RECORD

The summer of 1995 marks the beginning of working life. Just out of college,
the first job was at Syzygy Electronics, buying and selling memory chips over
the phone in a pre-internet world. It was transactional, fast, improvisational,
and strangely foundational. The work demanded language, quickness, nerve, and
attention to how people behave when money and urgency are involved.

It was also the summer Jerry Garcia died, which somehow belongs in the file.
Not because it altered the career trajectory in any obvious way, but because
certain cultural moments fuse themselves to personal thresholds. A working life
began at the exact moment some older cultural dream seemed to close.

The years that followed involved movement through publishing, writing-adjacent
professional roles, and a growing ability to shape technical and conceptual material
for real audiences. There was already a pattern developing: take complexity, make it
readable; take structure, make it usable; take somebody else’s difficult material
and give it form.

This was also the era in which adulthood stopped being theoretical. Work became a
real structure. Professional identity began to accumulate. A sensibility formed around
being both inside the room and slightly apart from it: close enough to understand the
system, distant enough to describe it clearly.

LINES

NOTE

This period matters because it establishes the practical discipline underneath
everything that came later. Long before books, courses, or consulting had their
current names, there was already a person learning how to translate complexity
into something another person could use.