Thang Nguyen 555

Happy Friday.

To All. And I mean “all”, Ukrainian refugees included.

While at it, might as well send my “Happy Easter” ahead of time.

We’ve lost a bunch of good folks of late. Let’s hope the next wave of folks that are now washed ashore carry with them bigger and better dreams: a future for freedom and a future for folks everywhere.

War destroys and thrives on fear. Peace builds upon hope and dream.

The nuts and bolts of our life should be clear air and clean water.

Then rational thinking peppered with a heart full of empathy.

Can’t raise the level of compassion. Could only be demonstrated…as in “the Son of Man wept”.

By the river of Babylon, there we sat down.

Many Ukrainian, by the tune of 8 million refugees are joining our ranks.

My parents were displaced, slept in a downhill corner shack of my cousin’s huge tea farm (with two dozens or so imported cars). Then they turned refugees and immigrants. First-generation. Nomadic life-style. Au Courant, in the flow, on the road.

When Ginsberg and Kerouac drove cross-country, they became famous for “blogging” and boasting about their new vagabond adventure.

Yet, those who fled war for safety, became invisible. Unkown. Not even qualified as K-mart shoppers.

Just hand-me-down clothes, while China keeps making new ones.

The table has turned since the late 70’s when Kissinger was daily on the news.

Now, the theatre of war has moved on to the Eastern side of Ukraine (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…distant memories).

Life goes on. The old died. The young think they’re entitled to more stuff. Shopping online, friending online, and paying tax online (if you can get through).

We used to be allergic to pollen. After covid, to people.

Such a sad affair. Playing solitaire. Rainy day Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The lone man – Nighthawks – at the cafeteria counter, nursing his cup of coffee.

21st-century man. Macho man. Tattooed man. Rodeo man. Riding like a Lone Ranger down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Heroes of another time and place. Keep checking your phone, your wallet and and your bank account.

Meanwhile, 8 million souls only have their carry-on ; 100,000 will be receiving UNHCR plastic bags containing their “Guide to re-settle in America” – essential documents to the New World and New Life. Chances are, they will join other Ukrainian American, filling out job applications for Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Walmart, and other big box companies. Just don’t work for the IRS (we can’t recruit ‘m).

Bonne Chance. I know. Been in your shoes. Crying my heart out. Jesus wept. The Son of Man, by the river of this new Babylon. Come, all ye who are wretched and poor, for the Kingdom of God belongs to you.

Happy Easter. Happy Friday. Happy New life here or elsewhere in Poland, Romania and NATO’s land. Fight on. Inspire us. Show us to appreciate this mundane and boring life of ours, on or offline.

I woke up this morning – still under the effect of NyQuil – thinking of the 3 million newly minted refugees.

I am one. So I know. Where to pee, what to eat (if any) and where to place your belonging (watching it like a hawk eye).

I started out with two sets of hurriedly packed clothing. And even then, I almost gave away one of two to a defected Air-Force neighbor who stood out like a sore thumb amidst a sardine-pack full of civilian refugees on the USS Blue Ridge.

He was a helicopter maintenance guy, who later opened and operated an auto shop in St Louis, MO.

I checked the Red Cross bulletin every day. For news from home, for news of friends who might have gotten out.

We’re lucky. After months of being adrift at seas, in Wake Island, we landed in Indian Town Gap, PA (my first encounter with something akin to Native American). Then graduated with a media degree after an internship covering the Three-Mile-Island incident.

I felt like I have had many lives: Vietnamese youth, American adult, and now, amnesia old-age.

Actors and writers I admire are dying off by the dozens. About time to go, myself. No need to fake it till I make it.

Then I woke up this morning, instead of turning the clock Spring forward, rewinding back to when I was 19. Adrift at sea. Uncertain of any immediate future. “Let’s confront it” – I blurted out at an academic advisor, regarding whether to take Speech Communication as a study major.

I gave a passionate speech for final, about cherishing your freedom, not to take it for granted….to a classroom full of Nittany Lions footballers (half asleep). That freedom was later taken away from their Defensive Coach, who took young children into campus locker room for a quickie.

Now, facing their future uncertain, the same millions might wish they had been dead by covid.

