Home Sweet Home

Today is the day.  On April 10th, 2011 I stepped off the plane and into Vietnam for the first time.  It feels appropriate to tell the story of that very first morning.  I wrote this shortly after we moved and I've been saving it for today.  Enjoy.

The plane touched down at the Ho Chi Minh City airport.  The long taxi to the gate told me a lot about what I should expect over the next 24 months.  Lining the road were broken down and derelict airplanes and helicopters in various stages of decomposition.  Most looked like they had been parked and abandoned ten or more years prior to my arrival. Looking at them reminded me of how the houses on my street in Las Vegas looked during the economic disaster in 2008. There were also local people dotting the runway; families with small children mostly.  They appeared to be relaxing on the side of the landing strip taking in the show of the planes coming and going.  The runway itself was cracked and pocked with weeds and grass growing through.  In this tropical climate, even the most robust concrete cannot escape the penetration of nature.

I exited the plane and headed for customs.  I was relieved to find that there are surprisingly few automatic weapons in Vietnam.  I always notice the airport security around the world toting M16s and AK-47s and think to myself, “why do they need automatic weapons?”  I can understand carrying a pistol or a Taser for the occasional dust up at the coffee bar, but a machine gun just seems like it’s more for show than anything else.  Interestingly, the only place I have seen an AK-47 in Vietnam is outside the American embassy.  Go USA.  But I didn’t see any in the HCMC airport.

I made my way through the customs line and followed the crowd to the baggage carousel.  I managed to locate a cart for my luggage, which was only slightly easier to handle than carrying the 100+ pounds of luggage manually.  All four wheels on the cart turned, so it was nearly impossible to steer once loaded with anything weighing more than ten pounds.  They are also clearly not designed for the thirty-five cubic foot lady bag I was bringing into the country.  I managed to balance my bags like a game of Jenga onto the cart and keep it there to walk 20 feet before being forced to remove it all and put it through yet another baggage x-ray, the fourth of the trip. 

After another minute of hernia inducing lifting and balancing, I got the bags back on the baggage cart and exited the airport.  Two things hit me the second I walked out.  First I was overpowered by the heat.  I lived in Las Vegas for four years, rode my bike nearly every day, and spent most of my childhood in the Deep South.  I have never felt heat this oppressive in my life.  I was already feeling nervous and apprehensive about the trip as a whole considering not a single thing had gone according to plan so far.  With the introduction of 100+ degree heat and 98% humidity my whole body turned into a faucet.  I was finding new and interesting places on my body to sweat.  Second were the throngs of people waiting for the passengers exiting the airport. 

There is a T-shaped aisle that all passengers walk through when they leave the airport creating a gauntlet of families, children, people with valet signs, security with whistles and passengers with hundreds of pounds of luggage all making a disorienting, ear-splitting and chaotic noise.  This was my real introduction to Vietnam.  My hermetically sealed flight into this place gave no indication of what I was to expect in the first 30 seconds of my time in country.  People in front of me were stopping and reuniting with what I assumed were family members, which resulted in a line of traffic not unlike driving through a construction zone.  This was my first encounter with a sensation I would become all too familiar with over the following weeks and months.          

I had been told that the company driver would be meeting me and picking me up.  I had not been told that the weekend I arrived was a holiday weekend.  I scanned the crowd without stopping my precarious load of luggage looking for my name on a sign.  I saw nothing.  I turned and made my way through the rest of the arrival area without seeing anything bearing my name or the company name.  I got on my phone (which thankfully still worked) and called my parents.  I told them I had arrived safely and was looking for my ride that hadn’t shown up.  It was a welcome relief to hear a familiar voice for a few moments before I was thrust, yet again, into the legions of people straining to find their loved ones.

