THE OBSERVER RAGES AGAINST ABSURDITY — LIFE AND TECHNOLOGY

Prologue

When I thought about writing this, I was not sure where to begin … My life can't be described any other way than just plain crazy! Most of the time that's what everyone called me. This is a real story of the early days of revolution, protest, sex, drugs and high-powered rock and roll … to computers, technology and global warming.

Nobody in the 1950s had a name for what was wrong with me. There was no diagnosis, no acronym, no pamphlet in a doctor's waiting room. There was just a kid who couldn't sit still, wouldn't nap, wouldn't behave — and a string of adults trying to figure out what to do with him.

Seventy years later, I finally sat down with a psychologist and got the label everyone had been missing the whole time. ADHD. There's a prescription now, and a pharmacy trip still ahead of me. It's a strange thing, starting something at this age that might have changed the entire shape of a life, had it existed sooner.

Maybe some of us were never broken — just running on a clock nobody else could hear.

But that's getting ahead of myself. That restlessness — the one that never had a name — is the thread that runs through everything that follows: the accidents, the surgeries, the bands, the businesses, the whole unlikely ride from a beach town next door to the Hell's Angels to a life spent chasing whatever came next in technology. All of it traces back to a kid who couldn't power down.

It starts on a porch, in Ocean Beach, in 1955, with the chickens scratching in the dirt.

Begin — Chapter One →

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THE OBSERVER RAGES AGAINST ABSURDITY — LIFE AND TECHNOLOGY

Chapter One

My body got tested early, before I even understood what resilience meant. At three years old, living among those tiny one-room 1920s beach cottages that are still scattered around Ocean Beach today, I had a friend named Timmy just around the corner, and the narrow gaps between our yards were our whole playground.

DRAG ME ⊕

My house itself was practically designed for injury. The garage sat roughly six feet below the kitchen door, joined by a short staircase. One day Timmy and I got the bright idea to walk the guard rail along those stairs like a balance beam. My ADHD brain — always a little too fast, a little too reckless — took over; my foot slipped, and I went down six feet, head-first onto the concrete garage floor. I came away with a fractured skull and a serious concussion.

My dad Ed was old-school Norwegian stock, so his first move wasn't the ER — it was calling a local doctor connected to his brother, a neighborhood pharmacist. That doctor lived way out on Bancroft Road, in what's now Casa de Oro, and getting to our house took him what felt like forever. I remember lying there, dizzy and hurting, while he pressed a cold stethoscope to my chest.

But the moment he reached into his bag, the fear disappeared — because instead of medicine, he pulled out a PEZ dispenser. For a fractured three-year-old, that was better than any prize imaginable. I lay in that quiet house completely delighted by a plastic candy toy, having just survived my first real brush with death. My Dad put a cheap plastic football helmet on me and told me to go outside and play.

Modern medicine has never once matched the recovery rate of candy and a firm shove back outdoors.

My mother spent that whole stretch on Orchard Street on edge, watching her helmet-wearing, hyperactive toddler run wild next to the motorcycle club that had set up shop two doors down.

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The pressure on my mother started building before I was even old enough to notice it. I was six months old when it finally became unbearable, and she packed up and left West Virginia for good, heading west to stay with her stepsister in La Mesa, California.

My mother had grown up an orphan. Her parents — out of County Clare, Ireland — brought her to America, and by the time she was somewhere around ten, both of them were gone too, taken by disease within a short stretch of each other. She grew up parentless, coming of age through the hardest years of the Depression with nobody left to lean on. By the time she had me, survival wasn't a lesson she'd had to learn. It was the only thing she'd ever known.

DRAG ME ⊕

I left Bluefield without my two older brothers — Robert/Bob, 13, and Richard/Rick, 10. They were my father's sons too, full brothers of mine, but when my parents split, they stayed behind with him in West Virginia while my mother brought me west alone. They weren't part of my childhood at all — as far as I knew, I was the only child making my way through the world solo. Then, around age seven, my mother offhandedly upended that entire picture: "Oh yeah, you have a brother, and he has a daughter. You have a niece, and they're coming to visit." Just like that, my world got bigger. A brother I'd never known about was suddenly real, and so was his daughter — my niece, Vicki — who was about to walk straight into my life. It was one more strange twist in a childhood full of buried secrets and abrupt reversals.

