Thang Nguyen 555

They used what was available to them (terracotta)…in the time frame allotted to them (40 years) to leave behind traces of greatness…a glimpse beyond the transient and impermanence.

In so doing, they left their marks (Qi dynasty) and stayed true to their aspiration (Mandate of Heaven).

Each culture and country appoints ministers of Communication and Information. Those people make sense of (and out of) chaos.

The narrative.

The re-drawing of the map, re-invention of legendary (Putin has been in power forever).

Strong men. Guarding the Emperor tomb (not to mention musicians and concubines – gotta to have them, since the nights were long and life stretches beyond death toward infinity).

And so it goes…Ancient script for today’s world.

The problem? aplenty. The solution: me.

I drain the swamp. Clean up the mess. Build the equivalent of ancient citadels, knock down diseases and death (Jericho march – circling the borders).

The everyday presentation of self…(narcissistic one). Then since 1979, the culture of narcotic and narcissism joint forces, a confluence that makes a perfect storm. God has a lot of money!

Back to our glimpse of immortality of ancient Confucian ancestors. We all want what’s best for ourselves and our descendants…

Yet we leave behind dirty air and a gridlock (governmental shut-down).

All the while, calling it “freedom” “equality” and “brotherhood” in the Rousseau- tradition.

Give me the mike.

Give me the money.

Give me the credits (deservedly or not).

Give me, give me, give me.

Sounds no where near the democracy I used to know and aspire to.

Meanwhile, our Olympics’ aspirants and winners show us what could be.

They reflect our self-projection, what it is that we hope to become…a glimpse of immortality.

To go beyond the boundaries.

(Most times, self-imposed and self-inflicted).

We are no Papillons. We walk right in the prison of our own making.

We hear the clanking of iron doors (behind us).

Resigning to the usual (payments).

Giving up and giving in. Without a fight.

Without even kicking and protesting.

The Olympics will come around again. But ours never does.

So we inadvertently build ourselves up to be a terra-cottas army of one, standing guard over an unknown-soldier tomb.

What’s so precious that deserved guarding? our Values? our legacy? our shortcomings – collective and personal.

It took me a while to learn to separate the two…since people have a way to impose and pass the buck…to hand over more and more on your plate what’s supposed to be in theirs. Shared grief but unshared responsibility.

Prodigal son I am not. Disloyal soldier I am not. Apathetic citizen I am not.

Yet I find myself in shame when looking at those terra-cotta soldiers.

May their spirits live beyond the grave. Their humanity and heroism. There is nothing more noble than when one died in sacrifice for others. Our civic duty and our hope of enduring intangibles.

Just a glimpse, a spark. That’s all it takes…a light house…a fire that warms and shows the way. Glad to be born. Ready to die. Leaving traces beyond our temporal existence. We are all scholars and soldiers. To learn and to fight against ignorance and imprudence. To put the stake on the ground and draw a line in the sand. All the while, mindful of peace makers – honorable and admirable. We are ministers of culture, reshaping the narrative and carving up the .terra-cotta in our own images…in hope of getting beyond the transient and impermanence.

All that loving…longing…even lusting.

First the corner store owner. Then the jewelry store couple. Amidst counting their silver coins and bitcoins.

Leaving their inventory behind. Their relatives behind. And their retail customers bewildered.

Stores closed. Finished. The end.

Never got to do Sinatra’s “My Way”.

Never got to take that trip of a lifetime

Never got to celebrate their well-deserving birthdays, to walk their daughters down the aisle (and to give them away properly and publicly.)

Never got to see tomorrow’s sun, to look up Groundhog Day’s weather.

Just like that. Gone and forgotten. Like yesterday’s flowers.

Perhaps they once learned languages, second ones: at Chinese school, French lycee or at an ESL class.

What’s with Vietnamese, our century-old native language? Just because it doesn’t carry the weight of “currency”?

We have our loving, longing and lusting too!

That had been before we died…not in war, but during the pandemic.