I fought my way back and forth through the crowd for the next twenty minutes looking for something, anything that looked familiar, feeling more and more panicked with each passing minute.  The only thing I had with me was the address to the hotel.  Each time I made my way to one end of the crowd I was stopped by an older man claiming to be a taxi driver.  I rebuffed his repeated advancements, but eventually noticed that he had what appeared to be a credential around his neck.  I reasoned that he wouldn’t bother wearing it unless he was actually a taxi driver.  I decided that I had no choice but to let him drive me to the hotel.  Relenting, I asked him how much to take me to my hotel.  He said “$20 US.”  I asked him how long it would take and he said “45 minutes.”  I said “Let’s Go.”  Thankful to be going somewhere out of the heat and crowd. [Later I learned that a taxi from the airport to that particular hotel costs around US$8, so I got taken.  In my own defense, I was hot and panicking. Twenty dollars seemed totally reasonable given my situation -and in the US, $20 to drive that distance isn't unreasonable.]

He took my cart from me and wheeled it across two streets to what I guessed was the airport parking lot.  When we got to his car, a beat up silver compact 4-door Hyundai, I thought, “My luggage is not going to fit in there.”  I tried to ignore the fact that there was nothing on the car to indicate that it was indeed a taxi.  I moved around to help him lift my bags into the car, but he waved me away saying “I do, I do!”  I obliged and moved out of the way. 

On his first attempt to heft my largest bag into the trunk it would not fit.  His efforts to lift the bag brought on a fit of wheezing and coughing that made me think that he hadn’t done a whole lot of heavy lifting.  Considering he was supposed to be a taxi driver, this didn’t fill me with confidence.  I think of taxi drivers as men who were born to move luggage.  Loading and unloading it effortlessly because that is a significant percentage of their job.  He turned to me and exclaimed, “Beaucoup kilos! Beaucoup kilos!” and waved me over to help.   

We managed to squeeze my largest bag, large enough to hold a medium sized cadaver, into the back seat along with my camera equipment.  The two backpacks were crammed into the trunk. Once the luggage was loaded he ushered me around the car.  I folded myself into the front seat, where my knees touched the glove box as a result of scooting the seat so far up to accommodate my now embarrassingly large amount of luggage.  He plopped into the driver’s seat wheezing like a man who smokes 12,000 cigarettes a day, laughed and said “BEAUCOUP KILOS!” again.  I noticed that he hadn’t returned the luggage cart to its stowing area as one would in the US.  Come to that, I hadn’t even noticed any place to store luggage carts.  They were just drifting around the parking lot waiting to be picked up by a person in need like shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

The engine came to life and we rumbled out of the parking lot and onto the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.  To say that the city is confusing would be an understatement.  For the most part American cities are based on a grid running on a north/south or east/west axis.  HCMC is on an angle running northeast to southwest with streets that cut diagonally across what would be a standard city grid.  The Saigon River meanders and weaves its way through the city creating bridges and dead ends around many corners.  Despite being mostly a grid, the detail that makes this city different in its grid is that there is not a clear pattern between two-way and one way streets.  This can, and often does, make circling the block into a site-seeing adventure that can last an hour or more if you aren’t careful.

About 20 seconds after leaving the airport I found myself totally disoriented and overwhelmed by the traffic.  People had told me there were a lot of motorcycles in Vietnam.  Nothing could prepare me for the number of motorcycles.  I thought I knew what a lot of motorcycles looked like having gone to the Laughlin River Run the previous spring, but no.  There were thousands of them, buzzing like locusts like some kind of alien symphony of honking horns and the Doppler effect created by 100cc engines whizzing by.  My driver handled the car with one hand on the steering wheel and the other moving between the gear shift and the horn.  He honked the horn about every three to five seconds, handing out “beep-beeps” to nearly every vehicle or pedestrian we passed.  Sometimes he would mix it up and usher forth with a “beep-beeeeeep-beep-beep-beep” like he was speaking to the other vehicles in some kind of horn code.

We swerved and cut people off and then would, in turn, be cut off by others like some kind of insane square dance.  It seemed that we were nearly in about 35 accidents.  Accidents which included, but were not limited to hitting pedestrians, hitting a bicycle, hitting a motorbike, rear-ending a bus, being rear-ended by a bus, and others that I’m certain have been blocked from my long-term memory.  There are nights when I wake up sweating after dreaming about exposed bus and eighteen wheeler tires coming at me, sucking me underneath in a festival of flesh melting and bone crunching agony.  I could see my heart pounding though my shirt.  We made about 47 turns, drove either on the wrong side of the road, or straddling the center line and we may have even taken a momentary detour onto the sidewalk.  It’s all a blur in my memory.

