“We’ve all got a lot more living to do now”
“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience that supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.”
-Introduction to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
If you’re reading this, that means you are alive, which is awesome and amazing and miraculous. You really are lucky, you know? I mean, come on! Alive AND reading my blog at the same time? You’ve won the existential lottery! Okay, sorry about that. I’ve got to pump up my blog a little, it gets insecure sometimes, you know? In any event, I’m glad you’re here. This is a very important moment for both of us. It’s NOW o’clock. There’s never been any more possibility or perfection than there is right now. I think I stole that from Walt Whitman. Oh well. He’s not alive right now. Finders keepers.
You may never have thought about it this way, but when you walk away from this screen, there will be countless swarms of spirits sitting on the sidelines of existence, shouting at “THE Coach” to let them back into the game. I’m not sure how to frame this in a scientific sense. Maybe it has something to do with anti-matter or dark energy. Regardless of the logical validity of my claim, these spirits will wail and scream and stomp their feet because they were taken out of the game and put on the bench before they even got tired. Now if this Coach is anything like my high school basketball coach, their complaints and sincere insistence that they can come in and hit a 3-pointer better than those idiots in the game right now are falling on deaf ears. Although I somehow think THE Coach is a little more competent than my high school basketball coach, there never has been and never will be a better time to prove you belong in the game than NOW.
As you’re reading this, perhaps you just played a round of golf, or watched your favorite show with a friend, or got stoned and listened to a record that was amazing, or you just finished some boring paper work at the office because that’s what you gotta do to survive. And you’re thinking, who are YOU to tell me how to live? Well, I’m just another human, trying to figure it how himself. And you’re right, I can’t tell you anything. But I can give you a hint based on my experience. After all, pretty much everywhere I’ve gotten in life has been from hints that other humans have given me, so I feel obligated to pay it forward. Thus, the best hint I can give you that was once passed along to me is this: if you’re not enjoying life right now and haven’t in a while, those spirits on the sidelines might be really pissed off at you when THE Coach takes you out of the game and puts you on the bench with them…permanently. That might make absolutely no difference in terms of your longevity on the Magic Fun Time Spin Ball. The Coach always has mysterious reasons for ordering players to do what they do and playing them when he does. So it might not matter right now that the spirits are jealous of you and writing in their sports blogs that you suck and are paid way too much in terms of living moment currency. But even so, when you are taken out of the game, you may be subject to a lot of what could have been easily avoidable harassment from the spirits who didn’t get to live as much as you have because you didn’t use your life as well as you could have.
I’m not pointing the finger. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that the unique curvature of the Earth and the universe makes it so that every time I point my finger, I’m pointing it back at myself. Whatever I write about trying to live life to the fullest and so forth I’m mostly writing as a reminder to myself. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, maybe you won’t. But it can’t hurt. If anything, you’ll say, “I’ll show that stupid pale freak how to REALLY live life, and go do something he would NEVER do, that hypocritical littlewuss!” Which would make me very happy, although the pale part might hurt my feelings a little. I'm only human.
And I know as well as you do that sometimes you just can’t enjoy life because it sucks. Sometimes it has to in order to get you to the bliss. The classic roller coaster metaphor about life comes to mind: it’s got to go the bottom if you want to get to the top again.
Listen: all I’m saying is that if you’re finding life to be one dull day after another, you CAN change things. It IS possible. Maybe you’ve got certain circumstances that are holding you back, and it will require some patience until you’re given a window of opportunity. But in the long run, the only things holding us back besides the laws of physics (which are far from being completely figured out) are ourselves and our own fears about life.
Right NOW I am doing my best to prove to THE Coach that I belong in the game of life by following my bliss. Specifically, I’m in Oudomxai, Laos. There’s not much to do here, which doesn’t sound very blissful. But there is working internet here, which enables me to indulge in my rambling writer tendencies, which is definitely a part of my bliss, so I’m very happy to be here. Plus I’m alive, which is nice. I think I’ll celebrate that fact by going to China tomorrow. I hear there are things to do there. This is one of the closest towns to the border crossing, so it’s a fitting place for me to write my last blog before I enter the People’s Republic of No Facebook, which will make advertising and distribution of my blog a little sticky.
One year ago at this time I was back home in Cambridge, New York. This time two days ago my parents were there, attending Bill Palinski’s birthday party. I went the last two years, but two days ago I was in Laos, so it didn’t really make sense for me to make the trip. But I’m doing my best to celebrate Bill’s birthday by living the life I love. Following my bliss. Doing things that make me smile or give me goose bumps. Sometimes I do things that give me traveler’s diarrhea, which sucks, but I suppose it’s all part of the bargain of eating food in underdeveloped countries. And when I get diarrhea, I think, “Hey, at least this means I’m alive!” Okay, I don’t really think that, but maybe I should from now on.
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I’ve been traveling in Asia for 139 days. I will not return home for another 70 days. In one week I will surpass my previous record of self-chosen exile, set in New Zealand five years ago. The last 31 days since I wrote have been amazing, as usual. If you view the world from the point of view of fate or all powerful divine plan or determinism or what not, I am extremely lucky and fortunate so far. If you view it from the personal free will and choice side, I’m really happy with the choices I’ve made so far. And I owe a lot of those to Bill Palinski.
Bill Palinski is dead. You are not. I bet he really wishes he could get off the spirit sidelines right now and read my blog himself. Or at least dance and laugh. Take one more risk. Bitch slap me for egotistically building up my blog because he’s BEEN the entire cosmos and knows what’s really important. Maybe. I don’t know anything about death, whether or not it’s actually a bad thing for the deceased. I know it’s a natural part of life. Based on my sister’s reaction and the looks on the faces of his family at his wake, I know it’s absolute agony for the one’s who have to go on living without their deceased loved one. Whether or not Bill is experiencing unimaginable eternal ecstasy in a dimension and state of consciousness that exceeds all human understanding won’t change the fact that his family, friends and my sister really fucking miss him with all their hearts and wish he was still making them smile and laugh with his magnetic presence.
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When I was a younger living thing, I think I did a pretty good job of using life well, but not always. I was reeeeeeeeally afraid to try new things. Mega afraid of new things. Like unfamiliar food. Or talking to girls that filled my stomach with Finnish butterfly tornadoes. Or new ideas that didn’t fit with my current safe ones about life (many a stubborn argument with my sister where I defended the unquestionable supremacy of the United States, illegality of drugs and superiority of logic over art come to mind…man, now I want to bitch slap the younger me). I played sports and laughed with friends and did a lot of cool things that lots of young kids do, but the trepidation and depression of adolescence really held me back. Hell, I didn’t even get the courage to ask a girl on a date until I was 17.
In college, after two years at Cornell, I still didn’t know how to grab the bull of life by the horns. I was getting better by my sophomore year, no longer spending Friday nights in the dorm playing Mario Kart, and instead finally loosening up to the idea of having a beer or a smoke with other young people here and there. Socializing, talking, laughing, those sorts of things. But I was still spending far too much time in my room on nights I should have been experiencing other human beings, or sadly pining for some faraway love that I was too afraid to approach, or attending the first meeting of some interesting club or experience and then never going back because I didn’t feel confident enough to talk to anyone. I had devised a safety bubble for myself, that offered perfect isolation from emotional let down’s and social embarrassment. I know I’m not the first college student to feel this way. But if the world were only 100 people, only one of them would get a college education. And maybe that person’s pinky finger would get the chance to have an Ivy League education. Imagine how the rest of the body would feel about that pinky curling up into the fetal position with his door locked on Thursday nights because it felt safe and at least couldn’t risk being hurt that way? The body would probably “accidentally” smash the pinky in a car door or something.
Sometimes I had daring ideas like studying abroad, although the country I visited would have to speak English. Maybe a place like Australia. I was always fascinated by the Outback when I was a child. I went to several introductory meetings held by the Study Abroad Department but never took any further steps beyond that. My sister was always going cool places like Germany and France and Russia, but I didn’t have the balls to leave behind everything and everyone I knew for a little growth experience.
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When I last wrote, I was in Dalat, Vietnam. I’d been feeling very weak but still anxious to go explore the surrounding area. Sometimes life puts you on the sidelines for your own good. I remember spending a lot of time in bed reminding myself that this was just a necessary step in my journey to get me where I needed to be. After all, I’d just written a blog about the Butterfly Effect and the interconnectivity of all things and events, as illustrated by a sentence in my only novel (“A butterfly flapping its wings in Finland could cause you to lose your socks wherever you do your laundry”) and my run in with three Finnish guys and a British guy wearing a Butterfly Effect T-shirt in Bangkok two years later.
After a few days of much needed rest, I went on an Easy Rider tour. These are given by old guys on motorcycles who take you wherever you want to go for a few bucks. So on the first day of spring I didn’t have the strength to climb a mountain as I had hoped, but I did walk behind a waterfall, through a pine forest and under a gigantic statue of an enormous smiling Buddha. This statue will always be my favorite religious sculpture ever. You never see them SMILING. And this guy looked like he’d either just had the best orgasm or bong rip or piece of pizza or heard the best joke of his life. I mean that grin was fantastic. I tried to wear it myself the rest of the day. I didn’t have bong rips or orgasms or pizza on the back of that motorcycle, but I had life and bliss running through my veins, more than enough fuel for a big old Buddha grin.
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I spent the evening of April 24, 2004 sorting through my parents’ old vinyl record collection and my sister’s 1960’s CD’s. After years of resisting out of a sense of sibling rivalry, I’d finally come around to embracing some genuinely quality music. One of those CD’s was The Last Waltz by The Band, which I had never listened to before. I put it on the stereo full blast while I rummaged around the basement, feeling a magical tingling every time I pulled out a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid or Tommy. And I was really loving The Last Waltz. Toward the end of the album, Bob Dylan joined The Band on stage for a special version of Forever Young, a song I had never even heard of until this night:
The next morning my friend Dan woke me up with a phone call. It was pouring rain outside, typical for New York in April. “Bill Palinski died,” he said.
“Huh?” I replied. I couldn't have heard him right. Bill was my age. People my age didn't die. It was like some unspoken rule of my reality thus far. But my mom appeared in my doorway with tears in her eyes, and I knew it was true.
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Bill Palinski was in my graduating class of 79 at Cambridge Central School. I was not a close friend of his, but he was my older sister’s best friend. He was one of those special people who seemed to transcend social cliques and have relationships with everyone. I remember when I was 15 my parents offered to give him a ride to the SAT II with me. I hardly said anything the whole way there or back, but Bill managed to carry on a decent conversation with my father. I remember thinking how amazing it was for someone to be able to do that. Not because my father’s a bad conversationalist (bring up duck decoys and he won’t shut up for hours…love you, dad). I just couldn’t put myself in his shoes. If the Palinskis had given me a ride instead, I would probably blurt out one-word answers to any questions intended to open me up a little. Even though I could act like a hyped up maniac with my close friends, I was just really shy with people I wasn’t already comfortable around. But Bill didn’t seem to care. He came off as very mature and at ease in any surroundings. I was really impressed. Even a little jealous, perhaps.
Bill always seemed to be around when I got into car accidents. Let me explain.
On Columbus Weekend 2001 I was a senior in high school and my sister was home from college with all of her friends. The night before I had finally mustered up the courage to tell a girl I really liked her and wanted to be her boyfriend, and she turned me down because she was in love with Bill. Bill was gay, although not openly, and I pretty much suspected he wasn’t interested in girls since every other girl in our grade had a crush on him and he didn’t seem to ever date any of them. In any case, my persistence convinced her to be my girlfriend months later (although she dumped me after 5 weeks! It surely wasn’t meant to be). The night after she turned me down, my friend Brad cheered me up over some Clint Eastwood movies (which turned into a weekly tradition we dubbed “Sundays With Clint”) at my house and I drove him home late at night. On the way back two deer jumped in my path and instead of running over them I swerved off the road thinking I could avoid a collision altogether. Instead I smashed into a telephone pole that had been concealed by darkness until it was too late, snapping it in half and causing power lines to come crashing down around me, but luckily not on me. If some butterfly in Finland hadn’t flapped its wings at the exact split second that it did, you wouldn’t be reading this right now (Hey! Stop wishing it hadn’t!) Anyway, my dad’s car was totaled. Since my dad is an awesome human being with an amazing sense of humor, he overcame the initial shock of seeing his beloved Volkswagen in such a state and managed to be joking about it by the time we got home. And when we got home, Bill Palinski was sitting at our table. The guy who had indirectly caused me such heartbreak was waiting there. I held no feelings of animosity toward him at any time, because I knew it really didn’t have anything to do with him, especially since my mom had just told me he was gay in response to hearing my story of recent heart break. And after my sister and her friends left once they saw I was okay, Bill stuck around and joined in the fun of making jokes with my dad. He really cheered me up after the most traumatic experience of my life.
Months later I was at a They Might Be Giants concert in Massachusetts. My first rock concert. Hey, we’ve already established that I was behind the social curve growing up, so let’s not rub it in, okay? Besides, they really rocked the house. Bill was there too, with some other friends. Afterward, my friends and I were so pumped up about the show that we decided to get some food to calm down. I raced across the Burger King parking lot, unaware that the lack of street lights was concealing some evil (evil I say!) curbs inconspicuously located right in the path of my little 1990 Honda Civic hatchback. One “DUDE!” later from my copilot, Brad, and my radiator was leaking fluid all over the parking lot. His dad, a mechanic, had to drive for 90 minutes after midnight to tow us back home. The next day Bill apologized to my sister for not taking better care of me, and I thought that was such a weird thing to say. Maybe he's been making up for it lately. If so, that's damn generous of him, since I'm sure there are way more interesting things going on in the universe for a spirit to check out.
