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Week 1

Well I left off at Christmas, so I’ll start from there. My mom asked if I would babysit the kids while she went to work and of course I said yes. It was pretty fun watching and playing with them all day, but for the love of god does Colton wake up way too early. Clay was awesome by waking up with him and watching him in the morning and letting me sleep in, but still, Colton needs to learn how to sleep in =) Monday was a pretty shitty day for me since I awoke to the news of Tan’s death and had to break the news to some of my other friend’s and try to make plans on how to get back to my hometown for the funeral, which was on Wednesday. My mom wasn’t getting home until Wednesday and so there was no way I was going to be able to make the funeral unfortunately, but his family was having his cremation ceremony on Thursday and so I realized that if I drove through the night on New Year’s Eve, I would be home by early that morning and be

The minute my mom walked into the house, I packed up my truck and headed out on the road. I didn’t leave until around 8:30, so my parents were kinda worried about me driving with a bunch of drunks. And trust me, there were quite a few drunks out on the road. I was tempted to call the police on one guy because he was going 40 MPH and swerving all over the damn road, but I watched him pull off the highway right as I was pulling out my cell phone, so I let it be. At about 11:40, every car on the highway pretty much vanished, leaving just me and the truckers, so I was making some damn good time. In fact, I made it into North Carolina by midnight and I was flying outside of Charlotte by 2 AM, so I was happy about the time I was making…

And that was until the moving truck in front of me exploded. That’s right folks, here I was making great time, singing along to whatever CD I had in at the time to keep me awake, starting to climb up a hill when all of a sudden this giant fireball erupted from the other side of the hill. I had no idea what the hell had just exploded, but I soon found out when I came up over the hill. A tracker trailer full of furniture was at the bottom of the hill just blazing from front to back. There were a few cars between the burning inferno and me and I was both amazed and sickened to see a few of them just fly by the truck. I pulled over onto the shoulder and called 911 and as I was explaining what the hell had happened and where exactly we were on the highway, an SUV pulled up and the driver sprinted up to the truck to see if the driver was alright. Apparently the driver had bailed out right after the truck caught fire and the man who had jumped out to help him brought him back to his SUV. Just as I got off the phone and the two men were arriving at the SUV, the trailer exploded again. This time I was able to actually see the explosion and it was pretty cool. The left side of the truck shot burning wreckage all over the highway. Right about then a highway patrolman pulled up and blocked off the road so that cars couldn’t keep trying to get by. Within a few minutes fire trucks finally pulled up, but since it was New Year’s Eve, they were a little short on firefighters and those that were there were just volunteers who had been out celebrating.

So there I sat, with a front row seat, watching 15 or so firefighters try to put out this ungodly huge fire with just two fire trucks and no fire hydrants around for extra water, so all they were able to do was spray the fire for a few seconds and then watch it and wait for it to just burn itself out. And while this was cool and all, it was 2 in the fucking morning and I had been on the road for hours. I figured that they would have the fire out enough to get traffic moving within an hour or so and god was I wrong. It took them 4 hours to put the damn thing out and I was going crazy. I was so damn tired and Tan’s cremation ceremony was only hours away, so when I saw them finally moving the fire engine in the left lane and walking out with light sticks to wave us through, I screamed in jubilation and went to crank my truck up. And that’s when my battery decided to fucking die and leave me sitting there stranded. It took me a few minutes to get the fire fighter to notice that I was stranded, but when I did, he came over and asked what was wrong. I told him that I needed a jump and he went and got a self-jumper from his truck and got me going within a few minutes. I thanked him and jumped in my truck and he went to close my hood. He slammed it down and it just shot back up. He looked at it weird and pushed it down again and again it wouldn’t latch. 10 minutes and 5 fire fighters later, we came to the conclusion that when I pulled the latch to unhook my hood the first time, the cord snapped and therefore wouldn’t latch back. So here I am, standing on the highway, having left my house 10 hours ago trying to get my truck’s hood to close. That’s when one of the fire fighters just grabbed a bungee cord, roped my hood shut, and said to get it fixed when I got to wherever I was going. I thanked them all and finally got moving. I watched the sunrise as I continued to drive home and finally made it home at like 7:30 AM. I was so fucking exhausted and knew that I shouldn’t even sit down, much less lay down, but you know me. I sat down to take a break and passed out on the couch.

