Know Thyself
Who am I? A good place to start is at the beginning. Born in the suburbs of Los Angeles—the San Fernando Valley, to be precise—I came into this world, kicking and screaming and raising quite the fuss, on the first day of 1983. Yes, New Year’s baby. No, I didn’t win any gifts. I slept in that day. With New Year’s Eve landing on a Friday, you can’t really blame me. How does this pertain to my writing? I’m not sure. But without having been born, I could never have become a jealous little author in the making.
Fast forward about seven years, and I’m a first-generation Mexican American tyke, running around and still kicking up a fuss, whilst speaking Spanish to my mom and English to my dad. My running came to an abrupt halt when my older brother, having just come home from school, excitedly relayed his assignment to write a story that included his friends and family. He also mentioned his plan to stick me in his tale, which he did, turning me into a scientist who blasted a pesky door with a stick of dynamite. To this day, he doesn’t recall that assignment, but I do, because the soul-corroding envy I underwent is seared into my memory. Jealousy, ladies and gentlemen. Jealousy.
In the wake of this slap to my light brown face, I set forth to write my own damn story. It didn’t matter that none of my teachers had ever assigned any such assignment. I needed to satiate the green-eyed beast, and I succeeded after penning my masterpiece, which I wrote on blue-lined paper with one of the mechanical pencils my dad would always ‘borrow’ from work. Admittedly, my tale was blatant plagiarism, having been set in a Contra videogame level and packed with copyrighted enemies, but that was beside the point. My goal was to satiate the beast, and I succeeded in calming its ravenous hunger… for the time being.
A few years later, I’m no longer running around. Instead, I’m pedaling my BMX bike to the local library, my backpack filled with books I’ve read, and eager to grab some more. Always fascinated by all things military, I leaned toward war stories, both fictional and nonfictional, but I always tossed in some others for good measure. This was necessary, as my reading assignments at school weren’t enough to get my fix. Surprisingly—or perhaps unsurprisingly—I still remember many of the books I read, including several shockingly minor details. It’s surprising because I struggle to remember names, birthdays, or other important factoids that most folk tend to recall. If I ever get married, I’m sure those mental lapses will come back to haunt me, probably in the form of my wife chasing me around with her rolling pin. However, that’s in the future. Back to the past.
I’m in high school now, and my pants are baggy, while my musical tastes have expanded beyond rap and hip hop to punk and metal, and even classic rock. No longer perusing libraries, I now spend my days deluding myself with notions of toughness, all while smoking weed, drinking crappy booze, chasing girls, and pretending it doesn’t bother me when my chases come up empty. Writing-wise, this is relegated to school assignments, which I get a massive kick out of, along with recognition from classmates and teachers. Sadly, I know that excelling in school will impair my social standing, and given my adherence to climbing the stupid ladder, I stopped engaging in my own writing assignments. The only scribbling I get done is journal entries in a notebook, one that nobody has ever read and which I can no longer find. Have fun with it, sands of time. I still engage in reading, however, and I remember shocking my English teacher when she saw me palming Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Unfortunately, the damn book turned out to be a love story, and I was all about the action. Well, the action was on its way.
Fresh out of high school and still on my idiotic quest to prove myself, I joined the United States Army, figuring this would show the world that I was a reckon-worthy force. One month into my service, the 9/11 strikes blanketed the sky with smoke and effectively stamped my ticket to Middle Eastern battlefields. This bone-chilling realization made it clear how idiotic my quest was—a realization that revisited me when I found myself in Iraq, white knuckling the grips of a .50 caliber machine gun, pushing into hostile territory. Obviously, I survived my Mesopotamian adventure, but not everyone did. E.A. took a rocket-propelled grenade to his chest. G.G. paid the ultimate price in an IED blast. S.P. survived the battlefield, only for the war to achieve its wicked aims years later. I often think about these soldiers, along with everyone else who didn’t survive their deployment. This helps keep me grounded, keeps my petty complaints in their proper perspective, keeps me remembering that things could be worse… far worse. On that sobering note, let’s move on.
Fresh out of the Army and somehow in one piece, it was time to take advantage of being alive. I enrolled in school and started working, but that’s not the advantage-taking I had in mind. With school and work humming in the background, I guzzled beer by the gallon and engaged in the shenanigans that usually stem from fermented beverage excess—dancing that looked more like staggering, sloppy conversations I thought were profound but lacked any semblance of intelligence, sending text messages that mortified me when I saw them the following morning, and, of course, chasing girls. Every so often, my pursuits of the opposite sex succeeded, leading to late-night dalliances I now regret… but not completely. If you’re wondering where my writing is at this point, well, it’s nowhere in sight. Not only that, but it disappeared without me noticing, probably because I was laser-focused on living it up. Ducking the grim reaper’s scythe will do that to you. However, the writing was just around the corner.
As the curtains closed on my twenties, the same with my desires for reckless fun, I hit an existential road bump. This didn’t make sense because I was almost done with school and had solid job prospects lined up. With my future sunny and bright, why were clouds of uncertainty gathering? Unsure, but wanting to find out, I posed the question people often ask when confused about life—if I came across a massive amount of money and didn’t have to work, how would I spend my time? The answer came quickly—I would try my hand at writing. Since this didn’t require a financial windfall, I sat at my computer days later and typed the opening lines for what would become my first book. I… was… hooked. I mean hooked. As the months turned into years, the hooks only entrenched themselves deeper. When the years rolled into a decade, the hooks remained in place, and they still show no sign of retracting.
So here I am, in my early forties, seated once more at my computer, wondering why I’m typing these lines. Ostensibly, this is to lure people to subscribe to my newsletter. However, I never anticipated being so detailed, which is what puzzles me. Perhaps I cranked out all these sentences more for myself than for others. After all, as a writer, my story ideas come from my internal wellspring of knowledge, so knowing what’s there is important. Everything I’ve experienced—the sad moments, happy moments, harrowing moments, the music, movies, books, and friendships, the jobs I’ve worked, the jobs I’ve hated, my education inside and outside of school, my existential confusion, my existential gratitude, staring at the ocean or starry sky, the aimless drives through the city, the late-night dalliances—it’s all grist for my writer’s mill, so I need to inventory the silo. Said another way, if I’m going to craft effective stories for you, I need to be familiar with my own. I need to know who I am, which requires reflection, analysis, even criticism. If successful, maybe, just maybe, I’ll compose something that will help you do the same—something that will deepen your self-understanding, if only by a minuscule amount. Given who we are as a species—creatures both blessed and cursed with conscious awareness—what loftier goal is there for us?
Know thyself, my fellow humans. Know thyself.
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