Outside of his presence before and after incidents revealing my vehicular incompetence, we didn’t really have a personal relationship outside of school or my sister. When he came over to visit her we would quote the Simpsons a lot, but that was about it. I also remember us shooting Koosh sling-shots at her one afternoon, her getting really pissed off and accidentally ripping his shirt, him driving away angrily, them not talking for a while and me feeling kind of bad about it all. Who knew a Koosh could cause so much trouble? Anyway, it’s strange how someone you don’t really know can inspire you to change your life so much more infinitely for the better…
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After Dalat I took a bus to Nha Trang on the coast. It was an awe-inspiring sunny ride down from the mountains and through rice paddies and forests. Of course I listened to all those old 1960’s protest songs about the Vietnam War while I watched the landscape fly by. 40 years ago my country was bombing the shit out of this place so that they wouldn’t become socialists. They became socialists anyway. Now they’re pretty much capitalists so that they can interact with the rest of the world. The word “pointless” comes to mind.
In Nha Trang I got off the bus, hopped on the back of the motorcycle and told him to go to the Dive Shop. Earlier in the day I’d run into a pair of Canadian women at the Peace Café in Dalat, an hour before I was supposed to leave. They told me they were going to Nha Trang the next night, and would be staying for free at a Dive Shop through couchsurfing.org. I found the guy online, asked him if I could stay 2 nights, and he said sure. So I arrived at this shop and out front, drinking a beer, is my old Finnish friend from Bangkok, Saigon and Dalat (see my last blog entry about The Butterfly Effect and Finland). He’d left 3 days ahead of me, and ended up here because his friend was interested in diving. I ended up sharing a room with them. Those beautiful butterflies…
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Bill Palinski had been hiking on April 24, 2004, in the woods outside of Earlham College, where he attended school in Indiana. He and his friends were celebrating his 20th birthday four days late. At one point he slipped while crossing a river and bruised himself. He and his friends returned to school so he could be treated by the nurse. They cleaned up his scratches and figured he would be fine. Hours later he passed out in his dorm room and his friends rushed him to the hospital. He was bleeding internally. The doctors brought him back once, but soon he was gone for good.
It turned out he had mononucleosis and was completely unaware of it. Although his spleen was dangerously enlarged, he was otherwise asymptomatic, and thus didn’t have any reason to go to a doctor and get the steroids that would normally treat the condition. When he fell (or possibly the night before at a dance), his spleen burst and he began to die inside, completely unaware. In other words, you might say that God fucked him over big time. He didn’t get drunk and hop in a car or shoot up too much heroin or run into a firefight in Iraq so Uncle Sam could build another Wal-Mart. He was simply enjoying nature with his friends. Why him?
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To me, Nha Trang was just another beach resort area. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it more yourself if you go. Since I’d already spent 10 days at the beach in India and two weeks on a tropical island in Thailand, it wasn’t really my thing anymore. I swam in the ocean and read On the Road while lying in the sand, but after one full day I was ready to move on.
The next stop on my open bus ticket up the coast to Hanoi was Hoi An (I have a theory that the names of most Vietnamese cities are the result of a lazy game of anagrams). This involved a night bus. A sleeper bus, as they call it. And they mean it. When I got on, I saw that the bus was full of horizontal berths for people to barely squeeze into. But you could actually lie down. The ride was still bumpy and curvy as Hell, but I think I actually got a few hours of shut eye.
Hoi An is a charming little coastal town that was mostly unaffected by the war. If you go to Vietnam, definitely check it out. The architecture is superb. Unlike a lot of places in Southeast Asia, you really feel like you’ve stepped into another world here. I could describe it more in depth, but I’ve clearly got other things on my mind in this blog. Since I was anxious to get to Hanoi, I left the next day for Hue.
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The day I heard the news that Bill had died, my dad and I watched Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz. For those who don’t know, it’s a concert The Band gave on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco to mark the end of 20 years of touring. They invited all of the biggest acts of the era to join them on stage: Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond etc. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. It’s not just a rock concert. It’s a Scorsese film.
My favorite parts are when Dylan sings Forever Young (which he wrote for his children) and the end when everyone gets up on stage to sing I Shall Be Released. I don’t think it’s really relevant to go deeply into this now, but I really believe that the universe runs on some unfathomable pattern of song synchronicity that vibrates through our entire beings. And Bob Dylan keeps popping up in mine. It makes sense on a scientific level. After all, superstring theory states that the fabric of the universe is multidimensional vibrating strings; that existence really is music.
Two days later I was back at school, and really upset. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much, but Bill’s death was really affecting me. Nothing could break me from my romantic night wandering around campus, the sky cloudy, the wind persistent, my soul in some strange state that was certainly melancholy, but not depressed. As Butters from South Park would say, I was a feeling a “beautiful sadness”.
My sister’s friend had said that when Bill visited them at college he was always climbing trees, so that to celebrate his life we should all climb something. It felt like advice right out of Dead Poet’s Society. So as I was wandering through the Arts Quad, I climbed up on the stone statue of Andrew Dickson White, the college’s co-founder, and sat on his stone armrest, listening to Let It Be and Stairway to Heaven. If I was in a better mood I would have smiled at all the solitary pedestrians returning from the library who were noticeably fixing their stares to the ground and away from the strange colorful addition to the A.D. White statue.
I returned home that Friday for the wake. I would never be the same after that. Something sparked in me that I will never forget.
At first it seemed like a friendly reunion. It was a gorgeous day close to the beginning of May, and outside the line went down the block and I kept seeing my former classmates. Some looked great. Others looked devastated. As we approached the entrance, we were handed cards with Bill’s picture on them. On the back were the lyrics to Forever Young:
I didn’t really know anything about butterflies or Finland back then, but if I had, I probably would have run down the street screaming like a maniac.
After seeing his cold lifeless body on display and thinking “That’s not Bill,” I went to the next room where they had set out some of his possessions. Needle in the Hay, the most depressing song in the universe, played softly in the background (Richie Tenenbaum slits his wrists to it in The Royal Tenenbaums). There was a copy of an essay he wrote about his experience as an exchange student in Ireland when he was 16. Reading his words about living in another country and getting a real glimpse of something different stirred something in my soul that had lain dormant for far too long. I decided then and there that I would go to Australia…or somewhere. After that I noticed a copy of one of his Simpsons comic books. I burst into tears. I mean I was sobbing like a baby uncontrollably. Eventually my old math teacher, Mr. Lacasse, consoled me. He’d lost one of his sons to cancer years before (that was the first wake I attended in my life). I don’t know who I was crying for, Bill or me. After all, I’d just learned that not only was I really going to die some day, but that I could die ANY day. Scariest shit ever.
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Hue was one of the major battle sites in the Vietnam War near the North-South divide. Many 20 year-old Americans lost their lives here, or their arms or legs. Some lost their minds. It seems like the universal imagination has no shortage of gruesome ways for young people to be cut down early. Does the interconnectedness require it? If one GI hadn’t been killed in Hue or a peasant woman not been raped, would I not even exist? Would Bill never have existed if they didn’t drop the bomb in Hiroshima or the Holocaust had never happened? Did George Bush have to win re-election for me to see Radiohead at Bonnaroo in 2006? If there was no potato famine in Ireland, does my grandfather ever exist? Will my traveler’s diarrhea I had in India decide the outcome of the next presidential election? I should probably ask a Taoist. I doubt the answer is comforting.
I was only in Hue for about 6 hours in between buses, because I was really anxious to get to Hanoi. But I did an Easy Rider tour, checking out a tomb, a bunker on a hill and a pagoda.
The old bunker overlooked a river where the Americans and Viet Minh often clashed. As I stared out into the thick forest across the way, I couldn’t fathom that someone even younger than I was had endured the reality of watching bullets whiz by from unseen assailants in the distance. I’m really damn glad the universe never made me go to Iraq….
After the bunker we visited a Buddhist pagoda. At one point amongst all the aged architecture I passed an old Aston Martin. There was a sign that said “This is the car that the honorable Thich Quang Duch drove to…” and I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Some holy ground this is.” But then I noticed a very familiar picture on the hood of the car. I’d seen it before. On the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s first album. I read further: “…drove to the corner of [so and so] in Saigon before immolating himself to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.” Remember all that video footage of monks setting themselves on fire to protest the brutal South Vietnamese government (the ones we supported)? Well this was the first guy to do it.
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The day after the wake was the memorial service. It was a beautiful spring morning, but the atmosphere inside the church hardly matched the weather. As I took a seat in a pew along with my parents and friend Brad, the sound system played “Mad World” by Gary Jules, one of the most ominous piano openings in music history. Then “Across the Universe” covered by Fiona Apple and “Flake” by Jack Johnson. I noticed that more than half of my high school class was in attendance. And what appeared to be 20 or 30 kids from Earlham College. And dozens of others from what I later learned was a Quaker house he was involved with called Powell House. People had come from far and wide to remember this guy. How did he meet so many people in such a short life? I was about to learn.
Soon everyone became silent as they carried in the casket. Rufus Wainwright covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the sound system. After the President of Earlham College gave a speech about the tragic death of one of their beloved students, the family spoke. I remember his older brother talking about how he couldn’t think of what to say, so he just wanted to talk about a good memory he had of Bill. He talked about how they used to sneak into movies together when they were younger. I never snuck into a movie in my life. I was always afraid to get caught going against “the system”. I pretty much made most decisions with that attitude.
The best part of a Quaker service is that instead of some guy in a robe droning on and on about God and giving some generic speech about the unique individual’s seat next to God in the Kingdom of Heaven just like everyone else who ever died, they instead encouraged the people who actually knew him to stand up and share a story about their beloved friend. So many people felt compelled to share stories about Bill that they finally had to close the floor after 90 minutes. I’d never heard such a mixture of laughing and sobbing in my life. At times it was almost (almost) fun. As if the tragedy of his death was easily trumped by the magnificence of his life.
One aspect that really stands out in my memory is all the stories from people who described situations where they were really shy and scared and Bill came up to them, introduced himself and immediately made them feel better. It turned out he was the only friend for a lot of individuals at times in their lives. I remember thinking, “I want to be the guy who is full of confidence and cheers up the shy people!” After all, I knew how horrible it was to feel petrified with social apprehensions.
Another part that comes to mind now is his mom telling a story about how open-minded and curious the young Billy Palinski had been. When he was 10 or younger (I can’t recall exactly), he actually asked her to take him to a Buddhist temple so he could learn about meditation or something. I don’t think I’d even heard of Buddhism by age 10. I don’t think it stuck, because he ended up a Quaker (by his own choosing, not from inheriting a family religious tradition). But the willingness to just try something new, especially when he was the only kid there, is astounding. And the idea that a practiced and spiritually elevated Buddhist monk could believe in a cause so strongly that he would end his life by burning himself to death in public while others like Bill get pulled out against their will just boggles my mind. Maybe that’s why Buddhism didn’t stick with Bill.
At one point a local artist strummed the chords to Forever Young on acoustic guitar while a family friend sang the lyrics. Later, they asked everyone to sing along to Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game. It’s the story of a boy growing up and all the wonders and dreams and experiences he has on the way. In the song, the boy grows until 20 years old and it’s understood that he has new and better dreams coming his way. But Bill didn’t. There were no longer any dry eyes left in the building.
The ceremony closed with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s dual cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World. If you’ve never heard that song, you should download it and save it for a beautiful day. Walk around a lake, sit by a river, or climb up a hill, and just watch people walking by. Your heart will smile. Never fear, this is not a situation that calls for a consultation with a cardiologist. It means you are more alive than usual, which is the best thing there is.
After the service, there was a gathering at the family’s home, just a few minutes from my house. I recall one of my classmates’ parents remarking that we “all have to do a lot more living now.”
Heeding her advice, I walked into the Cornell Abroad office two days later and picked up an application to go somewhere I’d never been before.
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I finally arrived in Hanoi after a 14 hour overnight bus ride. The city really has a different feel from the rest of Southeast Asian cities, probably because of the French architecture. I really dug it. Vietnam has the highest rate of motorcycle use in the world, so when you cross the street in a busy city, try not to be freaked out by what appears to be a thousand-participant motorbike race about to start to your left, the unified roar of engines revving akin to what I imagine would be the sound of the start of the apocalypse.
There were two reasons I was so anxious to get to Hanoi. The first is that it was the departure point for Halong Bay, one of the most beautiful areas in Asia. The second was that I wanted to get things going on my Chinese visa, which takes five days at least. Since America makes it hard for the Chinese to get visas, China makes it hard for Americans to get visas. Everyone else pays about $40. Americans pay an extra hundred dollars. I was low on money (still am), so I reminded myself of getting ripped off at the Cambodian border and how worth it that country was. So it’s now my job to make China worth those extra hundred dollars. I’m going to enjoy it 100 dollars more than any citizen of any other country could! Take that, you interconnected butterflies!
My first night I went to a jazz club with a French girl (and her brother) that I met on the bus. We were all sharing a room and decided to take in some of the night life. They were leaving for a 1 night-2 day package tour of Halong Bay the next day. I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do. In my heart, I just wanted to go to Cat Ba Island, which is a little south of the Bay and still involves a ride through it.