All I could think was “This is home.  I’m home…”

When I read the things I wrote shortly after our arrival what strikes me is how often I refer to the temporariness of the move.  I seem to always work a "well it's only for two years" into it somewhere.  It doesn't feel that way now.  It took a long time, but we finally do feel like this is home.  Moving away will be every bit as difficult, maybe even more so, as moving from other places I've loved in my life.  Moving away from Vietnam will be much more difficult than moving away from Las Vegas.

This year has gone by fast.  I'm thrilled that Reyna encouraged us to take this challenge.  If it wasn't for her we wouldn't be here.  When I think about all that we've learned and experienced it's been one hell of a year. 

The Safety Dance

In anticipation of the one year anniversary of our arrival I've been reading a lot of stuff I wrote before I created the blog.  It's a lot of fun to read what I was thinking in those days.  One of the pieces I wrote discusses my impression of traffic in the city.  When you first arrive in HCM, the traffic is what immediately leaps out.  It's chaotic and it's frightening.  This is not helped by the fact that accidents occur with alarming regularity.  If you've been in the city for more than a few weeks and haven't heard the tell-tale crunch of plastic under tires, or the sickening squeak of skin on glass windows then you need to get out more.  So I thought I'd spend a little time talking about safety.

If you are considering moving to Vietnam here's the biggest piece of advice I can give you:  You don't know what you don't know.  There is very little you can do to mentally prepare yourself for what you're going to experience.  This is mainly due to the fact that there is no place you can go that simulates living here, especially in the US.  The adjustment will be huge and it will take time.  People we met told us the same thing in our first weeks.  We shrugged and laughed because there's really nothing else you can do.  But the reality of your move will hit at around the three month mark.  Everything stops being novel and starts being LIFE. 

Personal Safety:  There isn't a whole lot of violent crime here.  Most of the crime westerners are exposed to is petty theft and scam jobs.  It's important to remember that no matter how shoestring your move or visit is, you will be perceived as rich by local people.  In the US we were barely scraping by.  We weren't starving, but we were living paycheck to paycheck.  I tried to save as much as I could, without a ton of success.  Here we don't have that problem.  We've had no problems saving money while we've lived here.  If you find a job in Vietnam that pays $30,000 a year, you're doing very well compared to local standards.  You won't be rich, but you'll be free to do whatever you want. 

The best personal safety advice I can give is to use common sense.  If you make an effort to blend in, then you really shouldn't have any trouble.  I've never carried my wallet or passport underneath my clothes.  For a while I stopped carrying my wallet and just carried money and a few essentials in my pocket.  It makes sense because you'll never use your credit cards with any regularity and you don't need your diver's license.  Besides if you're not carrying your credit card you won't be tempted to spend frivolously.  The best wallet is a rubber band.  

If you are a lady, I recommend saying goodbye to your big-ass purse.  First of all, you don't need all that crap.  Second of all, you might as well put a t-shirt on that says "ROB ME."  Big purse = Big money.  Just about all the horrible crime stories we hear are ladies getting dragged behind motorbikes by their purse strap.  You think you're being safe.  Carrying it over your shoulder and on the non-street side.  But the fact is, if someone wants to rob you, it's better to just let them snatch and go.  Inconvenient, yes, but better than 900 stitches to the face after a 120ft skin sleigh ride through streets riddled with pot holes.  Someone tried to snatch Reyna's purse.  She managed to get away because she was holding her tiny bag under her arm; basically in her arm pit, so the would-be thief couldn't get a good grip on it.  She was able to clamp down and hold it.  It happens quickly.  You won't have time to react.  Best to not even give them a target.

