Thang Nguyen 555

At one time or another, certain fads e.g. bell-bottom, lambada …. rose to prominence, partly due to our diminishing attention span. They gained traction and with upward trajectory, in today’s parlance, with the most “Likes” (dopamine) top 20% ranking, with 80% critical mass followers, before the law of Diminishing Return kicks in.

In short, fade away. No thirsty data centers with unlimited cloud storage can handle the load. Murphy Law, Metcalfe Law, Moore Law and Law of Diminishing Return.

Unless, they are like “belt-bottom blues”, “give me one more day”…one more wear/wash/dry cycle.

That’s all there is to it.

No matter how one carves, slices and dices.

Evil rules. It eats up, chewed up and swallowed, without even spitted everything out. Nothing is left to be exploited, not even scum.

Everything fades.

Evil (capitalized E) keeps growing with more followers who exchange attention even with bad intention.

Gluttony! bubbling! puffing! Fatness without fitness and finesses. Popularity without depth. More following of same feathers until it pops.

Self-reinforcing cycle in the race to the bottom. The rich get richer by sheer mass ( accrued interest).

That is why Evil hangs around with the likes. My top 10 eye-witness recollections:

• the burning monk (1963) still I wonder why (climax of internal power struggle)
• the fake news (1974) saying I had committed suicide due to IBM grading fall-out
• tossing of babies over the wall and dropped from heli copters (75)
• real currency thrown to the four winds slowly from Saigon to Subic Bay (75)
• leaving my own father, friends and familiar incubator behind for the unknown
• people shooting each other in real time albeit in different outfit same language
• raped by pirates, if not, then raped by sojourners of the same feathers in camp
• refighting the war inside Hong Kong Kai Tac camp, like prison break
• extracting other-people’s time, gossip, insights, IP, weakness, hearsay, money for one’s own gain (this very digital platform included) in the name of crowdsourcing, but actually scale the model (marginal cost) to its max (who gives a f*ck about fines, chicken feed)
• the law of diminishing return will apply at every turn. Scarcity rules. That’s why my tenth most memorable is the orange in the “dungeon” I ate including rind, over the dimly lit bottom of the ship sleeping next to ammunition storage. Tk.

The rest of my life is for value-creation, without intent to reap any reward for this wasted self. Dust comes to dust, ash to ash. Even currency once cherished got tossed why not me? back to the sea!

Humbly speaking, the “soul” weighed 21 grams before and after. I am very surprised that 45 friends or so on FB and few others in real life are still in touch and online.

Take great care of yourselves.

Remember, memories are all there is, once we are no more.

That’s said, “do you want me to crawl across the floor to beg you to take me back”…I don’t want to fade away…I am not a fad…I am my mom’s youngest, tugged and raised in love and learning.