Rob The Writer

 If I won one billion dollars tomorrow, tax free, the first thing I would not do is announce it to the world. Sudden wealth attracts noise. I have had enough of noise. The second thing I would do is sit still. For a long time. Not out of shock, but out of respect. Money at that scale is not spending money. It is stewardship capital. It can either become a blessing that compounds quietly for generations, or a curse that evaporates in public view. I would start by building a structure, not a lifestyle. Trusts first. Family trusts that protect assets from impulse, predators, and bad timing. Clear rules. Clear governance. No heroics. Wealth that survives needs fences as much as it needs fields. Then land. Not speculative land. Useful land. Places that produce something real. Agriculture. Water rights. Modest but well built homes designed to last, not impress. A sense of place that cannot be cancelled by a market swing or a visa stamp. Land anchors families. I have lived long enough...

 Some problems do not yield to force. You can push harder and only make them tighter. Others unlock the instant you stop trying to solve them the way you were taught and instead solve them the way the world actually works. Nineteen eighty nine. I was flying in from Tanzania to Cameroon, heading for Bamenda to meet my brother. He was flying in from Canada. We had not seen each other in a long time. The kind of reunion that lives in your chest before it ever happens. I landed in Douala and walked straight into trouble. The immigration gendarme took my passport and invited me into his office. The door closed. Papers were shuffled. Silence stretched. The unspoken expectation hung in the air like humidity. Chop moni. Everyone knew the ritual. You pay, you pass. You do not, you wait. I sat there thinking I might be stuck for hours. Or longer. I had no interest in playing the game, but the game had me. And then it happened. A moment of clarity. Sudden. Clean. Almost funny. I stoppe...

 Moscow does not ease you into itself. It announces. Wide avenues. Heavy stone. A sense that the conservative way of life here still matters enough to die defending. We packed a lot into that visit. A bus tour looping around the city. Two riverboat cruises, one down the Moscow Canal and one along the Moscow River. The scenery was extraordinary in that severe, patient Russian way. And then there was the main event. Lenin. Four hundred rubles bought us a shortcut. Thirty of us paid an old woman who relieved us of both money and cameras with a practiced hand. As we waited our half hour, she filled the time with history. Red Square. The Kremlin. The weight of the place. I had little doubt that the guards would get their share. Normalna. This is how things work. We cut into line. Down we went, three stories underground, into a temperature controlled silence. The kind of cold that preserves more than flesh. At every corner stood young Kremlin police officers. Stone faced. Ceremonial....

 When I was six, maybe seven, I learned that risk does not always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it arrives as news. Quiet. Final. Irreversible. George Wall was our jungle pilot. He flew the Cessna 185 that carried us to school when roads dissolved into mud and rivers swallowed bridges. When the jungle closed in and land travel was impossible, George flew. Calm voice. Steady hands. The kind of man you trusted without needing to explain why. In my young mind, he was part of the landscape. As dependable as the airplane itself. Then one day he did not come back. The fog along the coast near Limbe had been thick. He turned steeply, trying to locate the runway. The rainforest does not forgive mistakes, and the trees there are older and taller than fear. The aircraft hit them. George was killed. I did not understand all the details. I understood the result. My father cried out when the news came. Not quietly. Not with restraint. He sobbed in a way that shook the room. It was one o...

 My favorite holiday has never been about the day itself. It has always been about a moment inside the day. A moment that slowed time enough for something deeper to settle. I must have been eight or nine. Christmas. My mother at the table. Spread out in front of us were several unassembled "Weihnachtspyramiden", German Christmas candle powered merry go rounds. They were not toys. They were intricate, deliberate constructions. Small engineering projects disguised as decoration. Precision cut wood. Tiny figures in Bavarian dress. Puzzles that demanded patience. My job was not glamorous. Glue. But my mother treated it like craft. She showed me how to apply it properly. Not too much so it would run. Not too little so the joint would fail. Enough to bond. Enough to last. There was care in that lesson. Care I did not yet know how to name. When they were assembled, they were beautiful. But when evening came and the candles were lit, that is when the magic arrived. We shut the lig...

 There are days when love feels poetic. Soft light. Long memory. Gratitude. And then there are days when love has to survive bureaucracy. Paul’s words to the Corinthians are often read at weddings, usually by people who have not yet had their patience professionally tested. The words sound gentle until life decides to interrogate them. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind.” “Is not easily provoked.” That last one is the line that caught me today. Not because it is beautiful. Because it is brutally inconvenient. A system holds my son in detention. A number is named. Twenty five thousand dirhams. Then the manager is suddenly out of office. It is Sunday. The typing center is closed. The system does not accept payment at the police station. Nothing is technically wrong, and everything is morally absurd. So my son stays one more night. Not because justice demands it. Not because safety requires it. But because systems do not care how long a father’s heart can be stretched b...