As for the scams around town.  Trip Advisor, Four Square and similar websites and apps are your friend.  Trip Advisor is mostly a bunch of bullshit in the US, but here it's invaluable.  People who live here are generally pretty vigilant about reviewing things.  That will help you avoid shady people and places.  It's okay to ask a stranger you meet on the sidewalk if they have experience with various things.

And that's the big picture thing here.  In the US everyone is obsessed with name brands and looking like they have money.  It was shocking when I went back.  That doesn't happen here.  People still wear "name brand" stuff, but I'm pretty certain Prada doesn't manufacture a line of crappy motorcycle helmets or seat covers.  So leave your Coach, Gucci, Fendi, Prada, Manolo status symbol at home.  If you need that status symbol on you when you go outside, then maybe you should reconsider your destination.  There are plenty of exotic places in the world where rich people can go to show off how rich they are. 

Crossing the Street:  It sounds crazy, but it's important to learn how to cross the street properly here.  Many times you will find yourself needing to cross, but unable to wait for a long enough break in the tangle of motorbikes to get started.  This is covered in Lonely Planet as well, but it doesn't hurt to reinforce it here.  When crossing the street, you just have to go and let the motorbikes dodge you.  The trick is to be predictable in your movements and watch what the bikes coming at you are doing.  Drivers will be obvious as to which way they are going to go around you; either in front or in back.  Maintain a pace that is as steady as possible.  It's generally a bad idea to break into a run or stop.  Just try to walk steadily and deliberately across the street.  Don't step in front of any vehicle that has more than two wheels.  It's likely they will not stop.  If a car flashes its lights at you, that means it does not intend to stop for you, so if you step in front of them be prepared to see what the undercarriage of a Toyota minivan looks like.

Motorbikes:  Once you get used to the traffic, and you will, you may consider getting a motorbike of your own.  There are plenty of places.  I recommend talking to your friends who've been here longer and seeing where they went.  Most people buy second hand bikes; at least most of the people I know bought second hand bikes.  A second hand bike is good to begin on because if it's a piece of shit you don't have to worry about a.) crashing it and beating it up -it's already beat up; b.) it getting stolen -there are plenty of nicer more stealable bikes around town.  Your bike is going to get beaten up.  It's a fact.  In parking lots, they park bikes so close to each other that scratches and minor damage is inevitable.  After we'd lived here for six months or so, I bought a fancy new bike.  Now I rarely ride it because it's "too nice."  I know if I take it and park it someplace I'm running the risk of it getting stolen or scratched up.  If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Now that you have your bike, you have to learn how to ride without killing yourself or others.  Despite how it may look, you can still employ your standard defensive driving skills.  In the beginning it's best to just concern yourself with what is in front of you.  Don't even bother with your rear view mirror(s) and focus on not running into anyone.  There is something of an unspoken rule that everyone is watching what's happening in front of them.  So the person behind you should be watching what you're doing just as you're watching the people in front of you.  As you grow more confident on the bike, you'll find that can look around to make sure you're not merging in front of a speeding taxi or delivery guy. 

Just like everything in life, the key is to stay relaxed and to not panic.  Other bikes and cars will come extremely close to you.  You will get used to it.  The worst thing you can do is jerk away.  If someone's too close to you, either slow down or ease away from them if you can.  If you can't, then try to focus on riding in a straight line.  Just like anyplace else, there are the odd asshole drivers who drive way too fast and recklessly.  Just like anyplace else, there's nothing you can do about it beyond staying vigilant.  My favorite metaphor for driving in Vietnam, and the one I use with people who are learning to drive here is to pretend it's a school of fish.  Where the school goes, you go.  When you stop going with the flow, that's when things get dangerous.  Driving in Vietnam is as much about feel as it is about being alert.  Just like driving on the Interstate in the US, you need to be aware of the big picture in addition to what's going on directly in front of you.  In time you'll find that you're paying more attention to what's going on 20-30 feet in front of you more than the guy right in front of you. 

