Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, poet and writer Kahlil Gibran, in his book of prose poetry fables The Prophet, describes a child as a living arrow being sent forth by God (the archer) and the child's parents (the bow). My own trajectory through life has for the most part been an unmentored and solitary existence filled with awkward contortionism, disgraceful tumbling and death defying splintering from the start. To have survived and continued notching personal progress somehow through 40 years of traumatic experience is astonishing and I believe that everything has happened for a reason. The countless trials, successes and failures of my journey to this point have all had their purposes and have afforded me a rich and tender perception of life and the world around us. As Gibran expresses so beautifully in his poem On Joy and Sorrow, "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

There are seasons of outreach and retreat in every person's life as we attempt to appease both our desire for happiness and our need of self-preservation. The world around us has by and large shifted dramatically towards fear, defensiveness, cynicism and a casual punitive destructiveness that greatly suppresses imagination, creativity, self-expression, friendship and romance, and progressive human understanding. Many people have exploited this overwhelming collective pessimism to unfairly persecute, defame, intimidate and control those of us who they disagree with and wish to suffer, or who they wish to take from unjustly for their own selfish gains. So many people have lost themselves in the misguided and ineffectual scheme to bypass life's required individual taxation and processes by trying shamelessly to drag other people down in the absence of their own ability and/or willingness to lift themselves up.

Currently I am entrapped at the cold, loveless and abysmal center of mankind's easy abandonment of human values and individual concern, and almost every good thing that I have to offer is being manipulated and used against me. After several years of superhuman effort to resurrect my life and somehow escape the manmade and legally deputized hell on earth that has entirely besieged me, I have no other choice but to accept that not all of us are going to be friends. As naive and cliché as that may sound, I am genuinely shaken and crushed by the total disregard for human decency and personal accountability by everyone on the opposing side of my epic loss and suffering. It is so surreal to realize without plausible recourse that none of the countless people who have condemned, tortured and forsaken me possess the minimum applicable character and/or life experience needed to value human life. They have objectified me to the extent that I am now more a thing to be freely used and abused by the world than a sensitive human being with God given entitlement to safety, privacy, freedom and equal opportunity.

In September of 2012, I set out to find redemption through meaningful self-expression and the creation of web design projects to help make the world a better place. From then until now I have always understood that I would only be able to get so far without a ton of help from other people. My greatest fear has always been that I would completely exhaust myself without additional support. Well, the plane has crashed into the side of the mountain and there are no survivors. I haven't been able to establish any new relationships and none of my old friends ever came back either. What can I say? Hey, it's not so bad, right. Sliding face first in the dirt for the whole world to see is a great honor in some cultures. Take the Ancient Romans for instance. Being eaten by a tiger provided memorable entertainment for the whole family. Seriously though, after such an intense and lengthy sacrifice without external cooperation, I was on the brink of going negative and I refuse to blow up this bridge after all the hard work I've put into it. I have decided instead that this will be the final update to the site. I'll keep everything online for posterity.

The Battle of Ia Drang

On November 15, 1965, at the Battle of Ia Drang during the Vietnam War, American Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, declared code phrase, "Broken Arrow," in request of all available aircraft to support his position while he and his troops were in imminent danger of being overrun by the North Vietnamese.