About ten years ago (can't believe it's been that long) I met Shawn. I was working at a four year old chemistry software company with about eleven people, and I had to hire someone to help me go peddle the wares. This was/is a tiny company by anyone's standards with a ridiculously cheap owner and staffed exclusively with computational chemists and computer programmers.

In walks this guy, towering above everyone in the office and wearing this three-piece suit (nobody wore three-piece suits in 1995), three degrees, and an IQ of like 190. To this day he is possibly the smartest and certainly one of the most erudite men I have ever met. A man who was turning down six-figure consulting gigs because he wanted to work somewhere he could make a difference. God was he wrong. Regardless, he was also an expert snow skier and one of the most fearless mountain bike riders I have ever met. I'm not sure it was really a lack of fear or the assumption that a 200 pound man on a 22 inch steel mountain bike can pretty much ride THROUGH any obstacle in his way. Including trees. Boulders. Timid Italian men carefully choosing lines in front of him. He is also the ONLY person I have ever seen while getting pulled face first underwater on his first attempt to waterski, by sheer force of will, hang on and manage to pull that ski out from under him and pop out of the water. I think he also managed to bed about half my female friends at the time, but nobody will confirm or deny any of this.

Why the hell he wanted to work there is still way beyond me.

Shawn was also an aspiring writer, and an exceptionally talented one. Now Shawn moved back to San Diego a few years back, and I sadly don't get to see him as often as I would like. He did, however, begin to distribute a weekly letter compiling his thoughts and observations on politics and philosophy and pop culture. The second it hit my mail box I realized he had better content than all but about .1% of the people keeping blogs, and, frankly, that includes myself.

He insists in his first letter that this isn't a blog. I insist that it should be.

He also insists that the community interest in his random, weekly creative purge would be met with resounding silence. I find this concept to be impossible as thousands of people seem to hang around here just to listen to me talk about my penis and occasionally bitch about Republicans.

I have been granted permission to repost his letters here. As much as I would love to do so, Shawn is even more verbose than I am, and frankly, I figure I lose half of my readers as soon as they fail to see an off-handed comment about masturbation. Pun intended.

Instead, I have created a temporary Live Journal home for his musings. I am convinced they are brilliant, but then again, I was convinced that Twinkies were not made of meat, so clearly I could be wrong.

Drop in. Wander around his brain a bit. And let him know what you think.

Notes From a Small Planet.