Found the one thing?

Billy Crystal once found his one thing ( all I remember was his sore butts back from an urban cowboy ride) in City Slickers.

You and I perhaps are not too different: sored and stressed from trying and failing to acquire and achieve The thing. If stuff makes one happy, we should all be hoarding and carrying around on our backs all the “toys” Made-in-Anywhere.

Kids learned fast: new toy, then next one, then next.

They got the juice and discarded the rest. Time is valuable, if only in their sub-conscious. I learned that at an early age, seeing my next-door neighbor brought home in a flag-covered casket, or my first love jumped on a slick scooter for a band audition: life is not permanent.

War time brought out the best and worst. People killed and be killed, shot and got shot at.

Conventional etiquette and rules were out of the window: bar girls in, school girls out.

Students at rival schools, instead of competing in a game of La Crosse, would use wrenches and knives to settle inter-collegial fights. The war wins, everyone else looses. People rushed, from Central Highlands down to the coast where helicopters ferried them to the international waters, round and round until funding stopped. Babies got thrown out and down from the air to the 7th-fleet aircraft carriers, or over the fence at the US embassy’s gate.

No one found that one thing or lost loved ones after all these years ( statistics showed that half of the Boat People died at seas many at the hands of Thai pirates). Johnny Depp shouldn’t be proud of his role in the Pirates of the Caribbean which makes Robin Hood out of South China Seas murderers whose victims got robbed and raped multiple times over.

I haven’t found the one thing either. But I have experienced the rush, the multiple-choice tests and life’s forced options. I have reflected on my choices: nature or nurture? happenstance or deliberate conscious decision?

And all the while, life continues to flow on irrespective of who is doing the contemplation.

I, however, recognize the signs (of something on its last leg) and (of something on the verge of breaking out). I recognize the circumstances that break the best of men ( time and idleness). And I recognize kindness and humility. I admire people who are down and out, but hold on still to their dignity – the last ounce of humanity.

The stink and stench of the naked selves after the last layer of masks exposes unreservedly the shamefulness of a revealed self. Luckily we still have that last and little reserve (pride). At worst, we are still better than what we thought of ourselves. We did not know it just yet, until the final curtain.

Billy Crystal and his yuppie friends thought they found the one thing. That was then (weekend outing) and this is now (weekend shooting). Manifesto this, manifesto that, 8chan this, 8 chan that. No one has ever found that one thing. Life evades us all. It is an eternal mystery not to be found in life or beyond. It keeps us on our toes, makes us guess: maybe karma, perhaps some atonement or penance?

The search for that one thing sharpens our dull souls and shines the light around us ( and we all of a sudden notice others on the same path, seeking the same thing ). That path, that boulevard has a song attached to it, a straight shot out of LAX ” all I wanna do is to have some fun, till the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard”.

It’s been quite a journey from Saigon to Santa Monica looking for a heart of gold…and I am getting old.