Being Tall

It’s probably not amazing for longevity. So everyone go have fun at the nursing home without me.

At least you can get into the NBA, the zoo for tall people. (Tall people get stared at anyway so we might as well get paid for it.) I’m not in the NBA though. So I get stared at for free, especially in Asia. 

Anyway, here’s what it’s like. By age 10, you’re taller than your mom, but she can still tell you what to do. By age 13, you’re a creepy child because you’re as big as some adults but your voice hasn’t dropped yet. Eventually you stop growing, but you’re still scared every time you stand up because it feels like you’re stuck on a creaky stepladder. 

Short kings who lie about their height on Bumble and wear lifted shoes might think being tall is awesome, because girls will want to talk to you in bars. But the people who REALLY want to talk to you in bars are the drunk dudes who want to tell you about other tall dudes they know back in their hometowns. Everyone thinks tall people want to hear about tall people in other places, but we don’t.

Being tall is only a benefit if you also have a tall essence. If you have the husky voice, charismatic leadership, and high income correlated with height. 

That’s not me. People are usually surprised to find out I’m a meek, confused introvert. I think what happened is that I body-switched with a film geek in high school, but we haven’t learned the Life Lesson to switch back yet. 

But you should all be thankful I'm an introvert. If I were this tall and also confident, I'd be the Supreme Leader of the galaxy by now.

In this life I still get my perks, though. Sometimes I get the pity upgrade to the exit row in economy class.

(PS - When two tall people of the same height meet, they have to fight to the death.)

Short or regular-sized friend? We'll never know.

Writing for Lonely Planet

I got to see endangered langurs in the jungle. And they got to see me, a travel writer, also an endangered species.

I’m happy it’s somehow still a job. Travel writing won't make you rich, but it's one of the most interesting ways you can stay poor. 

During research I went to a pagoda above a waterfall so beautiful it gave me heart palpitations. I ate frogs and snails. I met a 95-year-old village shaman who remembered French soldiers commandeering her house. I climbed karsts in Lan Ha Bay and did cliff dives at sunset.

But I don’t want to write more travel content. This piece is about travel writing as a job. I’m happy for people to think it’s intriguing and sexy, but everyone who works in an office will be happy to know that it really kicked my ass. 

You have to explore the whole multiverse. Go to every place and stay in detective mode, asking endless questions with a notebook in your hand. This feels pretty cool for a few days. But it takes time, and you’re on a deadline. So sleep is the first thing to go. 

I used to travel and not sleep, when I was 22. Now I’m middle-aged, which makes me a geriatric backpacker. Every time I get off a sleeper bus I feel like a partially reanimated corpse.

When I was on the motorcycle I played rainstorm roulette and I always lost, so I was always wet, drifting moodily through villages with a backpack of wet laundry. Sometimes in cities I found accommodations that could wash and dry clothes and that was always better than Christmas morning.

At night I wrote under a mosquito net. I was constantly worried my observations wouldn’t be as good as what other travel writers had written, but I didn’t check because I didn’t want to subconsciously plagiarize any phrases. 

I do know that lazy tour companies plagiarize Lonely Planet though, so I look forward to seeing my phrases in blogs and Facebook ads next year.

Anyway, now the job is done. If I had to do it all over again, would I? Maybe. It was very lonely work. It was many, many days as the quiet sigma male arriving in town at dawn. 

I rested for a few weeks and now it’s time to find the next job. Maybe something more stable, if such a thing exists in this weird new world.

Lonely Planet began when a couple in the 70s went overland from England through Asia and printed out their stories and stapled them together. Later they sold the company for $190 million. But the husband still sometimes works for Lonely Planet as a freelancer. The joke here is that even he can’t get a stable job.

This was in Mu Cang Chai. Not pictured are the rice terrace views, which are the best in the world.

The Curse of Being a Writer

Years of antisocial behavior have paid off. I have thousands of journal pages. Most of the sentences in them aren’t interesting, but some of them are. The problem is I’m not sure which notebook they’re in.

If you write a lot, you need to make it a part-time job to consistently go back and find the good ideas, or else they’ll be gone like you never wrote them at all.

