Steemians ahoy! ~ My story so far ~ The life of an artist, sailor, writer, herbalist, and crypto explorer.

My name is Brandon Lovejoy. Depending on the moment, the quality of light, the terrain, and the company, I might be a good many things to a good many people. I'll let you decide for yourself... Here's a rough sketch, some of the notes and angles on a life so far.

but first...

Thank you founders and citizens of Steem!

I've been enjoying so much of what I see here! A heartfelt thankyou to all who have contributed their time, and who have committed their visions to the steadfast unfolding of a printing press that never sleeps. A transnational commons capable of as of yet unknown creations. What a journey it has taken to bring us to this point in history!

After some 15+ years of relative seclusion from the written word and visual arts, I am once again approaching that elusive spark, which breathes life into our stories, and which moves the artist's brush or guides the aperture of perception. It never really left, I just needed some time to sort out my overly complex misgivings about language, and expression in general.

Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story. -Don Miguel Ruiz

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Now, by the mere fact of its existence, Steem is inspiring me to take another important step on my journey.

A true wonder of our age, Steem provides a unique and immutable foundation upon which to weave a living record of ones perceptions, dreams, dilemmas, and adventures. This to my mind represents the first efforts at a truly enduring cultural heritage of stories.

Steem is a 'Library of Alexandria' which cannot be so easily burned, and we are the authors and custodians of such a library.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human. -Don Miguel Ruiz

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Learning to be human

The son of an aviator, inventor, engineer dad, and a self-reliant, storytelling, emergency-room-nurse mom; I grew up on the shores of the Mississippi river, where the ancient sand and limestone bluffs climb from massive river valley to the rolling farmlands of Southern Minnesota.

These 'rolling farmlands', i.e. monocultural deserts of corn and soy blanketing the land, were a constant presence which permeated everything, yet here and there were tangled patches of wild.

Like the frog in the well, growing up in this world seemed like an inevitable quality of life, the whole world was that well, as it must be with people in every culture. One early glimmer of beyond the veil of the cultural mask began with a ubiquitous little plant, i'm sure almost everyone is familiar with: the dandelion.

I must have been nine years of age, when I first began pondering the strange obsession all the adults seemed to have with exterminating the dandelion. Sure, the dandelions were everywhere, in every lawn and field, but i didn't mind; I rather liked them, they were tenacious, bright, and fun to watch the seeds parachute on the breeze.

My curiosity was stirred, and I started reading about the plant. I discovered that not only was every part of it completely edible and bursting with nutrition, but it was also one of the most revered liver restoratives known to humankind. I was seriously puzzled.

Since clearly the grown ups had their priorities all messed up, I realized that all was not what it seemed. A deep cultural mistrust took root, and so began what has become a lifelong study of plant medicine, as well as traditional, and alternative ways of living. Respect to the rebel dandelion!

Discovering My Voice

In my early years, along with time spent exploring nature, and riding my bike, I would play around with the camcorder, making the early VHS home movies all but lost to time, as well as audio recordings on an old reel to reel tape recorder. In high school I discovered photography, and resurrected my dad's old Super 8 camera. Film, photography, drawing, painting, theater, and football (Soccer) were the major themes for me at that age.

Right around this time was also the birth of the internet, as we know it. It was 1994 and I was playing around on the first Netscape web browser, on Sun Microsystem work stations at the University of Minnesota, where my friends went for computer science. This is when I started playing around with html, and building basic web pages. At that time we were also experimenting with MOO's and MUD's, exciting stuff. ;)

My first computer was an Amiga 2000... Sadly Amiga didn't make it, but I learned a great deal from exposure to that sweet machine.

I had grown up rocking a 1200 baud modem mind you, and dialing up to early BBS servers and tying up our only phone line for hours, so this was all indistinguishable from magic.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

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After high-school, I dove into radio and television broadcasting as a sort of compromise between what I perceived to be real world practicality and my own artistic dreams and desires... but the industry may as well have been the same monocultural cornfield I was raised in. I never ended up working in radio, but I had two years of training which would serve me well further on down the road.

