Who the hell am I anyway?

I was born in Michigan, where I mostly lived until joining the U.S. Navy upon graduating high school. The Navy sent me first to Concord, California, where I served on the U.S.S. Haleakala and embarked on my first WestPac (western Pacific) cruise, sealing my fate as an incurable wanderlust and unrepentant Asiaphile, the latter further cemented by the two years I lived in the Philippines. I was next stationed in Hawaii, where I remained when my I finally decided to leave the Navy to attend the University of Hawaii at Maona At university, I earned both a B.A. (1990) and an M.A. (1997) in History. I now live in Tokyo with my wife and two cats.

I write non-fiction, fiction, poetry, haiku, rants on facebook, and now this blog. I also re-write translations, the most interesting of which was Yurai: The Origin of Tenshin Seikyo, which is memoir of the founder the Japanese religion Tenshin Seikyo. My publications to date are five articles in the Macmillian Encyclopedia of World Slavery, a few poems in Rain Bird, a literary and art journal published by Windward Community College in Hawaii, where he once taught history, and the flash fiction blog 52/250 Flash (http://52250flash.wordpress.com/).

Thanks to the advent of Kindle, I’ve decided to plunge into the world of self-publishing with my first book, All That Is: 81 Meditations Inspired by the Tao Te Ching, available from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/All-That-Is-Meditations-ebook/dp/B0094A305E/.

The All That Is blog is at: http://allthatis.wordpress.com/