This page is not my full resume but only focuses on my qualifications to write about psychology. I don’t have any formal education in psychology, just bootstrap experience from years fighting the profession at every level.
I learned drilling engineering at Exxon in a year and got promoted into exploration drilling. I learned structural steel at NPS Industries in a year. Got licensed as a Professional Engineer in HVAC, mechanical, electrical, software, and energy conservation in five years at O’Connell Robertson & Associates in Austin.
Why not psychology after a lifetime of grief at the hands of the profession?
Crashdown at White Sands
My genes are cursed. My mother had a BS in psychology. My father’s direct ancestor was William Erb, the Swiss psycho-physiologist for whom the reflex that occurs when you hit that spot on your knee was named.
My first encounter with a real psychiatrist was on White Sands Missile Range circa 1982. I’d just presented a formal research proposal to the post commander, MG Niles Fulwyler, and the chief scientists at the $1 trillion “Star Wars” laser, HELSTAF – the High Energy Laser Project.
Captain Mark Chapin, a social worker on post, said I had been referred to him for schizophrenia by my commanding officer, LTC Ellis. We had a nice talk. Captain Chapin found no evidence of mental illness. He said Colonel Ellis was jealous that I’d just spent three hours with General Fulwyler and his senior staff.
Rx for Whistleblowers in the Military
I wrote my first research paper on psychology when I was locked up on an Army psych ward. I had filed a complaint with the Inspector General about nefarious goings on (drug abuse on the job by senior NCOs, abuse of authority by senior officers to cover up the drug trade, etc.) at White Sands Missile Range.
This was 1982, back when the standard operating procedure for whistleblowers was to zip them in a straitjacket and slap them with an extreme psych disorder to discredit their word. It’s a very effective system. Worked like a charm!
The tech paper showed the psychological ramifications of an extreme radiation incident when I was at the US Naval Academy (circa 1975, when they still did radiation experiments). A detailed map of major events in my life to that date showed a repetition, like a radiation half-life, cycling in my life.
The Chief of Psychiatry at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Ft. Sam Houston presented my case to his colleagues at BAMC. Nothing quite like nailing your own coffin shut… I was discharged with a psych diagnosis. I attempted suicide a few months later.
While I was confined at Rusk State Hospital in Texas, I missed a VA disability review, and they bumped my disability rating from 10% to 0%.
A Trainwreck in Texas
From that point forward, I kept a small notebook with psych observations and comments. I had spent six months building a case with my JAG lawyer, Captain Franco, against the wrongful diagnosis by Dr. Durand-Hollis at BAMC. My Medical Evaluation Board (MEB) took three hours. They usually don’t last more than fifteen minutes.
I had written lengthy rebuttals to the diagnoses handed down by the Army psychiatrist and psychologist. They got everything wrong about everything in my life. The officers on the MEB decided I was unfit to serve. Evidently, my rebuttals were signs of severe mental illness.
I put it all behind me and worked my way back into engineering. Via night stocker at HEB, then assistant manager at Sonic Drive-In (both in Cedar Park, TX), and sales/estimating at NPS Industries in Austin, a fabricator for nuclear power plants.
Full Disclosure
I have never been on any psychoactive meds. I saw a VA therapist for a couple of years when I was a consulting engineer in Austin. She let me go, saying, “There’s nothing more I can teach you.” I’d just gotten fired from two engineering jobs in quick succession.
“How about learning me how to keep a job!”
I’ve been rated 100% Permanent and Total by the VA since 2005. I saw a VA psychiatrist early on, about therapy, but she said the VA no longer did that. By that time I had extreme dry eye, and all the meds can make your dry eye worse, so I couldn’t do meds.
In the last 20 years I’ve gotten all my medical care via the VA. No doctor I’ve seen at the VA during that whole time ever asked, “How’s that schizophrenia going for ya?”
My new VA doctor, in July 2026, finally asked. I had to refuse. Don’t want to spend my energy fighting my ire against VA therapists and psychology in general.
Texas is for Haters
In 1997, fired from my third consulting engineering job; I started grad school at the University of Texas. I was a semester away from a Ph.D. in celestial mechanics when they discovered I was schizophrenic. I was expelled with extreme malice six weeks later.
Who knew the plutocracy could operate at warp speed?
The Office of Students with Disabilities was instrumental in my dismissal. Without their rigorous intervention, I would have had a fighting chance.
Redneck Texas bigots, even on campus. Especially on campus! I created a giant website to fight the University, The Texas X Files. A large segment explored schizophrenia, Schizophrenics R Us. (Best viewed on a desktop PC because this is vintage 2002 HTML code.)
The Third Act is the Game-Changer
I fought the campus bureaucracy for two years, after which time I had a math phobia. The VA increased my rating from 0% to 100%. An engineer with a math phobia is useless – dangerous!
When all my appeals were exhausted, and no attorney would take my case to charge Texas with a hate crime, my neighbor suggested. “Why don’t you write a movie about what happened?”
Six months later, I sent off copies of CRASHDOWN to Hollywood. I’ve been studying screenwriting ever since. Several of my scripts have done well in major competitions. I learned character development, subtext – psychology!
I continued to fight Texas to get credit for my research. Circa 2010, I created a website where I used basic psychology ideas to illustrate my orbits research. The gravity of the situation. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. A close encounter with the object of your desire.
Mars Madness or Mathematical Genius?
Then a stroke of luck: I matched my PhD research, a computer optimization of the Earth to Mars trajectory, to the Three Act Screenplay structure. The similarities were uncanny.
When I self-published my research (extracting the 150 diagrams from my formal dissertation, no math), the first third of Temporal Mechanics was my psychology ideas.
That worked so well that I used the same 150 diagrams to create a whole new model of the human psyche. That book was called the Zen of Gravity.
The latest is called Gender Math. It extends my research beyond the basic id-ego-superego fundamentals into a full-blown model of human sexuality, complete with a whole series of stable configurations to match all the new sexualities that have evolved lately.
None of this research has been formally published. Self-published books, however well written and typeset, don’t count. They’re all here as free PDF files.
I still have the math phobia.