twenty five

This is absurd 1982 chain letter nonsense that earned the USPS a pile of cash and made a lot of people think they were going to die within the week. However, this particular one is actually an interesting exercise.

<chain letter nonsense deleted>

1. I have never wanted a pony. A unicorn or a mermaid would be pretty cool, but better would be a box of infinite monkeys. Except for the poop problem.

2. I like sunsets better than sunrises.

3. I celebrated xmas for almost 10 years straight with someone else's family.

4. After 9/11, I seriously considered joining the marines.

5. I wish my French was better. (So I'm practicing.)

6. I made it 31 years before someone close to me died.

7. My favorite response to a posed, unanswerable (by choice or philosophy) question is, "I am a very small dog."

8. I can tell time by the sun.

9. If I were a vegetable, I would be a pineapple. My favorite color is blue, no, yellow.

10. I'm atheist. Really. For real. A lot. Seriously.

11. I'd like to know everything a doctor does, but I don't want to be a doctor.

12. I wear a compass on my watch band. I use it often.

13. I think about suicide at a rate of around once a decade. Thankfully, the rate of attempts is far lower.

14. I don't like sharing.

15. I think dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight sounds exquisite.

16. I'd like to go to Africa next.

17. I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

18. I lie sometimes.

19. I tell the truth most times. Especially when it's inappropriate. e.g. "You are an idiot and the best thing you can do for the human race is sterilize yourself."

20. I learn more through hardship and failure than through success. I think success may make me complacent. Who's the cliche now, eh?

21. Living room fight club is amazingly cathartic.

22. My jaw really really hurts right now.

23. Living out of a backpack, lo-fi, is extremely liberating. Electricity and running water are expendable. Candles and mosquito nets, on the other hand, are invaluable.

24. I've lived the American Dream and won. Now what?

25. I honestly don't think there's an answer out there, but I'm going to keep looking anyway.

And there you go.

I wonder if moderation is naturally selected for

Of all the True Things ever said about me, I still like Packer's the best. (You can ask him about that.) However, I think perhaps we might all agree that moderation was never my strongest point.

I, as is my nature, have signed on for rarely taken (but often talked about in revered, hushed tones) technical trimix (breathing a mix of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen) dive training. It is so cool. You actually use gases that would kill you if you breathed them on the surface. In normal recreational diving, the manuals always tell you (truthfully) that even if you do something horribly wrong, you'll likely live happily ever after. In my tech manual, practically every other word is "death." Yeah, and in between "death," they like to insert "permanent injury." Sweet. Sounds like a proper challenge.

The standard depth limit for normal human** diving is 40 meters/130'. With trimix, I'll be able to go to 75 meters/250' (that's approximately the roof of a twenty five floor building, in the opposite direction). There's some amazing things to see down there. In the Pacific, there's a sunken Japanese WWII carrier with planes and tanks *still on the deck*. She lies in 67 meters/220' of water. I am so all over that. At those depths, there are things that very few other humans have ever seen [and lived to tell about it]. Clearly, I totally have to go there. Yup, I suck at moderation.


It's been a while since my last missive. I left the Palau ship when the season ended in June and returned to Thailand to work on my teaching chops. (If any of you want to learn to dive, I'm a relatively slick instructor now. Well, relative to before, at least.) Teaching, while rewarding, is somewhat consistent and uneventful. Mildly unworthy of an adventure note, which is my excuse for the egregious lack of recent front line reporting. I know, lame excuse. I did teach the Captain of a US Navy rescue and deep salvage ship how to dive. I felt pretty good about myself that day. Go forth and save some lives sir.


I miss you all terribly, and I know I keep promising and bailing, but I will actually make it back to the States at some point for a visit. In the meantime, next time you climb to the 25th floor of a building, look out the window and think of me.


**I think the standard depth limit for normal chicken diving is something like 500 meters/1650', but I can't be sure. I believe it varies depending on whether it's fresh or frozen. And don't even start about feathers.

oh snap!

New photos up.

I'm still floundering about a bit with the whole taking-pictures-underwater shtick, but you know what they say, practice makes a lot of deleted photos. Anyway, almost all the new ones were taken underwater, so forgive the sometimes dubious composition. Getting fish to hold still and pose while you photograph them is like herding three-year-old children who have just smoked crack and have access to motor vehicles.

One other interesting thing of note: all the main subjects of the underwater photos are animals - no plants; you'll understand why that's both cool and non-obvious if you go have a look.

