I’m a Southern California native, actually born in what is now modern-day Watts, or South Los Angeles in today’s parlance. Anyway, we didn’t still there long and ended up down in the South Coast area around Torrance.

We weren’t deprived, nor particularly well off — nor even “middle” middle class — but I wouldn’t wish my childhood on anyone, not because of financial concerns but because of family dysfunction.

Anyway, you don’t want to hear that. I eventually got a bachelor’s degree and headed off to the United States Navy during the Vietnamese war. I eventually found myself floating in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin aboard the frigate U.S.S. Josephus Daniels (the man who banned booze on board ships).

When my service days came to a near close, I was offered a gig as an attaché to an admiral in Taiwan if I re-upped. I turned that offer down, and in hindsight wish I had accepted it. I probably could’ve stayed there after my gig, married a native woman, and created some kind of import-export business to great success.

To my future and current dismay, I chose instead to depart the Navy and become a journalist. I went on to USC and received a masster’s in print journalism, which was good career-wise for maybe 10 or 20 years, after which span newspapers began disappearing in flocks.

In the 1990s, I turned to web work, which allowed for some writing but mostly for creation of web pages with marketing — money, money, money — in mind.

That’s how I spent most of the rest of my life — coupled with some nighttime teaching for the University of Phoenix — when in the year 2020 I walked out on my day job rather than suffer, in the words of Shakespeare, “the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune.”

In other words, I got tired of being underpaid and professionally shortchanged and under-appreciated. In short, I was tired of the blame game — my getting all the blame when something went awry, proving the Navy adage, “Shit rolls downhill.”

So, here I sit, semi-retired and pondering the inexorable fate of us all, the journey to the beyond. God help me, and someone please tell me that there is no such thing as journalism in the afterlife. Give me that attaché gig.