I’d first heard of the bay during a fortuitous motorboat ride in Kho Phan-gnan, Thailand. I was riding with a Canadian English teacher and his Chinese wife (wasn’t planning to go to China at that point). I was bemoaning the lack of kayak rentals on the beach, because I really really love kayaking and I hadn’t done any yet on my journey. He told me that if I wanted to go kayaking I should check out Halong Bay in north Vietnam and stay on Cat Ba Island. Since then, I’d heard a lot of bad reviews of the Bay because the tours really were a “get what you pay for” deal. And since I didn’t have a lot of money, it looked like I wasn’t going to get a good experience. When I asked fellow travelers about going straight to Cat Ba Island, they said it would probably be very difficult and involve advanced planning (something I haven’t really been doing during this adventure).
At the jazz club I was joined by a Canadian pianist who was trying to escape from a weird elderly German guy who was creeping out everyone in our corner with his strange toasts and dancing. Somehow we got to talking about the most talented musician of our time, Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, probably because we were at a jazz show and I tell most people about her when they bring up music or pianos or Japan, and we really hit it off because he’d actually heard of her. You'd think that wouldn't be surprising given my claim that she's the best in the world, but it is. Soon the conversation turned to Cat Ba Island, which may or may not be more famous than Hiromi, depending on which circles you hang out in. He and his girlfriend were planning to go straight there for $12 instead of paying $90 for a 3 day tour where everything was regimented and done with a group of fellow tourists (plus only one hour of kayaking). I told him what others had told me, and he laughed and said, “If you really want to do something your way instead of the tourist way, you can pretty much find a way. It might be a little more inconvenient, but you can do it.”
He was right. Two nights later I was paying $5 for a room on Cat Ba Island.
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At the last minute I changed my mind and went to New Zealand. I laugh now to think about my fears when I embarked on that journey, because New Zealand is infinitely safer than anywhere I’ve been on this journey. But it was still terrifying to ride to the airport with the realization that I was going to an island on the other side of the world where I didn’t know anybody for five months.
Five months later, I’d made unforgettable friends who still stay in touch, seen some sights that unfortunately might never be topped (sunset on Milford Sound…), and changed in ways I didn’t understand until afterward. My senior year of college I made more friends than I had the previous three years combined. I got involved in more activities, had more fun and generally loved life more.
If it hadn’t been for the New Zealand experience forcing me to hit the social reset button and just risk saying “Hello” to strangers over and over again, I never would have had the courage to move down to New York City on my own the following year and pursue my lifelong dream of being a writer.
As great as it all sounds, the pesky specter of logic keeps popping up in my mind, infuriating me with childish taunts that this chain reaction of life affirming behavior could never have come about without Bill’s death…
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Have you ever seen King Kong (the new one)? Remember that freaky island? Or how about Jurassic Park? Well, if you ever go to Cat Ba Island, you’ll have déjà vu. It’s freaky. It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming. It’s awesome. It’s right up there with the Himalaya on my Asian highlights reel.
My first full day I rented a kayak for $5 and went out on my own for 6 hours. Unfortunately they only had double kayaks, so steering was tricky, but it was better than no kayaking. I began by paddling past the floating villages that inhabit the many harbors of Cat Ba. To keep up the movie reference theme of this blog, I felt like I was in Pirates of the Caribbean. After about thirty minutes of this, I got beyond some karsts and I was completely alone.
Before I continue, I must explain karsts. They’re enormous limestone hills jutting out of the water, covered with green bushes and plants, and very vertical. In Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island they are everywhere, on land and in water. It’s really strange. And magnificent.
Soon the clouds cleared out and all I could hear was birds chirping. No boats motoring by. No tour guides shouting, “Now we meet at 6:00 at the hotel! You will store your things in your room! At 6:30 we gather in the lobby for dinner! Dinner finishes at 8:00! Then you go to bed! Tomorrow morning we leave at 7! We kayak for one hour! Then we return to boat!” I’m not exaggerating, because I rode with one of the tours to get to the island, and this is what they said to the passengers. The guide even smacked one of the passengers for complaining about his food.
Right now words won’t do justice for this experience, but floating around that day was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Sometimes you are lucky enough to experience something that stirs some extra soul into your synapses. At times it felt like more than I could handle.
Okay, I can’t leave it at that. Joseph Campbell, take it away!:
Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: "When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity." Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence.
That will do, Joseph. That will do.
Two days later I went on a 17 km hike through the jungle, over hills and rocks and through dense bush. I was accompanied by a lovely German couple and an amiable Vietnamese guide. We ate lunch in a secluded village and rode a small boat back to our starting point for an hour at the end. I sat on the front of the boat, listening to Phish’s Prince Caspian, of course. Prince Caspian is from the Phish album Billy Breathes, which I discovered one month before Bill Palinski died. It's got three of my favorite Phish songs on it: "Free", "Bliss", and "Prince Caspian". Not to mention "Billy Breathes" ("above the trees where Billy breathes, we float upon the air, ohhh sing softly...). I discovered at Bill’s funeral that his family always called him “Billy”, even though in school he was always Bill to us. I remember thinking that day that Billy can’t breathe right now, so I’ll have to breathe all of this in for him. I took a lot of deep breaths and smiled a lot during that adventure.
At one point during the hike I was thinking about Bill. In fact, I was thinking that “Billy still breathes”. That God is everything, that is there is no death, that life is a dream and all is an illusion, and that we’re all part of the universe and the universe is constantly alive, so we should never worry. It’s just an ego thing. Our spirits get recycled and renewed into psychic energy that we can’t comprehend, time is an illusion and even though I think Bill is dead in my timeline right now he’s still alive and spreading bubble wrap outside his friend’s dorm room in some other dimension. As if to test the sincerity of my thoughts, the universe pulled an invisible rug out from underneath me when the thoughts “Billy breathes” crossed my mind and I slipped on a rock and fell on my back. It scared the living fuck out of me. I remember thinking, “I don’t have mono I don’t have mono I don’t have mono I don’t have mono”. I guess it called my philosophical bluff.
When we got back I went back to my room and finished Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now there’s a guy who knew how to grab the universal bull by the horns and tell it how things are going to be! I would later read another of his books, Kingdom of Fear, which is basically a summary of all the craziest trouble he’s gotten himself into, and somehow always gotten out of. Hunter later blew his own brains out because he’d simply had enough. They shot his ashes out of a cannon to Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man. Anyway, I already knew what this encounter with Dr. Gonzo meant for the next day…
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From Joseph Campbell:
"Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss."
Friends! I have been around the world, I have seen sights that have made my soul cry with shame and shake its figurative fist at the heavens. I have seen beautiful sunsets unrivaled in any galaxy, felt warm hearts and received saintly smiles from the poor and downtrodden. I have ridden in planes, trains and automobiles, on tuk tuks, riverboats and motorcycles, and seen jungles, mountains and beaches whizzing by. I’ve met six dozen damsels I would have happily made the love of my life had we more than one hour or one second in each other’s perfect presence. I've even seen an Indian shaman lift a boulder with his cock! But now, yes NOW I finally know the secret! I now know the uncontested best recipe for bliss in the universe:
Take 1 Motorcycle (speedometer broken), add a stretch of straightaway, put in your earphones even though they specifically warn you not to in the instructions, crank up the volume full blast, and God help you, you better have Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix on your iPod. If not, Born to Be Wild or Jumpin’ Jack Flash can act as a temporary substitute until you finally get your hands on the most badass song of all time. And if you want to know true bliss, by the time the drums kick in, it would be in your best interest to be flying at the bike’s top speed, whatever that may be.
After an hour of zooming around the island on my beloved speedometerless motorbike, I passed through a village, and a dog ran out in front of me. I wasn’t going very fast since it was a village, but it had been drizzling all day, and the bike skidded out from under me as I hit the brake and I went flying onto my back. Luckily I was wearing a backpack and long sleeves, so the only damage was a small brown mud stain on my right army jacket elbow to forever remind me that you can in fact fall off of a motorcycle. The clutch was a little bent, but an angelic Vietnamese man came out immediately and bent it back into place with his tools. I bought some soda I didn’t want after they refused straight money in return for their kindness. 4 hours of zooming around later I saw him on a different part of the island, and his hand motions indicated that he was amazed to still see me riding around all over the place. Just because you fall off a bike once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get back on. Especially on your first day. Definitely wear a helmet.
The next day I went back to Hanoi, hoping my Chinese visa had been accepted. I’d since read many horror stories of people throwing down wads of cash, hiding out in Halong Bay while they waited, and returning to find out their application had been rejected because the agency they used had filled out something incorrectly but was still going to keep most of their money for their services. Luckily, I did not run into this problem. My passport was returned to me with a beautiful spanking new Chinese tourist visa inside. I actually kissed it I was so happy.
As I walked the streets of Hanoi that night, I felt like something had returned to me. Even though I go on and on about pursuing life to the fullest and blah blah blah, I don’t always feel the bliss of life around me. Just because I encourage others to search for it doesn’t mean I’m perfect at it myself. We’re all trying for it. But on this night, I felt like something returned to me. Something important…
Bill Moyers: Do we ever know the truth? Do we ever find it?
Joseph Campbell: Each person can have his own depth, experience, and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being through consciousness and bliss. The religious people tell us we really won't experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.
BM: Bliss is now.
JC: In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won't get your own experience at all. That is not the place to have the experience--here is the place to have it.
BM: Do you ever have the sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?
JC: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time--namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
BM: Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?
JC: Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one's pity.
BM: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where?
JC: Wherever you are--if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
That’s what it was. The refreshment! My money was basically gone, and I was about to start living on an overdrawn checking account. I didn’t know how I was getting to China or when I was coming home, but I did know that I had just done something I wanted to do without chickening out, and it was marvelous.
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I entered Laos a few days later. That was two weeks ago. In two weeks I’ve been on six different multi-hour bus rides on curvy mountain roads (sometimes unpaved). I’m pretty worn out. Even so, Laos is an astoundingly beautiful country with incredibly friendly human inhabitants. Even though they hold the unfortunate distinction of being the most bombed country in the history of the Magic Fun Time Spin Ball (thanks to Richard Nixon), they really didn’t seem to harbor any resentment. I suppose that was decades ago. Then again, unexploded ordnance from the war kills and maims unsuspecting children every year, putting them on the bench with Bill Palinski.
I wish I had more time here, but my wallet tells me to move on.
My Lao experience began with two fellow Americans. I crossed into the northeast section of the country from Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam (where the French lost a major battle and eventual control of Vietnam back in the 1950’s). I had wanted to cross a day earlier, but my hotel didn’t quite grasp my explanation of the concept of a wake up call and I rushed to the bus station at 6 am for my 5:30 bus only to find that my bus had left on time for the first time in my Vietnam experience. As I bought a ticket for the next day and signed the list, I noticed the name Adam Sterling. I met him in Dalat and again in Nha Trang. The strangeness of our meeting is that he went to Cornell also, class of ’04, two years ahead of me. So fate held me back a day so I could travel with some friends.
The next morning, after buying an alarm clock, I made it to the bus on time and met Adam’s traveling companion, Todd, who also turned out to be a cool guy. The border crossing itself involved several stops on the way to pick up and drop off animal feed, climbing over rock boulders once we left Vietnam and entered some kind of no man’s land, and many windy unpaved roads situated on the edges of many a cliff. Good times, good times.
We pushed on to Oudamxay after our original bus journey ended in Muang Khua, a town in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty much what I like about Laos. But we wanted to get to Luang Prabang, a world heritage site and called by the guide book perhaps the best town in Southeast Asia. We made it there the following day after a long bus ride where the engine started making some horrible clanging sound that everybody simply shrugged off. We met a trio of travelers that consisted of two Americans and yes, a Finnish guy.
The next day I was sitting by the Mekong River, enjoying the sun set and fondly recalling many an afternoon by the East River in Astoria, Queens where I did the same thing. Sitting on a rock and watching the sun light sparkle on a river is one of my favorite activities. Men rode by in narrow river boats and children floated by on tubes, laughing and screaming. I finished my current book, Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson, and then enjoyed the river peace. Before I got too deep into the zone, however, I noticed the Finnish-American trio from the day before floating by in a narrow river boat. They said they were going to an island nearby to play bocce ball and drink Beerlao. The old me would have come up with some lame excuse for no reason, but there was no way I was going to say no and risk embarrassing myself in front of a Hunter Thompson book. Soon enough we were on a sparsely populated beach up river, our company being one Lao woman and her two tiny children. We went swimming in the river (even though they mentioned that the Mekong has sharks in it) and played bocce. Soon I was playing with the little kids and having a blast letting them pour sand on me and vice versa.
Day 2 in Luang Prabang involved traveling to a nearby waterfall. During the 30 kilometer ride we were repeatedly ambushed by guerrilla child soldiers wielding super soakers and buckets filled with water. Lao New Year was a few days away, and one part of the celebrations involves soaking everyone on the street, including foreigners. We were riding in the back of an open tuk tuk, and they took no mercy on us. Sometimes a little kid would pop out from the back of a truck and spray us, other times we would slow down for a bridge and resign ourselves to our soggy fate as we approached a gauntlet consisting of ten children and ten very large, very full buckets.