 I am told I have been named supreme ruler of the universe. My task is to create a holiday in my honor. A day. A festival. Rituals. Food. Decorations. Me Day. I find the whole premise ridiculous. Not because imagination is bad. But because the fantasy reveals something we have grown frighteningly comfortable with. The belief that we should be celebrated simply for existing. That the natural trajectory of a human life is toward godhood. That the ultimate problem with the universe is that it has not yet recognized our greatness. This is not satire anymore. This is cultural doctrine. We design personal brands. We curate identities. We gather followers. We celebrate ourselves loudly and call it self care. We crown our opinions, sanctify our feelings, and demand the world rearrange itself around our inner weather. And then we wonder why nothing holds. If I were truly supreme ruler, the first thing I would do is abolish the holiday. No You Day. No statues. No anthems. No carefully ...

 If I could appear and disappear at will, I would not waste the ability doing parlor tricks or sneaking into bank vaults. I know what it is like to be needed in a moment that decides everything. I know what it feels like to wish I could vanish from a moment that hurts. So here is how I would use my superpower. When my son faced his first night behind a locked door, I would appear beside him. Not to break him out. Not to bend justice. Just to sit. To tell him the walls were temporary and the world outside was still waiting for him. Fathers cannot always fix, but we can always remain. And when the decision came down from a judge with more power over my family than any human should have, I would disappear into my own calm, just long enough not to let fear speak for me. I would appear in the homes of every hiring manager who tossed my résumé aside after fifteen years of loyalty evaporated with the word “redundant.” I would stand right in front of them until they could not ignore my...

 People like to pretend that life unravels slowly. That calamity sends warning shots. That if you pay attention you can sidestep the worst of it. Not always. Sometimes life just swings. August twenty fifth. Fifteen years of service turned into a digital signature on a redundancy form. The job that built my reputation gone before the ink dried. The timing was cruel. Which is to say, it was real. Then September fourteenth. My mother. The one who carried me, prayed for me, and worried over every lost direction in my life. Gone. I had the gift of one last visit in July. I got to say goodbye face-to-face. But when it came time to lay her to rest, I watched from Dubai. My cousin sent me a video of the funeral. My brothers and nephews carried the casket. I carried the distance. Try grieving through a screen. It scratches the soul raw. October thirteenth. My son is arrested over a handful of marijuana. A young man’s mistake, despite all our warnings, now inflated into a legal storm. I...

 Some kids dreamed of the toy inside the wrapping. I dreamed of the wrapping itself. Well, not the wrapping. The box. The glorious cardboard box. There is a family story they love to tell about me. Birthday morning. Shredded paper everywhere. Adults watching to see the look on my face when I see the gift. Instead, I light up and shout, “Another box, another box!” To me, cardboard was possibility shaped into a rectangle. I did not see packaging. I saw cockpits. Helicopter instrument panels. The pilot’s seat of a DC-3 I had once glimpsed on a runway. My scissors were design tools. My marker pens were avionics. A flap of cardboard taped upright became a control yoke. A cut-out side became a windshield on the Serengeti. My brothers played with toys. I flew aircraft. Toys were static. They came with rules printed on thin paper. Boxes had no rules. They held engines and altitude, and sound effects my imagination supplied with precision only a child can claim as fact. Nothing was ou...

 People imagine rescue as a heroic leap into danger. Flames. Sirens. Triumph. In my life it has looked smaller. Stranger. Less cinematic. And far more true. Let me start with the chameleon. Cameroon is a land where the rain forest does not apologize for existing. I was a boy who did not yet understand how quickly wonders can turn into fear. There was a day when I found myself alone, lost enough that the air tasted wrong. Panic grows loud when you have no one to hear it. In that frantic rush of steps in the wrong direction, something made me stop. A chameleon. Perched on a branch like a tiny prophet in scales. It turned its eyes toward me, both at once and sideways too, as if to say pay attention. The absurdity of that creature, calm while my heart raced, brought me back into myself. And in that stillness I finally noticed the path I had missed. If rescue is the return of clarity, that lizard saved my life. Years later the dangers changed shape. Dubai highways. Hospital rooms. ...