I remember firing off a barrage of questions, trying to make sense of how an entire family could just appear out of thin air. But whether I was simply too young to grasp the answers, or my mother and Ed just refused to give them, most of my questions were met with wall-to-wall silence.

My very first memory is more of a snapshot than a scene — a single frame stuck in my mind. I'm about two and a half, sitting on a porch in the California sunshine, watching chickens scratch around in the dirt. Years later I asked my mother whether that memory was real or something I'd invented. "Yes," she said. "That's exactly how it was."

Being a single mother in the 1950s with no work history was a losing hand. To keep herself afloat while she figured out her next move, my mother made a brutal call: she placed me in foster care. Eventually she landed a job at Union Title, banging away at a mechanical typewriter — which, looking back, was an odd little preview of the computer businesses her son would go on to build in San Diego decades later.

It was when she was working at Union Title that she met Edward — Ed. He was a solid, decent man, wanting a child of his own. Once things stabilized, my mother went back to the foster home to get me, and Ed adopted me officially, making my name legal on paper. But paperwork doesn't undo psychological damage. As far as my two-year-old brain was concerned, the foster mother was my mother — she was the one who'd kept me safe. Then, out of nowhere, a strange woman (my biological mother) and a man, Ed, showed up claiming to be my parents, and I was pulled away from the only stability I'd known and dropped into the hands of strangers. It was a jarring break in my sense of who I belonged to, and it's the moment I'd point to as when my survival instincts first switched on.

And my life as an Observer began.

From La Mesa we moved to Ocean Beach, into an apartment on Voltaire Street. My memories of Ed from that period are blurry fragments — I hadn't yet grasped what "father" even meant. What I do remember is being out on the water with him, watching the fishing lines drop.

Even then, my brain wasn't wired like the other kids'. I was enrolled in a neighborhood preschool, and it turned into a daily standoff with my own restlessness. Nobody in the 1950s knew about ADHD.

"Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by executive dysfunction resulting in symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation that are excessive and pervasive."

It never really had a name through most of my life. It just had consequences — the guardrail I walked instead of the stairs, the naptime I refused, the decisions made at speed instead of at caution. Looking back, the thread runs through almost everything: the restlessness that got me hurt as a kid, the same restlessness that probably built the businesses later, and never much in between.

They just saw a kid who couldn't sit still and wouldn't behave. My memories of that place have nothing to do with finger paint or building blocks. They're memories of pushing back — specifically, refusing naptime. My mind moved too fast to power down just because the clock said it was time to sleep. The staff called my mother constantly to come collect her wired kid. Even at that age, I was built to keep moving.

Next, we landed on Orchard Street, close enough to the Pacific that the surf was basically our front lawn — two houses from the water, with the waves as constant background noise. Ocean Beach in the '60s was nothing like a tidy suburb; it was rough-edged, beautiful, and untamed.

Ocean Beach inherited its personality by being a small, freedom-loving, surfing, beach town separated on the north from the beaches like South and North Mission by a boating channel, the jetty. To the south was Point Loma, a piece of land that juts out into the San Diego Bay, complete with a lighthouse you can visit.

DRAG ME ⊕

"In 1900, Theosophical leader Katherine Tingley established 'Lomaland' on San Diego's Point Loma peninsula as an international utopian center for esoteric philosophy, education, and the arts. The community featured a prominent Raja Yoga school and the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity, blending Eastern spirituality with Western classical ideals before relocating in 1942."

Point Loma's countercultural roots go back further than most people realize — planted decades earlier by a utopian colony that had nothing to do with surfers or bikers at all.

Every generation invents its own name for the same old hunger — to find a place where the ordinary rules don't quite reach.

This meant OB was always full of Hippies, Revolutionists and forward-thinking individuals.

Right next door to us sat proof of that: an actual Hell's Angels clubhouse. OB back then was a magnet for anti-establishment types, and the biker culture was just stitched into the neighborhood. As a kid, none of that registered as scary — it was simply how the block worked. Two doors from the ocean, one door from the most infamous motorcycle club in the world — that combination shaped how I saw the world from the start, well outside anything resembling normal suburban life. I grew up on the literal edge of the country, ocean on one side, and outlaws on the other.

DRAG ME ⊕

#1 FIRST SURGERY

The real medical saga of my life kicked off when I was four years old. A local physician whose practice sat right next to my pharmacist uncle was called in to do a routine procedure: removing my tonsils and adenoids.

