Page 3 of Personal Disaster

Marcus Dane has some very wealthy friends.

Are the rules different when you’re besties with billionaires?

While I wait for him to tweet, or not tweet, because maybe I’ve pissed him off and he’s going to try and throw me off his scent, I pull up the dossier I’ve compiled onhim.

I can’t concentrate on the words, though. There’s no maybe about the pissing him off part. I’ve definitely gotten under his skin. I pushed a little toohard.

Besides, I don’t need to go over the dossier again. I’ve memorized every single word init.

Marcus Dane went to MIT, where he met and befriended Jake Aston and Toby Hunt, when they were ordinary young men with extraordinarily big dreams.

Reading between the lines, it would be easy to assume that Marcus was a third young men with equally big dreams, but the career that follows belies that hypothesis.

After graduating, Marcus and Toby headed to California. But where Toby used seed money from Gladiator Inc’s young CEO, Ben Russo, to start his own company, Marcus got a job as a software engineer.

A regularjob.

Because Marcus Dane, best friend to billionaires, was a regular Joe—hypothesis numbertwo.

But after a few years of chasing the tech 401k dream, he walked away from the suburban house and workplace-with-a-gym-and-smoothie-bar, for…

I glance aroundme.

Nothing, really.

Maybe everything.

Trees. Freshair.

Painfully high altitude that sort of makes me faint, although that could also be attributed to the clash of wills with the bearded mountainman.

Freedom.

Hypothesis number three, should anyone still care about Marcus Dane after he disappeared up a mountain, is that he’s seen the inside workings of capitalist, tech-worshiping America, and he doesn’t like it. In fact, he hates it, and now that society has broken down to the point of chaos, he’s going to use whatever platform he can find to ensure the things that really matter to him—the environment, protection of the land and animals, water—have a voice.

No matter what official edict gets handed down from on high, Mr. Alt Park Service won’t be silenced.

As far as I know, nobody has looked at Marcus Dane but me. I’ve run the story in the loosest of terms past two of my favorite editors. Both were open to hearing more, but I needed to put this trip on my credit card because nobody is paying freelancers to hunt stories like this. Not in the heat of summer. Not when there are courthouses and law offices to stalk.

If I wanted to pay the rent, I’d join the stringers from MSNBC and CNN outside the Washington DC law firms and wait for the White House staffers to come to me. Most of them are a sympathetic look away from spilling their guts over coffee.

Except…

I want to pay my rent, but not by lunging desperately at low-hanging fruit.

I want to write a good story. Something I had to dig for, that nobody else has any idea aboutyet.

I want to expose a real truth, which is getting harder and harder to do thesedays.

If I do that, I’ll be able to land a job that pays the rent on a regular basis.

Teach a man to fish, theysay.

Or in 2017…teach a woman to follow a wild hunch, no matter how high up a mountain it dragsher.

---