The river Thu Bon is receding with a palpable sigh by the local community - an ancient consortium most nobly represented by my best known constituent and neighbor farmer Anh Ay Tran and his family · As a foreigner adventurer, my position is and will always remain dubious; that i am allowed to evacuate shit stained puddles into the irrigation ditches to the sea is more testimony to the millennium’s of human history's mismanagement of simple equations about survival, and negation of the fundamental wisdom of those closest to the solution - “rui tay” · is the expression i could discern as my pride soaked - shit stained, egotistically satisfied hands passes off the squeegee, to my “friend” thinking i’d somehow closed a karmic loose end only to realize the flood waters “my” culture’s depravity are not lost on anyone, least of all those most affected by effluence, affluence and exaggerated flood waters exceeding the normal behavior of nature.
The snot now running down my face commingling with the tears of my role, not as sacrificial lamb of deeds not of my design or intention but as willing vanguard to a new day for all whose ideas transcend the ignorance of profit in favor of service to all who breathe - sentient life or not. I am not the best representative, for i am wounded as an elder from a time when faith in leadership was nearly sacrosanct; it is my own scholar father’s willingness to trade insults about the worthiness of personal beliefs that gave me confidence to continue in my youthful doubting about a culture rife with flaws, but lacking any constructive vocabulary for critical analysis - including the precious, and as i experience it specious reasoning of my own brethren.
I am tired now and am in no great haste to fulfill some arbitrary compilation of any number of paragraphs describing my journey just now, and will join you in the morrow, for i am free and intend to remain free to my dying day - may you ever now such illimitable rejoice. .. ···
··· .. . and shit just gets weirder and weirder. The Tao said to me once years ago that if you are kind and gentle, people will make the assumption that you are weak and unwilling to resist aggression. Ugly angry people whose “goto” behavior is violence are tedious and lack self-awareness. I am not, nor purport myself to be anything but a struggling lover looking to leave the world a little better than i found it. My response to people’s behavior often mystifies me. A neighbor who i find to be problematic was walking past the front of my house, as i was making a payment for a delivery; the neighbor made snide and disparaging remarks, after he returned to his yard and we were speaking privately, i asked him why he tried to insult and shame me.
It did not go well, his next remark was “we no longer talk - you give me no more things.” I pressed for a few more sentences for my water faucets had just moments earlier mysteriously ceased, and i asked him did he have water? Turning his spigot to demonstrate he did, he said to no one in particular, for i had ceased to exist as a human being, “i have water, if you have problem you speak to your landlady.” Whoever said when it rains it pours was not kidding, for the same landlady had just left after inspecting the roof that leaked like a sieve during the last 155mm rainfall a day earlier and which i had spent 3 hours the day after sweeping water from the inside of my house trying to protect her flooring. While she was inspecting the roof, felt compelled to question my housekeeping habits, remarks i was no mood to entertain given the ground fault that leaves bulbs glowing with the light switches “off.”
I don’t take abuse well and do everything in my power to control myself, rather than struggle with weak-minded individuals who labor under the delusion that they can control anything but themselves . . . (two days later - 141020) · as one which i once experienced as melodious pitter-patter recedes another thrumming takes it’s place, and rather than days or weeks, the “talking screen” is posing forecasts of months. I’ve written in many environments, including the kitchen table of my then octogenarian independent, but adorably conflicted mere - now nonagenarian and sequestered from any contact: by choices of hers, those of siblings frightened that my particular craziness is contagious and virus circumstances no one could have anticipated mean i must utilize the telepathic link she seemed most comfortable with. So ma, know this, i am still alone, and continue to confuse people i try to communicate with from the heart - i do not share your oft expressed beliefs that if i would only ______ fill in the blank, my life would correspond more closely to my well-adjusted and imminently successful brethren, but also the same people who partition news from each of us to the other - so you have to hear it here through the thunder of ceaseless rain of empathic wonder where i live but which oddly correlates to the days of your passing, suffering from a malady those around you hide so as to protect you from what cannot be eluded - one’s destiny · i love you and it has been a privilege to do so. PEACE
jts 14/10/2020, 15/10/2020, 16/10/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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