Hospital standards in the '50s left a lot to be desired. Once the operation was done, staff wheeled my small four-year-old body into a recovery room, shut the door — and simply forgot about me. Alone in that room, my surgical wounds reopened, and I started hemorrhaging, swallowing my own blood while my vitals crashed.

By the time a nurse finally checked in and found me, I'd lost a dangerous amount of blood. The staff scrambled to stabilize me with a full transfusion, pulling me back from the brink. It was a horrifying, careless introduction to hospitals — and it marked the true beginning of what would become a lifetime defined by surgery: the first of fourteen major operations I'd eventually have to survive.

Eventually mom had enough and made my dad buy a house up on the Mesa, in Clairemont. I was about four or five when we relocated. Clairemont was the classic 1950s suburb in the making — a sprawling new development of identical tract homes cut across the canyons. My parents bought the place for around $12,000, which sounds almost fictional now. For a kid raised around beach shacks, surfers, and outlaws, Clairemont's pavement felt like landing on a different planet — clean, orderly, built to civilize me. But no new geography could slow down what was happening in my head. Just like that, my life living right on the beach, immersed in a wild world of surfers and hippies, was traded for the neat suburban rows of Clairemont and a sea of neighborhood kids.

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Continue — Chapter Two →

THE OBSERVER RAGES AGAINST ABSURDITY — LIFE AND TECHNOLOGY

The Mesa, the Canyons, and the Coast

I'm sure my mom was pretty excited when we finally moved from Ocean Beach to Clairemont. It was built in the early '50s — the Navy had a big presence there and needed new housing. They also put in these new-concept shopping centers: the grocery store and the surrounding shops sat together in a big lot with parking out front, instead of lining a street the way a strip mall would. One went into Linda Vista, a small community next to Clairemont that actually had a movie theater. Moms would drop us off on Saturdays for fifty cents, and we'd watch Elvis Presley movies all afternoon.

Back then, Clairemont wasn't the dense, sprawling suburb it is today. It was a raw, unfinished frontier of red dirt, exposed concrete slabs, and frame houses going up on every corner. For a little kid, it was an absolute paradise of unsecured building materials. We scavenged scrap 2x4s and bent nails out of the dirt lots, hammering together crude forts before the framing crews even showed up for work the next morning. My parents would bring me up to the house while it was being built — 2x4s jutting out of the concrete foundation where the roof frame would attach.

Soon the house was finished. We got a moving van, and the whole neighborhood became my new playground. There were kids everywhere — almost every home had two or three. Clairemont was a true bedroom community. I introduced myself around to the kids who'd become my new friends and figured this might not be so bad.

Mom enrolled me in kindergarten, which made me susceptible to the full gauntlet of pre-vaccine childhood diseases. I caught them all — mumps, measles, chickenpox — but the big one was a brutal case of spinal meningitis that nearly took me out.

Meningitis is an infection and swelling of the protective membranes and fluid surrounding your brain and spinal column.

I survived it. What I didn't survive so easily was the local school system's patience for me.

They hadn't finished the school closest to me, Kate Douglas Wiggin, so I was sent to one farther away — an older school called Field Elementary, with wooden stairs leading up to what they called bungalows. Just inside the door of each classroom sat a box with a red fire extinguisher in it. I noticed that when the boys walked in, they'd punch the lever on top of it — not to be the one who didn't. So I followed suit. What I didn't notice was that some prankster had already pulled the pin before me. I punched the top of the extinguisher, and white foam went shooting everywhere, filling up the classroom. All the boys howled. The teacher panicked, chased us outside, and — of course — sent me straight to the principal.

Justice, I would learn early and often, has never once cared who pulled the pin — only who happened to be standing there when it went off.

DRAG ME ⊕

Early on, I was pure friction in a classroom — brawling, fidgeting, losing my temper. When Wiggin finally opened, I was moved there, but nothing really changed. I wasn't too happy about being told to take a nap one afternoon, and I threw a temper tantrum so violent that the teacher had to pick me up off the floor and throw me over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I pounded on her back the whole way as she marched me to the principal's office, where I knew his heavy wooden paddle would be waiting. My parents spanked me too, right along with him, because in those days that was the whole treatment plan: you didn't manage a hyperactive kid, you beat the hyperactivity out of him. Nobody had a name yet for what was actually going on with me. They just had a paddle.