The living need help, as oppose to the dead who need no sympathy. And here we are, forwarding the clock, by one hour for daylight saving. I wish we could forward past this sad chapter of our current conundrum, fast forwarding for a month or two.

When there is still life, there is still hope.

I hope for a quick resolution to the situation in Ukraine. I hope for an eventual settlement of the three million who have fled danger. I hope for the healing of the children of war. I hope for music to be played again outside and in the hearts of many Ukrainians.

When the President – after his term – returned to his true calling: of making people laugh, instead of crying, then we have peace. Hope so. But the reality on the ground is just the opposite: bodies get maimed and marinated. Smokes get in their eyes. “Why do the birds go on singing…don’t they know, it’s the end of the world”…

Their bodies bagged and tossed into a mass grave. And the undertaker said “I don’t care which side is right or wrong, I just want this to stop”. Sounds like he has reached his limit. For an undertaker, that says a lot about a sudden war.

Betty Ford clinic?

Too late.

We need to press re-start. From the beginning. Again.

No way in this world, this time around.

Yes, if Putin, the bully, had his way, he would push all the way to “ends of Earth”.

His self-appointed “Great Commission”.

He should have been toilet-trained more properly: put the trash here, sit over there, and DO NOT hit your classmate.

Too late.

For re-parenting. Re-habitualize and re-form.

The only language bullies of the world understand is FORCE bigger and more painful than they themselves exert on others…like Ukraine, like Poland ( they missed it first time around).

We need more than 007 and Reacher.

We need the whole wide world coming down on them. Not just free fly zone. Not just NO MORE RUSSIAN OIL. Not just NO MORE CREDIT CARDS. Not just NO MORE Big Macs (Thomas Friedman’s theory of “any two countries with a McDonald don’t go to war” – well, came to a head).

The whole world, N Korea, China, Venezuela, India, Iraq….BTW, what are those Indian-decent techs driving Teslas quietly around Austin doing? Why don’t they pressure their own government to shun Russia? Can’t have a cake and eat it too.

For too long, we have allowed people, cake-eaters, to be cake-keepers.

Can’t do it. Unsustainable. It’s just physics. What is consumed transformed into compost to generate energy e.g. cow fart and s*it (ask UC Davis professor who has studied methane for two decades).

No way around it. Can’t rationalise it away.

I am heading toward my end my beginning. Not much fear left in me.

Wish I could join the Foreign Legion. The other option might be to google map the Ukrainian Embassy in D.C. , then hold a sign out front that says :

“Put PUTIN in rehab”.

On Sunday, God rests, then we close the book. Take a drive in the hill country.

Thinking the toilet-training has been done.. Until, the tanks rolled across the border, until the refugees fled across the border, until the nuclear reactors got occupied … Putin has been eyeing everything. His self-appointed Messianic complex and his Great Commission…”Go ye, unto the ends of Earth, subdue every nation, JEWS and Gentiles, under the Soviet 2.0 umbrella…”. Then we can have Woodstock 2.0 Peace on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Sit. Sit. Sit. Put the trash here. Don’t touch your classmates. DO NOT TOUCH anything. You’re grounded.

Even with doomsday scenarios unfolding, we should note that self-imprisonment is also hard to bear. For instance, one of Putin’s excuses for war was “de-Nazification”? What’s that? we had to google it. We thought it had been put to rest as an WWII ember. Yet it is making a comeback, even here in the US – Charlottesville. Like bell-bottom pants. Like that NYC black-out (in 7/77, per New York Post “even looters were being mugged”).

Putin is in prison of his own making. He thought by turning the clock back, he could return Russia to greatness. To the contrary, he instead paints himself into a corner: his judo title is being stripped off (honoring champion etc…), his amassed 10 Billion-USD account blocked i.e. no more horseback riding and bare-chested tanning. Just a self-subjugation after years of training in intense psychological manipulation ( e.g. lie detector in his KGB days!?!).

Instead, he might end up penning “papers from prison” in the Hill Country, Texas where he’ll join the old Nazi inmates – people he seeks to “de-Nazify” (bend over, newbie, says the warden, “in here yours is ours, Tsar or Messianic complex).

Couldn’t wait, he hurried to check himself into the prison of his Cold-War mindset, like a two-prong plug in a three-prong society, to steal an Andy Rooney’s expression.