At this same time, good friends, and new plant allies, were beginning to illuminate for me the the unseen worlds which lurk just beneath perception. I was voraciously reading the likes of Terrence McKenna and others who shared his amazement at the course of human history, and the glaring mysteries right outside our cultural blinders. The dandelion was just a precursor, the rabbit hole was getting deeper and deeper.

After college I worked in the cafe and co-op grocery world for a while, but winter was once again threatening to bring a big chill to Minnesota, and I felt the need to practice that age old tradition of heading South for the winter. What followed was a journey which would take me and my best friend Pedro, hitchhiking across the country, through Mexico, and into Guatemala. On that journey I learned a lot about myself, but more and more questions were raised.

Learning Spanish, hopping freight trains, getting derailed in vast canyon lands, evading bandits and Federales. A whole book could be written about those five months on the road, and perhaps I'll expand on that at a later time, there are a few gems there for sure.

After five months, the road had made me restless. With no foundation to stand upon in constant nomadic pursuit, I came back with a thirst for creative pursuits, and was increasingly fascinated by politics and environmental studies.

Antigua, Guatemala

Into Academia

I applied and was accepted at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs Ohio. It was a radical school with no grades and a student run government which was in charge of hiring and tenure of faculty. A crazy experiment! It was there I started to get serious about film production, and political science. Antioch is a strange place. Alumni include Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone, the inventor of Teflon, and the Bassist for the band They Might Be Giants, just to give you an idea. Antioch's pitch was that they were the college for those who wanted to change the world, and it was fertile ground for every conceivable form of exploration.

However, after a year of school, I was over $20k in debt.

While I appreciated all the wonderful people I'd met, and the opportunities for further study, I distilled my feelings on the whole debt for college trade, and wrote a paper called, "And drop out" riffing on Timothy Leary's famous suggestion to "Tune in, turn on, and drop out."

I had determined that for all it's virtues, the university system was simply producing a mass of indebted dreamers who would be slaves to their debt, thus kept in check and unable by and large to fulfill their dreams and effectively barred from bringing about real change.

I was helped in this realization by inverting the word university, to discover it's hidden message. "YTISREVINU" It is revenue.

A year at Antioch College is like 2 years somewhere else... It's a fast moving scene, like crypto. But I didn't want to be further in debt with a head full of ideas and a liberal arts degree, so I decided it was time to move on.

Chasing the Sun

As usual, Minneapolis was my stopover. I saved up a couple thousand dollars from working at random jobs with a few months back home. In those days my mainstay was always barista at whatever cafe in whatever city, slinging random coffee drinks to the masses.

So instead of going into debt to learn a craft, I would do it work-study style, and come up through the industry. I headed out Los Angeles, where a high school friend of mine was working in the film industry, and decided to break in to that mythical world right along with him.

"On the set of the 'Interstate-5' A feature length psychedelic road trip film that was never released!"

As with Antioch, I spent an intense year in the film industry, working my way up from Production Assistant, to Boom Operator, Sound Recordist, eventually defecting to the camera department, where I worked as 3rd or 2nd Assistant Camera on a whole slew of independent features, shorts, music videos, and student films. However, within a year I had wearied of Los Angeles, it's frenetic pace, and the fake oasis in a desert vibe.

I really loved the people I met in the film industry, and was finally getting comfortable after a year of relative poverty, but for better or worse I've never been one to let comfort get in the way of the next adventure and so I set off again, leaving behind a promising career in the film industry. I headed back to Minnesota, with no plans, just a hunch.

Forever Winding Roads

After a brief stint in Minnesota, I left on another trip, to spend Y2K in the Copper Canyon of Northern Mexico. Some friends of mine and I were hoping to watch the satellites fall out of the sky from a peaceful spot in Divisidero, a high plateau which overlooks a sprawling canyon five times larger than the Grand Canyon in the USA. That didn't happen, the satellites falling that is, and was kind of a disappointment but oh well, empire marches on. After New Years, I parted ways with my crew, and trekked solo, hitchhiking up Baja, and back into the US, where I was to meet up with friends in LA, in Venice Beach. It was much much better for me to be visiting LA than living there!