The turning point came in third grade, thanks to a teacher who intuitively understood how to handle a hyperactive, high-energy kid long before ADHD became a household term. She stuck a paper train on the wall with little empty squares. Every day I managed to control my temper and stay on track, I got to color in a square. If I made it through a full week without throwing a punch or causing a riot, I got a candy bar. Up to that point, I'd learned that acting out was the fastest way to get attention. She flipped the script — hacking my brain's reward system and showing me that channeling my focus paid off in tangible ways.

Living off Mount Everest Drive meant a half-mile trek up and down a steep hill to school every day. My dad, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, never let me hear the end of how tough his childhood was — walking miles to school through knee-deep blizzards, uphill both ways, without shoes. Then, one surreal morning in the late sixties, a rare, improbable cold front hit San Diego and dropped a thin sheet of slush onto Clairemont. I looked at Mount Everest Drive covered in actual snow, kicked off my Converse, and marched all the way up the hill barefoot. I was ten years old, my toes were bright red, but I'd earned the absolute right to out-Buffalo my father for the rest of my life.

That was about as close as Clairemont ever got to the outside world touching us directly but it didn't stay that way. In June 1963, the cool mom across the street packed us into her car and drove us down to El Cajon Boulevard after President John F. Kennedy spoke at San Diego State. We squeezed up to the curb, and as the open-top limousine swept past, JFK looked straight toward our spot on the sidewalk and waved directly at me. Five months later, the PA system in my classroom crackled to life with the news that he'd been murdered in Dallas. Before the shock of that day could fully wear off, the late sixties brought the news of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy being gunned down too. I was just a kid who'd been waved at by a president who was dead within the year. That does something to how you see the grown-up world running things.

So we retreated into the canyons. Summer parenting back then was an exercise in strategic eviction: your mom fed you a bowl of sugary cereal, kicked you out the front door, and gave you one rule — “Don't come back until the streetlights turn on.”

The Clairemont canyons became our self-governed testing ground. We graduated from scrap-wood forts to mechanical engineering out of pure necessity. Older kids started tearing four-stroke Briggs & Stratton engines off discarded lawnmowers, wedging them into welded frames, and building crude mini-bikes to blast through the dirt trails in the canyons. On the paved streets, we took Flexi Flyers — essentially wooden luge sleds on four small wheels — and dropped flat on our stomachs down the steepest hills in the neighborhood, steering three inches off the hot asphalt. Some guys would fly off, land bare-chested on the asphalt, scrape off half their skin, and walk around the rest of the summer with scabs all over their chest.

Before urethane wheels arrived, sidewalk skating was a contact sport. We clamped metal roller skates directly onto the soles of our Converse using a skate key. With zero grip and no shock absorption, every tiny pebble on the sidewalk acted as a dead stop, launching you forward into a full-speed face-plant.

Eventually, someone had a stroke of backyard genius. We took a couple of scrap 2x4s, nailed them into an L-shaped scooter frame, and mounted the disassembled metal skates to the bottom. Naturally, the upright board eventually snapped off under stress. Instead of throwing it away, someone stood on the flat board with the metal wheels underneath, realized you could steer by shifting your weight, and the homemade skateboard was born. Pretty soon, every kid in Clairemont was running the exact same setup, filling the neighborhood with a sound like a low-flying freight train.

When commercial urethane wheels finally hit the market, everything changed. The ride became smooth, fast, and silent. We started building three-foot wooden long-boards to mimic the surfboards we saw down at the beach, cruising the boardwalk in Pacific Beach. Later, a local genius named Tony Hawk showed us how you could basically break the laws of physics and make a skateboard do amazing things. He teamed up with Carlsbad CA. to help get the world's first skate park built in 1976 and with his support the YMCA built a huge skateboard park in Clairemont he rode.

By ten years old, the leash was completely gone. I'd walk a couple blocks out to Balboa Avenue, throw out my thumb, and hitchhike down to the coast. It was a different era — you'd catch a ride with a local surfer or a contractor with a pickup truck, and you just jumped in the back. No seat belt, no nothing. It was just how a kid without a car got to. the water. I learned to body surf, spending hours in the saltwater until my eyes were red and my skin was burned. We all walked around with that white zinc oxide stuff smeared on our noses.