There is a poem by Hermann Hesse that begins with a confession and a denial at the same time. Ich log. Ich log. Ich bin nicht alt. I lied. I lied. I am not old. There is a man in those lines who knows perfectly well he has lived many years, who feels the weight of them in his bones, yet refuses to let time declare the final verdict. The lie is not deceit. The lie is rebellion. Hesse goes on to insist he is not tired of life. Beautiful women still cause his pulse to kick and his thoughts to wander with the same electricity of youth. There is something both funny and painfully true about that. The body ages at a schedule nature dictates. The heart often refuses the memo. He dreams still of women, of lust both noble and ridiculous. He dreams of waltzes with wild tempo. He dreams of nights where love feels like a secret only two people on earth share. Some of us grow older and lose appetite. Others grow older and simply understand hunger more deeply. But then Hesse twists the knife. ...

 There are noises in life that never quite fall silent. They echo without sound. They haunt without presence. My anxiety often comes wrapped in those invisible frequencies. Not alarms I can respond to. Not engines I can repair. The kind of noise that comes from what I cannot control. A judge decides a future I cannot defend. A hiring manager chooses someone I cannot influence. A corporation thanks me for my service by pushing me out the door right when my family needs me steady. Even silence can roar when the waiting begins. And then there are the moments where control seems close enough to touch, but slips anyway. A car accident waiting to happen on a sunny Dubai day. A BMW 520 pulling out suddenly on the Palm. A Pakistani Uber driver making a mistake at the worst possible time. Metal colliding. Time slowing. The brain replaying all the alternate versions of the universe in which I had braked sooner. Or driven slower. Or stayed home. The mind loves to ask questions that have...

 Growing up in Canada, patriotism was never loud. We did not chant the flag each morning or recite national slogans like daily vitamins. That always felt more like training than pride. A country should earn loyalty by how it treats its people, not demand it by repetition. So am I patriotic? Not in the way most people mean. I do not pledge allegiance to a flag simply because someone printed colors on fabric and called it sacred. I do not believe geography defines virtue. And I do not mistake nationalism for identity. What I pledge allegiance to now is survival. Not the shallow version of survival that hoards canned food and waits for society to collapse. I mean survival as purpose. As clarity. The kind you feel in your bones when the comfortable illusions fall away. The moment you realize most systems are not built to save you. They are built to use you until you cannot move anymore. Survival forces honesty. You learn quickly what matters when everything unnecessary burns off....

 People love a neat label. Kinesthetic learner. Auditory learner. Visual learner. Bookworm learner. PowerPoint survivor. Pick your favorite and wear it like a badge. That is the modern way. The problem is, none of it holds up outside a classroom poster. Learning style theory, at least the version that tries to sort us into tidy buckets, has been debunked over and over. Not because people do not learn differently at different moments, but because no one learns only one way. We are not potted plants. We are toolboxes. Think about a pilot. You do not learn to land an airplane by reading a manual alone. You listen to instructors. You fly the aircraft. You feel the machine respond. You watch the instruments and the runway. You reflect on what almost killed you and do not repeat it. That is not a style. That is survival. Think about building a bridge in Papua New Guinea at seventeen. You learned by swinging a hammer. By watching others swing it better. By listening when the...

The furthest I have ever traveled from home was not only about geography. It was about how far a person can be stretched before he begins to understand who he is. Papua New Guinea. Nineteen eighty-three. I was seventeen, equal parts bravado and naivety, convinced that God and adventure were waiting for me just beyond the horizon. The journey began in Florida, at something called the Lord’s Boot Camp. Romantic name. Very unromantic lifestyle. We lived in canvas tents. Rain soaked us without apology. The William Tell Overture blasted at five in the morning whether you liked classical music or not. We ran obstacle courses against other country teams. Winners got smug. Losers got dish duty and the joy of scrubbing latrines. We learned construction basics. How to swing a hammer with purpose instead of guesswork. How to mix concrete that does not crumble. How to get blisters in places you did not know had skin. We memorized forty Bible verses in two weeks. Not the popular coffee mug ones. ...

 Most people think bullets are loud. Sometimes they are quiet. Sometimes you only hear them after they miss. I was home in Edmonton, visiting my family, breathing the air that always smells a little like childhood and possibility. While I was there, I decided it was time to renew my Canadian Private Pilot License. Ten hours with an instructor. Check rides. Signoff complete. Legal to carry passengers again. The first ones I took up were not strangers. They were my youngest brother Russ, his wife Lisa, and my Dad. Three people I loved enough to trust with my wings. Or maybe three people who trusted me more than I had yet earned back. We launched from Cooking Lake Airport east of the city. The plan was simple and proud. Fly into downtown Edmonton. Touch and go at Blatchford Field. Then right back to Cooking Lake. Nothing dramatic. A bit of nostalgia with a propeller. The approach into Blatchford went high. My fault. Then the tower asked me to keep my speed up because a Twin Otter ...

