Though I served as an officer with the USMC, the above graphic is
about as far as I am going to go in discussing my career therein.

That's a picture of me at the office, that's my rack and
those are my qualification badges and rank insignia.

 

The short synopsis
- also known as  -
The "A/S/L+" Version

 

For those interested, the last time I checked, I was male, married, living in Grapevine, Texas and my life spanned the better part of  cesium-133 radiation cycles1 but I could well be wrong on any and all counts.

My interests include:

the practice of Japanese Sword Arts ...
the Russian Imperial School of Fencing ...
the practice of Medieval and Renaissance martial disciplines (swordsmanship, weaponsplay, archery, etc)...
the practice of modern tactical disciplines (firearms, tactical and strategic analysis and implementation, defensive and offensive driving, etc.)...
military history ...
the study of physics and mathematics ...
my native religious traditions...
the study of world religions and mysticism ...
plotting the overthrow of King Francis of France (the swine) whose cultural extravagances have brought economic ruin to the country ...
practicing my kissing skills on innocent and unsuspecting dust-bunnies ...
chasing the cats about the house screaming "hoody-doo! hoody-doo!" repeatedly ...
competitive belly-button-lint taste-testing ...
fornication with underage woodland creatures dressed in a variety of selections from the "Frederick's of Hollywood" catalog ..
  ... and ...
the seamless integration of computer and network equipment with my own flesh.

For me, insanity and utter disaster lounge restfully on the highway, a mere fraction of a nanometer in front of my "speeding-race-car" of a lifestyle. During my free time, I enjoy exhaling the skeletons of my past and dreaming up new ways to weave cobwebs in the corners of my eyes.

 

Aside from the ASL+ version, there's a lot to tell and no coherent way to organize it all outside of an autobiography. Like anyone else's life, all the pieces and parts are interrelated and can not be isolated and examined accurately without an understanding of all the other parts. It's just too confusing. However, in an effort to offer at least something, I leave you the following:

I was born in Navat Tsibir in Irkutsk, Russia which is about 230 or so kilometers west northwest of the northern tip of Lake Baikal and spent most of my childhood either avoiding or fighting the Soviet authorities who considered me and my family Kulaks and враг народа (enemies of the people).

I lived in Japan for five years of my early childhood where I was first exposed to Ko-Shoda Shinkage Ryu which I took to learning seriously and continue to study and practice today.

When I returned to Russia at ten years old, my grandfather took me to Ulyanovsk to the Ульяновская Академия Ограждения (the Ulyanovsk Academy of Fencing) where I met Grigory Illievich Vasiley who started teaching me fencing in the Russian Imperial school, which I also still practice.

Later that year, I was "detained" (read: arrested) for being in possession of improper documentation. A legitimate enough charge, I suppose, considering that as a Kulak I was not allowed to have travel permits. I was sent to a juvenile "re-educational" camp run by the Комсомол (the Komsomol, an acronym for Коммунисти́ческий сою́з молодёжи, the Communist Union of Youth) where I spent two years felling timber for the Байкало-Амурская Магистраль (the Baikalo-Amurskaya Mainline) which is essentially a Northern parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Just under two years later, at the age of thirteen, I escaped and rejoined my family and we kept hiding and fighting and a year later I came to America and spent the next few years travelling back and forth between there and to various family friends in Europe (England, Germany, Italy).

When I was fifteen, I lied about my age (using my older, deceased brothers credentials) and started working for a security company first doing high-threat, low-profile security work domestically and then doing contract paramilitary work both domestically and internationally and found out that I was pretty good at it.

 A few years later, I used my contacts and experience here to enter OCS with the USMC under a seldom utilized section of the Officer's Exchange Program, graduated and entered service as a First Lieutenant, assigned to 1st Force Reconnaissance Company as Force Recon Platoon Leader.

While with the USMC, I saw action in Southern Africa, Colombia, Southeast Asia, Panama, the Israel/Egypt border with the MFO and finally in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq before and during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Wounds received in the HAJ forced me to take a medical retirement after a year of rehabilitation and recovery and since then, I have tried to avoid jobs where I have to catch bullets for a living.

Since then, I took up computer work for a living (had my own consulting company for a few years in Morristown, NJ) and resumed my studies into religion and philosophy I had started at my grandfather's knee when I was a child.

I've worked at construction, framing, sheetrocking and I've worked security at nightclubs and bars. I've done retail management and I've done computer consultation and sales. I've worked at events promotion and marketing and warehouse and logistics management.

Today, I am married to a beautiful young artist by the name of Anastasia Smith, whom I love and adore. Though I'm not an easy person to live with and though I'm not perfect, for some reason, she sees fit to share her life with me and I count myself lucky for it. She's been a wonderful source of comfort and joy in my life and I honestly look forward to growing old in her company.

Although we have no children and have no immediate plans to start a family, we do live with a small herd that we tend to think of as our kids.

Short of actually writing a full-out autobiography, this will have to do for an "About Me" page. It is quite limited and necessitatively somewhat inaccurate but hey ... it's what you've got to work with.

     

 

1 - re: cesium-133 cycles: atomic clocks work essentially by counting the radiation cycles of cesium-133 as it transitions between the energy levels of it's two hyperfine ground states. Since the 1960's, the International Standard of Units defined a second as the duration of time necessary for 9,192,631,770 of these radiation cycles to complete themselves in the absence of external influences - an extremely, precisely consistent interval. Clocks based on measurements of this transition are reliable to within their own margins of observational error.

To date, commonly accepted scientific wisdom has it that the the acceptable inaccuracy of these clocks for the purposes of common, daily time-keeping holds them to within a margin of error equal to a loss or gain of no more than .00000001 seconds per day which essentially means that if the clock dropped or gained a second after 344 years of continuous use it would be considered unacceptably inaccurate and require adjustment. Keep in mind that this is the standard for common, daily time-keeping - that's time keeping for you and me. Timekeeping so that we're not late for work or so we don't miss the latest episode of whatever reality show is being excreted from the networks these days. My wife thinks I'm anal retentive. She's never met an atomic clock designer. And by the way ... who'd really notice if the guy maintaining accuracy were to suddenly decide to get lazy for say .... the span of his lifetime?

In case I haven't bored you enough, cesium-133 radiation cycles is also roughly equivalent to:

  nanoseconds, or ...
  seconds, or ...
  minutes, or ...
  hours, or ...
  days, or ...
 roughly  years.

Now, yes, I did the simple calculations here. While the inaccuracy just gnaws and chews at something deep inside me, my wife tells me that this is more than accurate for an internet audience looking at my personal website. I disagree, but I love my wife, so I listen to her.

And after this far-too-long footnote, you now know three new things about me. First, I'm years old years old. Second, I'm married, and third, I am boring as hell when you let me ramble about any scientific field I find interesting. So, the big question is, why in the hell did you let me go on like that?