When hunger set in, I funded my own lunch through the local beach economy. I'd walk the sand, rummaging through fire pits and trash barrels for discarded glass Coke bottles. At ten cents a bottle, a few of them traded in at the corner liquor store gave me enough cash for a hot dog, a bag of chips, and a cold soda. There was biker-bar across from crystal pier called Maynard's that served twenty-five cent spaghetti dinner on Wednesday night. Since we were underage they had a little window where they sold us to-go.

Maynard's opened in 1961 at 701 Garnet Avenue, on the corner of Garnet and Ocean Boulevard, directly across from Crystal Pier. It became a neighborhood fixture for surfers, beach residents, and the local counterculture, known for cheap food specials — twenty-five-cent spaghetti nights (later thirty-five cents), taco nights, and Sunday morning Spanish omelets — and for its back-door policy, where underage regulars could order at a window facing Ocean Boulevard without setting foot inside the bar. The original building was demolished in the summer of 1973 to make way for beachfront condominiums; the bar relocated up Garnet Avenue for a few more years before closing for good in the 1980s.

Eventually, I upgraded from body surfing to a real board: an 8-foot Gordon & Smith with a heavy redwood stringer. At barely 4'10" and 100 pounds, lugging a fiberglass board that weighed a third of my body weight down the sand was heavy labor. But paddling out on local San Diego foam, catching open-face waves, and long-boarding back along the oceanfront boardwalk as the sun went down — the transition was complete.

With that many kids and that much energy running around, parents needed somewhere to put it. For me, that started with Y-Indian Guides, and then — while other kids went through Cub Scouts — I went straight into Boy Scouts, meeting at the local church near my house. The scoutmaster had two sons a little older than me who were also in the troop, and they were serious about hiking. At first, since most of us were young and totally inexperienced, we'd just head up to the local mountains or down to the desert, hike a little, and spend the night. Those trips kept getting longer and farther, until eventually we'd leave on a Friday when the dads got off work. They'd drive us up to the mountains and drop us off, then come back Sunday afternoon to pick us up after we'd hiked thirty miles and camped two nights. I was a skinny, weak, insecure little kid, but it built stamina, and I started to like it. I had friends, too, which mattered when you're a junior teenager in training. I started earning merit badges and became a group leader with a couple other guys — we called ourselves the Beaver Patrol.

My dad was a plant engineer, especially when I was younger, he used to take me to work with him on Saturdays so Mom could get me out of her hair. I always gravitated toward the facility crew in the back. When they found out I was hiking with one of those old-fashioned knapsacks, they got together and designed a modern one for me — an aluminum frame with a custom-bent wooden bow across the back, attached to a hip belt made from a seat belt, which was a new idea at the time. It let you carry the weight on your hips instead of your shoulders. I remember one Christmas being thrilled to get an ultralight goose-down mummy sleeping bag that weighed only two and a half pounds. By then I think I had more than twenty merit badges. I was a Life Scout, just about to make Eagle. Over those years, we ended up hiking from the Mexican border through the desert, climbing from San Jacinto to the San Bernardino Mountains, connecting to the California Riding and Hiking Trail, going up Mount Whitney, and hiking the John Muir Trail through Kings Canyon and Yosemite.

I guess I got bored, which was pretty common for me. I was only thirteen and hadn't started smoking yet, but I stole one of my dad's cigarettes, and as the scoutmaster came huffing and puffing back from a thirty-mile hike, I lit it up in front of him. He didn't really like that too much. He decided it was probably time for me to move on from scouting.

My dad was a hunter. He owned a 12-gauge shotgun and used to make long trips up to Tule Lake, near the northern border, to shoot goose and duck with his buddies from work. As I grew older, he started bringing me along on hunts closer to home.

Once you got a mile past our house, the neighborhood vanished. It was nothing but open fields stretching for miles in every direction — with one major exception: Miramar Naval Air Station, the legendary home of Fightertown USA, where they trained the real Top Gun pilots long before Tom Cruise ever filmed the movie on the tarmac.

We'd wander those open fields hunting for rabbits. The local coyote population was so thick back then that the county even offered a bounty for shooting them, trying to keep the numbers down.

After taking me to a few of his favorite spots, he decided it was time to break me in. He handed over his heavy 12-gauge shotgun and gave me a brief instruction: “Put it up to your shoulder, hold it tight against yourself, and shoot that can over there.”

I thought, no problem, I can handle this. I pulled the stock up, squeezed the trigger, and — boom — that sucker knocked me back two feet and left my shoulder black and blue for days.