When we got to the waterfall, it was the most amazing aquatic tribute to gravity my eyes have ever beheld. We immediately went swimming right under it, the enormous power of the falling water blowing us away from the center, but we stayed in as long as we could anyway. When I got out, I felt spiritually renewed, as if God had just planted a big slobbery drool of a kiss all over me. As we walked out, we noticed a “No Swimming” sign. Todd felt a little guilty, but I smiled even wider. SOMEBODY had to experience that!
Next we climbed a large hill that afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding valley area. I got kind of sick of climbing, plus I was listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on my iPod and it was reaching that galactically sublime climax, so I ran up the rest of the way and made it just in time for the loud German words that I don’t understand but never fail to fill me with ecstasy.
Walt Whitman, what do you have to say about this whole experience?
"Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you waded timidly holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair."
Damn straight!
After the fun with the waterfall I decided to go with Todd down to Vang Vieng, another six hour journey. Originally, I had thought I would only stay in the northeast section of Laos because I was pressed for time, but here I was venturing as far south as Vang Vieng, notorious party tube town. People float down the river in tubes from bar to bar while imbibing free shots and “Happy Shakes”. I first heard about this place while riding a ferry across Lake Champlain last August. I mentioned this in a previous blog, but the day before my friends and I had climbed an Adirondack mountain, an experience which propelled me to finally start to aggressively pursue my Asian adventure plans. On this day we were returning from Burlington, Vermont and a Canadian struck up a conversation with me. I told him I was planning to go to Thailand in a few months, and he told me I should definitely go to Vietnam and Laos as well since they’re less touched by tourists. He also told me about this place Vang Vieng. Since it’s the first place I heard about after solidifying my will to travel, I think I pretty much had to go there.
Todd and I arrived in the afternoon and heard that bungalows were a good cheap bet for a room. We heard this from a British couple that I met in Dalat, bumped into again on Cat Ba Island, again in Luang Prabang, and finally in Vang Vieng when we were searching for rooms. I ended up following a woman who sold pancakes and claimed to have a bungalow. We crossed a river, walked past a long line of more modern looking bungalows, crossed a field, and saw two solitary bungalows by themselves, next to her family’s hut. There was a mattress on the floor, a mosquito net and a fan. $2.50 per night. Best of all, there was a gigantic karst not far in the distance, and the only thing in between my porch and this karst was an open field. The sun was just about to set behind it.
When I went back into town, I found out that my friend Ilan who I had traveled with for 2 weeks in India was still in town. This wasn’t a complete surprise, because we’d been corresponding on Facebook a little, but still an awesome surprise when he sat down next to me in the internet café. I also ran into one of the Canadian women from Dalat and Nha Trang, 3 British guys that I met at my guest house in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the British couple again, and a British girl I met in Dalat. At the end of the night a good chunk of them were hanging out on my porch. Who would have thought I would have found a place where everyone knows my name in the middle of Laos?
The next day we tubed down the river. I indulged in a free shot and may or may not have investigated the special shake situation. I think the spirit of Hunter Thompson was watching me, so ask him. My memory’s a little fuzzy. Either way, it was a beautiful peaceful ride down the river with karst skyscrapers towering over me the whole time.
After two days I returned to Luang Prabang, only to embrace the reality that finding a cheap room in the country’s cultural capital the first day of its New Year is an impossible task. I found a room for $20, which is better than the other offers of $50 that I came across. One day you get an incredible bargain, the next you’re ripped off. It evens out, I suppose. Because of this, I split town the next day, taking a bus to Nong Kiaw, a tiny river village surrounded by mountains. I was only there for a day, once again in a $2.50 bare bones bungalow, but it was a perfect peaceful retreat.
By the time I returned to Oudomxai, I was really sick of minivans and drivers who stopped to pick up anything from passengers we didn’t have room for to motorcycles that they tied to the roof.
Final review: 2 weeks in Laos is not enough Laos but certianly better than no Laos.
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"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On An Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. Schopenhauer concludes that it is although our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
If it isn’t evident already, I think a lot. Perhaps too much. I have a really big
imagination. I think about everything the universe has to offer in the form of clues about reality and what it’s all about. As a writer with the unfortunate human trait of egotism, I’m especially wowed by the plot of my life, and the ghostwriter who puts it together, even if there isn’t one, or it’s some strange concept like the will within me that I don’t control. And whether that ghostwriter is ultimately kind or mean or indifferent, or all three. Some people relish in the apathy of the universe, because a God who plans suffering or death is a God that people want nothing to do with. A God who murders Bill Palinski as part of some divine plan is a God my sister wants no part of. The Ghostwriter God who uses the death of Billy the Kid as an indispensable factor in the plot of my life fills me with an overwhelming sense of guilt. I wouldn’t want God to use me that way. At least not until I’ve had my fill of this thing. I love life. In fact, I’ve had certain overwhelming experiences that have CONVINCED me, a former devout atheist, that there is a higher power, called LOVE, which is always good and worth it and knows everything about us and IS us and always works out for the best in the big picture which we never get to see. And then I see the suffering in the world and fear future suffering in my life and or losing my loved one’s and will be damned if I’m going to be the one to try to justify anyone else’s pain for them. It just seems like bad manners. This is from The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James:
"Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse."
So what do we do about the pain and suffering and unfairness in the world?
I have inherited two very old ideas. One is compassion toward the pain and suffering of others, and the acceptance that we cannot remove it from the world. The other is to live more fully than we did before. Every day. Try new things. Meet new people. Be braver and kinder and more creative and less egotistical than we were the day before. I’m not prescribing this just for you. I’m prescribing it for myself too. Because I know that it damn sure isn’t easy.
For those of you out there who really want to do something and are too afraid to, I know where you’re coming from. Life is scary. But it’s your fear, not life’s, that fills you. Let the fear go. Go for life. I’ve been there. You can change.
If you’re worried about death taking you down when you take a risk, consider this. When I was on Cat Ba Island, a waiter wanted me to learn Vietnamese, so he gave me a sheet of phrases that he had come up with translations for. For some reason there were some platitudes in English on the back that he was proud of translating from Vietnamese to English. One of them was this: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. In the long run, safety is no safer than taking a risk”. I think you die more when you run away from the things you really want. As Thomas Mann points out, life really flies by when you don’t do anything interesting:
"Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony--uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time--and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery or air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes."
Here’s another one of my favorites from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt’s son just eloped with the neighbor’s daughter and took a job at a factory instead of going to college. Everyone had just been yelling at him in the next room until his father pulled him aside to give him some rare advice:
"But I've never--Now, for heaven's sake, don't repeat this to your mother or she'd remove what little hair I've got left, but practically, I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know's I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!"
If you don’t live the live you love, who will? And how do you think those spirits feel who were cut short in the pursuit of their bliss as indispensable structuring elements in the plot of your life’s story if you don’t even pursue yours? Hunter S. Thompson would probably shoot your ass with one of the many weapons from his mighty arsenal, and then call you a nazi swine just to rub it in.
I’m tired and hot and there are lots of moths flying around me right now and beetles landing in my hair, so here are some more quotes for you until I can put together some more words of my own:
Ghost of Nathan Fisher: You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it's worth something. Well let me tell 'ya, it's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.
David Fisher: Well what am I supposed to do?
Nathan: What do you think? You can do anything you lucky bastard, you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?
David: It can't be that simple.
Nathan: What if it is?
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"And I don’t know how a man decides what’s right for his own life, it’s all a mysteryyyyy…"
My second to last night in Dalat I was lying in bed trying to sleep. I’d spent the day with a cool Norwegian girl who was also doing the ‘round the world tour. Most of my strength was back, but I was still trying to remind myself that the timing is always right and that I shouldn’t get impatient about moving on. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I turned on the TV, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was on. It was at the part where he talks about a series of events and describes how if any one little thing had gone differently, the whole future would have changed. I continued watching until he packs up everything and heads to India. I gazed in awe as every other clip was of an exact location I had been to toward the beginning of my journey. And the voice over was as follows:
"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
The next night Slumdog Millionaire was on TV, reminding me of where my journey started, and all those slum children all over the world who weren't given the chances I was. Then again, according to Slumdog, "it is written".
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You don’t have to do anything like me or anyone else. You definitely don’t have to be happy all the time or love God (my definition: God = x = life = universe = everything we don't understand about why or how it happens) or anything like that (would be nice though, wouldn’t it?). But if you just simply don’t care anymore and have stopped trying to get the most out of life (or never really tried in the first place), and continually settle for the mundane and mediocre, I know of a guy who died far too early, and the only cosmic reason I can think of for his unfair demise is that he left so people like the old me who were scared of life could live more, and then pass on that life energy to others. His name was Billy.
www.rememberingbilly.com
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Death, God, Life, Bliss, Coincidence, Diarrhea…I’ve really tackled some big ideas in this blog. What do I make of all of it? Well, to state the obvious, that’s personal. I’m still working it out. But I do have some ideas that the circuits of my cerebrum constantly celebrate in cheerful congregation. For one, always take advantage of alliteration when possible. Second, I believe the universe has the power to provide us with a positive experience if we really want it. If we’re really going to put in the effort. I can’t answer any cosmic questions about the fate of the Bill Palinskis of the world, and it’s not my job to. Although if anything, I think we dishonor his memory more to classify his life as tragic simply because it ended early. Sometimes I think it might be unfair that I get to wander around Asia while Bill sits on the existential bench, but maybe in his twenty years Bill had a much better time and far richer experiences than I ever will. But who cares? In the end, the race is only with yourself. Comparisons are useless.
When he was in the game, Bill lived life well. He wasn’t a saint. As his own friends testify, he could be the biggest bastard too. I think that only makes me respect him more, in a Hunter S. Thompson way. I know from experience that being a clown around your friends is totally worth all the scowls in the long run. Even so, I don’t want to be him, or what he might have been had THE Coach given him more minutes. The lesson I take from his life is to live my life for myself more fully than I have before, and share my life with others and learn from others more and more and more…and more! And enough of this fear nonsense. I’m not talking about recklessness. I’m talking about doing things I really want to do because I know that’s the only way to get my bliss, and if I don’t at least try then I have no business being alive.
During all of these bus rides, I’ve got a lot of time to just ponder the landscape and listen to my beloved music. As I mentioned in my last blog, the album I’ve listened to most on this journey has probably been Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid by Bob Dylan. My favorite song ever, Wagon Wheel, was actually never finished and dropped from the soundtrack, only to be discovered, re-written and recorded by a bluegrass band called Old Crow Medicine Show decades later. But that’s another story.
The Billy the Kid album is actually incredibly laid back. Save for one ballad about Billy that’s revised several times throughout the album and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (which I usually skip because it’s not very inspiring traveling music), it’s mostly an instrumental album. The first song, “Main Title (Billy)” (which also appears in The Royal Tenenbaums), just can’t be beat for relaxing travel.
Billy the Kid is about freedom. Doing what you know is right and what you want to do, even though you know Coach Pat Garrett is going to take you out of the game some time, maybe when you’re exhausted, maybe when you’re just getting warmed up. If my high school basketball experience has taught me anything beyond the sad fact that small town sports politics are pathetic, it’s that when you do get a chance to be in the game, you’re going to screw up if you keep looking at the coach and hoping you’re pleasing him. You just gotta play like he’s not there and dive for every loose ball even though you’re going to scrape up your knees, take every open shot even though everyone might see you miss, set a pick for your friend whenever you get a chance, relish in the fact that you’re breathing so hard and when you come out of the game, you better be sweating a lot. And even though the coach probably barely noticed what you did, when your teammates on the bench high-five you for leaping out of bounds to save the bad pass or taking that charge, you know you made the most of your time. Even if their ego-centered reality still had them wishing they were playing instead of me (as I felt pretty much the whole time I was on the bench), they would respect me because they knew I’d earned my time (in the interests of honesty, I didn’t always earn my time). And even if they didn’t, I respected me because I knew I’d played my heart out. Sports metaphors, every writer’s friend. Are you satisfied, Mr. Thompson?
Every time I hear the first few strums of the guitar on “Main Title (Billy)”, I think of the kid named Billy who unknowingly and unintentionally put me on this path to follow my bliss around the world, whose life gave me the courage to see things that startle me, to meet people with a different point of view and to live a life that I’m proud of. I don’t know how the karmic debt system works, but the best I can calculate what I owe to Billy is that I follow my bliss to the utmost, wherever it may lead. And I don’t just owe it to him. I owe it to every little Indian or Lao child I’ve seen on the street who’s missing an eye or parents or any opportunity whatsoever to even know what bliss is. I owe it to 20 year old’s who died in Vietnam and seventy year old’s who can’t see or walk anymore. I owe it to every spirit on the sideline. So do you.
I’m going to China tomorrow, an activity that definitely wasn’t part of my plans when I left home for India on December 1. But for the last six weeks I’ve known it was an intricate piece in the puzzle of my bliss, and I’m finally doing it. One third of my mind is lobbying the universe for a great experience. The “it is written” third of my mind knows it’s useless to petition, because it’s already happened. The remaining third doesn’t given a damn about the universe or what’s been written. It’s going to draw on all the strength in my will, for whatever it’s worth, to make me pursue a good experience in China. And when I’m tired or bored or failing to perceive the greatness surrounding me, even though it won’t be easy, it’s going to remind me that it’s always all around me, that bliss is now, and that I’m on the right path, because I’m living the life that I love. For the Billy the Kid in my soul. For the Billy the Kid in all our souls.
“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience that supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.”