My plan at that point was to head north to Port Townsend, WA, and attend the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, but fortune had other plans. Due to a series of synchronistic invitations from friends, I was lured ever Eastward. First to Salt Lake City, then Denver, then through to Ohio and a visit to Antioch College to see about a dear friend in need.

From Ohio, it was an intriguing woman that inspired further Eastward movement, there has to be at least one such woman in every good story. She was in Philly at the time, I thought "well I'll not be this close to the East Coast again for a while, so..." So I set out for the city of Philadelphia. Cue the next crazy hitchhiking journey.

Philadelphia - Anarchist Paradise

I arrived in Philadelphia, having never been there before. All I knew was that I had a place to stay where this woman was living, at her "friend's house". Her friend's house however, turned out to be a 'squat' in West Philly, and she was out of town for the weekend. Nevertheless, with the name of a friend I was welcomed into this reclaimed West Philly row house of 6, now 7 residents.

I fell in love with Philly... and everyone in that house of artist miscreants were top notch human beings. I dove deep into Anarchist philosophy, community gardening, organizing, cafe job, the whole works. I was kind of odd man out.. you can tell by this photo below. I'm the guy with a Hawaiian shirt in the land of crusty punk black tank-tops, Carhartts and patches.

In 2000 We 'welcomed' the Republican National Convention when the future head of homeland security still ran the police force of Philly... crazy times. My radio broadcasting skills helped me greatly when we launched an Indymedia center in downtown Philly and broadcast events around the convention, 24-7 with live interviews and news from the streets, for a couple days.

We 'greeted' the bankers in DC when the IMF / World Bank Protests were called. It was wild times, things were really heating up. It seemed like the whole country was erupting in protest. I feel like today the wave of protests from the Battle in Seattle to the Miami protests are all but forgotten. They were huge.

But after all the excitement died down and after the Miami FTAA protests where all my friends were brutalized and disappeared. After my own risk assessment from perilous encounters with authority... I cooled my heels and began thinking about my next move. I was comfortable in Philly. I had moved out of the squat, the girl was long gone, and I was renting the whole upstairs of a house from wonderful friends. There was live music and DIY enterprises everywhere. But I didn't really know what I was doing there at the end of the day... just working at a coffee shop, hanging out with friends, and still on the hook for college loans.

It was time to do something drastic.

Out To Sea

I heard mention of 'the merchant marines' from various people over the span of a couple weeks, and then as fortune would have it, I met a guy who had worked on merchant ships for a few years, and he gave me the scoop. His name was Julian, and he recommended a particular school in Maryland, where he'd gone. He said, "The school is Hell, but if you can survive it, then shipping is good!" I figured why not, I'd give it a whirl, it was time for a change and I have always loved the ocean.

Surprising all the crusty anarcho kids in Philly, I cut off my hair, and headed off to this weird ass quasi-military maritime training facility in Piney Point Maryland: The Seafarers Harry Lundberg School of Seamanship. Here I would begin my journey to 'Able Bodied Seaman', the highest deck qualification short of being a mate.

After three months on land in a sort of seafarer's 'lord of the flies' scenario, (it really was a kind of hell) I was ready for my first ship. However, a condition of my training at the school was that I would be obliged to take the first two ships they placed me on, no questions asked.

So of course, by some strange karmic twist, the first two ships I worked on were US Military pre-positioning ships. The floating arsenals which loom on the horizon just waiting for the call to deploy their hardware in service to one form of foreign intervention or another.

One day I was hanging with my anarchist buddies in Philly, and the next day I was babysitting enough hardware to destroy a small country in the Middle East. Sometimes life has a real fucked up sense of humor.

I had the unfortunate duty of being stationed in Diego Garcia, when 'Operation Enduring Freedom' commenced the bombing of Afghanistan from that same island.

