Yesterday i described a shotgun blast in a room of an itinerant mining shack my mother shared with my grandmother and uncle - the discharge was precipitated by an unwelcome “suitor” at a back porch door while my grandfather was absent. The ripples of this violence still hold sway thousands of miles away and many decades after the fact. It gives me pause when i think about my own feelings toward young locals roosting at vantage points near my current home posing as fishermen. Nor can i say they are not in earnest or give a fuck about my “foreigners” hovel, save the fact that just days ago someone entered my home in the dead-of-night and left the never-used television toggled on. About this event, i have no real strong feelings, for in the best case it is simply disaffected young bucks “counting coup” in a city harboring predatory “alien digital entrepreneurs” seizing all the easy pickings, and in the worst case the manifestation of a sexually confused post adolescent man-child wanting to sort out his yearnings in entirely inappropriate, and possibly destructive ways. More to the point is how it relates to choices i make about my own lodgings. To stay or go, seems to be a theme from the day may changed the door locks to the home i had grown up in - i was 15. My scar is simply new skin growing from ma’s own brutal upbringing.
She was in her day a remarkably bountiful personality, yielding much to many for selfish and unselfish reasons as near as i can determine. Today i can only hope that the likely suffocation from the latest plague is quiet and peaceful. However it seems by the vigor i feel mentally, spiritually and physically despite the corrosive learning curve i’ve put my “mortal coil” through - i fear there are years left to me, when i would rather accomplish more than sampling the googol/youtube fare the ruling class would like to distract me with. For example, where would i go should i choose to vacate this, in its peculiar fashion, opulent domicile. The small ancient fishing hamlet/hipster doofus digital bucket list destination is flat, hence bicyclable, for the time being; more agrarian than the metropolitan destiny of its closest neighbor - Da Nang. I admire the culture and the people of Viet Nam, and have for many decades. Having lived in dozens of countries on 4 continents in the past 5 years, i can say i have a fair flavor of a broad swath of what the planet has to offer in amenities. The pressing consideration is my dotage. As a cantankerous solitary creative, i have reason to be concerned about who is nearby when i breathe my last gasp, and why.
The fiction my father, the wolf pack leader left me with was complex to say the least. His last “squeeze” took a powder, much the same as his last wife did once he could no longer, _______ you fill in the blank. How much i will have been influenced by his behavior can only be known upon my death, but between then and now the choices of my existence remain my own. There is a house next door to where i live that was occupied when i moved in by the “ebullient” young father-to-be mentioned prior in the chronicles. This house is decrepit and on the verge of collapse on one side and able to support a man, wife and child on the other. My position worldwide is to use as much as possible domiciles in place and not fall prey to the “speculation class” that depicts pots of gold at the end of every new trend formulated on the digital shackles most of the planet wears at the end of their wrists. I do no own a phone - do not want to own a phone · can picture a time in my future when i am “ordered” to own a phone. Until such time i will continue to plumb the imagination i was given and search for alternatives to the “infinite growth paradigm” and to propagate sustainable and planet friendly solutions to the seemingly inexorable demise of our film of atmosphere over the surface of our molten satellite to the star that we owe our light to.
Synchronicity determined that the restaurant i chose to patronize open or closed also is somehow related to my “ebullient” friend. So it is not outside the realm of possibility for me to simply move sideways into the actual hovel my friend and his family mysteriously vacated some months ago. The fantasy i have developed is to slowly renovate this older building and in so doing occupy the later years of my existence and leave to this community more than the Disneyesque echo that Hollywood has become and establish something of a multicultural island of research/study/and love. I cannot own property here in Viet Nam, but i can partner with persons to establish long term leases. I don’t require much to be comfortable so any preservation would be most importantly in what would be easily secured from speculation; would have an established function within a community about to be besieged by rising tides in an estuary mined for decades of its natural sand bank subjecting it to the coming “King Tides” which it seems only the shamans and foreign real estate speculators are paying attention to.
The irony of this post is that i do not ask for much, but in the context of what the world is facing it would seem i am asking for, as the movie said the “Full Monty”. Why not ¿? what else am i going to do - flee for a some international high ground with a history of stability and low economic growth resisting the unknown propagation of the latest plague; and in so doing, that the nest egg i invested into what had once been the backbone of a world economy, but which is now little more than the side yard of the fascist chop shop of empire remains solvent. It is within this lens of projection about our world’s future, i utilize the vehicle of essay to explore mine, and others possibilities. I think it would be fun to invigorate renovation as an economic engine in a World Heritage Site. There is much talent, local and foreign which i believe wants the very best outcome possible - despite the forlorn projections of a “4th Estate” long since rendered to nothing more fish bait brokers for the billionaire class wallowing in a phantasmagoria of fictitious “capital”. The boys at the irrigation channel fronting the site i am proposing as a “last stand” constitute more credible potential as investors for the future than any digital “coin” i have come across in my years of travel. So i will close this episode casting my hopes for a pacific passing into the vortex of a wind, both brutal but real that can only end in the results of those steps we humans now take to preserve life on our planet for those we love and those we could have loved with more time and more wisdom.
jts 27/04/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com se
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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