-Introduction to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything
If you’re reading this, that means you are alive, which is awesome and amazing and miraculous. You really are lucky, you know? I mean, come on! Alive AND reading my blog at the same time? You’ve won the existential lottery! Okay, sorry about that. I’ve got to pump up my blog a little, it gets insecure sometimes, you know? In any event, I’m glad you’re here. This is a very important moment for both of us. It’s NOW o’clock. There’s never been any more possibility or perfection than there is right now. I think I stole that from Walt Whitman. Oh well. He’s not alive right now. Finders keepers.
You may never have thought about it this way, but when you walk away from this screen, there will be countless swarms of spirits sitting on the sidelines of existence, shouting at “THE Coach” to let them back into the game. I’m not sure how to frame this in a scientific sense. Maybe it has something to do with anti-matter or dark energy. Regardless of the logical validity of my claim, these spirits will wail and scream and stomp their feet because they were taken out of the game and put on the bench before they even got tired. Now if this Coach is anything like my high school basketball coach, their complaints and sincere insistence that they can come in and hit a 3-pointer better than those idiots in the game right now are falling on deaf ears. Although I somehow think THE Coach is a little more competent than my high school basketball coach, there never has been and never will be a better time to prove you belong in the game than NOW.
As you’re reading this, perhaps you just played a round of golf, or watched your favorite show with a friend, or got stoned and listened to a record that was amazing, or you just finished some boring paper work at the office because that’s what you gotta do to survive. And you’re thinking, who are YOU to tell me how to live? Well, I’m just another human, trying to figure it how himself. And you’re right, I can’t tell you anything. But I can give you a hint based on my experience. After all, pretty much everywhere I’ve gotten in life has been from hints that other humans have given me, so I feel obligated to pay it forward. Thus, the best hint I can give you that was once passed along to me is this: if you’re not enjoying life right now and haven’t in a while, those spirits on the sidelines might be really pissed off at you when THE Coach takes you out of the game and puts you on the bench with them…permanently. That might make absolutely no difference in terms of your longevity on the Magic Fun Time Spin Ball. The Coach always has mysterious reasons for ordering players to do what they do and playing them when he does. So it might not matter right now that the spirits are jealous of you and writing in their sports blogs that you suck and are paid way too much in terms of living moment currency. But even so, when you are taken out of the game, you may be subject to a lot of what could have been easily avoidable harassment from the spirits who didn’t get to live as much as you have because you didn’t use your life as well as you could have.
I’m not pointing the finger. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that the unique curvature of the Earth and the universe makes it so that every time I point my finger, I’m pointing it back at myself. Whatever I write about trying to live life to the fullest and so forth I’m mostly writing as a reminder to myself. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, maybe you won’t. But it can’t hurt. If anything, you’ll say, “I’ll show that stupid pale freak how to REALLY live life, and go do something he would NEVER do, that hypocritical littlewuss!” Which would make me very happy, although the pale part might hurt my feelings a little. I'm only human.
And I know as well as you do that sometimes you just can’t enjoy life because it sucks. Sometimes it has to in order to get you to the bliss. The classic roller coaster metaphor about life comes to mind: it’s got to go the bottom if you want to get to the top again.
Listen: all I’m saying is that if you’re finding life to be one dull day after another, you CAN change things. It IS possible. Maybe you’ve got certain circumstances that are holding you back, and it will require some patience until you’re given a window of opportunity. But in the long run, the only things holding us back besides the laws of physics (which are far from being completely figured out) are ourselves and our own fears about life.
Right NOW I am doing my best to prove to THE Coach that I belong in the game of life by following my bliss. Specifically, I’m in Oudomxai, Laos. There’s not much to do here, which doesn’t sound very blissful. But there is working internet here, which enables me to indulge in my rambling writer tendencies, which is definitely a part of my bliss, so I’m very happy to be here. Plus I’m alive, which is nice. I think I’ll celebrate that fact by going to China tomorrow. I hear there are things to do there. This is one of the closest towns to the border crossing, so it’s a fitting place for me to write my last blog before I enter the People’s Republic of No Facebook, which will make advertising and distribution of my blog a little sticky.
One year ago at this time I was back home in Cambridge, New York. This time two days ago my parents were there, attending Bill Palinski’s birthday party. I went the last two years, but two days ago I was in Laos, so it didn’t really make sense for me to make the trip. But I’m doing my best to celebrate Bill’s birthday by living the life I love. Following my bliss. Doing things that make me smile or give me goose bumps. Sometimes I do things that give me traveler’s diarrhea, which sucks, but I suppose it’s all part of the bargain of eating food in underdeveloped countries. And when I get diarrhea, I think, “Hey, at least this means I’m alive!” Okay, I don’t really think that, but maybe I should from now on.
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I’ve been traveling in Asia for 139 days. I will not return home for another 70 days. In one week I will surpass my previous record of self-chosen exile, set in New Zealand five years ago. The last 31 days since I wrote have been amazing, as usual. If you view the world from the point of view of fate or all powerful divine plan or determinism or what not, I am extremely lucky and fortunate so far. If you view it from the personal free will and choice side, I’m really happy with the choices I’ve made so far. And I owe a lot of those to Bill Palinski.
Bill Palinski is dead. You are not. I bet he really wishes he could get off the spirit sidelines right now and read my blog himself. Or at least dance and laugh. Take one more risk. Bitch slap me for egotistically building up my blog because he’s BEEN the entire cosmos and knows what’s really important. Maybe. I don’t know anything about death, whether or not it’s actually a bad thing for the deceased. I know it’s a natural part of life. Based on my sister’s reaction and the looks on the faces of his family at his wake, I know it’s absolute agony for the one’s who have to go on living without their deceased loved one. Whether or not Bill is experiencing unimaginable eternal ecstasy in a dimension and state of consciousness that exceeds all human understanding won’t change the fact that his family, friends and my sister really fucking miss him with all their hearts and wish he was still making them smile and laugh with his magnetic presence.
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When I was a younger living thing, I think I did a pretty good job of using life well, but not always. I was reeeeeeeeally afraid to try new things. Mega afraid of new things. Like unfamiliar food. Or talking to girls that filled my stomach with Finnish butterfly tornadoes. Or new ideas that didn’t fit with my current safe ones about life (many a stubborn argument with my sister where I defended the unquestionable supremacy of the United States, illegality of drugs and superiority of logic over art come to mind…man, now I want to bitch slap the younger me). I played sports and laughed with friends and did a lot of cool things that lots of young kids do, but the trepidation and depression of adolescence really held me back. Hell, I didn’t even get the courage to ask a girl on a date until I was 17.
In college, after two years at Cornell, I still didn’t know how to grab the bull of life by the horns. I was getting better by my sophomore year, no longer spending Friday nights in the dorm playing Mario Kart, and instead finally loosening up to the idea of having a beer or a smoke with other young people here and there. Socializing, talking, laughing, those sorts of things. But I was still spending far too much time in my room on nights I should have been experiencing other human beings, or sadly pining for some faraway love that I was too afraid to approach, or attending the first meeting of some interesting club or experience and then never going back because I didn’t feel confident enough to talk to anyone. I had devised a safety bubble for myself, that offered perfect isolation from emotional let down’s and social embarrassment. I know I’m not the first college student to feel this way. But if the world were only 100 people, only one of them would get a college education. And maybe that person’s pinky finger would get the chance to have an Ivy League education. Imagine how the rest of the body would feel about that pinky curling up into the fetal position with his door locked on Thursday nights because it felt safe and at least couldn’t risk being hurt that way? The body would probably “accidentally” smash the pinky in a car door or something.
Sometimes I had daring ideas like studying abroad, although the country I visited would have to speak English. Maybe a place like Australia. I was always fascinated by the Outback when I was a child. I went to several introductory meetings held by the Study Abroad Department but never took any further steps beyond that. My sister was always going cool places like Germany and France and Russia, but I didn’t have the balls to leave behind everything and everyone I knew for a little growth experience.
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When I last wrote, I was in Dalat, Vietnam. I’d been feeling very weak but still anxious to go explore the surrounding area. Sometimes life puts you on the sidelines for your own good. I remember spending a lot of time in bed reminding myself that this was just a necessary step in my journey to get me where I needed to be. After all, I’d just written a blog about the Butterfly Effect and the interconnectivity of all things and events, as illustrated by a sentence in my only novel (“A butterfly flapping its wings in Finland could cause you to lose your socks wherever you do your laundry”) and my run in with three Finnish guys and a British guy wearing a Butterfly Effect T-shirt in Bangkok two years later.
After a few days of much needed rest, I went on an Easy Rider tour. These are given by old guys on motorcycles who take you wherever you want to go for a few bucks. So on the first day of spring I didn’t have the strength to climb a mountain as I had hoped, but I did walk behind a waterfall, through a pine forest and under a gigantic statue of an enormous smiling Buddha. This statue will always be my favorite religious sculpture ever. You never see them SMILING. And this guy looked like he’d either just had the best orgasm or bong rip or piece of pizza or heard the best joke of his life. I mean that grin was fantastic. I tried to wear it myself the rest of the day. I didn’t have bong rips or orgasms or pizza on the back of that motorcycle, but I had life and bliss running through my veins, more than enough fuel for a big old Buddha grin.
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I spent the evening of April 24, 2004 sorting through my parents’ old vinyl record collection and my sister’s 1960’s CD’s. After years of resisting out of a sense of sibling rivalry, I’d finally come around to embracing some genuinely quality music. One of those CD’s was The Last Waltz by The Band, which I had never listened to before. I put it on the stereo full blast while I rummaged around the basement, feeling a magical tingling every time I pulled out a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid or Tommy. And I was really loving The Last Waltz. Toward the end of the album, Bob Dylan joined The Band on stage for a special version of Forever Young, a song I had never even heard of until this night:
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
And may you stay
Forever young
The next morning my friend Dan woke me up with a phone call. It was pouring rain outside, typical for New York in April. “Bill Palinski died,” he said.
“Huh?” I replied. I couldn't have heard him right. Bill was my age. People my age didn't die. It was like some unspoken rule of my reality thus far. But my mom appeared in my doorway with tears in her eyes, and I knew it was true.
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Bill Palinski was in my graduating class of 79 at Cambridge Central School. I was not a close friend of his, but he was my older sister’s best friend. He was one of those special people who seemed to transcend social cliques and have relationships with everyone. I remember when I was 15 my parents offered to give him a ride to the SAT II with me. I hardly said anything the whole way there or back, but Bill managed to carry on a decent conversation with my father. I remember thinking how amazing it was for someone to be able to do that. Not because my father’s a bad conversationalist (bring up duck decoys and he won’t shut up for hours…love you, dad). I just couldn’t put myself in his shoes. If the Palinskis had given me a ride instead, I would probably blurt out one-word answers to any questions intended to open me up a little. Even though I could act like a hyped up maniac with my close friends, I was just really shy with people I wasn’t already comfortable around. But Bill didn’t seem to care. He came off as very mature and at ease in any surroundings. I was really impressed. Even a little jealous, perhaps.
Bill always seemed to be around when I got into car accidents. Let me explain.
On Columbus Weekend 2001 I was a senior in high school and my sister was home from college with all of her friends. The night before I had finally mustered up the courage to tell a girl I really liked her and wanted to be her boyfriend, and she turned me down because she was in love with Bill. Bill was gay, although not openly, and I pretty much suspected he wasn’t interested in girls since every other girl in our grade had a crush on him and he didn’t seem to ever date any of them. In any case, my persistence convinced her to be my girlfriend months later (although she dumped me after 5 weeks! It surely wasn’t meant to be). The night after she turned me down, my friend Brad cheered me up over some Clint Eastwood movies (which turned into a weekly tradition we dubbed “Sundays With Clint”) at my house and I drove him home late at night. On the way back two deer jumped in my path and instead of running over them I swerved off the road thinking I could avoid a collision altogether. Instead I smashed into a telephone pole that had been concealed by darkness until it was too late, snapping it in half and causing power lines to come crashing down around me, but luckily not on me. If some butterfly in Finland hadn’t flapped its wings at the exact split second that it did, you wouldn’t be reading this right now (Hey! Stop wishing it hadn’t!) Anyway, my dad’s car was totaled. Since my dad is an awesome human being with an amazing sense of humor, he overcame the initial shock of seeing his beloved Volkswagen in such a state and managed to be joking about it by the time we got home. And when we got home, Bill Palinski was sitting at our table. The guy who had indirectly caused me such heartbreak was waiting there. I held no feelings of animosity toward him at any time, because I knew it really didn’t have anything to do with him, especially since my mom had just told me he was gay in response to hearing my story of recent heart break. And after my sister and her friends left once they saw I was okay, Bill stuck around and joined in the fun of making jokes with my dad. He really cheered me up after the most traumatic experience of my life.
Months later I was at a They Might Be Giants concert in Massachusetts. My first rock concert. Hey, we’ve already established that I was behind the social curve growing up, so let’s not rub it in, okay? Besides, they really rocked the house. Bill was there too, with some other friends. Afterward, my friends and I were so pumped up about the show that we decided to get some food to calm down. I raced across the Burger King parking lot, unaware that the lack of street lights was concealing some evil (evil I say!) curbs inconspicuously located right in the path of my little 1990 Honda Civic hatchback. One “DUDE!” later from my copilot, Brad, and my radiator was leaking fluid all over the parking lot. His dad, a mechanic, had to drive for 90 minutes after midnight to tow us back home. The next day Bill apologized to my sister for not taking better care of me, and I thought that was such a weird thing to say. Maybe he's been making up for it lately. If so, that's damn generous of him, since I'm sure there are way more interesting things going on in the universe for a spirit to check out.