This is on top of the other full-time job of staying in shape as a writer—reading to fill up your brain with influences and then actually writing (to practice tHe cRaFt). Your brain will atrophy and you will get worse as a writer if you don’t spent addict-level amounts of time doing these things.

I’m out of shape right now. These days, I’ll write a sentence, and then later find a much better version of the same sentence in a journal from like five years ago. Then I feel guilty for using that old sentence, like I’m plagiarizing someone who deserves to use that sentence more than I do. 

Once I have a few good sentences I want to turn into a blog post, the real agony begins. Writing is hard, and when a piece is not going well (which is often) you’re consumed with latent—but turbocharged—anxiety until you can finally figure it out.

On a post like this one I spend a lot of time cutting out extra words, hack phrases, half-truths, lame jokes, and anything that sounds “bloggy.” But sometimes, when I get rid of all this stuff, there’s almost nothing left, so I have to go back in and pad it out, and then the whole cycle restarts.

This is why my posts usually take months. I could have used all this time to become a brain surgeon or an astronaut instead. Something that pays money.

You already know this, but most writers make embarrassing amounts of money. I published a book once. Most people assume it was self-published, but it was a real book from a publisher. It took me eight months, and it made me a thousand dollars. That would have been great money if the book was published in 1917, but it was published in 2017. 

So, you should try to be nice to people in this life. The more heinous acts you commit in this life, the greater the chance you’ll want to be a writer or artist in your next one, and people will feel sorry for you. Genghis Khan was probably reborn as a beat poet.

This is my headshot from my old job, where I wrote social media posts for banks. Now, robots do this job.

How to Travel

It doesn't matter where you go. (I’m not going to mention any countries because that would make this post sound like ChatGPT.) Just go look at something different for a few days. Scout some locations where you might want to be reborn in your next life. Enjoy the nirvana of struggling to find and then finding the right power adapter. Drink local booze on the street right out of the bottle (in many countries that aren’t the U.S., you are allowed to do this). Join a protest if you see one.

You should do a lot when you go on a trip, but also not too much. Don’t worry about waking up at an ambitious time in a new city. You can sleep until noon in a cloud of a hotel bed and still have the next eight hours to see some things of interest, then eat and drink too much, and then go back to sleep.

For the love of God, do not wait for retirement. Old people are supposed to have money and free time, so their trips aren’t impressive. But if you take a trip while you’re young, that’s very sexy and interesting. Unless your parents paid for it. 

Don’t wait for the holidays. Travel at random, off-peak times. Embrace the anarchy of awkwardly timed leaves that inconvenience your boss and coworkers.

But don’t travel too often. You don’t want to build up a tolerance—it is very possible to go to wonderful, exotic places and not appreciate them. Force yourself to sit at home for three or four months until you’re consumed with skullcrushing boredom and it suddenly horrifies you to realize your life is burning away. Then you’re good to go. You should want it so bad that your teeth should be itching as you buy tickets.

Travel, but just don’t make it your whole personality. If “I’ve been places” is your whole thing, people kind of tune you out after a while. And know that if you’re boring, travel won’t fix that; we all know boring people who went on hair-raising expeditions and came back still boring. 

And you should probably go soon, before AI takes your job and you don’t have enough money to do anything. Enjoy the unimpeachable luxury of traveling out of respect for your ancestors who never got to. You’re alive, act like it.

Forbidden City, 2007. If you ever wonder how comfortable it is to walk around Beijing in flip-flops and a swimsuit all day, it’s not.

Staying Alive in Your 30s

It’s the young man’s duty to fully enjoy the drug of youth. The decade or so when he is bulletproof. Because for most of his life, he’ll be a tired, irrelevant dork. So he needs to enjoy the fraction of his existence when he’s not that guy.

The young man should sleep only sometimes and go to the gym too much. He should be broke and go to too many parties. Maybe crash a vehicle or be rude to his family. Youth should be a Navy SEAL Hell Week of debauchery, but it should last for years, and it should be a crime to regret it.

