Tha Underworld

It really isn’t worth writing about. I was a fraction of myself. There were some signs that told me something was there. Other than that, I was a zombie in chains disguised as an extravert.

A very beautifully spirited friend released me.

New York City, United States

I knew I wanted to quit Google on the second day of orientation. It took me just shy of eighteen months to execute on this.

Initially I stayed because I needed the money. Then it was because of my manager, who was a genius and a major mentor for me. Everyone on our team was scared of him. I sat next to him and hung out with him at the office late at night. We were also sitting directly next to Eric Schmit’s office, which had a glass wall. It was a bit awkward.

Eventually, I stayed because for all of the days that I was miserable, there were a few where I discovered gold or diamonds and recognized I was good at my job and contributing value to the company. It was there I learned how much architectural information my brain could store.

What about free breakfast? Free lunch. Free dinner. Top chefs. Free snacks all day long. Made up working hours and top pay. All a glamourous mask for a corporate prison. I would frequently schedule lunches with people one-on-one and pull out of them how trapped they felt. It wasn’t easy. I don’t even think they realized it themselves until our lunches.

Eventually, just before quitting, I was recommended to switch teams so I bypassed the internal hiring system, wrote to 10 hiring managers who happened to be near director level, and got a lunch or meeting scheduled with a few of them. One of them was with the woman in charge of Google Assistant’s local search team. This was a very good team to be on at the time. She made a decision to hire me after a five minute meeting. I loved working for her and I loved the people I was working with.

I gave it three months, and realized it didn’t matter, and I had to go. The moment I decided to quit I left my apartment, walked into my manager’s office, and put in notice. She said it was the worst decision I would make in my life. It was probably the best decision I made in my life.

Kuaui, Hawaii, United States

Coming soon.

Outerspace

The fool is that I fooled April Fools by taking a plane from Hawaii on March 31st and landing in Osaka on April 2nd. For anyone who thinks I was on the plane during April 1st, I wasn’t. I crossed the international date line.

Busan, South Korea

Once I was in South Korea for 3 days. Busan, not the capital Seoul. That’s another story. I was miserable, it felt like where I grew up, no one spoke English, and I stayed in my rented apartment nearly the entire time, in spite of being on the beachfront and surrounded by populated beach bars.

When it was time to leave, I was flying to Thailand and was so concerned about the weight of my luggage that I spent many hours (possibly my entire last day) walking around with it (it was of course heavy enough for me to be concerned about the weight) without being able to find a single scale and, not wanting to pay a $50 overweight baggage fee, I proceeded to message my therapist for an immediate appointment about how I am unable to make decisions and spent a day walking around Busan looking for a scale to weigh my baggage to not have to pay an overweight baggage fee. The appointment was $150.

Busan, South Korea
International Airspace

While I locked myself in the apartment in Busan in agony waiting for the days to pass so I could fly to Thailand, I did the best thing I can do in these situations and started producing music. At first, it was garbage, but I kept it because I felt there was something there. I started to think of my excitement for visiting Thailand and channeled it.

By the time I left Busan, I had a seed of a track. The plane ride was five hours. I fought strong resistance and pulled out my laptop and keyboard to continue the track on the plane. This time I named it, Excitation, which was short for Excitation for Thailand. For two or three hours, nothing was happening. The production was vanilla. A few hours in, everything came to me.

I spent the rest of the plane ride doing the true production work, which comes to you when you least expect it, usually after a lot of patience, and takes an hour or less. It’s a flow state. When I wrote this track, I was a complete novice with no training in music production. I didn’t know how to use anything but Ableton stock sounds. It sounds like video game music.

It is still one of my favorite tracks to this day. I don’t post my music anywhere but I will now so people know how music ties into my story.

Thailand itself is one of my least favorite countries. Fortunately I didn’t know that at the time of production since I had never been.

Here’s the track. My friends call it video game music.

Surat Thani Province, Thialand_

There is a story that comes before this one. It is a brief one about my experience in Bangkok. It is not yet written but when it is, I’ll remove this introduction. The point is I was ready to move on.

