I’m just going to let my mind flow for this first post and see what happens:

I am a very simple guy. I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, went to Florida Gulf Coast University to get a degree in Civil Engineering and now I am living in West Palm Beach for a job in civil engineering. This is the average route that every parent wants their young son to take growing up and oh were they proud of me…

Throughout college they were skeptical though. I was in a fraternity and every time I came home  during the semester’s end I would get hammered and they would link that to me not doing well in college. Little did they know I studied my ass off all the damn time and barely had time to party like most fraternity men. The only time to party and not worry about my Structural Analysis or Fluid Mechanics test, was during holiday and oh fuck ya did I party. Well in the end I graduated and got my degree. The fam was very proud for a little bit until I went to Europe to celebrate with my buddy Junebug and backpack the whole damn place. The beautiful thing about Europe is there is absolutely no hangovers what so ever. You can be shit faced and wake up just tired in the morning it was glorious for someone like myself that feels like he’s gonna die for two days after a hard binder in the states.

At the end of the trip my tolerance for alcohol was insane. I could have 10 tall boys and feel slightly buzzed. We traveled everywhere. Started in Denmark and took a big ole loop around the continent. We went to Prague, Copenhagen, Budapest, Berlin, Osnabruck, Hamburg, Milan, Florence, Vienna, Bolzano, and honestly a lot of other places I don’t remember but you get it. Hell of a time. The ending of my trip though I had to make it back up to Sweden for my Farfar’s (grandpa) 80th birthday in Bastad. I was so excited to see the family. When I got up there I was reunited with everyone, I’m talking about sister’s, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, my god it was great. The festivities began and this was the best way to end my trip. During these festivities however, rumors started to spread saying, ” I think Devin has a problem with drinking” and the stereotypical response, “oh yeah he’s in a frat.” Fuck that noise. Mind you I was basically sober to all these parties downing eight 12oz beers at 5%. This lead to my family looking down on me and me having to be sober at my grandfather’s birthday party. It would make sense if I was being a retard in Sweden but I wasn’t. I found this crazy because this was my celebration to my one accomplishment I made so far in my life and people were raining on my parade. To put a cherry on top one of my family members called me out and said I would never get a job and no one would want to hire me. Solid ending to the trip.

The point is people have never really believed in me. The evidence was clear throughout college and at the end of Europe. Everyone was scared that I was going down the wrong path even know I just graduated in a pretty hard major that would challenge anybody. But the thing is I  always believed in myself and I know I am destined for great fucking things. I am a nice guy, fun, jolly, entertaining, hardworking, loving, and fascinated about the world we live in. I’m a god damn social butterfly that opens up to any body and I’m honest about everything. I love nature and that’s what keeps high when I’m feeling low. I love animals and want to protect and preserve what the upper man has created that we have destroyed. That’s why I chose engineering so I can be the man that could make a little impact in the world to change shit.

Well the family member was wrong. My poor self showed up back in the United States with 100 dollars in my name (because I had to pay for everything in Sweden and I did not account that in traveling expenses) and quickly started  to work for an old contractor’s company I worked for as a freshman. I made a quick 500 bones in a week and went off to West Palm Beach to find a job. I love the beach so West Palm seemed dope and that’s honestly the only reason I moved here. Within 5 days of being down here I landed a job at this water resourcing company and my job title would be field inspector/project engineer. I told the company I would love to be out in the field the first few years of my engineering life because I wanted to see how the process through construction works. And I wanted to maybe lean towards construction and see the feel of it. They said hell yes that’s exactly what we are looking for and got hired the next day. Well the company was great the first few months I was out in Belle Glade, Florida looking over projects and working with the foreman and superintendents. I was doing satisfying work installing water main for the people of Belle Glade and giving them clean water from their corroded cast iron pipes that weren’t even an inch thick in diameter for some of their 50 year water mains. Then things went down hill. They pulled me into the office and I had to stare at a screen for 8 hours plus a day, doing AutoCAD work. Imagine looking at fucking screen with no windows and doing repetitious and tedious redline work the senior engineers give you for four fucking months. My god! I was going insane. I chose engineering also because I wanted to be outside on site half the time and see the actual world. Not be stuck in a office every fucking day staring at a screen like most jobs. I complained to the company and the false expectations they gave me when I was hired and they said well see what we can do. So the next week they sat me down and said, “we have a very important job for you to do” and had me on project 16-1107. The fucking manhole assessment project. A project for no engineer, no man or woman for a degree in college, a hard labor job for someone that’s trying to make it back at life starting all the way at the bottom. These fucks. They said it would only last two months and it lasted for seven, and they paired me with my roommate which me and him had to see each other every day for 8 hours and back home. My god we were like a goddamn married couple but worse. This job was horrible, we started in April and ended in October. The hottest time of the year in Florida and had to pop open manholes everyday and inspect them and measure. Two thousand manholes we had to inspect. We would pop these suckers open, see shit flowing down the channel every day and also condoms and tampons and rats. If you can only imagine what you saw if you opened up a manhole where shit goes, it’s what you would imagine. It was unbearable, hot, and smelly. The worst part is I wasn’t learning anything as an engineer or anything that could help my career. I told myself if I don’t get what I want after this torture for seven months I’m fucking leaving. Sure enough they had me back in the office doing the redlines all over and I quit two weeks later. I never thought in my life sitting in those hard classes in school thinking I would be staring at shit all day with my major in the hot brutal sun of Florida.

