Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago I was watching a Chinese man on Television defy a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square in China. Actually I had been watching the events unfold over the course of several days--the student protests with bullhorns the hundreds of thousands of Chinese occupying the square, and the Unknown Rebel, who most certainly was executed for his act of rebellion against that advancing column of Chinese tanks. It is really a trip on how time has flown by so fast. 1989 was a turning point year of my life. All of the actions and decisions I made during the years preceding 1989 came to a head, and I didn't know how to handle any of it. Being young and dumb, and well you know the rest, doesn't do a whole lot of good, and though you are supposed to learn from the things that you do, oftentimes you still don't and always go back and analyze things, and then just chock it all up to experience. Basically 1989 was a year of rebellion, not only with external events such as Tiananmen, but internally within my own self as well. Twenty years later, it causes me to wonder, what in all heck was I thinking? Twenty years later, I feel my age. I am no longer a 20something with $hit for brains. I've got three kids, a mortgage payment, a car payment, a boat payment, credit card bills, college tuition bills, and the list goes on. I work from home, on a computer, on the Internet, and this enables me to visit far off places during my down time and just imagine. Lately I've been looking at this place called Cloud 9 in the Philippines. Its a right reef break that is pretty much one of the best tube rides in the world. And I want to go there next time I go to the Philippines. I also want to go to La Union on Luzon, there is some pretty good waves there as well. I just need a car. And a driver.