Somehow I awoke at 9:30 on my own, but that meant that I wouldn’t have enough time to take a shower or anything. I had been planning on finding something to wear during that time I slept, so I hastily grabbed some pants and one of my brother’s shirts and ran out the door…only to see that the damn bungee cord was loose. So I had to attempt and rope the thing back shut without getting grease and soot all over my clothes. I managed to get it done in good time and jumped in the car and flew downtown.

I arrived just a few minutes late, but when I got there people were already coming out of the mortuary. I wasn’t sure why they were leaving, but once I got out of my truck, I ran into Jess and Nick and learned that everybody was going over to the cremation house. I got a ride from Nick and the ride over there was pretty sobering. Eric pretty much summed up the mood when he asked Nick if Michael, Tan’s little 5-year old brother, had come up to him yet and said:

“We’re burning my brother’s body today.”

We finally got there and I found Jess and walked in with her. It turns out that we had all been ushered into a small room, in which located at the front was a giant furnace. And standing there were 6 men loading up Tan’s casket into the furnace while a Monk stood around it, singing and praying in Vietnamese while the rest of us just stood there in shock, at least that’s how it was for me. The whole thing lasted maybe 10 minutes, but we witnessed them loading the casket and then turning on the furnace and the whole time, there were only three sounds coming from the room. The first of which was from the Monk, the second of which was from the furnace, slowly humming, and the third of which came from Tan’s mother as she stood there bawling and screaming out. I’ll never forget that scene for as long as I live and I really would like to elaborate on it more, but it’s not as elaborate as one might think it should be. The emotions I can remember feeling would be served no justice if I tried to translate them into words and the images burned into my mind could never be accurately reproduced, even if I had pictures. Just standing there listening to one of your good friend’s body being burned while his mother cried out in a language that you could not understand is something I had wish I never had to experience, yet am thankful that I did.

Once we got back to the mortuary, Eric told me that him and some other friends of Tan’s were taking the flowers from the funeral over to his crash site and so I followed them over. I gave Chong a call on my way there and let him know where it was and he agreed to meet us over there. When we got there, we set the flowers out and then just stood there staring at them for a few minutes. Nobody really knew of anything to say and so Eric asked if Jess and I wanted to go down into the brush and see where his car landed. It was about 200 feet from the road and once we got down there, you could clearly see which trees his car had hit and all the bits and pieces of his car that were strewn all over the place. Eric and Kelly made their way back up to the main road while Jess and I just stood there, quietly staring at the tree. With the only sound coming from the chirping birds and being surrounding by nothing more then trees and brush, it felt peaceful and surreal it felt, yet only days before in this same exact spot, one of my best friends laid there dead. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went back up to the road and we all stood around and made small talk for a few minutes while people started to one by one make their exits. It was down to just Nick and me when Chong pulled up and came over to talk with us. He went down to the trees and came back up a few minutes later amazed by how far Tan had managed to jump his car. Nick and I were still just mulling around like zombies, not really feeling like thinking about Tan being dead when Chong said something along the lines of:

“Jesus guys, I still can’t get over how fucking far he flew. I can tell you this, he would have been damn proud of that jump and going out like that.”

That’s when Nick and I just burst out in smiles and realized that Chong had a point. Had Tan lived, no matter how horrible his injuries might have been, the only spin he’d have been able to put on it was how far he’d been able to jump his car and how none of us would ever come close to that. That’s the kinda of man Tan was. I know people overuse the phrase that their friends can always find the good in things, but when I think about it, I can’t think of a single time when Tan spoke negatively, whenever he did speak that is. If he couldn’t say something positive, he’d say something funny and let that be that while the rest of us tried to remind ourselves that we should think more like he does.

For the nest two hours we stood around the flowers and told story after story about Tan. I told every single one I could think of and it was funny how hours later I was thinking of tons that I had forgotten about. We probably would have stood around there longer reminiscing, but around that time swarms of bees had begun to flock to the flowers, so we left and went to get some lunch and talk some more. After that, I headed home to take a much needed nap and catch up on my rest…

So that’s what happened during the first week I took off from posting. I’ll post the second week tomorrow afternoon and I promise that it will be more cheerful then this one. Take it easy y’all.