At the start of START (the treaty), we all thought we could put behind nuclear arms. Today, it’s Germany who re-arms itself with an increased budget to 2% of its GDP.

As if we already forgot Dachau e.g. fenced-in, fighting for foods (scarcity) and getting tattooed – waiting for the liberating army? “Nous irons, au coeur du monde”…le jour le plus long.

It will be a long day for 3 million+ refugees, waiting to be fed, bathed, clothed (even in Moldova of all places).

There is the cold, the covid and the cover (nuclear bomb shelters).

World Wide War, with influencers like Sean Pence and Gomez (on instagram and tiktok per NYT’s Friedman – “We have never been here before”).

No precedence. The “Evil” Empire strikes back. Star Wars shield. “Tear down that wall!” Instead of drones in the air, it’s tanks on the streets. Black-out in the streets, but not on our screens (unlike the first Iraqi war, which CNN Peter Annett got an exclusive in the cover of night). This week, we watch the live press briefing by Biden, by the Ukrainian Foreign Minister – in long sleeves…we know play-by-play e.g. Russian tanks and Ukrainian resistance (a bare-hand man trying to stop a convoy of tanks, brings to mind the image of Tiananmen Square).

We know too much, acting too little and too late.

We’re immobilised by our own inertia. The black-out of the soul. Free soul. Who are you? ask Bonhoeffer. Are you free? ask Icarus before: Burn, baby burn!. Only when the self gets out of the way, gets burned up (by the Sun toward which we set our flight co-ordinance), that the soul gets blessed. Freed up to choose. Fresh choices. Clean slate.

To seize the moment in history, to own our new narrative (without the burden of ill-blessings from past parenting). Putin chose his KGB-like and soldier-like. We’ve yet figured out our choices and options. Wait, we deserve informed judgement, more information (dis-information), one more newscast, one more war, one more meeting before raising rates, raising kids or raising Hell.

Well, don’t wait. At the start of START (nuclear treaty), we all thought the same. That nuclear option would bring us to the brink of destruction (MAD). Well, the weed is growing back…like Jason of Friday the 13th, the sequence. Are you talking to me? (Taxi driver 2.0). Everything that is happening, happened before. It’s called a Deja Vu. It’s called a replication and repeat of history: our collective DNA, of collective amnesia, of collective self-imprisonment and sabotage.

Play your part Papillon! Play your part of French resistance (put on your beret). Back then, we’ve got intellectuals (Churchill and Bonhoeffer) to lead with courage and charisma. Lately, it’s Reagan and Zelensky. On selfie (never happened before until World Wide War).

Just make sure, when it’s black-out, history does not repeat itself i.e. the black-out are safe …well even for looters.

Growing up in Asia, I often had to stay indoors, since it was either rainy or dry season.

Downpour forces you to activities e.g. reading, singing and playing an instrument. I often looked out across the alley, past a curtain of waters, and watched a Franco-Vietnamese family of 9 playing among one another. Being the only kid left (after older siblings had flown the coop), I succumbed to loneliness and life reflection.

Bonjour tristesse!

Our ongoing war did not help. It made one pause, perhaps for a moment, before the tape started again: the rushing and bustling of a city bursting by the seams (taking in refugees almost daily). Inflation was a constant, drove the price of everything up (the Vietnamese dong couldn’t hold against war-time US dollar).

So let it rain, and “it” here stood for : PX’s black-market rations (still in Army-green wrappings), a-go-go bars, English schools and political upheavals. Newsweek and TIME were in. Old Chinese-language translated books, out.

Of all the things the war did to Vietnam, the worst was morale (on top of mortality). It had been (and still is) an agricultural society, a village society the size of California. Then boom! overnight, a new taxonomy, turned the 3-regions colonial country into a four-war-zones south of the DMZ, whose map fit neatly on an easel at the Five O clock follies press briefing, at which Western journalists ridiculed or refused to attend (unlike the interests showed today at Biden Q&A about Ukraine).

Women took up arms while men back and forth from the front, either via AWOL or R&R rotation. Everyone was on war-footing. Including us, me. We jumped classes, skipped classes and short-circuited men passages. We read about assassinations and resignations in the US, Nixon’s china card and Geneva/Paris Accord. Weren’t we fighting to hold the “domino” line? Then what’s with the handshakes and back-dealings?

