Southern California born. Six years in the Navy. Forty-plus years of figuring out what comes next. Still working on it — which turns out to make for better stories than having it all resolved. The rest takes a little longer to explain.
I started working at 17. Not out of ambition — out of the usual combination of needing money and not having a better plan. Six years later I was in the US Navy as a Nuclear Electrician's Mate, which is a long way of saying the military taught me that complex systems have consequences when you get them wrong. That lesson has stuck harder than most things I've learned since.
After the Navy came a stint doing risk analysis and facility inspections for an insurance company — walking through industrial operations and writing up what could go wrong. Then Southern California Edison, where I spent twenty-one years. The last stretch of that was managing the Records Management System for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is exactly as regulated and exacting as it sounds. You do not get to be approximate about record-keeping at a nuclear plant.
From there: a run managing sales and operations for a software company building workflow tools for SAP, then four years as Records Manager at Entertainment Partners in the entertainment industry — a $5 million budget, a team of five, and the particular challenge of getting a creative industry to care about document governance. After that, independent consulting, mostly through RGP, across utilities, insurance, real estate construction, and food services. The industries change. The work is always some version of the same thing: get the project done, get the information organized, get the organization doing things the right way rather than the way they've always done them.
"Twenty-plus years of watching organizations resist doing things right, and then pretending they hadn't. It's more interesting than it sounds. Occasionally."
Along the way: a BS in Computer Science from National University in 2004, finished while working full time because that was the only way to fit it in. Certifications in Enterprise Content Management and Information Professional practice. The through line across all of it isn't the industry — it's that complex systems matter and details have consequences.
In 2018 I had a bilateral pulmonary embolism — blood clots in both lungs. I'm fine. I was lucky, and I know I was lucky, and I think about that with some regularity. The short version is that I sat on symptoms for two days that I shouldn't have sat on, ended up in an ER at 3:30 in the morning, spent four days in a hospital bed, and came out of it on blood thinners with a different relationship to the concept of "later."
I'd run a previous version of this site before the PE. Shut it down. Kept the domain, because I held onto some vague idea that I'd do something with it eventually. After the hospital, "eventually" stopped being a comfortable concept. So I reopened it — not as a health blog, not as a comeback narrative, just as a place to write honestly about things I actually think about.
The name — Gnarly Old Guy — I'd had for years. It has edge without being precious about it. It's self-aware without being self-deprecating to the point of uselessness. It stays.
Travel, because I've been to nine countries and the most interesting parts of every trip were the parts that didn't go according to plan. Health, because I'm now someone with a medical history, and pretending otherwise seems like a waste of the experience. Whiskey, because I have opinions about it and opinions without somewhere to put them are just noise. Technology, because I've watched the industry move for twenty years and I have thoughts about where it's going and why most of those thoughts involve skepticism. Photography, because I shoot film in a world that moved on, and I find the inconvenience productive.
Lifestyle is the catchall. I don't love the word but I haven't found a better one for the things that don't fit the other five categories. Based in Reno, Nevada — which is not what most people picture when they hear "Reno" — and still figuring out what's next. That turns out to make for better writing than having everything resolved.
I don't have an agenda. I'm not trying to teach you anything or sell you anything or build a personal brand. I write the way I'd talk to someone I respect over a drink — which means I'll tell you the unflattering parts, I'll be specific about the details that matter, and I'll stop when I've said what needed saying rather than padding it out to hit some word count.
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"Three hours ago I was fine. Or I thought I was. You tell yourself things. You're good at it by the time you're my age."
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