Uploading 8mpix photos on a 56k dial up connection is like the least fun game ever.

It's never quite like the first time

Yesterday was my first time in the chamber.

As I surface from a beautiful dive with two guests and my videographer, I find out there's some sort of medical emergency involving one of my instructors who was out on a fun dive (no guests). She's just gone to 366 feet (111 meters) and shot to the surface.

For reference, after one hundred feet, you start feeling a little drunk. At two hundred feet, you've just pounded the ugly half of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Past two hundred, the oxygen in the air you're breathing becomes toxic. You start losing control of your extremities; your arms and legs twitch uncontrollably. Keep going, and you lose vision and hearing. Then you have a seizure and drown.

Apparently she panicked when she went blind.

So I'm still wet from my dive, and I'm arranging emergency evac for this girl who can't feel her arms and legs, and is drifting in and out of consciousness. There are so many reasons why she should be dead, I'm actually pretty surprised she's still twitching.

An hour later, we're putting her in the hyperbaric chamber. But they need a diver to go in there with her in case she seizes during recompression. The normal tender is on holiday in Bali. The nurses don't dive. Guess I'm going in.

It's a two person chamber: a metal tube about seven feet long and five feet in diameter. It is not big. Quite the opposite, it is very very small. Over-sized coffin is just about the right image.

No synthetic fibers, no electronics allowed inside; compressed 100% oxygen is serious combustion risk. In fact, there's a hose system to partially flood the chamber in case of fire. A tiny metal tube, pressurized, with a fire inside? Not cool.

We get all cozy, locked in nice and tight. Down to sixty feet we go (pressure-wise), sealed up for a few hours.

It wasn't so bad in the beginning. Mostly just chilling out, being mildly bored (I had forgotten to grab my book when I was arranging the emergency evac, silly me).

Your voice sounds different in there. It's the density of the air, I think. Sound travels faster, everything is more high-pitched.

After a while, you start to feel like you could really go all-the-way insane in there. You completely lose track of time, except for the doctor's voice over the ancient staticky radio telling you how many hours left. Nothing to do. No space. Sit. Lie down. Fidget. Sit up. The witty banter dies out. You need to pee. But you're stuck in the chamber. Fidget. Lie down. Sit up. You're hungry. There's no food. Lie down. Sit up. Fidget. Dust off the dried salt crystals on your legs from the morning's dive. You need a shower. Lie down. Fidget. Sit up. Try not to have a seizure. Fidget. Fidget.

On the bright side, cigarettes and beer are remarkably effective after you've been chambered. Of course, if you were actually sick when you went in, those things are forbidden, so it's a benefit reserved for tenders. Zing!

Epilogue.

The girl is still having motor function difficulties in her legs, but otherwise, she's made a decently miraculous recovery, considering there's a grocery list of reasons why she should be hanging out with Davy Jones right now. She was chambered again today for five hours; I was locked out for 24 hours, doctor's orders, so some other lucky sucker won the tender prize today. But it looks like I might be headed back in tomorrow. Doh.

And one more final note for those thinking about learning to dive: please don't let this scare you; this girl didn't have an accident. She fully intended on going that deep. She didn't tell anyone beforehand (because we would have stopped her), but it wasn't an accident (except maybe for the panicking part). I suspect some serious preexisting mental health problems or unprecedented stupidity, which I guess are the same thing. She's definitely getting a psych eval before getting discharged. Whatever, the story's about me anyway, not her. Focus!

Diving is fun and safe. Seriously.

Wish you were here making funny faces in the tiny chamber windows.

a moment on dry land

Just a quick note.

I've started working on a liveaboard yacht in Palau. It's amazing. We're out at sea for six out of seven days, and I've got about two hours off a week, but it's utterly and completely worth it. Sharks, turtles, whale sharks, mantas, crazy Superman currents (because you fly like Superman), and schools of fish so dense they blot out the sun. Ironically, I have an underwater camera now, but not enough free time to upload photos.

The ocean is so so so blue. Every beautiful shade of blue. Uninhabited rock islands coated with gorgeous lush jungle. Cruising on speed boats with the wind in your hair, a rainbow on the horizon (all the time here!), the blue ocean dotted with tiny islands as far as the eye can see, and the bright clean sun in the sky. Even when it rains, it's still amazing with the infinite drops splashing in the sea.

Come have a holiday with me. I'll be running the 150' yacht in about two months. Seriously, I'm training now to be Big Cheese.

My couple hours on dry land are nearly up, so I'm back to the ship.

Miss you terribly.