About me - Ryan Ariano

About me

Born and raised in Baltimore as the oldest son of a loving middle-class family, I always felt there was something outside of the slightly stodgy, one-dimensional world of Urban Maryland. I was always that kid who did real well on his standardized testing but who seemed to be spacing off in class, always looking away to the horizon.
Upon high school graduation, I wrote a sixty-some page novella based on the environment of the Baltimore private school community (shared with friends and family, but never any further), then moved out to San Diego for college to become a Marine Biologist. After realizing 8 years of school to become an underpaid ocean savant wasn't really my bag, I moved to Steamboat,CO, wrote some more in my spare time, and became a business major at CMC - that way, I could figure out a way to make money at whatever I wanted to do.
This was followed by some time back in Baltimore to collect my thoughts and learn to play the guitar (poorly), then a return to San Diego whereupon I hurtled myself down a three-year tunnel of Hunter S. Thompson, Brett Easton Ellis, Hemingway, college, club lacrosse, philandering, STD's, blackouts, minor arrests, a DUI,general self-destructive behavior, and lots of cocaine/THC/alcohol-fueled furious, dark writing, from which I emerged barely alive, wasted and hardened into a sharp-witted knife point barely hanging onto sobriety and humanity by one last, weakened tendon - and, somehow, possessing a college degree in Marketing.
To mellow myself out and bring my soul back to the side of the living, I moved to Jackson Hole,WY, smoked a lot of herbs, snowboarded and hiked through possibly the greatest mountains ever, and worked for a ski and snowboard video production company.
I left Jackson Hole because up there, I was way too peaceful and complacent at too young an age and moved to Newport Beach as a national sales and marketing director for a start-up surf video company after going on two national promotion tours stopping at all the great surf spots in the continental US with an ambarrassingly low per diem and small rental cars. After that company failed, I became a supermarket butcher, all the while reading every newspaper, magazine, and book (literature and enlightenment only) I could get my hands on. I also continued writing - and am still writing a book about that summer on tour, with slight exaggerations here and there and all the crazy shit that happens on the road.
Currently I work for a women's fashion company - earning the steady paycheck, learning about the minds of females, and preparing myself for the next explosion which will come my way.

Featured article by Ryan Ariano

Politics, News & Issues > Political Issues Are we [Americans] collectively dumb as a nation?

America isn't a country of idiots like the pundits would have you believe. Sure we spend too much time watching reality TV, bestowing privileges and acclaim to lunatic egotists who we like tearing down just as much as we like building up. But we're not dumb. We're just a country that's too busy worrying about getting through another day to ask questions, too comfortable when we finally get home to waste our time learning and even more, we're a country that doesn't much value intellectualism or intelligence as much as we do money, charisma or heart. We let our leaders think for us, tell us ...

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