Talking about war. Vietnamese got more-than-a-fair share of it: from fighting fits-and-starts with the Chinese up North, followed by anti-colonial sentiments and struggles against the Chateaubriands of the world (what were those European breeding in Southeast Asia to begin with) and fairly recently the Vietnam “experience”- hot flare up during the Cold War?!?

All those fighting and in-fighting, only to collapse at the feet of bat virus…From spare parts to body parts -victory counting and accounting derived from McNamara’s Pentagon propaganda.

And then they died, prospect or retrospect.

The moral arc of history traces itself to infinity, full weight of accounting…(and of sin, is death).

But when we focus (by zooming in), we see the differences, split hair….50 shades of grey, of vaccined and unvaccinated zip codes.

I felt a jolt, a reminder that life is short-lived. And that all the counting and accounting don’t amount much. First silver coins (to point out the Son of Man) to finally the bitcoins (for re-distributing digital disinformation).

Who is going to have the last laugh? The laugh soundtrack of late-night shows on TV? or the ones who keep tab of their growing war chests…for the next election and de-selection? Will they live on to be 100 and re-call their swindles and loots?

America is a strange land and a strange place. It thrives on being (both rightly and wrongly) and becoming better than anyone else… at home or at the Olympics… out West and in the Mid-West…but then… they died. A better more supreme- version of their previous selves…the ones had got left behind ( ethnic grandparents’)…

Live free? Sure, clothing are optional. Die free? For sure. Free to die. To bring others with you (by way of spreading anti-vac). By way of spreading hate (while still alive). By way of filling up your gas tank and war chest, to all of a sudden, fall by the wayside (like the last scene in the Godfather) unable to finish up a sentence, a complete thought or a full accounting of silver coins and bitcoins.

Wait….my passwords…my last words…Let me finish…Oh Lord, I have gone astray…too late to live out a Judas life.

We have yet learned to distinguish between cost and price… price paid for all that loving, longing and lusting called life.

All of a sudden … in mid-sentence. Like a dangling modifier, an incomplete thought. A life interrupted. Half-baked narratives full of attention-getters and impatient garbles – digitally unworthy in the age of artificial intelligence and internet.

It took time to grow roots. To re-establish one’s self. It’s more true in big cities.

Like Saigon. Pearl of the Orient.

10 miilion strong. All crammed in.

Food vendors, office workers, service workers, factory workers….

Now gone. Home. In a spontaneous urban exodus.

Leaving behind a trail of broken dreams.

Fleeing is what I know.

Leaving behind a part of you…

Embark on a gypsy life…drifting…like a rolling stone.

No roots, no growth.

Meek and transactional existence… day-to-day survival.

I know it. Now they know it. Leaving Saigon that is.

The hotel Continental, Caravelle and Cathedral (Notre Dame).

At least, they are now home. No longer the need for postage at the Post Office, nor the need to send home money.

The money seekers send themselves home. To be couch surfers and Internet surfers.

Not for long.

Just temporary…..until the pandemic subsides (herd immunity).

In South Korean, the wait for a jab is 111 days.

Perhaps longer than that in Vietnam, in post-Saigon existence.

It’s reverse culture-shock. For young couples to return to the country side…to seek refuge.

The dead will bury the dead….You go on and build a life…only to return to bury yourselves.

What we lost while making our way home.

Co-workers’ promise to stay in touch, last pay checks, fun and fashion from the city.

Urban habits and urban pace.

Do we even have wi-fi everywhere..to stay in touch.. to run a scam and/or to raise some money.

Who would respond at the peak of panic? True friends?

We burned all our bridges…We have lived a lie.

Now what? No one will miss the crammed urban space…not until the stillness and silence of the green landscape hit you in the face. Self-imposed new economic zones…gardening and ad-hoc farming. Co-op and fish farming.

It’s time to heal ourselves and heal the Earth.

No one intends to pick second best, to not take advantage of the concentration of educational, financial,social and governmental resources. Not to mention talented and artistic hub. Of engineering and web developers.

Brain drain.