Outside of his presence before and after incidents revealing my vehicular incompetence, we didn’t really have a personal relationship outside of school or my sister. When he came over to visit her we would quote the Simpsons a lot, but that was about it. I also remember us shooting Koosh sling-shots at her one afternoon, her getting really pissed off and accidentally ripping his shirt, him driving away angrily, them not talking for a while and me feeling kind of bad about it all. Who knew a Koosh could cause so much trouble? Anyway, it’s strange how someone you don’t really know can inspire you to change your life so much more infinitely for the better…
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After Dalat I took a bus to Nha Trang on the coast. It was an awe-inspiring sunny ride down from the mountains and through rice paddies and forests. Of course I listened to all those old 1960’s protest songs about the Vietnam War while I watched the landscape fly by. 40 years ago my country was bombing the shit out of this place so that they wouldn’t become socialists. They became socialists anyway. Now they’re pretty much capitalists so that they can interact with the rest of the world. The word “pointless” comes to mind.
In Nha Trang I got off the bus, hopped on the back of the motorcycle and told him to go to the Dive Shop. Earlier in the day I’d run into a pair of Canadian women at the Peace Café in Dalat, an hour before I was supposed to leave. They told me they were going to Nha Trang the next night, and would be staying for free at a Dive Shop through couchsurfing.org. I found the guy online, asked him if I could stay 2 nights, and he said sure. So I arrived at this shop and out front, drinking a beer, is my old Finnish friend from Bangkok, Saigon and Dalat (see my last blog entry about The Butterfly Effect and Finland). He’d left 3 days ahead of me, and ended up here because his friend was interested in diving. I ended up sharing a room with them. Those beautiful butterflies…
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Bill Palinski had been hiking on April 24, 2004, in the woods outside of Earlham College, where he attended school in Indiana. He and his friends were celebrating his 20th birthday four days late. At one point he slipped while crossing a river and bruised himself. He and his friends returned to school so he could be treated by the nurse. They cleaned up his scratches and figured he would be fine. Hours later he passed out in his dorm room and his friends rushed him to the hospital. He was bleeding internally. The doctors brought him back once, but soon he was gone for good.
It turned out he had mononucleosis and was completely unaware of it. Although his spleen was dangerously enlarged, he was otherwise asymptomatic, and thus didn’t have any reason to go to a doctor and get the steroids that would normally treat the condition. When he fell (or possibly the night before at a dance), his spleen burst and he began to die inside, completely unaware. In other words, you might say that God fucked him over big time. He didn’t get drunk and hop in a car or shoot up too much heroin or run into a firefight in Iraq so Uncle Sam could build another Wal-Mart. He was simply enjoying nature with his friends. Why him?
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To me, Nha Trang was just another beach resort area. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it more yourself if you go. Since I’d already spent 10 days at the beach in India and two weeks on a tropical island in Thailand, it wasn’t really my thing anymore. I swam in the ocean and read On the Road while lying in the sand, but after one full day I was ready to move on.
The next stop on my open bus ticket up the coast to Hanoi was Hoi An (I have a theory that the names of most Vietnamese cities are the result of a lazy game of anagrams). This involved a night bus. A sleeper bus, as they call it. And they mean it. When I got on, I saw that the bus was full of horizontal berths for people to barely squeeze into. But you could actually lie down. The ride was still bumpy and curvy as Hell, but I think I actually got a few hours of shut eye.
Hoi An is a charming little coastal town that was mostly unaffected by the war. If you go to Vietnam, definitely check it out. The architecture is superb. Unlike a lot of places in Southeast Asia, you really feel like you’ve stepped into another world here. I could describe it more in depth, but I’ve clearly got other things on my mind in this blog. Since I was anxious to get to Hanoi, I left the next day for Hue.
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The day I heard the news that Bill had died, my dad and I watched Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz. For those who don’t know, it’s a concert The Band gave on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco to mark the end of 20 years of touring. They invited all of the biggest acts of the era to join them on stage: Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond etc. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. It’s not just a rock concert. It’s a Scorsese film.
My favorite parts are when Dylan sings Forever Young (which he wrote for his children) and the end when everyone gets up on stage to sing I Shall Be Released. I don’t think it’s really relevant to go deeply into this now, but I really believe that the universe runs on some unfathomable pattern of song synchronicity that vibrates through our entire beings. And Bob Dylan keeps popping up in mine. It makes sense on a scientific level. After all, superstring theory states that the fabric of the universe is multidimensional vibrating strings; that existence really is music.
Two days later I was back at school, and really upset. I didn’t know why it bothered me so much, but Bill’s death was really affecting me. Nothing could break me from my romantic night wandering around campus, the sky cloudy, the wind persistent, my soul in some strange state that was certainly melancholy, but not depressed. As Butters from South Park would say, I was a feeling a “beautiful sadness”.
My sister’s friend had said that when Bill visited them at college he was always climbing trees, so that to celebrate his life we should all climb something. It felt like advice right out of Dead Poet’s Society. So as I was wandering through the Arts Quad, I climbed up on the stone statue of Andrew Dickson White, the college’s co-founder, and sat on his stone armrest, listening to Let It Be and Stairway to Heaven. If I was in a better mood I would have smiled at all the solitary pedestrians returning from the library who were noticeably fixing their stares to the ground and away from the strange colorful addition to the A.D. White statue.
I returned home that Friday for the wake. I would never be the same after that. Something sparked in me that I will never forget.
At first it seemed like a friendly reunion. It was a gorgeous day close to the beginning of May, and outside the line went down the block and I kept seeing my former classmates. Some looked great. Others looked devastated. As we approached the entrance, we were handed cards with Bill’s picture on them. On the back were the lyrics to Forever Young:
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay forever young
I didn’t really know anything about butterflies or Finland back then, but if I had, I probably would have run down the street screaming like a maniac.
After seeing his cold lifeless body on display and thinking “That’s not Bill,” I went to the next room where they had set out some of his possessions. Needle in the Hay, the most depressing song in the universe, played softly in the background (Richie Tenenbaum slits his wrists to it in The Royal Tenenbaums). There was a copy of an essay he wrote about his experience as an exchange student in Ireland when he was 16. Reading his words about living in another country and getting a real glimpse of something different stirred something in my soul that had lain dormant for far too long. I decided then and there that I would go to Australia…or somewhere. After that I noticed a copy of one of his Simpsons comic books. I burst into tears. I mean I was sobbing like a baby uncontrollably. Eventually my old math teacher, Mr. Lacasse, consoled me. He’d lost one of his sons to cancer years before (that was the first wake I attended in my life). I don’t know who I was crying for, Bill or me. After all, I’d just learned that not only was I really going to die some day, but that I could die ANY day. Scariest shit ever.
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Hue was one of the major battle sites in the Vietnam War near the North-South divide. Many 20 year-old Americans lost their lives here, or their arms or legs. Some lost their minds. It seems like the universal imagination has no shortage of gruesome ways for young people to be cut down early. Does the interconnectedness require it? If one GI hadn’t been killed in Hue or a peasant woman not been raped, would I not even exist? Would Bill never have existed if they didn’t drop the bomb in Hiroshima or the Holocaust had never happened? Did George Bush have to win re-election for me to see Radiohead at Bonnaroo in 2006? If there was no potato famine in Ireland, does my grandfather ever exist? Will my traveler’s diarrhea I had in India decide the outcome of the next presidential election? I should probably ask a Taoist. I doubt the answer is comforting.
I was only in Hue for about 6 hours in between buses, because I was really anxious to get to Hanoi. But I did an Easy Rider tour, checking out a tomb, a bunker on a hill and a pagoda.
The old bunker overlooked a river where the Americans and Viet Minh often clashed. As I stared out into the thick forest across the way, I couldn’t fathom that someone even younger than I was had endured the reality of watching bullets whiz by from unseen assailants in the distance. I’m really damn glad the universe never made me go to Iraq….
After the bunker we visited a Buddhist pagoda. At one point amongst all the aged architecture I passed an old Aston Martin. There was a sign that said “This is the car that the honorable Thich Quang Duch drove to…” and I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Some holy ground this is.” But then I noticed a very familiar picture on the hood of the car. I’d seen it before. On the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s first album. I read further: “…drove to the corner of [so and so] in Saigon before immolating himself to protest the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.” Remember all that video footage of monks setting themselves on fire to protest the brutal South Vietnamese government (the ones we supported)? Well this was the first guy to do it.
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The day after the wake was the memorial service. It was a beautiful spring morning, but the atmosphere inside the church hardly matched the weather. As I took a seat in a pew along with my parents and friend Brad, the sound system played “Mad World” by Gary Jules, one of the most ominous piano openings in music history. Then “Across the Universe” covered by Fiona Apple and “Flake” by Jack Johnson. I noticed that more than half of my high school class was in attendance. And what appeared to be 20 or 30 kids from Earlham College. And dozens of others from what I later learned was a Quaker house he was involved with called Powell House. People had come from far and wide to remember this guy. How did he meet so many people in such a short life? I was about to learn.
Soon everyone became silent as they carried in the casket. Rufus Wainwright covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the sound system. After the President of Earlham College gave a speech about the tragic death of one of their beloved students, the family spoke. I remember his older brother talking about how he couldn’t think of what to say, so he just wanted to talk about a good memory he had of Bill. He talked about how they used to sneak into movies together when they were younger. I never snuck into a movie in my life. I was always afraid to get caught going against “the system”. I pretty much made most decisions with that attitude.
The best part of a Quaker service is that instead of some guy in a robe droning on and on about God and giving some generic speech about the unique individual’s seat next to God in the Kingdom of Heaven just like everyone else who ever died, they instead encouraged the people who actually knew him to stand up and share a story about their beloved friend. So many people felt compelled to share stories about Bill that they finally had to close the floor after 90 minutes. I’d never heard such a mixture of laughing and sobbing in my life. At times it was almost (almost) fun. As if the tragedy of his death was easily trumped by the magnificence of his life.
One aspect that really stands out in my memory is all the stories from people who described situations where they were really shy and scared and Bill came up to them, introduced himself and immediately made them feel better. It turned out he was the only friend for a lot of individuals at times in their lives. I remember thinking, “I want to be the guy who is full of confidence and cheers up the shy people!” After all, I knew how horrible it was to feel petrified with social apprehensions.
Another part that comes to mind now is his mom telling a story about how open-minded and curious the young Billy Palinski had been. When he was 10 or younger (I can’t recall exactly), he actually asked her to take him to a Buddhist temple so he could learn about meditation or something. I don’t think I’d even heard of Buddhism by age 10. I don’t think it stuck, because he ended up a Quaker (by his own choosing, not from inheriting a family religious tradition). But the willingness to just try something new, especially when he was the only kid there, is astounding. And the idea that a practiced and spiritually elevated Buddhist monk could believe in a cause so strongly that he would end his life by burning himself to death in public while others like Bill get pulled out against their will just boggles my mind. Maybe that’s why Buddhism didn’t stick with Bill.
At one point a local artist strummed the chords to Forever Young on acoustic guitar while a family friend sang the lyrics. Later, they asked everyone to sing along to Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game. It’s the story of a boy growing up and all the wonders and dreams and experiences he has on the way. In the song, the boy grows until 20 years old and it’s understood that he has new and better dreams coming his way. But Bill didn’t. There were no longer any dry eyes left in the building.
The ceremony closed with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s dual cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World. If you’ve never heard that song, you should download it and save it for a beautiful day. Walk around a lake, sit by a river, or climb up a hill, and just watch people walking by. Your heart will smile. Never fear, this is not a situation that calls for a consultation with a cardiologist. It means you are more alive than usual, which is the best thing there is.
After the service, there was a gathering at the family’s home, just a few minutes from my house. I recall one of my classmates’ parents remarking that we “all have to do a lot more living now.”
Heeding her advice, I walked into the Cornell Abroad office two days later and picked up an application to go somewhere I’d never been before.
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I finally arrived in Hanoi after a 14 hour overnight bus ride. The city really has a different feel from the rest of Southeast Asian cities, probably because of the French architecture. I really dug it. Vietnam has the highest rate of motorcycle use in the world, so when you cross the street in a busy city, try not to be freaked out by what appears to be a thousand-participant motorbike race about to start to your left, the unified roar of engines revving akin to what I imagine would be the sound of the start of the apocalypse.
There were two reasons I was so anxious to get to Hanoi. The first is that it was the departure point for Halong Bay, one of the most beautiful areas in Asia. The second was that I wanted to get things going on my Chinese visa, which takes five days at least. Since America makes it hard for the Chinese to get visas, China makes it hard for Americans to get visas. Everyone else pays about $40. Americans pay an extra hundred dollars. I was low on money (still am), so I reminded myself of getting ripped off at the Cambodian border and how worth it that country was. So it’s now my job to make China worth those extra hundred dollars. I’m going to enjoy it 100 dollars more than any citizen of any other country could! Take that, you interconnected butterflies!
My first night I went to a jazz club with a French girl (and her brother) that I met on the bus. We were all sharing a room and decided to take in some of the night life. They were leaving for a 1 night-2 day package tour of Halong Bay the next day. I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do. In my heart, I just wanted to go to Cat Ba Island, which is a little south of the Bay and still involves a ride through it.
