Rambling

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On one side of my helmet was written, "Morituri te Salutamus" - which I understood to be said by Roman gladiators before the fight and to mean, "We who are about to die salute you." They started with “Hail Caesar!” – but I wasn’t hailing no mf Caesars. On the other side was a wonderfully rendered Grim Reaper (and my blood type). I understand that lots of people now are running around with tattoos that say similarly grim or grimmer things. In some cases they’re reality statements, like my helmet.

An entry on pain in Erika Lopez’ “clog” (http://clog.erikalopez.com/) put me in mind of that place of mind. I’m adding her site to my links as well as Jo’s wonderful photos taken in Burma and dorf’s backpacking site.

It’s about 6 weeks until we leave to visit David for Thanksgiving in Berkeley, then to Hong Kong for 4 days, Bangkok for a few days, then fly to Hanoi and around (Ninh Binh?) for I don’t know how long and then train on down Vietnam via Hue and I’m unsure where else and on into Saigon and then bus to Phnom Penh where we’ll meet David and spend the week with Samnang’s family. David and Leslie and I will go from there to Chiang Mai area or maybe Penang and back to Bangkok, where we’ll split up and David will head to Houston and Leslie and I will hang in BK for a few days and then fly to Hong Kong for 3.5 days, then home. Photo: Star Ferry stairs

It’s a little strange to be doing this in these economically perilous times, but it’s all been done for a month and Samnang is pretty sick. I’ve been thinking, like many others, about things laid up where moth and rust corrupt. We may need for me to unretire. We’ll see how it goes.

One year, maybe about 1983, Leslie and I were talking about having a garage built, you know, thinking about size, construction, color, cost and what not and then the idea of going to Asia came up and we realized not only would it cost less to go to Asia, but going would be a memory treasure uncorruptable by anything except death or dementia and she looked at me and I looked at her and we laughed - talk about a no-brainer! Annnd, we ended up getting RT Thai Intl. tickets 2 for the price of one!