I do not know what the reader thinks of this but I’m sure everyone goes through some kind of struggle that can relate. My outlet through these rough times was going out in nature and finding moments in time where something magical happens. If you sit still out in nature long enough, you’ll see something. If you don’t hunt I’m sorry, but the best part of the hunt is just sitting invisible to the true world and seeing marvelous things in the four hours of sitting, it’s truly therapeutic. I feel so connected to nature and the woods, everything just makes sense. Out in the woods I always saw really cool shit and I would say damn I wish I would of captured that moment. A light bulb popped in my head and said buy a camera and start taking pictures of these moments. You have an eye (I think) and certain way you look at the world and share it with people. So I started doing this and it has become quite a hobby and a passion. I usually just go out on a nature trail and enjoy myself. Whenever I think is a moment of happeness, I like to call it, I get out the camera and start taking pictures. I do other things to keep my mind at ease like working out and socializing with people over a beer. I also have an obsession with free diving and would swim a quarter mile out off shore with some fins and just stare at all the sea life Palm Beach has to offer on the corals. It’s a whole other world down there and it keeps my mind wandering with amazement.

This blog is a cluster fuck of ideas that I just need to play with and make this slowly develop. The idea of making this blog was to give you guys a story of a simple guy like myself facing the world at age 24. One year out of college, just quit his job and now has some money to finally do wanted he wanted to do. Go traveling and experience new things. Find myself and find the true meaning of why I am here and take pictures of my adventure. Show the reader the beauty of the world and a little of my own outlook on it. After I left my job I started to plan. The plan is as of right now to go to Thailand for two months and then Australia to land a job. I leave for Thailand December 5th and land in Bangkok. I plan on backpacking the whole thing alone and showing you guys a day by day (or maybe every few days) of the journey. Pictures will definitely be included. Speaking about pictures, let me show you so of my nature pictures that I take from time to time.

Here’s a picture of a little blue heron out in wetlands of West Palm Beach mid way in chomping down a fish in a puddle.

Pileated Woodpecker on slash pine.

Curious doe

Fire Sky out in West Palm Beach intercoastal

Plant in the light

 

These are just a couple and I have a lot more that I’ll post from time to time. The paragraphs before were just a scramble of my life in the past year. No real detail or precise story, just frames of memory in my head typed in this blog. A certain look into my recent life a somewhat of a feel of what I’ve been going through, so I’m sorry if it is sloppy.

The world is a beautiful place and too many times you have influences like your family and expectations that they want to see in you. They want you to take a path that has already been paved an easy route to a destination that you already know. They get concerned when you start walking a wobbly line. Veering side to side to slowly getting off that paved road. Pestering you to stay on track or else you’ll get lost. Sometimes though in life you need to get lost to be found and find something that you would have never known unless you strayed from the road. Go into the woods and explore a world that you only saw from the window of your car. There is fear and there is uncomfortableness in these woods, but with this lies opportunity and life lessons you will need in order to be successful. A new route that will be formed and a beaten path that people might respect and dare to take. Be yourself and follow your heart. Let know one tell you what to do. Listen to people and hear what they have to say, but in the end the world is yours and go find your destiny. Come with me on my journey and let me show you the world through my eyes. Starting now sitting in my apartment in West Palm Beach typing this, to going to Thailand to with an open mind. I have been a bird trapped in a cage with restraints and now I am free and will start to learn how to fly.