I’d first heard of the bay during a fortuitous motorboat ride in Kho Phan-gnan, Thailand. I was riding with a Canadian English teacher and his Chinese wife (wasn’t planning to go to China at that point). I was bemoaning the lack of kayak rentals on the beach, because I really really love kayaking and I hadn’t done any yet on my journey. He told me that if I wanted to go kayaking I should check out Halong Bay in north Vietnam and stay on Cat Ba Island. Since then, I’d heard a lot of bad reviews of the Bay because the tours really were a “get what you pay for” deal. And since I didn’t have a lot of money, it looked like I wasn’t going to get a good experience. When I asked fellow travelers about going straight to Cat Ba Island, they said it would probably be very difficult and involve advanced planning (something I haven’t really been doing during this adventure).
At the jazz club I was joined by a Canadian pianist who was trying to escape from a weird elderly German guy who was creeping out everyone in our corner with his strange toasts and dancing. Somehow we got to talking about the most talented musician of our time, Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, probably because we were at a jazz show and I tell most people about her when they bring up music or pianos or Japan, and we really hit it off because he’d actually heard of her. You'd think that wouldn't be surprising given my claim that she's the best in the world, but it is. Soon the conversation turned to Cat Ba Island, which may or may not be more famous than Hiromi, depending on which circles you hang out in. He and his girlfriend were planning to go straight there for $12 instead of paying $90 for a 3 day tour where everything was regimented and done with a group of fellow tourists (plus only one hour of kayaking). I told him what others had told me, and he laughed and said, “If you really want to do something your way instead of the tourist way, you can pretty much find a way. It might be a little more inconvenient, but you can do it.”
He was right. Two nights later I was paying $5 for a room on Cat Ba Island.
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At the last minute I changed my mind and went to New Zealand. I laugh now to think about my fears when I embarked on that journey, because New Zealand is infinitely safer than anywhere I’ve been on this journey. But it was still terrifying to ride to the airport with the realization that I was going to an island on the other side of the world where I didn’t know anybody for five months.
Five months later, I’d made unforgettable friends who still stay in touch, seen some sights that unfortunately might never be topped (sunset on Milford Sound…), and changed in ways I didn’t understand until afterward. My senior year of college I made more friends than I had the previous three years combined. I got involved in more activities, had more fun and generally loved life more.
If it hadn’t been for the New Zealand experience forcing me to hit the social reset button and just risk saying “Hello” to strangers over and over again, I never would have had the courage to move down to New York City on my own the following year and pursue my lifelong dream of being a writer.
As great as it all sounds, the pesky specter of logic keeps popping up in my mind, infuriating me with childish taunts that this chain reaction of life affirming behavior could never have come about without Bill’s death…
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Have you ever seen King Kong (the new one)? Remember that freaky island? Or how about Jurassic Park? Well, if you ever go to Cat Ba Island, you’ll have déjà vu. It’s freaky. It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming. It’s awesome. It’s right up there with the Himalaya on my Asian highlights reel.
My first full day I rented a kayak for $5 and went out on my own for 6 hours. Unfortunately they only had double kayaks, so steering was tricky, but it was better than no kayaking. I began by paddling past the floating villages that inhabit the many harbors of Cat Ba. To keep up the movie reference theme of this blog, I felt like I was in Pirates of the Caribbean. After about thirty minutes of this, I got beyond some karsts and I was completely alone.
Before I continue, I must explain karsts. They’re enormous limestone hills jutting out of the water, covered with green bushes and plants, and very vertical. In Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island they are everywhere, on land and in water. It’s really strange. And magnificent.
Soon the clouds cleared out and all I could hear was birds chirping. No boats motoring by. No tour guides shouting, “Now we meet at 6:00 at the hotel! You will store your things in your room! At 6:30 we gather in the lobby for dinner! Dinner finishes at 8:00! Then you go to bed! Tomorrow morning we leave at 7! We kayak for one hour! Then we return to boat!” I’m not exaggerating, because I rode with one of the tours to get to the island, and this is what they said to the passengers. The guide even smacked one of the passengers for complaining about his food.
Right now words won’t do justice for this experience, but floating around that day was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Sometimes you are lucky enough to experience something that stirs some extra soul into your synapses. At times it felt like more than I could handle.
Okay, I can’t leave it at that. Joseph Campbell, take it away!:
Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: "When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity." Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence.
That will do, Joseph. That will do.
Two days later I went on a 17 km hike through the jungle, over hills and rocks and through dense bush. I was accompanied by a lovely German couple and an amiable Vietnamese guide. We ate lunch in a secluded village and rode a small boat back to our starting point for an hour at the end. I sat on the front of the boat, listening to Phish’s Prince Caspian, of course. Prince Caspian is from the Phish album Billy Breathes, which I discovered one month before Bill Palinski died. It's got three of my favorite Phish songs on it: "Free", "Bliss", and "Prince Caspian". Not to mention "Billy Breathes" ("above the trees where Billy breathes, we float upon the air, ohhh sing softly...). I discovered at Bill’s funeral that his family always called him “Billy”, even though in school he was always Bill to us. I remember thinking that day that Billy can’t breathe right now, so I’ll have to breathe all of this in for him. I took a lot of deep breaths and smiled a lot during that adventure.
At one point during the hike I was thinking about Bill. In fact, I was thinking that “Billy still breathes”. That God is everything, that is there is no death, that life is a dream and all is an illusion, and that we’re all part of the universe and the universe is constantly alive, so we should never worry. It’s just an ego thing. Our spirits get recycled and renewed into psychic energy that we can’t comprehend, time is an illusion and even though I think Bill is dead in my timeline right now he’s still alive and spreading bubble wrap outside his friend’s dorm room in some other dimension. As if to test the sincerity of my thoughts, the universe pulled an invisible rug out from underneath me when the thoughts “Billy breathes” crossed my mind and I slipped on a rock and fell on my back. It scared the living fuck out of me. I remember thinking, “I don’t have mono I don’t have mono I don’t have mono I don’t have mono”. I guess it called my philosophical bluff.
When we got back I went back to my room and finished Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now there’s a guy who knew how to grab the universal bull by the horns and tell it how things are going to be! I would later read another of his books, Kingdom of Fear, which is basically a summary of all the craziest trouble he’s gotten himself into, and somehow always gotten out of. Hunter later blew his own brains out because he’d simply had enough. They shot his ashes out of a cannon to Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man. Anyway, I already knew what this encounter with Dr. Gonzo meant for the next day…
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From Joseph Campbell:
"Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss."
Friends! I have been around the world, I have seen sights that have made my soul cry with shame and shake its figurative fist at the heavens. I have seen beautiful sunsets unrivaled in any galaxy, felt warm hearts and received saintly smiles from the poor and downtrodden. I have ridden in planes, trains and automobiles, on tuk tuks, riverboats and motorcycles, and seen jungles, mountains and beaches whizzing by. I’ve met six dozen damsels I would have happily made the love of my life had we more than one hour or one second in each other’s perfect presence. I've even seen an Indian shaman lift a boulder with his cock! But now, yes NOW I finally know the secret! I now know the uncontested best recipe for bliss in the universe:
Take 1 Motorcycle (speedometer broken), add a stretch of straightaway, put in your earphones even though they specifically warn you not to in the instructions, crank up the volume full blast, and God help you, you better have Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix on your iPod. If not, Born to Be Wild or Jumpin’ Jack Flash can act as a temporary substitute until you finally get your hands on the most badass song of all time. And if you want to know true bliss, by the time the drums kick in, it would be in your best interest to be flying at the bike’s top speed, whatever that may be.
After an hour of zooming around the island on my beloved speedometerless motorbike, I passed through a village, and a dog ran out in front of me. I wasn’t going very fast since it was a village, but it had been drizzling all day, and the bike skidded out from under me as I hit the brake and I went flying onto my back. Luckily I was wearing a backpack and long sleeves, so the only damage was a small brown mud stain on my right army jacket elbow to forever remind me that you can in fact fall off of a motorcycle. The clutch was a little bent, but an angelic Vietnamese man came out immediately and bent it back into place with his tools. I bought some soda I didn’t want after they refused straight money in return for their kindness. 4 hours of zooming around later I saw him on a different part of the island, and his hand motions indicated that he was amazed to still see me riding around all over the place. Just because you fall off a bike once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get back on. Especially on your first day. Definitely wear a helmet.
The next day I went back to Hanoi, hoping my Chinese visa had been accepted. I’d since read many horror stories of people throwing down wads of cash, hiding out in Halong Bay while they waited, and returning to find out their application had been rejected because the agency they used had filled out something incorrectly but was still going to keep most of their money for their services. Luckily, I did not run into this problem. My passport was returned to me with a beautiful spanking new Chinese tourist visa inside. I actually kissed it I was so happy.
As I walked the streets of Hanoi that night, I felt like something had returned to me. Even though I go on and on about pursuing life to the fullest and blah blah blah, I don’t always feel the bliss of life around me. Just because I encourage others to search for it doesn’t mean I’m perfect at it myself. We’re all trying for it. But on this night, I felt like something returned to me. Something important…
Bill Moyers: Do we ever know the truth? Do we ever find it?
Joseph Campbell: Each person can have his own depth, experience, and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being through consciousness and bliss. The religious people tell us we really won't experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.
BM: Bliss is now.
JC: In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won't get your own experience at all. That is not the place to have the experience--here is the place to have it.
BM: Do you ever have the sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?
JC: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time--namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
BM: Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?
JC: Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one's pity.
BM: The waters of eternal life are right there? Where?
JC: Wherever you are--if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
That’s what it was. The refreshment! My money was basically gone, and I was about to start living on an overdrawn checking account. I didn’t know how I was getting to China or when I was coming home, but I did know that I had just done something I wanted to do without chickening out, and it was marvelous.
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I entered Laos a few days later. That was two weeks ago. In two weeks I’ve been on six different multi-hour bus rides on curvy mountain roads (sometimes unpaved). I’m pretty worn out. Even so, Laos is an astoundingly beautiful country with incredibly friendly human inhabitants. Even though they hold the unfortunate distinction of being the most bombed country in the history of the Magic Fun Time Spin Ball (thanks to Richard Nixon), they really didn’t seem to harbor any resentment. I suppose that was decades ago. Then again, unexploded ordnance from the war kills and maims unsuspecting children every year, putting them on the bench with Bill Palinski.
I wish I had more time here, but my wallet tells me to move on.
My Lao experience began with two fellow Americans. I crossed into the northeast section of the country from Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam (where the French lost a major battle and eventual control of Vietnam back in the 1950’s). I had wanted to cross a day earlier, but my hotel didn’t quite grasp my explanation of the concept of a wake up call and I rushed to the bus station at 6 am for my 5:30 bus only to find that my bus had left on time for the first time in my Vietnam experience. As I bought a ticket for the next day and signed the list, I noticed the name Adam Sterling. I met him in Dalat and again in Nha Trang. The strangeness of our meeting is that he went to Cornell also, class of ’04, two years ahead of me. So fate held me back a day so I could travel with some friends.
The next morning, after buying an alarm clock, I made it to the bus on time and met Adam’s traveling companion, Todd, who also turned out to be a cool guy. The border crossing itself involved several stops on the way to pick up and drop off animal feed, climbing over rock boulders once we left Vietnam and entered some kind of no man’s land, and many windy unpaved roads situated on the edges of many a cliff. Good times, good times.
We pushed on to Oudamxay after our original bus journey ended in Muang Khua, a town in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty much what I like about Laos. But we wanted to get to Luang Prabang, a world heritage site and called by the guide book perhaps the best town in Southeast Asia. We made it there the following day after a long bus ride where the engine started making some horrible clanging sound that everybody simply shrugged off. We met a trio of travelers that consisted of two Americans and yes, a Finnish guy.
The next day I was sitting by the Mekong River, enjoying the sun set and fondly recalling many an afternoon by the East River in Astoria, Queens where I did the same thing. Sitting on a rock and watching the sun light sparkle on a river is one of my favorite activities. Men rode by in narrow river boats and children floated by on tubes, laughing and screaming. I finished my current book, Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson, and then enjoyed the river peace. Before I got too deep into the zone, however, I noticed the Finnish-American trio from the day before floating by in a narrow river boat. They said they were going to an island nearby to play bocce ball and drink Beerlao. The old me would have come up with some lame excuse for no reason, but there was no way I was going to say no and risk embarrassing myself in front of a Hunter Thompson book. Soon enough we were on a sparsely populated beach up river, our company being one Lao woman and her two tiny children. We went swimming in the river (even though they mentioned that the Mekong has sharks in it) and played bocce. Soon I was playing with the little kids and having a blast letting them pour sand on me and vice versa.
Day 2 in Luang Prabang involved traveling to a nearby waterfall. During the 30 kilometer ride we were repeatedly ambushed by guerrilla child soldiers wielding super soakers and buckets filled with water. Lao New Year was a few days away, and one part of the celebrations involves soaking everyone on the street, including foreigners. We were riding in the back of an open tuk tuk, and they took no mercy on us. Sometimes a little kid would pop out from the back of a truck and spray us, other times we would slow down for a bridge and resign ourselves to our soggy fate as we approached a gauntlet consisting of ten children and ten very large, very full buckets.
When we got to the waterfall, it was the most amazing aquatic tribute to gravity my eyes have ever beheld. We immediately went swimming right under it, the enormous power of the falling water blowing us away from the center, but we stayed in as long as we could anyway. When I got out, I felt spiritually renewed, as if God had just planted a big slobbery drool of a kiss all over me. As we walked out, we noticed a “No Swimming” sign. Todd felt a little guilty, but I smiled even wider. SOMEBODY had to experience that!