Emotionally draining.

Financially destitute.

Bottoming out.

Before the virus caught up with us, it’s us who died by self-inflicting panic and paranoid.

Death by herd instincts instead of survival by herd immunity.

Saigon and many SEA cities got thinned out, the Earth finally catches its breath. “You can’t always get what you want”…

But human…loss and losing out…such a zero-sum game we play, more than often with a lose-lose outcome.

Wish we could nail down our target, like we once hunted down OBL to the gate of Hell.

No closures. Only death by attrition and survivor’s guilt.

I know a thing or two about leaving Saigon. About one’s memory of its last scene, of the winding river, polluted and stoic. Of the intangibles called life, which only make themselves known more in their absence…in the stillness of the night, when away from it all.

You’ve got a friend in me. An empathic one. A fellow sojourner and sufferer who understands loss and brokenness.

Before you know it, night will bleed into day…and with day, there is hope. Always.

““For those heading to an airport,” the 9/11 Commission report stated, “weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey.” The 8:51 a.m. temperature reading was 68°F at Central Park, 72°F at La Guardia, and 73°F at both JFK and Newark Airports.”

A good day to fly or die as any.

Twenty years on. 6 Trillion dollars later. And 21 million dollars more for 8000 Afghan visas.

At least this time, Congress did not hesitate (it did back in 1975).

First the plot, then the plunge. Buildings collapsed, stock brokers jumped.

All hell broke loose.

Our Commander-in-Chief was doing his mom’s job (help children read) turned to his war-footing (flying and landing on a air-craft carrier to declare “Mission accomplished”).

Yet, today, in his most recent interviews, George W. Bush said we haven’t finished the job.

In a sense, he is right. The world is still very unstable, no mater whose hands are that the helm.

Just a little less unsettling than years previous. But the poor and the variants are still with us.

At least, we get to roll up our sleeves to focus on infrastructure (as we should have, albeit two decades late, distracted and all with far-away lands and far-flung conflicts).

A generation has grown up, digitally.

Games, games and games.

Comics, comics and comics (counterparts in France).

War stops and game stop.

Kids in the West worry not about not having foods in their fridges.

They only worry about not having wi-fi signals.

Life online is more important and relevant than life off-line.

Tik tok profile, and instagram photos.

Digital natives vs Afghan non-natives (new arrivals).

All those who wear turbans and masks are arriving at our doorsteps.

What we fear happened is happening. (Replacement Theory?)

The invasion of the body snatchers. Fiction turns non-fiction.

America gets to be multi-colored. A large percentile of Republican said they would take up arms to defend the old ways of life. Whatever that means…Against the British Empire? Against dead OBL? Against China and the origin of virus?

Against those young Russian hackers? or our own home-grown terrorists who refuse to wear a mask and get a jab?

First choose one’s battle.

And one chapter at a time.

We need to eat and sleep. Life makes basic demands on us: its flow and its perpetual cycle of growth.

Nice weather for travel on that crisp Fall day.

Perfect for flying. Also perfect for destroying.

It would have taken 2 years of willful distmantling of the structure.

But in a few hours, both towers were no longer there.

When the smoke clears out, we see Sept 11 – 2021 approaching.

6 Trillion dollars all spent.

Lives and limps lost.

We’re all baseless ( I did not know al Qaeda means “the Base” per Peter Bergen).

Ask the Saigonese who are migrating back to the country side.

De- urbanization. Baseless. Rootlessness.

Gypsies and reality re-constructs.

People do travel. Crisp and clear day or not.

While a few (19) purposefully killed themselves and brought others down with them.

In the name of Allah. In the name of zeal and of vengeance (against infidelity and heathenism).

This makes my blood boil. This makes me want to rebel against hypocrisy and hyper-fervor.

In the name of this and that. End justifies the means. Ideology over individuals – aka collateral damages.

Somehow nature patiently puts up with man’s folly…Suit yourselves.

I am still here. Albeit a few degrees hotter…but still a crisp Fall day…good to travel as any other day.