Tell that to today’s Ukraine. Tell that to future fighters.

Tell that to everyone. Meanwhile, it rained. A lot as far as I can recall.

So we, kids, got restless. Hit the book (English idioms) instead of the streets to delay the draft. The inevitable.

So let it rain. The British Invasion and the North Vietnamese Invasion.

The invasion of the body snatchers and the invasion of the US greenbags.

Everything and everybody got invaded. No more norms. No more regular scheduling of the 6 o clock news program (“We interrupt our regular broadcast for breaking news”). War-time propaganda. Peace-time propaganda. Truth Social. Truth anti-social. Truth hard to get at. Multi-faced and multi-versed truth(s) ; to be aimed for but never attained.

Like animals,..by instincts, we aimed first for survival.

In apprehension and anticipation.

Meanwhile, it rains. Let it. Let it be. Let it pour. We got no choice as to the seasons of time, seasons of conflict and seasons of life. Growing up in war time, I had to juggle many balls in the air with only two given hands. Bonjour tristesse!

A hurried child, with only that much time to grow up: French? Vietnamese? English? which was which? Vietnamese dong? US dollars? Gold? Always living with your back packed (wished there had been such thing as granola bars). And bang. One day, it proved to be true. Couldn’t go on forever. Unsustainable. War has a beginning, a middle and an ending. Just like any story, sad one.

Mine had a sad ending. Not hopeful as I’d like to. You can’t bend history to your liking. You can’t cheat the rhythm of the rain. When it gets so dried, water gets heated up. What goes up must come down. Seasons in the Sun. War and Peace. Guerre and Paix. Chien Tranh va Hoa Binh. Dry and rainy season. Turn-taking to keep the world go round.

Let it rain. So I can lift my chin up – face uncovered – self unhindered; clearing the deck (they pushed a lot of helicopter steel down to the China Sea that day) and wiping the slate clean. “Finally, it’s over!” (the heat, the temperature, the unbearable lightness of being, of struggling, of wanting , of unfulfilled potential, of anticipation and apprehension).

Let it rain.

President Ford.

Pardoned Nixon, brought an end to Vietnam (got us scrambling elbow-to-elbow for a space on a Saigon blood-stained barge). Since when does number 3, unelected by popular votes, preside over the fate of a nation and the world.

On this Presidents’ Day weekend, we celebrate their memories.

Chevy Chase used to play President Ford on SNL But the true Ford, emptying out his pocket change for the WH photographer, whom he trusted and who had no time for an ATM ( he had to catch a courier flight to cover Vietnam’s last day), won me over.

Yes, he was a bit clumsy (so was my Dad, both of them taller than the door’s beam) when holding one of the surviving orphans – the flight that did not crash out of TSN Airport (before it was deemed and declared in-operable, hence kick-starting Operation Frequent Wind).

From the football field to the political field, President Ford handled himself above-board, by the rules. Unlike the President’s men, most of them had been jailed by the time he took over (his unorthodox pardoning a month after taking office might have triggered anger resulted in two assassinated attempts by female shooters in CA.

In his last interview with Bob Woodward he mentioned he had to pardon Nixon for the good of the country (which could no longer endure a prolong Watergate trial). Mr. Woodward admitted that we thought we pursued the truth only to find out, the truth lies on the other side (of a dead-end trail).

The multi-facet truth is often times better understood in looking back than forward.

Still good judgment only comes after evaluating, judging and remembering those facts.

(That’s why reporters took a notebook with them). At the outset of dementia, we prefer the haunted over the happy times. After that arduous journey, I remember duffle-bag full of paper currency tossed to the four winds. Memory of a fallen nation. Memory of a father who did not want to join his family (much less keeping it all together as leadership requires).

President Ford kept his nation together (while parting with his cash). In times of need, who do you call ( late 70’s, call the Ghostbusters).

On campus we grew our hair, our cynicism and skepticism (journalism school enrollment went way up) hallmarks of a post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-Woodstock era.

