Facts Are Facts, But Belief Is a Choice

Don't worry! In some ways, I'm just like everybody else! In many ways, I still live in the past, too. I might even be "Still in Saigon" in many ways. I may have even died there in 1967! See, once... back in 2003, I had this problem. I couldn't hear out of one ear, which, believe it or not, I did not know at the time, was just an accumulation of way too much ear wax! Old dopey me, right?

So, I went to the campus hospital in the college town I was living in at the time, where a medical student graciously began to clean out my ear. But then... the weirdest thing happened! I was lying there on the table, with some gal I'd never seen before (or since) attending to my ear, and lo and behold, I started to have VERTIGO! And I mean SERIOUS ASS vertigo! I started spinning in my body, and the next thing I knew, I was looking down at my combat boots in the jungle in Vietnam!

Shells bursting! Rifle fire! The oppressive, sweltering jungle heat, and the sun beating down on me and my platoon.... So I jumped off that damn hospital table back in "the world," stumbled over to one side of the room, leaned on another table, and proceeded to tell the nurse what I was experiencing BACK IN VIETNAM. Well, her eyes got big as silver dollars, and she shot out of that room and did NOT return.

The vertigo passed, thank God, and they sent in a guy who was much, much more gentle in his probing of my cranium, and that was that. Which may explain a lot about my life and current predicament, really. And why I am still stuck in East Asia (this time, as an often highly reluctant career English Teacher) - in various parts of Asia that I really don't like anymore than when I died as a young soldier in Vietnam.

But... hey... you don't believe any of that, do ya? That's okay, 'cause, you know what? I honestly don't know if I did die in Vietnam in a previous life (though that was definitely NOT the first "flash back" to life as a soldier in Vietnam that I've had over the years, and I sincerely doubt it will be the last). Maybe I was just somehow psychically in touch with someone who did die over there before I was born. But most importantly, I HONESTLY DON'T GIVE A DAMN IF ANYONE DOES OR DOESN'T BELIEVE! Facts are facts. And belief is a choice.