Urban Thought Collective

About Me:

Destah Owens is a single father of two from Northern California and proud UCLA Bruin who travels the world for his job as a computer engineer. His blog “Souffles in Saigon” is exclusive to Urban Thought Collective.

I sat in coach on my return from Chicago to Oakland. It was a very crowded flight, and even arriving as early as I did, I was unable to secure an exit row seat. But I did get the bulkhead, bulkhead window to be exact. I used to go along with the […]

7:02pm: I parked the Murano in the parking lot at the elementary school, adjacent to my daughter’s middle school where she would be attending and I would be chaperoning the first dance. Although I like to think that my not nearly healed knee made me lag further and further behind as I struggled up […]

I had a dream last night and you know how dreams are. They stretch logic, they’re largely incoherent, but they usually have some sort of story line no matter how twisted. This one was no different, as it moved through the recesses of the far-fetched, in and out of REM-induced introspection, shaken with […]

It’s another glorious Thursday night in the San Francisco Bay Area and me and the crew, or rather, the Crew and I set out to do some celebrating. It’s almost Friday and by all accounts, it has been a rough week. That’s reason enough to celebrate. But we had actually convened for a […]

The first time she ever caught me doing this, my daughter was really perplexed. A notorious ear-hustler, with a future in the CIA at the rate she’s going, she routinely interrogates me about my phone conversations as soon as I put the receiver down.
“Dad, why did you tell that lady that your name […]

I recently paid a visit to Cinnabar’s Wine Tasting room in Saratoga, California. Mercury Rising was the first pour that I would enjoy. Modest, yet confident. Whatever that means! They actually had this set of trading cards with clever wine sayings on them so that you can derive hours and hours of […]

There has always been something about the written word that has fascinated me. It has always seemed to be more genuine than things that I might have heard someone speak in conversation or reported on television.
When I was a kid, the encyclopedia was king. If it said so in there, then it was […]

I was getting cabin fever to the fullest, so I decided not to cancel the trip to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic after all. I had no idea my knee surgery would be this severe, nor did I know that the rehab would be so lengthy. So while I didn’t turn the town […]

A friend of mine summed it up pretty well when he said, “Now I can truly say I’ve seen everything,” after I called him on the phone and told him to quickly turn on his television. Our man Barack Obama was addressing a crowd of thousands in Coral Gables, FL when a group of about […]

The better part of my last few days have been spent with my left knee elevated, lying on my back, and trying to be remotely productive while “tweakin’” off a pain medication that could probably knock out one of those Budweiser Clydesdales. Drifting in an out of consciousness between sessions of icing my surgically repaired […]