I flew to Surat Thani to attend a 10 day silent meditation retreat, not the hardcore dhamma ones where they brainwash you into 10 hours of meditation a day, their way or the highway, and if you try to leave they become the Mafia. It was a more welcoming one.

I had a plan to go to Koh Phangan directly after, and on the one hour plane ride from Bangkok I developed a gut feeling that I should skip the retreat and go straight to the island.

At baggage claim, I was tapped on the shoulder by a guy about my age who wore his heart as clothing. He asked me if I was headed towards the city and if I wanted to split a cab. It didn’t require thought to say yes.

In the cab, we learned a lot about each other. Two important pieces of information were that he had done the exact same retreat and said it was not worth the time, and that he was heading straight to Koh Phangan that night. I didn’t know that this was possible. He said it was possible by a night ferry. For those of you who have never been on a night ferry, it is like it is in the movies. There were more than several times that we were woken up by our ferry swaying back and forth around 60° (1/3 of the way to capsizing) and we questioned if we would make it to the island.

We spent 25 days together on the island. To this day, he is one of my closest friends and a true gem of the earth. I have many stories to tell about Karl but not here.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, April, 2019

Once I went to Argentina on a one way ticket anticipating seeing some of the most unique and beautiful culture I’d ever seen in the world. It was my first time in South America. The first night, shortly after I landed, I ate some food at a restaurant near my apartment. I got a form of severe food poisoning which escalated to a fever which I would estimate was around 104°F. I was so sick that in spite of knowing that I needed fluids badly I wouldn’t leave my bed to get water. I had no contacts there and at the time did not know how to use an emergency room or ambulance. So, for one week, I laid in bed feeling close to death, then changed apartments, stayed inside all day, and then left the city two days later to Germany.

As a cherry on top, I checked baggage with all of my collected currencies from around the world at the time, about 20 currencies worth around $400. It was stolen in Argentina by the baggage staff.

Berlin, Germany, April, 2019

Naturally after I had the experience in Argentina I decided it was time to stop traveling. It had been nearly a year and a half on the road, that was respectable. So, I decided to go somewhere I was comfortable. Even though I had been to Berlin quite a few times that year, mostly to party, I decided to rent a stay in a house out in the suburbs, just to be somewhere I felt safe but also alone to recover and process. In some moment, I don’t know which or why, I decided that instead of quitting traveling I would get a Motorcycle and tour Europe. This is a logical change in plans, I thought. So I called my same therapist who was an avid motorcyclist and asked him which bike would be good for me, and since he knew me so well he did recommend the perfect bike, a Kawasaki KLR 650, good mixed bike and great for touring, not too expensive and not dangerously fast.

So my next step was to find the bike. And I did, in about two days, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I called the guy and he made a good deal with me. I was ready to fly out to get it but with one issue: I didn’t have a motorcycle license. And as it turns out, in Germany, the process takes several months. In fact in most places it takes a long time. But not in the US I found out. I quickly learned that it was possible to go to take a 2 day motorcycle course in the US and then have the correct license to drive a bike in the UK. Even though you drive on the other side of the roads. And the traffic lights are on the side and not the top.

Tampa, Florida, United States, May, 2019

I found a course. It had to be in Florida because that’s where my license was issued. I checked almost all places, almost all were booked, except one, in Tampa. I quickly booked a one way intercontinental ticket to Florida. I had about one day to catch the flight, and there was a strict policy about not being late for this course, even by an hour. Something happened with the flight, as it always does, and I was behind schedule. No matter what I did, I was going to be an hour late. I called the instructor and he said I wouldn’t be able to attend. I explained my situation and he made an exception.

One of the last things our instructor told us was to never drink and drive., which was followed by a story about how as a kid he had drunk a case of beers and was flying a helicopter and crashed it into a tree, and he woke up in a hospital bed looking at the TV with the news on with a story about a boy who crashed a helicopter into a tree. The next day, I had a motorcycle license.