We chew on the pain of being betrayed. They (president Thieu and Nixon) had the luxury to fly their furniture and erased tapes ahead of departure, while we, the uninvited foreign labor, fought tooth-and-nail for an unseat (how we wished we had been orphans on the non-crash flight out a few days before).

And so it goes. On this long weekend, we commemorate and commiserate past Presidents, their accomplishments and short-fallings. Presidents are first human, but more on the side of ambition and abuse. Once in a very rare while, number 3 got bumped up and bumping his head against the beam of the Oval Office.

Come to think of it, it’s refreshing to witness better exercises of power like “I have to pardon Nixon”…

Presidential Pardoning Power, well executed, just as the Oath of Office says..

With all that has been going on, that’s what we need: un-clogging.

It’s Friday. Folks are into “Happy Friday”, “Happy Hour” etc…

But it’s not at this time. The funny thing about Ukraine is that US is more worried e.g. will inflation get worse, how about BA2.0 (new Omicron variant) and Wall Street is rattled.

That’s all. Or else, it’s just a normal long weekend, commemorating past Presidents.

We’re all going to join them; deadth by assassination or from resignation.

My first American presidents were Gerald Ford (owed him a debt of gratitude), then Carter etc..after that, they all seemed to be younger e.g. G.W. Bush, Obama….then bang! Biden, on world stage with Putin and Jinping.

At least, Biden doesn’t receive any love letters (tucked away somewhere among the 150 boxes in Palm Beach ) from N Korea Dr Evil.

Don’t mean to be funny or anything. Just the way things are. Big guns and bigger guns. Taking the world hostages… for 6 million dollars ransom. or 6 billion (having been away in a deep freeze).

We all spend our allowance on G.I. Joe’s and toy guns. Except now they are real. And they kill.

After all, too many people live way past their prime (thanks to all those vaccines) and productive years.

Gotta have a way to get rid of them e.g. climate change, war and famine.

Back in cave-days, we at least co-operated (against bigger Dinosaurs). The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Not now. Since we have
extra life for and extra means to connect, but it doesn’t translate into better cooperation.

Everyone is out to make money via social media on us.

We are all “employed” to do ghost work (non-compensated). And we are so naive and gullible to keep doing it ( how do we convert Likes into tangibles like bit coins!).

All the while, complaining why inflation is eating up at our slice of pizza. And how much the likelihood of war and eruption in Ukraine will affect us. Of course, it will and has dragged stocks down. Back during WWII, it’s the Japanese American on the West coast that got locked up due to war eruption abroad. So what happens somewhere else affects the here/now directly.

Just wake up (when the booze weans and wears off after Happy Hour). See for yourself.

We “can’t handle the truth”.

All those ideal and abstract notions like truth, justice, peace and love. They are and remain so: abstract and ideal notions, to be strived for, but never obtained. Nice try.

Now pat ourselves on the back. Happy Friday. It is what it is.

Life. The only real thing, not Coke. Everything else? illusions to be un-clogged.

Our upbringing, at least mine, were geared toward survival; on foods, clothing and shelter; Maslow the whole scale through (with security, self-esteem, love and self-actualize after that). Growing up in war times, we did not need Maslow to tell us what’s next. But in our household, we were taught to look out not just for ourselves and above all, self-respect.

Thanks to current computational capacity, sociology and biology drill it further while digital media wider with their 24/7 news cycle. Triggered by tweets and baited by posts, our attention span is stretched to the max and often times, no match for machine, network effect and algorithm-automated ads that keep Big Tech server-farms humming (Cha Ching!)

Drown in data deluge, the audience – like a deer facing oncoming headlights, freezed up, then by reflex, followed alpha males (to the cliff) or “snake-oil salesmen” (per Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff) for tips on what drugs to take, what horses to bet and even what horse drugs to inject. When pressed as to why, was it shameful, they pulled a “Spotify” e.g. technicalities and procedures.

Back in the 60’s, it’s more of an ANTI message: anti-establishment and not becoming sterile with spic-and-span status quo.

In short, we wanted no conformity, no Revolutionary Road, no Organizational Man. On de-coming (as opposed to On becoming). We explored Nature (Walden II), we preferred less stiffness and more spontaneity; a sense of belonging, of brotherhood (Come on People now, smile on your brother …).