This isn't going to be a piece where I talk about how fit and strong I was back in my day. The reality was more nuanced. I never had a six-pack as a young man, but I also never got fat. This is because most of my precious youth was blowtorched away by social anxiety, so during those immortal years I just hid in the gym like a cave troll. I only worked the nightclub muscles. I always skipped leg day or ab day. I’m not a coordinated person, so for cardio I would just run sprints in simple, straight lines, so I wouldn’t get confused. Then I would go to parties wearing tiny T-shirts I bought in the Hanoi night market and drink tanker trucks full of beer. 

I got to be the young man for a long time. It was magical. The Captain America serum didn’t wear off until I was 36. Then I got Achilles tendinitis, so now I have to do tedious foam rolls and stretches every day just so I can maybe not tear my Achilles tendon. Now I gingerly tip-toe around like I’m in a minefield.

But not everyone has something like that happen when they get older. You might still be fine. You might still be able to run around forever. But if you don’t injure a tendon or a joint, the first sign of death will be your face melting like a candle. One morning, the pillow creases on your cheeks won’t go away. Father Time will find you. He doesn’t forget about anyone. If he hasn’t found you yet, then he’s looking for you right now.

It’s fine. You just have to keep moving. You can do new things if you can’t do the old things. I can’t run now, so I do jiu jitsu, which I am not good at because I’m not coordinated. I only go once a week, and it’s the worst part of my week. It hurts my mind and my body. On the mat, five-foot-tall Vietnamese guys treat me like a shoelace. But this brings humility, which is also your duty to experience at some point.

Another sad day as a #WhiteBeltWarrior.

Hanoi

I got to Hanoi in 2016, when the backpackers ruled the Earth. I was a suburban child in search of exotic vibes and maximum weirdness, and I found those things in Hanoi.

It’s a place of casual anarchy. Where in any bar you can meet someone who might be a fugitive, and where it’s OK to drive your motorcycle up the sidewalk like Tom Cruise if you’re late for work. Or if you just want to.

You have to wear a ninja mask all the time but you still taste gasoline in the air. Wherever you are, there is a woman in floral-print pajamas nearby killing a chicken and not washing her hands. 

Vietnam is so hot that it feels like the concrete is about to bubble into magma and suck us all down into hell. So you spend a lot of time at the pool drinking fifty-cent beers with ice cubes, giggling with your friends as you warp into a state of dehydrated delirium. There are worse ways to live. 

The backpackers all came here “for a few weeks” but then decided to stay forever and formed a fake aristocracy. They play the game of life with cheat codes on. They teach English classes and get paid too much money in cash like drug dealers. They have de facto diplomatic immunity to commit minor crimes on the roads and in the clubs. These people will go down as the luckiest idiots of all time. 

Everyone is a long way from home. Vietnam is very far away, and it feels far away. It takes a long time to get here. I like that. I believe that if you want to go somewhere exotic and worthwhile, you need to suffer. Direct flights are too easy. You should have to be in transit for at least thirty hours and get lost trying to find your connection gate in Tajikistan or wherever. By the time you finally land at Noi Bai Airport you feel like you’re on the other side of the galaxy. 

Whenever I get back to Hanoi, I feel like many problems in life have been solved. And whenever I have to leave, those problems get unsolved.

Photo by Chris Hocker

One of the OG Tays, a great photographer and a great friend.

Why This Website Exists

I've been a good little ghostwriter. I lurk, do the work, and don't say a word. 

I’m also a ghost when it comes to personal expression. I fill up notebooks like a detective but never really post anything (except for Instagram captions, which are my favorite art form).

Of course, the irony of being an invisible mercenary is that nothing shows up when clients Google you. So, I had to break cover and make this website. And here it is. Welcome to Ben Engelbach’s Website.

Fortunately for me, the writing is already done. I just have to go through my notebooks, and I’ll post any good stuff I find.

I know reading is really hard (it feels like you’re planking with your brain) so thanks for reading this far. And now, the post is over and you can get back to indulging in the bright poison of Instagram or whatever else you want to do.

These all say BEN’S SECRET DIARY DON’T READ!!! on the cover.