When I was 19 years old I lived in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon, and had a sexy and promising career in the field of table bussing. It was my day off, the phone rang, and soon my “called in” ass was on the bus to work. I wished I had a dentist appointment, a house fire, an aneurism, or anything at all to keep me from having to go in. But no, and my shift would end after midnight.

Little did I know that if I hadn’t gone in that day, I would never have impressed that particular table of Japanese businessmen with the Tarzan-level Japanese from 9^th grade, they would never have offered me the job, I would never have accepted it, and my future would have gone in a completely different direction. Getting called into work that day proved to be the single most important event of my life (so far at least).

Two weeks later I was on a plane, the first of many planes that carried me over 100,000 miles depositing me into the homes, cultures, languages, and lives of just enough people to teach me how insignificant I really was, and how every single one of us, from the billionaire to the dump dweller, mattered exactly as much as every other person. My journey also showed me what a powerful but discouragingly rare concept this actually was.

Over the next five years I acquired more than just a diaper-rash of stories and three languages, I gained an intricate, differentiated, and conflicting perspective on damn near everything with which I made contact. This soup became the foundation and the structure of my adult experience, and the spatter of understanding that accompanied it is what enables me to find an unseen edge on almost any lid and rip it wide open to reveal the fleshy tapioca inside.

Somehow through my entire adolescence and even through most of my travels, I managed to fall firmly on both sides of almost every conflict that entangled me; though after September 11^th 2001, that changed considerably. My global experience had made me a strong moral-egalitarian, but after 9/11, I was forced to admit that I don’t even want to treat equally those who disagree with me on egalitarianism, and that egalitarians are actually hurting their cause by extending to non-egalitarians the freedoms that come with being equal. But double standards are wrong, aren’t they? This is in fact a paradox isn’t it? It was this conundrum that inspired me to take up the pen and bring to life the Compos Mentis series of Intellectual adventure thrillers.