I tried to make my morning bike circuit between the two beaches in the city i live - i found the link North closed; it was the first time i’d ridden in two days and given the viral onslaught i felt the tradeoff of exposure vs exercise a fair one. But this is where the equation gets dicey - because of my own recent errands prior to the outbreak it was as much a question of who was exposing who to what · Tensions are running high where i adjusted my domicile to the other side of my farmer friends, lacking facility with the language it is hard to know why people i’ve never met, but are now new neighbors with are giving me the stink eye. Happily i’m reaching a point closer to my own demise where such popularity contests affect me less and less - unhappily it confuses me to know that just by my taking breath i cause another human being to succumb to hatred. So i hew close to what i have learned to do and try to find ways to do just that · the goofy thing is that i have done so many things in my life, one never knows how it will play with others.
For example: the neighbor to my east came blustering over two mornings ago banging on the gate loudly calling my name - it was just as “lockdown” was looming and barely a week after my taking up residence. As it happened he had a sickle in his hand and was hellbent to get the offending bamboo on my side of his metal frame barrier cut down so that leaves would not drop in his enclosed porch. As much as i’d like to think of myself as a Cadillac human being easily steered and capable of going very fast, i don’t take easily to peremptory demands - child of the 60s residue · so when he commenced to hack away at plants that were not on his property, i gently disengaged him from his task and began to shape the offending plants with my newly acquired shears. When through, i hollered, then louder; “Tommy, HEY TOMMY are you going to come and help carry this debris away?” He finally appeared and made it clear it was a “one way street,” i help him, but not vice/versa. I loudly pointed this out, for when he interrupted my morning with his demands, i was in my clean clothes that were now soaked through with sweat and not in any mood to broach more impertinence.
But it wasn’t impertinence for him - a day earlier he had shared that the town he came from was Sơn Mỹ, where the My Lai massacre had taken place during the American war in Viet Nam. Mr. D____ has a business as a tour operator in the world heritage site where i live. Mr. D_____, when business is not impacted by the virus, spends his days sharing his nation with travelers, many who come from countries that supplied armed combatants during the ‘merican provoked conflict, and to have a man living next door to him who is that same age as those who committed the atrocities at Sơn Mỹ is testimony to the lengths this country has gone to push past a heinous violation of her sovereignty and embrace a world barely recognizable to the one she had so valiantly struggled in for her independence. The saddest part of this entire paragraph is that the same financial forces that had been responsible for the ‘merican invasion have simply traded ordinance and are now firing bucks instead of bullets.
I am an outlier, i came to this country believing that a population willful enough to defeat the ‘merican armada using bicycles and mud could coalesce into a force capable of defeating the “capital” arrayed against the people of planet earth - true to my ·: dollar-short-hour-late-going-in-the-wrong-direction life-timing the bourgeoisie had arrived about a decade ahead of me and ensconced their greed into the impoverished but victorious population so much so that rather than raising proper proletariate vanguard - they are busy raising condos, and rents · My, “the sky is falling” refrain falls flat and the expats are miffed that one of their own cannot, or will not participate in the re-raping of one of the world’s finest warrior/scholar populations. It’s okay, i’ve never felt comfortable around expats - why would i go to a foreign nation to live in compounds of likeminded people who don’t like their own minds, but feel okay enough to overlay their convictions wherever they go · unfair, judgmental and certainly the beam in my own eye and not the mote in another’s, but still . ..
It may be possible to stave off cancer, beat back Covid-19 even mend the deep wound in my heart that keeps my love tucked away out of the good service that it yearns for, but i am doing the best i can with what i have available. Writing has turned out to be a god-send, and demonstrates an obedience to one’s parents can have fruitful outcomes; pop pulled my lapel down to his crusty face over the catheter evacuating his bladder and made me promise two things - don’t change who i am, and never stop writing · At another time i will try to find a gentle way to share ma’s last imprecation which i experience now as the bluster of a too-young miss thrown into the maelstrom of mid-wwII ‘merica alone except for her ravishing auburn beauty, and too adult physique for a 15 year-old on desert highways flush with young GI’s looking to defeat the fascist terror which now occupies our white house; that paradox, or is it irony, will have to wait for another day and another episode of “Extinction Chronicles”
jts 03/08/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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