One of the hardest things for me to get used to is trusting the machine I'm sitting on.  At the end of the day your bike was made in Asia and is being maintained in Vietnam.  Unless you work on the bike yourself, you will never know what kind of condition it's in, how secure the wheels are, how secure the pegs are, how grippy your tires are.  This is probably paranoia from too many bicycle crashes, but it keeps me from driving recklessly.  Because let's face it, riding a motorbike here is outrageously fun and it's about ten times faster than riding in a car.

The other decision you'll have to make is what kind of helmet you're going to buy.  This has been a topic of regular discussion for Reyna and me.  I am a helmet guy.  I don't ride anything with wheels without a helmet.  I've had three serious bicycle crashes in my life.  Helmets are the things that kept me from potentially serious brain injury.  Here's the problem in Vietnam: you can buy a helmet here for less than $5.  If you want a proper DOT US style motorbike helmet, they cost about the same as they do in the states.  If you've lived in Vietnam long enough to consider riding a motorbike, then you will have definite opinions about dropping $200+ on a "proper" helmet.  In addition, a "proper" helmet is HOT and really does a number on your hair.  You have to determine the level of risk you're willing to live with and make your decision accordingly.

If you're visiting and are considering renting a motorbike, here's my advice: You might as well buy one.  There are plenty of places where you can buy a motorbike for a few hundred dollars and then sell it when you leave.  The overall cost will be equal or less than renting a car in the US or Europe and will insulate you from motorbike rental scams.  You also don't have to worry about breaking the bike.  If you own the papers and you crash it, you're out a few hundred dollars.  If you rented a Honda Wave and you crash it you're on the hook for the cost of a new bike; potentially thousands of dollars.  The bread and butter of motorbike rental places are naive westerners who crash their bikes.  If you're worried that your $200 POS bike is going to break down, you're in luck because there's a mechanic on almost every street corner.  They'll patch up your bike for a few dollars.

Here's a quick story about this very thing.  A friend of mine came to Vietnam for five months.  He bought a Daelim 125 motorbike for $400.  He rode it for about four months, spent a hundred bucks or so fixing it when it broke.  Then when he left, he sold the bike for, you guessed it, $400.  So he had transportation for five months for $100 plus gas (around $5-$7 a week).  A rental would have cost ten times that.

So there's a brief and, I hope, helpful primer on safely transitioning to life in Vietnam.  Good luck!

Watching Scotty Die

I was born in Texas*.  Some of my earliest memories are being whisked out of bed in the middle of the night -or at least whatever constitutes the "middle of the night" when you're three- huddling in the hallway between my parents room and mine while wind roared and storm sirens blared.  We never made it on the news.  Our house, thankfully, was never blown into a pile of rubble shown from helicopter view on the nightly news, while we paced the wreckage like ants.  What was left behind was an overriding anxiety associated with severe weather. 

*Please don't hold that against me.  I only bring it up to illustrate a tangential point.  I'm not one of those "Texas Forever" people.  At least I'm not as long as I'm not ensconsed in a Friday Night Lights marathon.

I can remember getting worked up over tornado drills throughout elementary and middle school.  We moved to Georgia when I was nine, which is not as well known as a hot bed for severe weather, but has it's share.  The buildings of the school, especially those of the middle school were actually made from stucco-covered styrofoam, and all the classrooms we used as "shelters" had windows.  We were told that the hill outside the chosen storm shelter classroom would cause any approaching tornado to pass over the building in which we crouched.  I tried not to think about the fact that the building was a lot taller than the hill.  I was relieved that their theory was never tested.  My worries over the stability of the buildings were confirmed over the years, however, as we were repeatedly sent home whenever tornados or other severe storms threatened.  Styrofoam buildings can't be much safer than trailers when faced with 250mph winds.

In Vietnam we had a holiday this past weekend.  Reyna and I had spent the week prior discussing what things we might do with our extra day off.  Mostly we agreed that we'd simply relax and do nothing, but we also wanted to make time to spend with our friends.  Sunday was to be the day we all got together.  We awoke Sunday morning to rain.  Despite it's reputation, Vietnam in the spring time is not a particularly rainy place.  Even in the rainy season, it rarely rains for more than a couple hours at a time.  Sunday was different.  It rained all day.