At least it was beautiful, in the few precious moments on shore, where I could sequester myself away from the war machine.

Diego Garcia beach

A Crisis

My health didn't fare well in this scenario.

Every morning at 5am it was my job to get up and climb through every single cargo hold on every deck of a ship the size of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, all by myself, and take the temperature and humidity which I would log in a book.

I was babysitting an arsenal of mass destruction. This meant climbing over and between huge stacks of bombs, ammunition, over legions of tanks, and god knows what. This was my every morning meditation, followed by deck maintenance and random drills at sea.

I started to get weak, and my digestion suffered... I lost my appetite and the ship's food seemed like useless matter. My body was rebelling... It was like a system shutdown, silent protest.

After 5 months on this particular ship, my relief finally came, and I flew hope to the States from the Indian Ocean. (After one well deserved week long layover in Amsterdam) I was hopelessly depleted and out of balance from the whole experience, but didn't even realize how bad off I was.

West Coast Part II - The City by the Bay

So I landed back in the States, thoroughly worn out from my previous ship experience. I decided to say farewell to Philly, and headed back in Minnesota once again. In a couple months, I had my sights set on San Francisco.

The shipping union out West was legit, plus I had visited SF on that psychedelic road trip film, and found it highly intriguing. Yes, yes, of course there was a remarkable woman waiting in San Francisco... (but it's never really worked out that way)

I hopped on my 1972 Honda CB 500, and set off to California, it was to be a new chapter!

The ride itself was quite an amazing journey, one I will never forget.

Landing in SF

In San Francisco I quickly got up to speed with The Sailor's Union of the Pacific. They were the real deal. Between them and the Inland Boatman's Union, I had plenty of work on the ocean, and the bay.

However, after a few more stints out at sea and some work on inland waters, I was feeling pretty worn out on ship life and not even fully recovered from my Indian Ocean experience.

About this time, I moved into the spare-room of a house in the mission where there were seven of us including me, the guest. A friend of a friend had pulled me in, and in time, my temporary housing slowly became a permanent thing.

The house was swirling with Burning Man goers (burners), circus performers, psychotherapists, strippers, nomadic neo-beatnik poets, psychedelic sophists, tea masters, situationists, Ayurvedic scholars, yogis, activists, and every cast of character you could imagine.

Amidst this carnivalesque world, in some moment of clarity I resolved to return to my roots in the healing arts, having been casually studying plant medicine my whole life. Furthermore, I decided it was over between me and the shipping industry. It paid well, but it was extracting a toll on my life, and my health. When you look at the old timers on the ships out there you see a glimpse into a future that you may not wish to be a part of.

Healers and Mentors

Immediately after that decision, a whole host of healers and mentors flocked into my life. A dear friend paid for me to see a Chinese Medicine practitioner known as Master Wang Ming Yi, from Yunnan China... And from here is where a deep reverence of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and tea, was born.

My new friend, Prashanti, an Ayurvedic scholar and practitioner, also was instrumental at this time, fixing me up with sound advice and Ayurvedic herbs and formulas such as Tulsi, and triphala.

After a couple weeks of receiving 'cupping', from Master Wang, while working with various herbs, plus drinking pure hot water every morning very early, I took the deepest breath of my life. I felt completely re-energized, my digestion returned to excellent, my sleep was sound, all was right with the world. It was nothing short of a miracle.

My body had been dying. I know that sounds dramatic, and that we are all dying all the time in a way. Most of the time you just can't understand how out of balance you are until you recover. We seem to get used to disease, over time, in subtle ways, until it overtakes us. It's like the boiling frog.

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What happened over the next few years will be the source for several rich pieces of writing.

In this newfound balance and vitality came all manner of opportunity, and tragedy... this was the beginning of my thirties. The Bay Area in all vectors both tangible and energetic was in full force. For a moment in time there came together a stellar group of friends, an inflection point was reached, and when the time came our energies scattered far and wide, to cross pollinate the future.