Friendly sky, hostile terrorists. Got on all of our nerves, unsettled and upended our lives.

At the tune of 6 Trillion dollars and counting. Yet it’s still not quite dealt with. The root of evil lies at the heart of man. Can’t get it out without getting rid of man himself.

The human condition. Sometimes it makes me ill. To think of the hypocrisy vs transparency, of Evil vs Goodness.

We move the needle in between those extremes, or settle in the middle for a compromise called daily life. Pretending that it’s someone else’s business. The outsourcing war, the contractors and the drones.

All mix-up life comprises of Artificial Intelligence, man’s poor judgement and a virtual world that grows in size.

Twenty years ago, we lost two towers and many lives. Today, we lost our causes (Jan 6) and the ones who defended the building (Capitol) spoke of hatred and humiliation at the hands of fellow American. Don’t see any al-Qaeda here!

First were the explorers…Blue-Ocean types who pushed the envelope.

Hand-in-hand were the missionaries who hitched the ride…to ends of Earth.

After Commerce and Creed, are the Commanders… Gotta to have them, to deal with pirates and prisoners…

Then the loot, the merchandise and the money…back into the Capitalists’ coiffeur.

There you go. The history of man as we know it.

Calvinists and Columbus….are linked and worked in tandem.

First the blessing of the vessel (before) then the blessing of the foods – spice from afar (after).

As long as you pontificate and take the high road – “to civilise” ‘m savages (per Calvinistic theology, those salvages were pre-ordained, not to run around naked…but to be dressed in 100% cotton).

When early settlers went West, for Gold Rush or per God’s latest revelation to the White Men, “God” blessed’m, with T-shirts and hamburgers – McWorld, not the Others. Then in the 70’s the Others got doubly-blessed with oily stuff squirting from the ground….Voila…the Saudi Princes….on their yachts as it is in Heaven.

They sat not on the throne; but might as well on gold-plated toilet seats.

They were like that Egyptian King in 300 where no arrows can touch. Their hobbies were none others than Arabian horses and un-masked Russian women (DJT pee-tape rumour).

Meanwhile, Islamic kids have been learning the Koran by heart – No Child Left Behind.

Then they pushed the envelope: let them learn not just the Holy Book, but also how to fly (as if Architectural studies in Hamburg were beneath them).

So we awarded them wings…out of all places, Sarasota, Florida where Bush was trying to push “No Child Left Behind”… in an Elementary class ; half-way through, he was forced to be on his war footing (apparently, he abandoned No Child Left Behind – to this present day, only to push for another version of it in today’s Kabul).

History is full of irony.

“Abraham! Listen…Go to the ends of the Earth…subdue them…make them believers”…

Both sides hear the same calling. But only One monotheism version can stand …hence, the duel to the death.

It’s been 20 years since NYC got knocked off of its two front teeth (Tom Wolfe). It got an implant, for substitute, for “steeling” our resolve.

McWorld is thriving again…Jesus vs Jihadist…the battle continues…

It’s not just blood draining. It’s coiffeur and patience. Twenty years of a war of attrition, a drop in a 4,000 years bucket.

Kids not only got left behind. They got killed on their flights out of Boston on that fateful Fall day.

Millions of pages after (9/11 Commission Report) We still haven’t put the nail on the coffin of that eternal struggle. Mind-set problems? No problems! We’ve got a military solution ready to go, right at this minute (Air Force).

THE WORST WE HAVE DONE IS NOT AN EYE_FOR_AN_EYE. THE WORST IS WHEN AFGHAN WOMEN AND GIRLS GOT A TASTE FOR IT _ ALL DRESSED UP _ NO PLACE TO GO.

I am glad the Saudi women finally not beheaded but are getting their licenses to drive.

I am glad the Taliban mentioned that women will have a place at the table (politically) – that’s what they said.

I am glad at the Olympics, we have seen many female athletes getting medals…perhaps it’s not the duel to the death between ideologies (interpretations of the revelation) but 1+1=3 to include Mother Earth whom we depend on so much for our continuation of life – rightly or wrongly….we will find out, after the dust settled.

