Thinking About the Future

I look at the road I've traveled in the past two years, and also the road ahead. Both seem equally as fraught with danger and hardship. Coming back to America has proved to be as difficult if not more so than my adjustment to living life on the run as an illegal immigrant and migrant worker in Thailand. As strange as it may sound, I had accepted that role, and had done what I could to make the best of it. As I begin to get my senses back here and overcome the culture shock and travel fatigue, my mind often turns to the memories of the last two years and how seemingly incredible and far away they are now.

I have done a great deal of writing over the past two years. Some of it has ended up here in the blog. Some of it is saved in digital files online. And, even more still is on paper as I often was only able to scribble down notes as I lived and worked in some of the most remote and dangerous conditions. I've now had a few days to look at some of these and realized that it is quite a story. I compiled most of these together and have begun piecing and tying them together in a timeline format.

For every post I made here on the blog there are at least three more stories and experiences that I never had time to relay. I had even given up on blogging for a long period of time until my arrest and court case started back in March. There are portions of the the story and my experiences that I believe do need to be told. There are others yet that I probably will never speak or write about again as long as I live. Having personally and first hand witnessed the world that very few ever see, I feel that some of these do need to be told. In the time I spent there, I saw the absolute beauty and kindness that the culture has to offer. In contrast, I also witnessed first hand and up close the darker side of the third and developing world. Organized crime, government corruption, human trafficking, prostitution, migrant worker exploitation, prisons, the aftermath of civil war, and how people just keep moving along despite the greatest of odds.

Now that I have finally made it back to the states, I literally don't have a penny to my name. However, I do have something much more valuable. I have this story to tell. I have put a great deal of work in recent days into compiling my notes, fragments and fully written pieces. To my surprise, it currently totals over 60,000 words already. I am seriously considering formatting and finishing it into a full manuscript. I expect that if completed it will easily top 100,000 words. I paid dearly for these experiences with blood, sweat, bone, and tears. Some of which will be forever etched on my body and mind. My only hope is that I might be able to put them to paper and pass them on. As I fought my way through the last two years, there was one thing that kept me going. That one thing was that I had not yet told the incredible story of where I had been and what I had done and seen. This thought kept me from doing the unspeakable on many an occasion when things seemed the darkest.

It seems that the time may have come to finally tell the story. It's all I have, so I might as well make good use of it. Let me know your thought and ideas as I further explore this possibility. I have plenty of time to write at the moment, and have been averaging 2,000 to 4,000 words a day as I do my best to document the strange journey that I have been on.

As always, take care of yourselves and each other.

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