I remember the last time I was homeless. It was in the early nineties after I followed my son Riley and his mom Colleen up to Kent, WA, south of Seattle.

I had just turned Forty in a downtown Oakland, CA bar, when I realized that my computer career in California, was over. I needed to be where my son was, Colleen and I were no longer a couple, but I went.

They moved into an apartment complex called Parkwood. I lived with them for a while, but Colleen and I didn't work, so we just shared raising Riley together, while I moved into another place.

My coding skills were still peaking and I fell into Assembly Language. This was the most complicated base level language available on the new IBM PC, and I had gained a reputation.

I worked a contract with Sundstrand Corp up in Bellevue writing code for the airlines Black Box (actually red...).

Z-Soft out of Atlanta, the authors of IBM's graphics program PC Paintbrush, hired me to write device drivers for the flock of new scanners coming in from Japan, with no English documentation.

They sent me their first one, to see if I could do it. I wrote a great driver, charged them 5K for it, and used it as a template for the scanners that followed.

Like all good things in those days, things changed. The two guys named Mark, who ran Z-Soft, came out to Seattle and we got stoned together on a salmon fishing boat out in the Bay. I then picked them up an ounce of bud to take back to Atlanta, while they watched Riley at my place.

These guys had just come from a meeting with Microsoft with a fresh unreleased diskette of Windows 3.1. They installed it on my computer and watched my son while I bought them some pot.

Eventually I landed in an apartment building two units down from Colleen and Riley. I lasted for a couple of months, ran out of money, and ended up on the street. Colleen let me store my important possessions, which I still have here in the Cave, on her back porch, and I moved out into the field on the back side of Target.