After 20 years, NYC 9/11 acrid smell and dust sure have …but new dangers and new challenges are here… with a new Giuliani variant ..Delta variant and the Dome (climate).

I am not wasting time regarding pre-destination vs free will debate. But I know if we keep leaving Child Behind, they will learn and know the Terrorist version on line by heart….And when the flood keeps rising, when the adults keep supplying drugs and guns…they will join any fight or flight school to become and belong to something bigger than themselves, not to mention to live however briefly for the greater glory..( and to have an orgy with unmasked virgins on the other side of death – Paradise).

First the commerce, then the creed, and finally the conquest for commerce…. Told you, It’s the greed that grinds the wheel, gyrating in circular motion from time eternal.

We’ve got to be hurried. Or else.

Or else the machine will spell, auto-complete, grammar-ly correct and comment on our and our friends’ postings.

They said the machine will take up all the chores (Klara watches over your kid in the Sun), like a lifeguard at the pool, and while at it, offers some advices.

Got to be hurried.

Toll booth workers are laid off. Elevator operators are laid off. Gas-station attendants laid off.

Even fire fighters partly replaced by automatic sprinklers.

Those are the known knowns. Unknown unknowns are the water-boarding experts, the Patriot Act executioners…

Until the table turns.

Until the machine and machine operators look for something else to do.

We have yet fulfilled our duties and obligations in our known world.

Yet machine is so advanced (so ubiquitous that they are now short of chips for auto-mobiles).

We all live in a world – that floats like a Yellow Submarine….chips-enabled and operated.

Even our feet get tired and re-tired (those who understands a little bit about biology would know that energy spent is energy earned). If you sit idle, down at the bottom of the rabbit hole, waiting to be validated by peers of your own groupthink…then it’s group narcism (my new term).

Stop the steal. R by name only. No action talk only.

Somehow, we all agree that the others are bad.

“They” came, conquered and control us…(sounds like the other way around, if you asked Native American).

My long thesis is: we have yet exhausted and exploited all the opportunities to do well and to do good in our known world. There is no need to explore outside of our borders (known knowns) in order to move up the food chain.

No child left behind? Oh yeah? We left many of them behind, in unmarked graves that recently got discovered up North.

Say No to Drug? Oh yeah, they, the pain-killer pushers, just settled out of court at the tune of billions of dollars.

How about the vaccines? 49 % of us already situated inside the known knowns quadrant, while the rest are still on the fence…

What is going on? Do we need more catch phrases, slogans and tweets to appeal to the better angels of our nature?

I am so exhausted that on this Monday morning, I already feel like it’s Friday.

Thank God it’s Monday (TGIM)…How about that for Making oneself’s great again.

More opportunities to do well and to do good.

The whole week ahead for us to make a difference in our known world.

How about reach out to a friend? Your own kids? Our own bodies….those feet that haven’t had decent exercises, worthy of being attached to bi-pedalists (us).

God has given us plenty of chances..with our two hands than two feet to move, to lend a hand to others in dire need.

My name is Samaritan. What’s yours? Now that you know I exist, in your known world. You too can join us…we’ll be there, by the side of the road, where plenty of opportunities to do well and to do good will present themselves, from Monday – Friday, never fails. “the poor shall always be with you”…that’s known knowns, if you care to agree.

It’s not that we do not live in a machine-aided society. It’s that we refuse to live in a man-aided one.

The WHO (not the band) started using it – unprecedented – early in 2020.

Then it’s been a string of “to mask or not to mask, that is the question”…

Then “Happy Birthday” (X2) to wash one’s hands long enough to scrub out the exposed virus…

Unprecedented…The whole world now understand care workers and essential workers…how they prep for their work (of operating a patient – however urgent).

Many of them died during the process…unprecedented.

Then the firefighters…underpaid, overworked…up in Portland and out West.

Unprecedented.

