Christmas day in Viet Nam - what can i say that would warrant your attention · my native land is spontaneously combusting @ the rate of one human being per minute; hardly very joyous; i have love in my heart, after a fashion - not the giddy euphoria you see my expat cohort forcing out its pores in transparent denial of its existential isolation bandaged by ebullient camaraderie reserved for drunken compadres at dice games gone bad in East L.A.; what could go wrong¿ We even have the most recent experience of year 2020 to help us parse an answer to that complex question, why would we then ignore such vivid events? I’m only guessing, but for myself when i deny the obvious, it is based on some conceit i’ve conjured in the deepest recesses of my shame to protect what is often obvious to everyone but me. “You can run, but you cannot hide” - A. Nonymous.
“Christmas Spirit” by Julia Lee is playing, i am sitting in a large empty upstairs room at Dingo-Deli happy as a pig in mud, and i do not know where i will be living next month. I’ve given up trying to understand the variegated emotions of my life as though some regime or wisdom might lend constancy to an essentially dynamic state of flux that so closely tracks with our physical universe - bombarded by quarks, memes and neutrinos · how is it possible we as such a seemingly cogent creature have taken to marking our passing with tombstones and testimony rather than the immediacy of “i love you”¿ that is a question? Chewing on this writing i considered the immediacy of “greed” and the very real need for an easily accessible anodyne; don’t i feel a lot like the young Dutch lad with his finger in the dyke surrounded by images of “fatted calves” and outsized egos demanding a place in the advertising sunset.
The only universe left for me to conquer is the one within my own skin, and Madame Paradox has arranged the timing of that personal revelation to coincide with the incremental demise of my warrior spirit by death from a “1,000 cuts,” mostly at my own hand. At least i will have been allowed to leave this “vallis lacrimarum” laughing. The weather is changing and one can almost feel the heat haunting the land, like fingers from some gaseous leak looking for a match. I would like to say that condition is not a result of my design and therefore absolve myself, but that is the conceit of every human who buys any single use plastic container and attributes it to “plague fatigue.” A little like my whinging about all the poor companion choices i’ve made each time some pretty dame sparks my receding tinder, and i say to her, but “_______fill in the blank”
I envy the discipline of those fierce souls who have interjected useful conflict into the placid waters of an occupied species fighting specters it has been socialized since birth to disavow as irrational, but not too much. I have found combatting my own ghosts is war enough. However the blood lust of victory has eluded me in this mortal combat for the soul of a species armed only with my gimpy psyche and goofy vision. Interestingly what my defects seemed to have afforded me are allies that others have ignored, marginalized and/or devalued for the apparent lack of return. My allies are the armies of survivors who know how to make something out of nothing, including meaning and purpose of our uncertain future based on the simple logic that their connection will be the first to be yanked when shit hits the fan.
One would hope, when it gets to the dregs of a day like this there would be some nugget of value - what i find is the gist of why T.S. Elliot said “this is the way the world ends / not with a bang, but a whimper.” I have cake in front of me full with sugar that scares the shit out of my ravaged anatomy, and the end of a modest toast between me, myself and I. Good company but not the sort of fractious frolic i sort of recall from happier days. Is it that my memory is being fortified by age and experience and the empty places i once filled with wish and fabricated fun, but now can only write down candidly with the aid of death sitting at my shoulder¿ is it true that our best friend is found in the end after all illusion has been burnt clean off from delusion and all that is left to us will be the simple love we have managed to nurture within our own experience? I don’t know, but i do know until i befriend myself as well as i do anyone i meet there is little hope of finding anyone with as loving a heart as i can foster within my fragile frame.
peace out people
jts 25/12/2020
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