The Travels of Roger "Muzungu" Moore

Perhaps, you should know something. In all my years; I have ridden camels across the Thar Desert in India; pinstriped hot rod cars; been Principal Investigator on two National Science Foundation grants involving the design and use of what has now evolved into the Internet; falsely impersonated the son of a famous Southern Baptist Minister; have photographed a 1,900 year-old “house of ill repute” in Ephesus, Turkey, the city of Antony and Cleopatra’s honeymoon; was the Information Systems Officer to the Commanding General of the U S Army Medical Service Corp in Washington; at one time thought a “duck-tail” haircut was “cool” (and actually wore one); have been certified in both Neurolinguistic Programming and Eriksonian Hypnosis; have sold life insurance door-to-door; have won trophies drag racing; have been married more than four exquisite decades to an angel-on-earth; have taught basic business skills to students at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; was the first American ever seen by many villagers near the Amur River in the Russia Far East; have led photo expeditions into the Amazon jungle … and out again; never smoked pot (so I do not have to claim that “I did not inhale”); have negotiated the construction of hotels in Dubai and Sharja with an Arab group composed of the Sheik of Kuwait and a Palestinian smuggler (they got the best of that deal, by the way); played saxophone in a jazz band; wrecked every car I ever owned when I was a teenager (and it was NEVER my fault … I promise); have the most incredibly wonderful son any man could imagine; a sweet and beautiful granddaughter named Jette (no middle name, just Jette Moore), have taught computer modeling and simulation to students at Texas Tech University; with native guides, have hunted the Spectacled Caiman (Caiman Crocodilus) in canoes, before midnight, on the Rio Negro of Brazil; have photographed the bowels of the medinas of ancient Moroccan cities; have designed and made boomerangs; have raced motorcycles (and have the steel plates in my body to prove it); have thrilled at the sensation of speed by windsurfing only inches off the surface of the water; have written and published numerous scholarly papers regarding the managerial economic issues of computer networking; have fished for Piranha in the Amazon river; have not yet skydived; have fly fished with my own hand-tied flies; have broken multiple bones in the false belief that I could be a martial arts master; have endured (and still do endure) the surgical fusion of three of my vertebrae; have made erotic nude photographs; have made nude photographs which were not erotic; have written my last words with the lead from the tip of a bullet when I believed I would not survive being stranded with no food and no heat in a blizzard in the Colorado Rockies; have fought mosquitoes in the Peruvian rain forest with the man who trained our original 16 American Astronauts in jungle survival; have marveled at the wonderfully muted colors and textures and stone and wood that 1,500 years of life have molded into what we know as “Aya Sofia” in Istanbul; have had the honor of holding the hands of both my Mother and my Father at their death beds as they left this world; have the belief that I can become an accomplished Japanese Sumi-e painter; have the honor of having people who seriously collect my photographic works; have written poetry (and have the belief that I can learn to express “negative space” in the form of Japanese Tanka poems); drove a 15 year-old rust-bucket Suburban with “blow-away-gray” paint simply because it fit like an old shoe; have consumed gallons of honey-sweetened tea while haggling with Kilim peddlers, incense hustlers, and turban-fabric hawkers in such places as Marrakech, Casablanca, Fez, and Mekness; have pumped gas and fixed flats in a service station (back when there really was service) until I graduated from high school; was fired from a high-level corporate management position (apparently the Chairman of The Board didn’t understand who I thought I was); survived a tasting of “Siete Raices” (7-Roots), know as ‘jungle viagra’ served to me by a native Shaman in the Peruvian Amazon; lost my heart to the beauty and humanity of the people of the Russia Far East; was the best “bait caster” in thirteen states when in the Boy Scouts; was an international wheeler-dealer dealmaker during the boom days of real estate in the ‘80’s (and have lived to tell about it); have been on more diets than I can count; find Taoism intriguingly interesting; have always believed that every woman is attractive in some way; still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up; and so on … and so on …

But, I think you get the picture. I have been “down the river” a few times in my life, and who would have thought that after all of that, I would still have so much to learn? One of the more important things I have discovered in this wonderful and varied life of mine is that the things that have been most important to me have come as a by-product of something I have done for someone else. And, furthermore, the more the other person feels what I have done for them was important to them, the greater my personal pleasure.