In the late afternoon, we received a message from our friends that we were invited to their house across town for dinner.  I changed out of my lounging clothes and was sitting on the couch reading while I waited for Reyna to get ready.  I could hear the rain growing harder outside and the wind picking up.  It was nearly dark outside when the power went out*.  A few minutes later Reyna was ready.  The wind outside was gusting loudly down our street.  I grabbed my phone to call a taxi to come pick us up.  After dialing the number and placing the phone to my ear, I heard the "deedle-dee" that comes with a call that can't go through.  Soon we were both frantically calling the taxi company.  No luck.

*It was at this moment I realized that it was the first time I'd been in the house while the Light That Never Goes Out was not burning in nearly two months.  It was uncomfortably dark.  I realize that the LTNGO has become something of a security blanket.

After sitting around and failing to get through to the taxi company, I suggested we walk to the end of the street to try and get a taxi.  I said something to the effect of, "It doesn't look like it's raining that hard.  Let's just walk."  What I'd failed to realize is the reason it didn't appear to be raining hard is because the wind was blowing the rain sideways.  By the time we reached the end of the street, where there were no taxis, we were both soaked to the bone.  This despite both of us wearing raincoats.  Even my hair was wet even though it had been under the hood of my rain coat the whole time.  We trudged back down our dark street to our powerless house wet and defeated.

After changing clothes, we sat on the couch.  Reyna used her laptop as a reading light while she finished her book.  I read on my iPad, but one thought kept turning over in my mind: "we're trapped here."  Soon I noticed that I was getting wet.  Water was dripping, not periodically, but steadily onto my shoulders and onto the floor of our living room*.  I walked up the stairs. When I reached the stairway leading to floor 4 I noticed that the steps were wet. Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're imagining the water.  We spend so much time here in various stages of wet, sometimes it's difficult to tell if things are actually wet or if it's in your head.  In this case, it wasn't in my head.  Rain was blowing sideways into ventilation holes in the walls at the top of our house. The floor there had nearly an inch of water on the floor, which was running down the stairs and dripping through the opening in the stairwell into our living room and onto the couch.  I walked all the way back down to the kitchen on the ground floor, got a bucket, and walked back up to the fourth floor to stop the dripping water from ruining our already beat-to-hell couch.  Out of breath, I returned to the couch.

*A little home tour.  Our house is five stories tall.  The living room is on Floor 2 (or Floor 1 if you usually count G, 1, 2... as they do in Vietnam.  For our purposes we'll use the American way of counting floors: 1, 2, 3...).  There is an opening at the stairwell so when you sit on the couch in the living room, you can look up and see all the way to the tin roof of the house.

We sat in silence for a while, reading, and the wind sounded like it was dying.  I tried calling for a taxi again.  After about 20 minutes I managed to get through.  I said our address and the dispatcher said, "OK."  Sometimes it's hard to tell if they really mean it when they say "OK" because most of the taxi dispatchers speak little to no English.  I tried to think positively as we sat in the kitchen and waited.  I would occasionally walk to the front door to look down the street for our ride.   None came.   The wind was still whipping down the street in loud, freaky gusts.  I stood at the door to our house wondering what we were going to do.  There wasn't any actual food in our house.  I was doing a mental inventory of food in the house.  We had crackers.  That's pretty much it besides condiments.  We hadn't bothered going to the store because we assumed we would be eating with our friends. 

When no taxi came, we took off our clothes, put them in a bag and put on our wet clothes from earlier.  I soaked my ass backing the motorbike down the ramp and into the street.  We decided we'd just drive until we found some place to eat that was open.  We drove down the street, which was littered with fallen trees and branches.  A stack of bricks sitting next to a house that's being built nearby had blown over, broken bricks covered our street.

We drove down Thao Dien road and arrived at an open Mekong Merchant.  It was operating despite more than half the restaurant being open to the outside.  I walked straight to the bathroom and put on a pair of dry shorts.  The servers were all walking through the fallen leaves and branches barefoot while people sat and ate.   The whole scene was utterly surreal.  We drank a pleasant Cabernet, Reyna ate duck and I had lasagna while the storm blew around us, occasionally threatening to get us wet at our table.