Next we climbed a large hill that afforded a magnificent view of the surrounding valley area. I got kind of sick of climbing, plus I was listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on my iPod and it was reaching that galactically sublime climax, so I ran up the rest of the way and made it just in time for the loud German words that I don’t understand but never fail to fill me with ecstasy.
Walt Whitman, what do you have to say about this whole experience?
"Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you waded timidly holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair."
Damn straight!
After the fun with the waterfall I decided to go with Todd down to Vang Vieng, another six hour journey. Originally, I had thought I would only stay in the northeast section of Laos because I was pressed for time, but here I was venturing as far south as Vang Vieng, notorious party tube town. People float down the river in tubes from bar to bar while imbibing free shots and “Happy Shakes”. I first heard about this place while riding a ferry across Lake Champlain last August. I mentioned this in a previous blog, but the day before my friends and I had climbed an Adirondack mountain, an experience which propelled me to finally start to aggressively pursue my Asian adventure plans. On this day we were returning from Burlington, Vermont and a Canadian struck up a conversation with me. I told him I was planning to go to Thailand in a few months, and he told me I should definitely go to Vietnam and Laos as well since they’re less touched by tourists. He also told me about this place Vang Vieng. Since it’s the first place I heard about after solidifying my will to travel, I think I pretty much had to go there.
Todd and I arrived in the afternoon and heard that bungalows were a good cheap bet for a room. We heard this from a British couple that I met in Dalat, bumped into again on Cat Ba Island, again in Luang Prabang, and finally in Vang Vieng when we were searching for rooms. I ended up following a woman who sold pancakes and claimed to have a bungalow. We crossed a river, walked past a long line of more modern looking bungalows, crossed a field, and saw two solitary bungalows by themselves, next to her family’s hut. There was a mattress on the floor, a mosquito net and a fan. $2.50 per night. Best of all, there was a gigantic karst not far in the distance, and the only thing in between my porch and this karst was an open field. The sun was just about to set behind it.
When I went back into town, I found out that my friend Ilan who I had traveled with for 2 weeks in India was still in town. This wasn’t a complete surprise, because we’d been corresponding on Facebook a little, but still an awesome surprise when he sat down next to me in the internet café. I also ran into one of the Canadian women from Dalat and Nha Trang, 3 British guys that I met at my guest house in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the British couple again, and a British girl I met in Dalat. At the end of the night a good chunk of them were hanging out on my porch. Who would have thought I would have found a place where everyone knows my name in the middle of Laos?
The next day we tubed down the river. I indulged in a free shot and may or may not have investigated the special shake situation. I think the spirit of Hunter Thompson was watching me, so ask him. My memory’s a little fuzzy. Either way, it was a beautiful peaceful ride down the river with karst skyscrapers towering over me the whole time.
After two days I returned to Luang Prabang, only to embrace the reality that finding a cheap room in the country’s cultural capital the first day of its New Year is an impossible task. I found a room for $20, which is better than the other offers of $50 that I came across. One day you get an incredible bargain, the next you’re ripped off. It evens out, I suppose. Because of this, I split town the next day, taking a bus to Nong Kiaw, a tiny river village surrounded by mountains. I was only there for a day, once again in a $2.50 bare bones bungalow, but it was a perfect peaceful retreat.
By the time I returned to Oudomxai, I was really sick of minivans and drivers who stopped to pick up anything from passengers we didn’t have room for to motorcycles that they tied to the roof.
Final review: 2 weeks in Laos is not enough Laos but certianly better than no Laos.
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"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On An Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. Schopenhauer concludes that it is although our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
- Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss
If it isn’t evident already, I think a lot. Perhaps too much. I have a really big
imagination. I think about everything the universe has to offer in the form of clues about reality and what it’s all about. As a writer with the unfortunate human trait of egotism, I’m especially wowed by the plot of my life, and the ghostwriter who puts it together, even if there isn’t one, or it’s some strange concept like the will within me that I don’t control. And whether that ghostwriter is ultimately kind or mean or indifferent, or all three. Some people relish in the apathy of the universe, because a God who plans suffering or death is a God that people want nothing to do with. A God who murders Bill Palinski as part of some divine plan is a God my sister wants no part of. The Ghostwriter God who uses the death of Billy the Kid as an indispensable factor in the plot of my life fills me with an overwhelming sense of guilt. I wouldn’t want God to use me that way. At least not until I’ve had my fill of this thing. I love life. In fact, I’ve had certain overwhelming experiences that have CONVINCED me, a former devout atheist, that there is a higher power, called LOVE, which is always good and worth it and knows everything about us and IS us and always works out for the best in the big picture which we never get to see. And then I see the suffering in the world and fear future suffering in my life and or losing my loved one’s and will be damned if I’m going to be the one to try to justify anyone else’s pain for them. It just seems like bad manners. This is from The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James:
"Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse."
So what do we do about the pain and suffering and unfairness in the world?
I have inherited two very old ideas. One is compassion toward the pain and suffering of others, and the acceptance that we cannot remove it from the world. The other is to live more fully than we did before. Every day. Try new things. Meet new people. Be braver and kinder and more creative and less egotistical than we were the day before. I’m not prescribing this just for you. I’m prescribing it for myself too. Because I know that it damn sure isn’t easy.
For those of you out there who really want to do something and are too afraid to, I know where you’re coming from. Life is scary. But it’s your fear, not life’s, that fills you. Let the fear go. Go for life. I’ve been there. You can change.
If you’re worried about death taking you down when you take a risk, consider this. When I was on Cat Ba Island, a waiter wanted me to learn Vietnamese, so he gave me a sheet of phrases that he had come up with translations for. For some reason there were some platitudes in English on the back that he was proud of translating from Vietnamese to English. One of them was this: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. In the long run, safety is no safer than taking a risk”. I think you die more when you run away from the things you really want. As Thomas Mann points out, life really flies by when you don’t do anything interesting:
"Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony--uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time--and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery or air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes."
Here’s another one of my favorites from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt’s son just eloped with the neighbor’s daughter and took a job at a factory instead of going to college. Everyone had just been yelling at him in the next room until his father pulled him aside to give him some rare advice:
"But I've never--Now, for heaven's sake, don't repeat this to your mother or she'd remove what little hair I've got left, but practically, I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know's I've accomplished anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you. Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!"
If you don’t live the live you love, who will? And how do you think those spirits feel who were cut short in the pursuit of their bliss as indispensable structuring elements in the plot of your life’s story if you don’t even pursue yours? Hunter S. Thompson would probably shoot your ass with one of the many weapons from his mighty arsenal, and then call you a nazi swine just to rub it in.
I’m tired and hot and there are lots of moths flying around me right now and beetles landing in my hair, so here are some more quotes for you until I can put together some more words of my own:
Ghost of Nathan Fisher: You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it's worth something. Well let me tell 'ya, it's not worth shit. Let it go. Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.
David Fisher: Well what am I supposed to do?
Nathan: What do you think? You can do anything you lucky bastard, you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?
David: It can't be that simple.
Nathan: What if it is?
-Six Feet Under, TV
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"And I don’t know how a man decides what’s right for his own life, it’s all a mysteryyyyy…"
-Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips in the song "Fight Test"
My second to last night in Dalat I was lying in bed trying to sleep. I’d spent the day with a cool Norwegian girl who was also doing the ‘round the world tour. Most of my strength was back, but I was still trying to remind myself that the timing is always right and that I shouldn’t get impatient about moving on. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I turned on the TV, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was on. It was at the part where he talks about a series of events and describes how if any one little thing had gone differently, the whole future would have changed. I continued watching until he packs up everything and heads to India. I gazed in awe as every other clip was of an exact location I had been to toward the beginning of my journey. And the voice over was as follows:
"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
The next night Slumdog Millionaire was on TV, reminding me of where my journey started, and all those slum children all over the world who weren't given the chances I was. Then again, according to Slumdog, "it is written".
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You don’t have to do anything like me or anyone else. You definitely don’t have to be happy all the time or love God (my definition: God = x = life = universe = everything we don't understand about why or how it happens) or anything like that (would be nice though, wouldn’t it?). But if you just simply don’t care anymore and have stopped trying to get the most out of life (or never really tried in the first place), and continually settle for the mundane and mediocre, I know of a guy who died far too early, and the only cosmic reason I can think of for his unfair demise is that he left so people like the old me who were scared of life could live more, and then pass on that life energy to others. His name was Billy.
www.rememberingbilly.com
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Death, God, Life, Bliss, Coincidence, Diarrhea…I’ve really tackled some big ideas in this blog. What do I make of all of it? Well, to state the obvious, that’s personal. I’m still working it out. But I do have some ideas that the circuits of my cerebrum constantly celebrate in cheerful congregation. For one, always take advantage of alliteration when possible. Second, I believe the universe has the power to provide us with a positive experience if we really want it. If we’re really going to put in the effort. I can’t answer any cosmic questions about the fate of the Bill Palinskis of the world, and it’s not my job to. Although if anything, I think we dishonor his memory more to classify his life as tragic simply because it ended early. Sometimes I think it might be unfair that I get to wander around Asia while Bill sits on the existential bench, but maybe in his twenty years Bill had a much better time and far richer experiences than I ever will. But who cares? In the end, the race is only with yourself. Comparisons are useless.
When he was in the game, Bill lived life well. He wasn’t a saint. As his own friends testify, he could be the biggest bastard too. I think that only makes me respect him more, in a Hunter S. Thompson way. I know from experience that being a clown around your friends is totally worth all the scowls in the long run. Even so, I don’t want to be him, or what he might have been had THE Coach given him more minutes. The lesson I take from his life is to live my life for myself more fully than I have before, and share my life with others and learn from others more and more and more…and more! And enough of this fear nonsense. I’m not talking about recklessness. I’m talking about doing things I really want to do because I know that’s the only way to get my bliss, and if I don’t at least try then I have no business being alive.
During all of these bus rides, I’ve got a lot of time to just ponder the landscape and listen to my beloved music. As I mentioned in my last blog, the album I’ve listened to most on this journey has probably been Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid by Bob Dylan. My favorite song ever, Wagon Wheel, was actually never finished and dropped from the soundtrack, only to be discovered, re-written and recorded by a bluegrass band called Old Crow Medicine Show decades later. But that’s another story.
The Billy the Kid album is actually incredibly laid back. Save for one ballad about Billy that’s revised several times throughout the album and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (which I usually skip because it’s not very inspiring traveling music), it’s mostly an instrumental album. The first song, “Main Title (Billy)” (which also appears in The Royal Tenenbaums), just can’t be beat for relaxing travel.
Billy the Kid is about freedom. Doing what you know is right and what you want to do, even though you know Coach Pat Garrett is going to take you out of the game some time, maybe when you’re exhausted, maybe when you’re just getting warmed up. If my high school basketball experience has taught me anything beyond the sad fact that small town sports politics are pathetic, it’s that when you do get a chance to be in the game, you’re going to screw up if you keep looking at the coach and hoping you’re pleasing him. You just gotta play like he’s not there and dive for every loose ball even though you’re going to scrape up your knees, take every open shot even though everyone might see you miss, set a pick for your friend whenever you get a chance, relish in the fact that you’re breathing so hard and when you come out of the game, you better be sweating a lot. And even though the coach probably barely noticed what you did, when your teammates on the bench high-five you for leaping out of bounds to save the bad pass or taking that charge, you know you made the most of your time. Even if their ego-centered reality still had them wishing they were playing instead of me (as I felt pretty much the whole time I was on the bench), they would respect me because they knew I’d earned my time (in the interests of honesty, I didn’t always earn my time). And even if they didn’t, I respected me because I knew I’d played my heart out. Sports metaphors, every writer’s friend. Are you satisfied, Mr. Thompson?
Every time I hear the first few strums of the guitar on “Main Title (Billy)”, I think of the kid named Billy who unknowingly and unintentionally put me on this path to follow my bliss around the world, whose life gave me the courage to see things that startle me, to meet people with a different point of view and to live a life that I’m proud of. I don’t know how the karmic debt system works, but the best I can calculate what I owe to Billy is that I follow my bliss to the utmost, wherever it may lead. And I don’t just owe it to him. I owe it to every little Indian or Lao child I’ve seen on the street who’s missing an eye or parents or any opportunity whatsoever to even know what bliss is. I owe it to 20 year old’s who died in Vietnam and seventy year old’s who can’t see or walk anymore. I owe it to every spirit on the sideline. So do you.
I’m going to China tomorrow, an activity that definitely wasn’t part of my plans when I left home for India on December 1. But for the last six weeks I’ve known it was an intricate piece in the puzzle of my bliss, and I’m finally doing it. One third of my mind is lobbying the universe for a great experience. The “it is written” third of my mind knows it’s useless to petition, because it’s already happened. The remaining third doesn’t given a damn about the universe or what’s been written. It’s going to draw on all the strength in my will, for whatever it’s worth, to make me pursue a good experience in China. And when I’m tired or bored or failing to perceive the greatness surrounding me, even though it won’t be easy, it’s going to remind me that it’s always all around me, that bliss is now, and that I’m on the right path, because I’m living the life that I love. For the Billy the Kid in my soul. For the Billy the Kid in all our souls.
May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay
Forever young
