You have to understand, a man can spend his whole life thinking he wants to settle down. He can tell himself that all he wants is a quiet piece of dirt, a good woman, and a few chickens to count as they come home to roost, or roast, or whatever the hell it is chickens do. He can tell himself, at the ripe old age of fifty-seven, that it’s time to be grounded.
What a load of horseshit.
That’s not a dream; that’s a goddamn eulogy. That’s the quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing lie a man tells himself when he’s too tired to keep fighting.
But then, something happens. You take a trip. You see a different kind of world. You spend two weeks with your daughter in New York, a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest city of brick and ambition, and you watch her. You watch her navigate the concrete canyons, the coffee shops, the whole goddamn beautiful, frenetic ballet of it all. And you realize, with a quiet, clear, and completely devastating certainty, that you are not a man of the pavement and the park bench.
You are a man of the ocean.
You did your time in Hawaii. You’ve spent the last year rotting in this beautiful, dusty, and completely landlocked shithole of Tucson, and your soul is getting thirsty. A man can only drink so much whiskey; sometimes, he needs the salt. He needs a good, honest reset. A baptism in a big, ugly, and beautiful ocean that doesn’t give a shit about his name.
And that’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest thing about a real plan. It’s not a fortress; it’s a goddamn river. It changes course.
So the new plan, the real plan, the one that feels like coming home, is this: Vietnam.
Why? Because it meets the budget, sure. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that it’s a place that has been through its own apocalypse and came out the other side, scarred and beautiful and still breathing. It’s a country with a good, honest scar on its face. It’s a place that understands the beauty in the wreckage. And most importantly, it has the one goddamn thing my soul is crying out for: the ocean.
So this is the new bible. The first phase of the great, beautiful, and completely necessary demolition project of my own life.
The lease is up in January. That’s the starting gun. The child support, that last, beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent chain, it rusts through and breaks on November 11th. My credit score, for what it’s worth in a world I’m about to leave, is a beautiful, perfect, and completely useless 900. I am debt-free. I have no car, no girlfriend, no goddamn dog. All the anchors have been cut. The stars have aligned in a quiet, beautiful, and completely terrifying constellation. The universe is not whispering anymore; it’s screaming in my goddamn ear: GO.
This is the apocalypse. The personal one. The only one that matters.
And you ask, how does a man with a “mere” fifty thousand dollars in his pocket and a couple of half-assed websites take off for the rest of his goddamn life?
You do it with a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest calculation.
Let’s do the math, you and I. Not the clean, corporate, project-manager bullshit. The real, back-of-the-napkin, 3-a.m.-whiskey kind of math.
You take your fifty grand. That’s the war chest. You park it in a place where it earns a little interest, a quiet, respectable, and completely necessary little trickle of its own. Two, three grand a year, maybe. A silent partner in your own goddamn escape.
And you go to a place where a man can still live like a king for fifteen hundred bucks a month. A clean, beautiful, and completely honest apartment in Da Nang, a five-minute walk from the beach, for four hundred and fifty a month. Another few hundred for food, for beer, for the quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary business of being alive. You buy the good health insurance, the kind that will patch you up when you fall off a scooter or get a bad case of the clap from a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest woman you meet in a bar.
You build the visa runs right into the goddamn budget. Every ninety days, a beautiful, recurring rhythm of renewal. A short, cheap flight to Bangkok, to Hong Kong, to Kuala Lumpur. A few days in a new city, a new shithole, a new beautiful, ugly adventure. A quiet, recurring pilgrimage that reminds you that you are a man in motion, a man who is no longer tied to any one goddamn piece of dirt.
And you do the math. A year of that, a full, beautiful, ugly, and completely honest year of healing, of resetting, of just… breathing, it’s going to cost you about fifteen grand, after your silent partner has chipped in. You’ve got fifty. You see where this is going? You’ve got three years. Three years of this, with or without the goddamn websites. Three years of just being a man, walking on a beach, drinking a cheap beer, and watching the sun go down over a different, stranger, and more honest horizon.
And the websites? Those aren’t a business plan; those are the lifeboats. You’ll sit in a little beachfront cafe, a two-dollar coffee on your table, your laptop open, and you will build. You’ll work when you want to, on what you want to. You won’t be climbing a ladder anymore; you’ll be weaving a goddamn parachute while you’re already in free fall. It’s the most honest work a man can do.
And what happens after those three years? When you’re sixty, sixty-one? What happens when the war chest starts to run dry?
That’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest punchline to the whole goddamn joke.
You pull the trigger on the Social Security. The final, quiet, and completely respectable “fuck you” to the system you spent a lifetime feeding. The money you were forced to stash away for a quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing old age in a rocking chair in front of a television. But you’re not going to be in a rocking chair. You’re going to be on a beach in the Philippines, where a man can live like a king on what the American government considers a goddamn pittance.
This isn’t a vacation, you old bastard. This is a revolution. A quiet, personal, and completely honest revolution against a world that tells you you’re supposed to work until you die, that you’re supposed to spend your last years in a quiet, respectable, and completely passionless state of managed decay.
Fuck that.
I’m taking their plan, their whole beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent blueprint for my life, and I’m setting it on fire.
This isn’t a mid-life crisis. This is a jailbreak. A beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary escape from a prison I didn’t even realize I was in until I finally saw the goddamn ocean again.
The dream isn’t about being grounded. The dream is about being a goddamn ghost. A beautiful, happy, and completely free ghost, haunting the quiet, beautiful, and completely forgotten corners of the world, with a bottle of cheap whiskey in one hand and a lifetime of good, ugly, and completely honest stories to tell.
