I grew up on the East Coast. Summer days were spent on the lake, jet skis cutting through still, warm water, humidity that settled on everything the moment you stepped outside. Those were good days – the kind where time moved slowly and you didn’t think much about what came next.

Once a month, Boy’s Life (now Scout Life as BSA is now Scouts America) would arrive from the Boy Scouts, and I’d flip through those pages looking at places that didn’t look like home: the mountain west, desert landscapes, and canyons and peaks that seemed like they belonged to a different world entirely. I loved where I was from, but something in those photos deeply called to me. That tug remained all through my childhood, but I’d not been able to place it or where to take it.

I’d thought I was going to live in Boise, Idaho and work for a major chip manufacturer there. After that fateful rejection letter, I’d realized that door was closed. When that first job offer came through after school it was California. I hesitated. We’d been on a family vacation out that way but things were “different” there. I wasn’t sure about so many things. However, it was the right move for a job in tech for which I’d spent 5 years studying for. I packed everything I owned and drove west, unsure of what was next.

I recently came upon this song by Luke Combs “Where the Wild Things Are” and that season in life came back into focus again.

I was out where the wild things were. The safety of the east coast was in the rear view mirror. Now today, that song has kicked off many a motorcycle ride out into the adventure.

Freedom Measured in Miles

California gave me something I didn’t know I needed: geography that rewards exploration. I remember an early fall ride up Highway 88 toward Carson Pass. I was young, just a few years into living in California, still figuring out what real mountains were. I was learning about how expensive heated gear really was on a shoestring budget and whether I actually needed it. (I did). The aspens were peaking and this was the adventure I wanted to see: bright yellow dotting the mountainside above 7,000 feet. I was rewarded. Every turn felt like a postcard I’d stared at in those Boy’s Life magazines, except now I was actually riding through it.

I was new to motorcycling—newer than I probably should have been for a trip to Seattle—when my clutch started leaking fluid somewhere near Quincy back in 2005. I rolled into Sierra Cycle not knowing the scope of the problem, what parts were involved, or how to fix it. Andy, the technician there, took the time to understand what was wrong, assessed the severity, and figured out a solution. They weren’t even a Suzuki dealer, but he was confident I could make it to Grant’s Pass for a new clutch slave cylinder. I learned alongside good people like that and became stronger in my riding craft. That’s part of what California gave me—not just adventures, but a community willing to teach and grow others. I try to do the same by advocating for tech days in my communities.

Then there’s the Avenue of the Giants—ancient redwoods so tall the light filters down in shafts through the fog. I live for those late afternoon moments. The late afternoon when the sun’s rays were long and the fog was creeping in. The afternoon light cuts through the canopy, with knifelike rays of sunshine hitting the road below.

Finally, I fell hard for Lake Tahoe. There’s one stretch of Highway 89 heading north up to Emerald Bay that I think is the most beautiful snippet of asphalt in California. The road extends across a narrow ridge between Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay on the right and Fallen Leaf Lake on the left, and the land just disappears underneath you. It was featured in City of Angels, I saw that movie in college and made a mental note to find that place. Turns out it’s been right here all along under my nose.

But it’s the desert that yet again showed me something different. I feel in love with the gestalt nature of the desert —the way distance, heat, and emptiness combine into something that makes you feel small and awake at the same time. I’ve done the Queer Invasion of Death Valley a number of times over the years, and every year the desert reminds me why I keep coming back. It’s not pretty in the traditional sense. It’s stark, honest, and wild.

I’ve put over 200,000 miles on motorcycles since moving here, most of which have been on two motorcycles. The bright yellow V-Strom carried me through 120,000 of those, teaching me to trust completely, to read weather, to find joy in the journey itself. The GS has taken me another 36,000. What keeps me riding isn’t any single road—it’s the variety. Aspens in fall. Redwoods in fog. Desert in winter. Tahoe at sunset. The geography here doesn’t let you get bored, and I’m grateful for that. Riders from other places home here leave exhaused and full. I’m blessed I get to live here.

Building the Future

There’s a long journey from staring at a black and green monochromatic screen on Christmas morning in the early eighties to where I am now, working with AI and watching intelligence itself become programmable. I came to California in the early 2000s chasing the creative web, shifting to building mobile devices when most people thought screens that small would never work. Soon after, the industry moved to apps and social platforms, and now it’s cloud infrastructure at scale driving the scale of AI. Each wave felt impossible until it wasn’t.

What California offers isn’t just proximity to innovation—it’s immersion in it. I had the privilege to explore different things across different domains, surrounded by people solving problems that don’t have names yet. There was a night early in my career—2:47 AM, I remember checking the clock—when something finally clicked on a project I’d been stuck on for weeks. I’d finally completed PHP support in Dreamweaver MX. I kept working until sunrise, testing and retesting, making sure it wasn’t just exhaustion playing tricks. It held. (The diet coke consumption that week was… inadvisable.) The engineering manager and product owner didn’t laugh me out to pasture. It’s the one coding project of my professional career that actually shipped!