Back to the land, to tilt and to chill (you’ve got to let the morning last). Not to be pressured into being/becoming someone we are not, as in the Graduates? and certainly not the Jesus freaks, the computer nerds and the ROTC’s (not on campus, during the Vietnam War and around Anti-War College students).

Fast-forward 50 years, with Moore’s Law – the doubling of chip speed every 18 months – college dropouts turned tech titans, the “evangelical” Far Right called the shots and the Army-Navy surplus shoppers (and borrowed gun) wanted to alter a lawful election.

The times they are a’changin. For certain (until musicians stepped up, once again).

Thanks to an altered and splintered media landscape, “strong men” with headsets can amass and mobilize a movement to shift to either the Left or Right (and further right), Red or Blue, Tik Tok or Tweeter trends, Meta news or Apple news. We’re more data-driven and likely defined by FICO scores and Facebook Likes, our new currency.

Self-understanding or personal reflections? Go to your room! Then after that reality check, splash on some cold water and join us, status seekers of the rat race, to climb (progress) and to strive for that one position: King of the Hill. To our surprises, after all the hustles, the ladder was found to be leaning against the wrong building all along (PBS News Hour just closed with a doctor contracted ALS, then turned compassionate towards the handicapped).

I am a mama’s boy (not to the degree as portrayed in Hitchcock’s shower scene). Took me a long time to admit that (for fear of being jeered at). Growing up in war times, it’s the macho-man manifesto: black belts preferably in all-boys school (where I found out recently, on one occasion, during a school-yard clash between two 14-year-old butt-head’s, a grenade was pulled to force a lose-lose). Talking about my Columbine.

Being the youngest, I got to stay behind (like Private Ryan, exempted from the draft): learned the ABC’s (3 languages), cleaned the house and listened to Mom (honing to pass the Med school exam for draft-deferral). Big brother and sister could fly the nest. But for me the only time I actually left home outside of short trips was when I left my home-land ( a few miles city radius, to be more truthful) for good.

One never appreciates the well until it is dried up. Turning homeless, stateless and jobless within 24 hours, all three of us (I am the youngest) got sponsored out in a hurry to find menial work in three different states (bottom of the Maslow scale again) leaving Mom, all dressed-up with no place to go, except for her three solo meals a day in Indiantown Gap refugees camp.

On my own, fending for myself in a strange land (think today’s Afghan in Eerie, PA), I still had to double back upon graduation to upgrade my role as a protector for both my Mom. Even after college, culturally (and somewhat personally) I was never endowed with “get out of the house at 18” rite of passage.

This sounds like propaganda of the ministry of War back then: ” this year, I wouldn’t come home – during Tet – out of duty for country…” i.e. a tug of war between conflicting loyalties: to the family and to the flag) ref. Duy Khanh in “Xuan nay con khong ve”.

Through college, career and families of my own, I was always mindful of not letting progress be at the expenses of my lonely Mom. Friends at Penn State visiting would find unbound hospitality from her, despite obvious language gap.

Every juncture was a tug of war e.g. taking a media job or not, grad school or not, volunteering overseas or not; my Mom was always a part of the equation: is she safe, surrounded by loved ones, well-protected (since my Pop, supposedly in that protector role, had proved unreliable – even before his involuntary decade-long apart).

Two graves later, having outgrown my child-father phase; I was so used to take on the need of strangers (as Peace Corps volunteers can attest, when you forget yourself, in the service of others, you lived a different life even with a certain degree of hypocrisy in the mix).

No one has time for self-commiserating while attending to the need of others. Golden Rule the only rule.

I was criticised for helping Boat People in Asia on my second tour: “you just want to cast yourself in a better light, to feel yourself superior over damn miserable souls” (as opposed to browsing through the OC Register Sunday Paper inserts, on which house-for-sale was listed). To put it mildly, among those miserables, a few did help themselves to fellow dead passengers for foods and survival. Talking about Maslow Scale’s in full circle.

I learned about human experience on those few trips more than all the books in the library.

My critic was perceptive- (after all he had accompanied me on my first trip) but was correct only in part. Truth was, while being back (second tour no longer found me doing Relief Work, but more of Cultural Orientation), I did immerse among fellow stateless sojourners, hence putting the climb (Maslow) on pause. That “accomplishment” is now condensed into just a by-line in my LinkedIn profile.

