I saw a fascinating story on the television about this guy named Wayne Bray, who partnered with Greg Marino to forge and sell millions of dollars worth of sports memorabilia, all engraved with fake signatures. He worked as an “Authenticator and Wholesaler” in San Marcos, California, selling the forgeries to hundreds of dealers.

The show is called Masterminds: Foul Ball. Most of it is an actor playing Bray, but he appears several times talking about what he did.

They said at his peak, he was passing off ten million dollars worth of counterfeits per month. By 1999, the FBI was on to him, and being cautious, he hired a former FBI agent to research if the FBI was actually on to him (he wasn’t sure). He found the answer was yes, so he decided to turn himself in.

I expected him to get life in prison, considering he’d been doing this five years and had made at least 100 million dollars. Then they said he got six months in custody (not even prison) and is still running his sports memorabilia shop, now legitimately. What?

It turns out he turned in everyone he knew. Dozens of people who bought goods off him like …

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This is my first post as a 17 year old. The pivotal birthday was 2008 August 17, a Sunday. My youth is just slipping away. I’ve written this list of seventeen things I’ve learned over the years.

1. Passion is fleeting.

I used to be fascinated with the color blue. Then when I was 6 I switched to red. Around 14 I switched back to blue again. Now I’m starting to like green (notice my website’s colors?).

Don’t count on being dedicated to writing, piano, blogging, or photography all your life. Don’t root yourself in material mediums, because it doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is how you do it, or more clearly, what purpose it is for. My purpose is to courageously inspire and facilitate the worthy endeavors of others. I’m going to have to polish that up into a mission statement someday, but it’s a good place to start. I can look at anything I do and ask “is this doing that?” If it’s not, I drop it.

2. Be humble, not because it’s safe, but because it’s courageous.

It takes courage to admit ignorance, and you will never know everything, so you should always have humility. Even if you …

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Sorry for the lack of updates this week. It’s been busy for me… mainly because I have school and work (20 hours per week for the summer). And that’s right in the middle of the week (Monday-Thursday), where it keeps me busy.

Anyway, I’m trying now to switch jobs… to move back to the Ormond Beach library from Holly Hill (I’ve written of the two on my about page). My boss isn’t being nice to me. I told her that maybe she shouldn’t go into library service, because she doesn’t seem to enjoy the work. That hit close too home apparently, so now she’s threatening to fire me for being disrespectful. I didn’t know it was so easy to fire a public servant.

I can definitely see her reaction is rooted in fear rather than reason. Now, I have little bias for emotion or reason… half the time emotion is intuition, and that is a great skill to have. For the other half, the emotion is fear. Fear-based decisions are never good. They distract your focus and weaken your resolve. You get stuck in a repetitive loop of non-achievement.

What I told her, is pretty much the same thing I’ve been feeling …

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