The pace never slows down here, and I’ve learned to see that as a feature, not a bug. Being surrounded by people who refuse to accept that something can’t be done—that changes you. It makes you believe that better is always possible, and that waiting for someone else to build it is just wasted time.

Not Waiting for Permission

Furthermore, I’ve been Type 1 diabetic since just after college. I remember being newly diagnosed and bummed that I might not be able to ride a motorcycle—something I’d waited so long to be able to do with a very emphatic NO! from my parents. The day I was diagnosed I remember asking the hospital staff if I’d be able to ride a motorcycle as a diabetic. I was so close to my own bike, I could taste it. She joked, “you do know the head of the Endocrinology unit runs a large motorcycle charity ride in town.” That changed everything. Diabetes wasn’t going to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. We now see that stress in the rear view mirror having ridden multiple bikes across many thousands of miles.

I spent fifteen years as a camp counselor, teaching kids how to manage the condition, how to count carbs and calculate insulin doses and live full lives despite something that never takes a day off. I shared my own journey with those in my cabin—showed them that limitations are often just challenges waiting for better solutions. Those camp years built more than just medical knowledge. They built a foundation of believing that better is always possible.

More recently here, I found people who weren’t just managing diabetes—they were thriving by rebuilding the tools from the ground up. They created open-source pancreas. Think about that. You download a replacement organ from the internet in a zip file. That’s next level stuff. This internet pancreas facilitates a closed-loop (like a normal pancreas) that automated thousands of manual calculations. It was a platform of algorithms you could modify yourself rather than waiting for a manufacturer to catch up. I jumped in and became part of a community building solutions that are genuinely five to ten years ahead of anything commercially available. We share code on GitHub, troubleshoot in Discord channels, test on ourselves. (The FDA probably has opinions about this, but we’re not waiting for them to catch up.)

That’s what I keep finding in California—this refusal to wait for permission, this willingness to build what should exist rather than accepting what’s available. It shows up in medicine, in tech, in the way people approach problems that everyone else says are impossible. And for someone who’s spent a lifetime managing a chronic condition, being part of that community matters more than I can easily explain.

Influence at Scale

California politics is overwhelming by design. Every election, the ballot arrives thick with propositions—direct votes on niche policy, not just sending representatives who’ll decide for you. Infrastructure projects. Legal reforms. Industry regulations. The first time I saw one of these voter guides, I thought there’d been a mistake: 90+ pages! I spent an entire weekend reading through arguments for and against each measure, cross-referencing sources, trying to make informed decisions.

Now I host a Beer and Ballots party every election cycle. I specifically invite people from across my community—different backgrounds, different perspectives—and we deep dive into the ballot together. Each person researches a proposition, presents the arguments pro and con, and we talk through what it actually means. It can be exhausting, but it’s also exactly what democracy at this scale requires. You can’t phone being an informed voter in.

California’s economy rivals entire countries (we’re the 4th largest as of this writing), and what gets decided here ripples outward. Other states watch. Other countries watch. My individual voice might feel small in that equation, but I’m part of something larger. Democracy of our republic at this scale is messy and complicated, and yet I get to participate in it. I get to help shape a small part of what comes next, even when I’m not entirely sure where it’s headed. That’s both a responsibility and a privilege, and like everything else out here, it’s about refusing to wait for someone else to make the decisions.

From Now to Next

I think about the adventures in those old Boy’s Life magazines every once in a while. Every now and then I think about that kid on the East Coast, flipping through pages of mountains he’d never seen, wondering what it would be like to live somewhere that felt truly wild.

He found it In roads that reveal something new every season. He found it in technology that keeps pushing into new territory without maps. He found it in medicine that hits home and refuses to accept limitations. He found it in democracy that demands active participation. The story’s still being written—I’m still riding, still building, still chasing what comes next.

There’s something about the spirit of pointing your headlight west and just going. James Dean did it in the fifties, as Luke Combs sings about—that restless energy, that refusal to be tamed, that need to find out what’s out there beyond the familiar. Not reckless, just unwilling to settle. That’s what drew me west, and it’s what keeps me here.

Out here, where the wild things are, is exactly where I’m supposed to be.

I recently came across a performance that captured all of this better than I could write it. Jalen Johnson on The Voice, singing this same song—his version is slow, deep, thoughtful, and intentional. You can tell he’s singing his heart out, that he found where his wild things were in that moment on that stage. I’d dare say his version is better than the original. There’s something about hearing someone pour everything they have into finding their own voice that resonates.

That kid with the Boy’s Life magazines? He’s planning the next adventure!