Well, it did. Bye bye DDR.
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Parker
Parker was the guy I always wanted to be. He had movie-star looks, was charismatic as hell, and life always just seemed to go his way. He was a former golden gloves boxer and just flat-out cool as shit. One hooker told him that he was the man she’d waited for all her life. He was intelligence as well, but when we deployed to the gulf, he decided he wanted to have more fun so he transferred to the infantry guys in our company. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but you can’t just change groups in a war. He wasn’t trained, he just thought it would be fun. I once saw him knock out one of his teeth with a hammer and a screwdriver because it was bothering him. Other people would have been bothered by that, but not ol’ Parker.
The other thing was he’d fuck anyone. He just didn’t care. Beautiful, ugly, it just didn’t matter. I remember one time he showed up at my apartment at about 2am (sounds bad, but I’d just walked in. The bars closed in Frankfurt at 2). He had some giant beast with him. He wanted some place to fuck and figured I’d hook him up. Hell, of course I would.
Anyway, we decide to head up to Holland one weekend to have fun and do some acid. I can’t remember everyone who was there, but I know a couple Delta guys, Parker, and I for sure. Anyway, they had some friends there where we could crash, so Parker gave me a tab of acid and told me how to take it. As you might imagine, I figured I’d see Jesus or something, but didn’t see any effect for about 30 minutes. After that, things got a bit strange. I decided I needed to be alone, so I went upstairs into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, listening to Pink Floyd. The windows had those vertical blinds, slats really, and the shadows cast looked like bars on a jail cell. At least they did for me. So I sat there bugging for a while, then someone came up and talked to me for a while. Not sure who it was, but probably just wanted to make sure I was ok. I was, but you ever had an itch that you just HAD to scratch? Well, I had one in the center of my chest. So I kept scratching it. And it was kinda hot, so I was sweating a bit. Or maybe it was blood. It was dark in the room and I kept scratching, thinking I might be digging a hole into my skin, but couldn’t stop, and was on the verge of a giant meltdown when ol’ Parker turned on the light and came in. I was pretty much fine after that, and spent the next few hours just sitting there chilling out, enjoying the sensations. After a while I walked downstairs, and started doing that pope thing where you cross people who are in front of you. I think it’s called genuflecting or something like that. Anyway, I’m stumbling around annointing everyone and someone asks me how I’m doing. I tell them I’m doing great, that I know EVERYTHING now. They tell me they know, that they know it too. I tell them they’re all fools and know nothing, that I know everything, but they were smoking hash and were really mellow, so it all worked out.
The next day we all went out to the clubs. That’s where the absolute most amazingly gorgeous women I’d ever seen were hanging. The cool part was they didn’t get much of a chance to speak English, so people were lining up at the bar to buy us drinks. We were all pretty wrecked when I spotted the most amazingly hot girl I’d ever seen. She was even hotter than Connie Selleca (blessed be her name). I went up to her and did my best to lay down my game, but it wasn’t going well. Parker walked up to her and said, “You have funny hair.” and they left. Fucker. He was just like that. He ended up working for the CIA, then running a couple strip clubs. Fucking loon. The best looking girl in our battalion (not saying much) was a blond girl named Theresa. Ol’ Parker fucked her, then went up to her boyfriend and said, “I just fucked your girlfriend. What are you going to do about it?” Now her boyfriend was a total dick (he’s a cop in Florida now) so we all thought that was funny as hell. Dickhead knew he’d get killed if he started anything so he didn’t. Almost killed him in the gulf. Well, not really, but kinda. Anyway, that’s Parker.
TL;DR: Parker, Now HE was a God.
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