I’ve always had a talent for burning my life down and calling it “personal growth.” Florida raised me on gators, bad decisions, and the kind of sunshine that slowly cooks your brain until you think anything is a good idea. I hustled, gambled, blew off school, demolished houses, taught IT to people smarter than me, and even tried the corporate thing—right up until the day I realized fluorescent lighting was killing me faster than cocaine ever could. Every boss I quit on asked the same question: “What the fuck is wrong with you?” And honestly, fair.
Eventually, I looked around at the American Dream—traffic, debt, HOA Nazis, and neighbors performing passive-aggressive landscaping contests—and thought, yeah, I’m good. So I sold everything that wasn’t nailed down, packed two bags and a wildly inflated sense of confidence, and bought a one-way ticket to Ecuador. No research, no plan, just a Florida man with a tennis-fried brain and a small pile of poker money deciding he’d rather face volcanoes, bad weather, and cultural confusion than die in a cubicle called “The Rock.” It was less an adventure and more an escape attempt—like prison break but with fewer guards and way more altitude.
Ecuador didn’t disappoint. I traded gators for Andean altitude sickness, corporate misery for jungle chaos, and American boredom for a decade-plus of stories that probably disqualified me from reentering polite society. What was supposed to be a “fresh start” turned into a wild, reckless, occasionally illegal odyssey through bars, businesses, beaches, jails, narco nonsense, llama traffic jams, and every flavor of WTF the country could throw at me. I didn’t escape the chaos—I became part of it. And honestly? Best bad decision I ever made.