To me, Self-understanding and Charity are inseparable per “without love, you’re nothing”; contrary to what school and upbringing have drilled unto us: “Look out to be No 1!”. Marketers got this! and deploy bait and switch tactics, to prey (now with help from algorithm) on our unending happiness curve and to turn us into customers-hostages for life.

For a reality check without flashing cold water on my face, I still am with only two legs ( despite smoke gets in my eyes – for having tunneled in from the wrong end of the Maslow scale). My next ladder, at last look, is leaning against a building with a Karma-flashing sign – just as the one I found when doubling back for Mom, through whom all rivers flow (Vietnamese proverb).

P.S. For Mom who brought me up on her meager teacher’s salary and taught me the art of survival and self-respect. Till’ we meet again.

By the time I arrived, my refugee family had settled in and segregated from the look of family album: father and son (left page) mother and daughter (right page). Drifted South-ward, to Saigon. Then an aggressive swimmer (as oppose to lazy sperm/swimmer) met an egg that dropped. Hello it’s Me.

Then later, another aggressive swimmer, and another egg (from the other lady). Voila. My half-sister. Talking about taking the wind out of my sail.

We grew up in war times, war without and war within. My brother escaped the charade and joined the Army as a medic. I was stuck at home, drifting from one school to another: French, Vietnamese, English schools. Spared from the draft (Saving Private Ryan). Later, I purposefully institutionalised myself in camps, colleges and seminary. Structure is better. Reliable supply of foods. And predictability is preferred over chaos and in-fighting.

Been years since they confiscated all the guns and ammo in Saigon. Even the name got extinct. But our war from within rages on (like DJT lie). We just never wanted peace. We said we wanted it. But we don’t.

The hardest lesson in life is to know one’s self; from the get-go, from the swimming to the egg-dropping, from conception to maturation. Yes, we’re a joint product of two different people, personalities and purposes.

We’re re-purposed to learn the rope, clean and use it, to tow, to charge up the hill.

Many did not make it. Crashed and burned. Most times (except for Private Ryan since other boys in the family already enlisted).

It’s fun to see Graham Nash and Crosby back on the scene, to join Neil Young. It’s like the guy on Second Life, making a comeback on Metaverse where no one knows you’re a dog. Different breed and digital destination.

So from our conception – none immaculate – we’re to act “normal”, within bell-shape range, to secure social acceptance and fulfil its broad expectations.

No anomaly please. The IRS and every other institution expect their citizens to behave, to pay into the bucket and to go to bed early.

Citizens of North Korea and of the world. Hear ye, hear ye.

On a side note. That bully in my youth died of an overdose. Good to have karma around.

Or else, we’re all screwed & tricked into doing good, behaving ourselves for nothing. Sperm and the egg, united then died.

End of story. A life unexceptional. Unprovoking and unduly dull.

Let us pray. God, help us change nothing. Since we have (and are) nothing. Want nothing and get nothing. Stimulate us not, since we’re already predictably doomed from the start. We’re your obedient sheep, to be counted and led to the slaughter. Why bother creating us, after your image – of a dull God, helpless and powerless in face of Evil (uncalled-for bullies and unprovoked violence). We fear of nothing, since in your absence, we’re Home Alone, fending for ourselves with whatever means disposable: our play dough.

When there is no God, and supposedly no accompanied justice and punishment, Hell (or jail) fazes no one, resulting in the collapse of systematic theology (NYT Brooks’ piece on the dwindling and decline of the Evangelical Church)..

We’re people of multiple eco-systems: Justice system. Financial system. Educational system and Information system e.g. meta and digital verse. Grant us this life and our second life, good sperms and eggs, so we may go on in the cloud, our next life – world without end and without want. Meanwhile, evil deeds and evil men prosper. No Karma and lots of promises of pardons ( a picture worth a thousand words, and in DJT case, 100K paid to the PAC).

We stop here. Too tired of praying for peace. For there will never be peace. Only war, without and within, given unchanged hearts of men. So we tune out. Read not the front-page news. Just turn to the TV page. The weather page and the sports page. Don’t dream it’s over! Fading in sound. fade out blog. One life, one sperm.

Aggressive swimmer.