I am Cedric, DAMMIT! (Since college, “DAMMIT!” has been part of my name.) I was born on a United States military base in 1972. Which base? It doesn’t matter; I only lived there until I was six weeks old, so I have no memory of it. Later, when I was a toddler, I lived in Japan for a year and a half. Living there while I was at the age when children develop language / speaking skills, I basically learned Japanese at the same time I learned English. I was as bilingual as a toddler can be, and often served as a translator for my parents, who only speak English. Thus, at a very early age, I concluded that I was smarter than grown-ups. Regretfully, I have long since lost the ability to speak or understand Japanese.

I am the firstborn of my generation on both sides of the family. Being the only grandchild to two sets of grandparents, I assume I was spoiled early on. I really don’t remember; the cousins started teeming forth soon enough. In my immediate family, I was an only child for nearly six years before my only sibling, a brother, was born.

We proceeded to grow up mostly at a mobile home court (trailer park) in Hastings, Nebraska, across the street from a cornfield. There was only one entrance to the trailer park, which required passing through a former military housing complex that had been converted to a retirement community. At one corner of this complex, a garbage dump was established, specifically for construction debris as they remodeled all of the buildings in the retirement community. I spent a lot of time playing in that garbage dump, in the cornfield, and various other places where children shouldn’t play (cement plant, sewer construction site, railroad tracks, vacant homes). Other times, I would climb a tree with a book, and just sit on a branch and read. My parents divorced when I was nine years old. My father moved to Texas, so I spent a couple of summers in the land of ZZ Top and Mike Judge. But my real home was still Hastings, until…

Early in the summer that followed my high school freshman year, my mom moved the family to Des Moines, Iowa. There I became two new people. In school, I was very withdrawn, and had no real friends for the entire three years I was there. But I also started working at the local amusement park, and quickly found that parkies are my people! I was a completely different person at Adventureland – confident, entertaining, sociable, in a word: popular. But all good things must come to an end. Especially when those good things are actually bad things (i.e., a job that only pays $3.35 an hour, but makes up for it by letting you work 70 hours a week).

So, I left my ride-operating brethren (and sisterren??) behind and made my way to Colorado State University, NOT the one in Boulder! I took up the study of wildlife biology and the habit of screaming “DAMMIT!” in public just to unnerve people. My dual persona lived on; I never really made any friends among my fellow wildlife biology students, but had plenty of fun outside the classroom, partying with fellow heavy metal fans. But all good things must come to an end. (Wow, deja vu!) After five and a half years in college, I graduated. At exactly the wrong time.

I had hoped to use my wildlife biology degree to get a job with the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, or some other federal or state Service. But as luck would have it, I graduated shortly after the federal government (and some state governments) made the first serious attempts at balancing their budget. Unfortunately, balancing the budget included slashing the funding for agencies like the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. So when I graduated, there were extremely few wildlife biology jobs available. To make matters worse, many experienced wildlife biologists had been laid off due to the budget cuts. So there I was with just a degree, while my competitors had both a degree AND several years of experience.

Thanks to a workstudy job, however, there was a career field where I had actual experience: Information Technology. And it just so happened that MANY technical support call centers were located in northern Colorado. So I spent the next ten years in underpaying tech support jobs, before sliding over into the realm of cyber security. This new specialty paid much better than the tech support world, and in January 2014 an especially good job offer led me to move to Charlotte, North Carolina. One year later, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. I had gone from being an amusement park parkie to a Parkinson’s parkie. No, not the margarine!

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