This week, instead of “We all live in a Yellow Submarine”, we all Iive under the heat dome.

Unprecedented.

You would think people charge out of the gate like Spanish bulls, right after the virus get under control.

No, no, no. Unprecedented, due to the variant (and perhaps boosters).

Plus the force of habits (staying in, and staying socially distant).

We end up on facebook and post our grievances and grief.

Delayed and prolonged grief. Unending five stages…(albeit some people still get stuck in stage two: denial).

America gets split in two, not Red States and Blue States, but vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Precedented and Unprecedented.

People even took a seasonal flu shot at the nudging of a Walgreen near them. But not this.

Science under attack. Since when it hasn’t been!

The Church (Catholic) beheaded early-day scientists, astronomers in particular.

Then the greed and ambition to “subdue the Earth…dominion over the seas” led to pooling resources for an expedition. Many shipwrecks behind, Columbus ended up (unprecedentedly) in the Americas.

I’d rather the tale of Papillon with his unprecedented escape from the French colonial prisons (plural…that guy, married both sisters…since a butterfly needs to have two flapping wings).

That’s how we have lived….precedentedly…until recently.

Until this past year, when Trump and Floyd, Covid and Climate Change all converged to make a oh-well unprecedented year. Plus the Olympics without spectators (not short of protestors though).

Japanese normally stay quiet. But this time, unprecedentedly, they come out, holding Hell-No signs.

I have stayed home more than any other year in my entire short bi-pedalist years.

God gave me two feet. To pedal, to walk and run, to push the pedal to the medal… But I stay put.

I wash my hands, stay away from people, and find myself with new habits: anti-social.

They should start investing in Baby World….for after this past year, birth rates should shoot up.

To replenish the Earth…then to subdue it…

The instructions have been more than clear: in a normal year, go out and conquer the World, …keep your Oath (of lording over everything, woman and child, especially) and be Proud…move in formation, and charge….

Floridian man got charged and sent to jail (unprecedented). Now the rest of the bunch, 500+ recognizable faces shared on social media during the Insurrection, get plea bargains and sentences….”I will walk with you to take back”…”I will be with you in the end days”….All those promises, not kept. After all, most politicians I despised found themselves ducked in hiding – draft deferred – due to one reason or another during Vietnam, a war, per early estimate (Simulmatics) could be won in six months..just like the Bay of Pigs, just like Afghanistan…

Unprecedented prediction…”it will go away when it’s warm”…oh well, the Dome is here and damn Delta are rampant.

Keep bleaching and preaching!

Our 21-st Century witnesses a new phenomenon: card-board people, card-board cutouts (from Amazon discarded boxes)….from homeless folks using it for make-shift signs, to faces cutout at empty stadiums, least of which, the Tokyo Olympics…

We perform still…like comedians with the aid of laugh sound-tracks, and red-dot cameras sans operateur. In short, talking to ourselves…tweeting to ourselves.

Narcissistic society with speech and thought-masturbating. Found in our political and social divide: rich vs poor, Black vs White, the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated, space travel and foot travel.

One would think with the profileration of “social” media, we would come together, like at Woodstock 69.

But the reality is far from it. Tribalize and trivialise, Taliban (vs US-trained defence forces) and Taiwan (vs China).

The Olympics were supposed to bring nations together in pure sports and competition (no cheating and no kidding). But it is less than its perceived ideal. The World Health Organisation, formed to eradicate diseases world wide…now sees the inequity of 1:170+ ratio (poor vs rich countries’ vaccination rates).

Meanwhile, arms and drug dealers are thriving, with Opiod pushers settled out of court at the tune of multi-billion.

Easy money, chicken feed.

Profits from those sky-rocketed sales have already stacked away, invested and grew multi-folds.

That’s the way it is.

Our card-board society, cut-out in shapes of figure heads, to protest on empty streets already ravaged by the pandemic.

No need to speculate. Already the Cheese man in Cuba is joining our Tunisian vendor in street protest.

People got nothing to lose.

People with grievances.

Rightly so.