I started writing this post with intentions of saying something about how even though we've lived here for a year, it still finds way to frustrate us and leave us feeling like hopeless tourists.  It's amazing how helpless this place can make you feel sometimes.  Just when we think we've got this place clocked, we get thrown yet another curve.  Now I'm going to throw you one.

The first few months we lived in Vietnam I worked alongside a guy I'll call Scotty C.  He worked for another company, but we were working together on the same project.  We weren't what I would call pals, but I liked him a lot and saw him as a super smart guy.  I always like to hang around with super smart people.  It's amazing what you can learn.  Scotty was no different.  Unfortunately, that project we were supposed to share never got off the ground, and I never got to know Scotty as well as I wanted.  Scotty's company was forced to send him back to the US, simultaneously laying him off.  That was in October 2011.

Yesterday morning, we awoke with the storm past.  The power had come back on sometime in the night.  I awoke to an email telling me that Scotty C had secured a job interview on Friday.  He was riding the bus to the interview and fell asleep.  At least that's what people thought had happened.  In reality, Scotty had had a heart attack, lost consciousness and stopped breathing.  Because no one could tell he wasn't asleep, he was not breathing for an unspecified amount of time.  The email stated that he'd been put into a medically induced coma and had his body temperature lowered in an attempt to reduce the swelling on his brain.  Doctors hoped that this would mitigate potential brain damage.

This morning I received an email stating that the doctor's efforts were in vain.  Scotty C was declared brain dead at 10:31am on Monday morning.  They are taking him off life support tomorrow and he will be all-the-way dead.  I also learned from the email that because the company he worked for was a joint-venture partner with the owner of that particular project, he was never paid for the work he did while living in Vietnam.  Despite this shocking news I'm happy to report that Scotty is an organ donor, and his tragedy means that others will be able to continue living*.

*Hey you!  Be an organ donor.  Just because you died doesn't mean the kid that could use a kidney needs to die too.  Be a big helper, be a life saver.  Just because you're scared of knives and surgery is not an excuse.  I'm terrified of being cut open and having my organs removed, but you know what scares me more?  Watching someone I love waste away while they wait for someone unselfish enough to share organs he no longer needs.  While you're at it, get on the bone marrow donation list too.  You don't even have to die to give that.  Sure you'll have to endure a foot long needle in your pelvis, but that's a hell of a lot better than living with cancer.  Get off your ass and do your part.  Think how good it will feel if you get the opportunity to save a life.

We spent an evening getting wet and sitting in the dark.  We weren't hungry or sick or in any real danger, even though that wasn't entirely certain for the majority of the evening.  Stuff like this makes me realize just how lucky we are to be living this experience, even when it sucks.  It's easy to forget that most people couldn't or wouldn't do what we're doing.  And even if they could, they may not have the opportunity to stay long or share the experiences we've had the fortune to share.

Sometimes I get frustrated that because we've been here so long, I'm starting to find our lives a little dull.  We used to never have "normal" days, but now we have them all the time. When life feels a little dull, it makes it harder to write in this blog, which is one of my favorite things to do.  Scotty C's story is an excellent reminder that even when life feels dreary or frustrating, things can always be a lot worse.  Every day we get to live here and have this amazing experience is special, even when it's damn hard.

Scotty C, we weren't close, but I can tell you the world is a little less fantastic without you.  We weren't that close, and I never said anything, but I respected you, feared you a little and thought you were a great guy.  My impression on you was likely minimal at best, but you're impression on me was greater than you probably ever realized.  I'm happy that I knew you for an all-too-brief amount of time, and I wouldn't trade it.  Thanks and RIP.

P.S.  Now that you've reached the end of the post, you may think that the title is a little rude.  I've been using song titles to name the posts for a while, and this one popped into my mind. Many times when I start writing a post, I don't know where I'll end up and today's was evidence of that.  If you're offended by the title, I urge you to listen to the song here.