It was plenty sore, but the very next weekend he handed the gun right back to me and asked, “Are you ready?”

I couldn't look like a weenie, so I said, “Sure.” But this time I remembered to wedge that stock hard against my shoulder so it wouldn't have any room to bite. I lined up and pulled the trigger. Boom. Braced right, it wasn't nearly so bad.

Seeing that, he ended up buying me my own 16-gauge shotgun — a little lighter, with less of a punch, a much better fit for a scrawny, hundred-pound kid.

I still have that 16-gauge today, and when my dad passed away, I inherited his old 12-gauge as well. I never shoot them anymore, but they stay with me for the memories attached to every scuff on the stock.

San Diego was much more rural back then. Where the shopping malls sit today in Mission Valley, there were actual cow pastures. We'd drive up to Poway — which felt a world away, reachable only by a winding two-lane road into the hills — to hunt quail, dove, and rabbit.

Other times we headed east to the Imperial Valley. That meant rolling out of bed at 4:00 in the morning and driving an hour and a half to reach the fields right at sunrise, when the doves flew down from the trees looking for water. They were everywhere, and we almost always hit our limit.

Of course, guess who got the job of cleaning all those doves once we got home? Feathers went flying everywhere, and after all that work, each bird only yielded a tiny piece of breast meat — you needed three or four just to make a single meal.

My dad, being the plant engineer of one of the many companies that build equipment for the space program hung out with the General Dynamics guys at the local pub after work. Every now and then he'd sneak me inside, and I'd hide under the bar stools out of sight while the men drank their beers and talked shop.

It was at that pub that those guys told my dad about the Convair Gun Club out in El Cajon. Before long we were heading out there ourselves to shoot trap and skeet.

Trap was simple enough: you stood in one spot while the trap house launched a clay disc straight out ahead of you at various angles, and you tried to blow it out of the sky.

Skeet was a different challenge, using two houses — one high, one low. A bird would shoot out of the right house and you'd take your shot, then a second bird would launch from the left. Finally they'd throw a double, launching birds from both houses at once, and you had to take down both before they hit the ground.

Shooting through a couple boxes of shells every weekend, on top of the range fees, started getting expensive for my dad. To cut costs, we saved our spent shells from the range, brought them home, and used a bench-mounted reloading press to rebuild them — knocking out the spent primer, seating a fresh one, dropping in a precise charge of gunpowder, stuffing in the wad, pouring the lead BBs, and crimping the top shut. After cranking out a couple dozen, we'd pack them back into empty boxes, fully stocked for the next weekend.

Naturally, I joined the National Rifle Association and earned my hunter's safety license as early as legally allowed — I'm pretty sure that was age thirteen.

After a year or so of practice, we were getting pretty sharp. To celebrate, my dad treated himself to a beautiful Browning over-and-under shotgun — a stunning piece of craftsmanship and the prized possession of any dedicated skeet shooter. Since we competed in different classes, we didn't have to shoot at the same time; he'd shoot his round, then hand that gorgeous Browning over to me so I could take my turn with it.

He even bought a .410 bore — a tiny shotgun with a light load that leaves barely any room for error. If you could break targets with a .410, you really knew what you were doing.

Those are the times you never forget from childhood — the kind of memories that stick with you forever.

AS THE OBSERVER

All for the best. Testosterone was starting to rage, and the girls were looking pretty. We started going to the Clairemont Theater, and if you were lucky, there was a little kissing. Then you'd give your St. Christopher necklace to a girl. She'd keep it for a few days, break up with you, and give it back. You'd hand it to another girl the next Friday night.

Then you had to try to get home before 10:00 pm. In a Nixon-era police state, if you didn't, it wasn't just your parents who got mad — the police would stop you, arrest you for curfew, and drive you home in the back of a police car so the whole neighborhood could see what a bad guy you were, then hand you over to your parents, which meant you were grounded for at least a month.

This was the summer going into ninth grade. We were about to be the big kids at school. Life was changing all around us.

I was no longer just a kid causing trouble in the dirt lots of Clairemont — I was independent, self-reliant, and ready for whatever came next.