The right to live, to pursue happiness in which ever way they see fit and can afford without doing harms to others (setting himself on fire). Yet, there are those who prefer to occupy hospitals…in their different form of protest: hell No, we won’t go (to get a shot).

Baffling, yet it’s happening.

To contrary evidence, in the face of indisputable science.

5 million dollars (tax-deducted expenses of organising etc..) to refute “My Pillow” guy.

but,….(there is always a catch, like Publisher Sweepstakes…keep buying, you will win….Oh, one more thing, and on, and on…hook, line, sinker).

Oldest trick in the book.

America sucks up to it. To find an empty promise in an empty box.

Boxes that can be recycled, to make card-board people, who protest, who march and who mis-direct their God-given energy to promise unfulfilled, to platforms undelivered and to a god whose manifestation is akin to a mirage (keep going, it’s next month, next year, next pay day…).

BTW, my kid gets her $250. Good for school supplies section, already on display and sold at a Walmart near us.

Now, that’s a lot of cardboard for her Art classes. On those cardboard and art papers, she will paint a future of America: Red, Blue and White….and while at it, perhaps many coloured faces to fill an empty Olympic stadium. All we need is the sound track of audience cheering. Then we get our footage for Google digital archive about the year of 2021…about a pandemic that we all thought contained…about a world that we once thought we were (We Are the World)…..

Woodstock 69. Real audience. Raw music. Rowdy crowd. When do I get to see it before I myself turn to join creatures of extinction…whose faces captured and retained on….oh well, cardboard….what a journey, from Boat People to Cardboard People. Quite an integration, an odyssey and a journey to America, Land of the Free – to Not get a vaccine.

The boy in a Black-and-White picture stared back at me, his future self. He was standing in a Saigon slum, wearing a pull-over shorts and a striped shirt. His flip-flop completed his tropical daily wear.

I tried to tell him Not to grow up, not to be in a hurry and that he was in a great spot i.e. with parents, siblings and cousins/neighbors who cared. Never mind the infrastructure, the concrete and the heat. All things must pass.

But your childhood only lasts for so long.

Look at me – your future self – who is approaching “maintenance stage”, brain cells stop growing, intelligence far reaching.

Best you can do is to connect those dots, to fill in the missing pieces of puzzle..to know who truly cares.

Even life-expectancy cannot be relied upon to continue its trajectory…due to illness, pandemic and other variants like drug overdoses, natural or man-made disasters.

Human are our worst enemies. We kill, maim, hurt, speak ill of others, “commenting” and dismissing. We fight for causes and non-causes. We struggle and sin, strive and suffer.

There is not an evil thing we spare and try not to do. War and conflict just draw out the extremes in human being. During WWII and its aftermath, if you had a PX card, you have enough currency to do whatever you want. A pack of Luck Strike? no problem.

Now, it’s vaccination. And ironically, more in the US believe vaccines pose more risks than the variant itself.

Among the risks, I am sure it does not make one more brain-dead.

Although listed among advanced countries, the US has seen its people being conned, tricked, and goaded into avoidable disasters and deceptions. Let’s say, there are still a segment of society who keep entertaining the return of a King., who will reign on Earth for a thousand years….

That God only reveals his latest secret to White Folks in Utah…presumably more so, if you sleep on “My Pillow”… than the dream will come into sharper focus, and reality more likely come true .My heart aches for Southeast Asia, for Vietnam…for regions of the world where the virus are now rampant. People are not set up for long-term sustainable social distancing. In fact, it has been a tourist attraction feature e.g. crowding, bustling with life and night life.

Now lays in ruin…empty streets (very much like NYC in April of 2020). Ghost town Asia. Silence. Stillness. Suffocating. City walls turn tomb stones..human turn animals in cage, with labels like in a zoo….Chimpanzees live here, lions over there…oh, and here, the crocodiles….vaccinated but isolated still.

We have had our freedom. And we turn it on its head, ourselves into inmates. I meant to tell my past self: “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun”…Go, skin your head and skin your knees, hurry not…it’s all troubles.