One friend was left behind, though we all carry him in our hearts, and undoubtedly he is pioneering new realms, of strength, surrender, and liberation. All beings aligned with love and healing watch over our dear friend, whom I shall speak of at another time.

Let it suffice to say: the sailing was grand, the medicines were strong, the West was wild...
It's been a decade since, the waves are stirring once again.

Homeward Bound... Again

In the tail end of that wild west journey, I headed back home once again to Minnesota.

Returning to Minnesota was a strange, and at times awkward transition to a life on land... The midwest once again. I've missed the waters, even while being in 'the land of 10,000 lakes', I haven't kept up with my sailing.

In the Bay Area I had been thoroughly inoculated with tea culture, and plant medicine in general, now that I was back in the land of my birth I wanted to share.

For the last nine years I've been exploring all sorts of vocations. I've been the general manager at a tea house which I helped open, I've worked wholesale tea, gardening, landscaping, sales, gongfu tea service, event management, and more, I've dabbled with starting my own venture a time or two.

I'd long been wanting to fuse my various passions together, so dreams of being a sailing, filmmaking, craftsman, writer, rogue herbal medicine maker has it's appeal, but how to make it all work together?

Enter Crypto

In July of 2014 Bitcoin had caught my eye, and my revolutionary heart started considering all the insane potential of such a concept. I was living paycheck to paycheck at the time but at the urging of a friend, I pulled together a few dollars and put some skin in the game. That winter I got an all expense paid trip to Peru, courtesy of the Bitcoin market explosion. That was ok by me. :)

The Bitcoin explosion precipitated another wave of explorations into crypto, and I stumbled upon the intrepid crew of Invictus / Bitshares / Cryptonomex.

I was really inspired by the vision of the Bitshares project, and the writings of Dan Larimer, @dan, and became involved, slowly at first, through the forums at bitsharestalk.org, and with the help of a friend.

I slowly realized the whole thing was a completely decentralized platform and that pretty much no-one was in charge but the shareholders, the devs, and the delegates (witnesses)... That was everyone! What a radical affair. It started to look like some crazy meritocracy, where those who paid it forward and contributed to the system would be rewarded, at least through reputation. At that time, I inherited, and maintained a delegate on BTS, called 'bits', later 'bitscape', but have since left behind any technical blockchain work, as server maintenance isn't really my strong suit.

I wanted to focus on outreach, as I saw revolutionary levels of potential if only we could reach the right people, and make it accessible to them. I started organizing a local meet-up for Bitshares and discovered much to my surprise and delight, that there were a few local fellows involved as well.

We met up, and it was pretty amusing, because in the early days, most people in the project were completely anonymous, or trying to be. I just never had any illusions that I was even capable of maintaining anonymity, or pseudonymity nor did I feel it was important in my particular field of action.

The BitShares P2P Tour

As a result of these meetups, my new friend @roadscape and I were perhaps the first team voted in to delegate spots on the Bitshares blockchain, during the days of 0.9.3, and our obsession with endless hours on the forums and endless hours spent contemplating various angles of development for this exciting platform started to seem like it had merit. 'Paid by protocol' was the exciting concept of the day. Now in Steem it seems like old news. ;)

@roadscape and I determined we had to hit the road and meet the devs in Blacksburg. We decided to make a little documentary called the Bitshares P2P Tour. Our intention was to show the community to itself, and bring people together.

It was a hell of a trip. We got to meet the whole team in Blacksburg, and though we missed the on-camera interview, we did get to sit down with @ned for a beer in NYC. :) Here's the mini documentary if you'd like a gander.

We have more footage from that trip which has never seen the light of day, but I'm hopeful that with STEEM, time for editing and sharing some of that awesome footage is not far off.

What's Next?

I'll be here, on Steemit.com of course!

There are so many more stories to tell, oceans to be crossed, and crypto communities to pioneer! I hope you enjoyed my story. I'm really looking forward to where this extraordinary adventure takes us.

I look forward to collaborating with you all!

Best wishes,
Brandon Lovejoy

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