JB

I spent Saturday of this past weekend with my old friend, JB.  He is a remarkable man. An unfortunate reality of our society is that remarkable men are few and far between. But ones that become remarkable after life deals them an absolute shit deck of cards are all the more special. JB's shit deck consisted of being from small town, Upstate NY where his mom worked four jobs (F-O-U-R), day and night, her most lucrative being a prison warden. That didn't leave Mom much time to raise Justin, particularly because his father walked out and left her to do it.  JB willed himself into a wrestling program, willed himself into getting good grades, raised his two brothers (six and eight years their elder, respectively), and somehow developed an obsession with Cornell University. It's safe to say that the kid version of Justin had a lot on his plate.  This is a very condensed version of how it all went down:

He got into Cornell. Think about that for a second. Try and get accepted into Cornell WITH parents who can not only pay for for SAT Classes, extracurricular sports programs & summer camps, tutors, etc. but can also afford to raise you.  Take ALL of that out of the equation, and add the task of raising two significantly-younger brothers. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, a betting man would have money on two of three of those boys wind up in prison or dead. Right? Not in this case. JB, as I mentioned graduated from Cornell, and is now an executive on Wall Street. Middle brother is a Dentist and head high school wrestling coach. Little brother was an NCAA Champion wrestler, and is now an Officer in the Navy SEALs, and is single handedly the most impressive human I've ever seen walk G-d's bountiful green earth. Anyways, JB tilled the proverbial soil that wrought this insanely powerful trio.

So JB and I caught up properly in Georgetown. We watched a football game (until then I didn't know GTown had a football field on its campus) that we randomly had mutual friends participating in, walked the Exorcist stairs -- well, JB climbed the wall beside the stairs,

had a beer at the legendary Tombs, and then had another beer at his friend's brand new home in Cleveland Park where Justin regaled us with travel stories. He travels the way we all wish we traveled: he has great stories of immersing with Cambodian locals, for instance. Most recently he visited Japan, where he hiked Mt. Fuji, alone, taking a break only to take a 2 hour nap in a shack on halfway up the mountain. He is inspirational in that he just does it. Many of us are guilty of saying "I want to go to Morocco," and then never actually getting there. JB actually does it. And when those trips compound and all of the stories add up, it makes for a freaking remarkable man.