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Continue — Chapter Three →

THE OBSERVER RAGES AGAINST ABSURDITY — LIFE AND TECHNOLOGY

The Orange County Shift and the Coast Highway Awakening

By the mid-1960s, San Diego’s aerospace boom was in full swing. Sharp engineers at Convair, Ryan Aeronautical, and General Dynamics were working on the Atlas rockets destined for space — these were the same rocket scientists who would eventually take us to the moon, the most exciting event of all time. As those technicians got promoted, a lot of them migrated north to Orange County. That’s how my best friend Danny and his family ended up leaving Clairemont for Costa Mesa. My mom, who was always eager to get me out from underfoot for a while, packed me, my bike, and my surfboard onto the Amtrak train every summer to stay with Danny and his sister for a month.

Taking that train north along the coast by myself was pure autonomy. Costa Mesa back then was half-wild, an absolute goldmine of unsupervised freedom. We spent our days riding our bikes everywhere. We’d pedal right up to the perimeter of what was then the quiet Orange County Airport — long before it became the giant airport now known as John Wayne — and wander right into the open hangars. There were no security guards, no fences, and no red tape. Mechanics turning wrenches on light Piper Cubs and Cessnas would let us climb into the cockpits, grip the yokes, and stare at the instrument panels.

When we weren’t at the airfield, we were down in the Upper Newport Back Bay. It was a maze of salt marsh, reeds, and mudflats. We scoured the area for discarded 55-gallon steel oil drums, scrap lumber, and rope, lashing them together into crude, unstable rafts to play Huck Finn through the marsh channels. Later this became known as the Newport Dunes, a recreational area with multi-million dollar houses around it. It was connected to Newport Beach and Balboa Island — all really exclusive homes with private boat docks, a lot of them owned by actors and actresses of early Hollywood. Danny’s mom used to take us out to Balboa Island, where there was a famous place that served chocolate-covered bananas — we loved them.

Eventually, Danny’s family moved right onto Highway 101 in Corona del Mar, into a house where the Pacific Ocean was literally across the street. The bluffs dropped straight down into the coves. We’d walk across 101 carrying Hawaiian slings, masks, and fins, diving into the kelp beds to spear fish, or body surfing until our eyes were bloodshot.

We earned our own way. We both took paper routes, rolling ink-stained morning papers at 5:00 am. and saving every dime until we could buy matching Schwinn 10-speed bicycles. We built custom wire hooks onto the side frames so we could haul our surfboards on two wheels.

With those Schwinn's, our range exploded. We’d lean into the handlebars and crank five miles south along Highway 101 down into Laguna Beach. That stretch of road was where two distinct versions of Southern California slammed into each other. On one side of the highway sat Taco Bell, where we’d trade pocket change for cheap tacos. Directly across the street sat Mystic Arts World, the legendary new counterculture shop that had just opened that year. Incense smoke drifted right out into the coastal air, mixed with the smell of fried tortillas and salt water.

The world was shifting violently under our feet. On television, the evening news dished up a steady diet of Vietnam War footage — helicopter drops, jungle firefights, and rising body counts. Seeing guys just a few years older than us getting shipped off and broken in a conflict that made zero sense taught us early on to distrust blind authority.

The ultimate awakening came near the end of that summer of 1967. We were diving in Laguna and a friend of ours asked us to come over to his house because his older brothers were back from Harvard for the summer. Danny and I hesitated; those older brothers used to be neighborhood bullies, greasers in leather jackets who liked to push younger kids around. But our friend promised there was free food, so we went.

We walked into the kitchen of this big, beautiful house with an amazing ocean view, expecting Harvard preppies. Instead, we found two long-haired, radicalized anti-war activists. It turned out those brothers were core members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

While we sat on the floor eating, they introduced us to two older guys hanging out in the house: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, right as Alpert was transitioning into Ram Dass. To those older guys, Leary and Alpert were the high priests of the psychedelic revolution. To Danny and me, they were just two soft-spoken adults with wild energy hanging out in an Orange County beach house while we ate our food. There was marijuana being smoked, and they were talking about this new LSD experience. All of this was really new and wild to us. Of course we’d seen the stuff and heard about it on TV, but this was real life.

Riding our Schwinn's back to Danny’s house that evening, the innocence of early childhood was officially gone. A couple days later I packed my bag, boarded the Amtrak train, and headed back down to San Diego. I was thirteen years old, turning fourteen at the very end of August. As I watched the ocean go by, I couldn’t help but think about my experiences that summer — I was heading straight into my teenage years with my eyes wide open.

Some doors, once you've seen through them, don't close back up — they just wait for you to walk through the rest of the way.

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