 They tell you not to compare. Do not measure your life against the neighbor’s. Do not chase the illusion of status. Wise words. And mostly ignored by anyone with a pulse. But the one luxury I dream of is not a shiny car or a gadget that glows in the dark. I want land. And a home rooted in that land. A mansion, yes, because why lie about the scale of the vision? Something built to last. Something that cannot be folded into a suitcase or lost the moment a visa expires. Picture this. A wide stretch of earth that belongs to my family name. Soil that remembers the footsteps of children now grown. Trees that rise taller long after I am gone. A house with a high roof and windows that pull in the morning sun instead of shutting it out. A library filled with the books I wrote and the ones that wrote me. A workshop where tools rest not in transit cases but on familiar walls. A kitchen where laughter outnumbers plates. A long table where every seat has a story, and none are borrowed. A pl...

 We all have a private accounting system. You put in effort. You expect return. You sacrifice now. You imagine reward later. Neat math. Encouraging math. Math that makes you feel in control. For a long time, I thought I understood that math. I believed that twenty five years working abroad in the Middle East, away from family roots and Canadian soil, would translate into financial freedom. I imagined coming home with savings stacked, investments humming, and a calm sense that the future was covered. Then the bill came due. It turns out life charges interest on distance. On risk. On uncertainty. On raising kids in a country where family safety costs more than anyone back home could ever imagine. On working for companies that benefit from your best years but forget your name the moment the contract ends. And suddenly the numbers did not add up. I found myself staring at a truth harder than I liked. All that time. All that sweat. All that faith in a system. And I was not wealthy....

No. I do not have a tattoo. There are a lot of reasons, and they are not vague ones. My body was shaped by work, by gravity, by time, and by God. It carries scars that I did not choose. It carries strength I had to earn. That is enough writing on the skin for me. I grew up in a world where you fixed things. You did not decorate them. If something left a mark, it meant you had survived something real. A wrench slipped and sliced the knuckle. A cable tore across the palm. The stories were etched by accident and paid for with effort. That felt honest. Ink never did. Yet I am a father. And the moment you are a father, the world will test every rule you thought was carved in stone. My son has three tattoos already. Beautiful to him. Alarming to me. He calls them expressions of his identity. He says they will remind him of who he is. I argue the opposite. Identity is proven in what you do, not what you display. He tells me I am stuck in the past. I tell him he is writing checks with his s...

 If I ever washed up alone on a deserted island, the first sound would be the sudden silence. No engine noise. No aircraft passing overhead. No buzz of screens demanding attention. Just wind and waves. A life stripped back to essence. What five things would I need then? First. A knife with a proper grip. Something that remembers the shape of a human hand. I have worked too long in environments where the right tool is the difference between a fix and a funeral. A knife that can cut rope, shave wood, clean fish, and shape something from nothing. A tool that feels honest. No gadget beats simplicity earned over time. Second. A Bible. Even when I have tried to outrun it, the stories have found me again. In jungles. In deserts. In hangars at three in the morning. Words that remind me the world is bigger than whatever fear is gripping me in the moment. Horizons come back into view when you read truth spoken across centuries. Third. A notebook with a strong cover and a pencil that can ...

 We live in a world that tries very hard to keep everything at a distance. Swipe the card. Tap the screen. Watch from afar. Hands clean. Risk avoided. Yet our skin remembers a different world. One where knowing required contact. I have spent years handling machines. Grip a spanner. Feel metal warm under your palm after the engine has run hot. Check the tension in a cable. Trace the edges of a panel to find where alignment went wrong. You cannot truly understand a machine until you have felt its heartbeat through the tools that keep it alive. That is one kind of touch. The kind that transfers knowledge. But the touch that cuts deeper is something older. If you ask me what texture wakes the ancient chambers of memory inside me, I will tell you this. It is soil. African soil. The gritty red earth of Cameroon that clung to my shoes and found its way into every crease of boyhood. Under the fingernails. On the shins after a fall. On the pages of a school notebook that sat too close to...

 Television. Not radio. I want you to see my eyes. Because eyes tell the truth even when words try to dance. I come from a life spent between worlds. Raised under African skies. Schooled by German grit. Seasoned in Canadian winters. Sharpened in the workshops and hangars of aviation. Hardened in the heat of Dubai. All that movement taught me one thing. You are not a single story. You are many. And so am I. We pretend we are modern. We pretend we are advanced. We pretend that technology has made us wiser. But here is the test. Can we still look each other in the face and remember that every person we meet is a universe of battles we know nothing about? If we fail that test, we fail everything. I spent decades turning complex ideas into knowledge someone else could use. Product manuals. Safety procedures. Emergency checklists. The work always came down to the same question. Can I help this person do the right thing when it matters most? That is the question I ask you now. Not wh...