With adulthood and old age, come responsibilities and no respite. We came, we conquered and we left behind ruins and rubbles. Our “Lucky Strike”; don’t stop believing… in the goodness of people…especially when they are in trouble…Then, tomorrow, everyone gets up, and forgets…life is like a dream…especially when you sleep on one of those “Pillows”…Breakfast is over…childhood over….

I turned over the picture of myself at age 6 or 7. It’s on grainy Black-and-White paper. But inside my head, I know the alley and its contour, the shape of my past and how contorted its folding future has been. I am living its projected future ( unconceivable back then). I can’t say I like it, but have come to accept it. Its version, its portion and its allotment. After all, I am still here, vaccinated and eager to bellow:” Get your shots”.

None of us can lay claim to monopolising post-war pain and suffering…

Dante might…People who existed before novocain might.

Human cry out from the depth, like animals, might…

But war and aftermath…loss and betrayal…disbelief and feeling vain….

We have yet measured its full weight – veteran affairs or civilian affairs.

WWI was supposed to end all wars…

Then the first cut wasn’t deep enough. The Great Depression and Hitler rise got us right back into the ringer.

Subsequent wars….among them, Vietnam, crashed right out of the gate; post-VN USA vowed “No more Vietnam” i.e. unless one can dominate from the get-go, then don’t get involved (this Powel Doctrine helped with the first Iraq War).. Like an addict and his “last” fix before rehab, the war apparatus gets pulled right in…

Right after 9/11, the war on terrors was “open-ended”… (budget surplus)

Even after lost limbs and lives….of “Hurt locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”…our Coliseum spectators still haven’t got enough blood-sports, nor are they fully grasped the costs and consequences of war ( from its initial conception to its balloon-up completion.)

Many of my countryman have tried, to throw paint on the canvass, to sound the alarm bell, to be the lighthouse… – I have yet read “Things we lost in the water” – to no avail.

Most Vietnamese writers have tried their best…but faced a dilemma: ones with verbal ability to convey the pain did not fully exhaust and exploit the depth of separation and suffering, while the authentic remain maimed and numbed…(after all that betrayal, who cares about “educating” the ambivalent public on chapters and causes of war).

So we end up all the poorer…with Apocalypse Now, an adaptation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the Deer Hunter ( pre-existed script meant for a Las Vegas Russian roulette saga).

Let next generation keep marching into sunlight…to die or get killed, out there or in here e.g. on Jan 6, through the jagged-edges of Capitol broken window – now enshrined as Joan of Arc in our culture war? .

Can’t stand it when people kill in the name of this god and that god, the Holy Wars and the Crusades, for the latest revelation and Dead Sea Scroll…(to my knowledge, no revelation arrived in time to save Jim Jones, the Heaven’s Gate techs, or UA 93 passengers)…

Leave us/me alone.

Enough loss in the air and in the water.

Enough suffering that last a lifetime.

No more “God spoke to me last night”! All the powers to you…. Go ahead and speak in tongues to Alexa…. or try Google translation and help machine learn…

The world has moved on. Our era is the aftermath of an aftermath of an aftermath….

We live in cyber world, wireless and frictionless.

More broadband and fewer face-to-face.

Warfare is moving online, leaving past pain off-line…

Zoom it…(Zoom has just bought some cloud company at the tune of multi-billion dollars to scale up to enterprise levels).

Forget it. Past pain is for old timers, an older version..in Star-Wars time. Now it’s Cyber-Wars time, of multi-Billionaires in space race….”Ask not what your country can do for you”…

We still can’t stand six-feet apart, while they socially-distant planets-apart.

No one, neither the Afghan interpreters nor the Vietnamese ones, can claim monopoly of pain and suffering.

Live with it. Get a broadband connection….and join us in cyber space….It is what it is…War to end all wars…open-ended…out there..but on Earth and off-line, pain and suffering are still real and still count, with or without novocain.

“Strumming my pain with his fingers….Singing my life with his words…”