Brother, Can You Spare a Dong?

mike has posted something i had wanted to talk about months ago but couldn't figure out how best to express it. his is an excellent depiction of the stark duality of life here in saigon, and i would just like to comment a little on it.

i was, and still do, find myself wholly unprepared to confront the extreme welfare inequalities, manifested in myriad ways on the streets of saigon. it's there as soon as i open the gate in front of my house, one not much different than the ones that now house the growing upper classes here who, like me, must to some degree ignore the reality of the pleas of a child desperately tugging away at you mumbling for money, or the quiet despair of the disfigured holding an overturned hat at you, and look somewhere else. walk away. start up your bike and continue on your way to the club, restaurant, office, supermarket, home – the insides of which are familiar landmarks to all but the most destitute, offering seemingly essential 20th century amenities as nutritious food, entertainment, variety, purpose, and a permanent shelter. yet we coexist with such poverty, and in doing so deem such things as dispensable as our concern for the needy when the dreams and desires of one's own life have yet to be fulfilled. after all, we who have budgets are all paupers.

but is the indecent allure of consumerism really the problem? i believe we are by nature an endlessly greedy breed. but even if i know that tossing a dollar here or there will do nothing but satisfy personal guilt, i'm sure there are many sympathetic and charitable people who would offer nothing less than their life to end poverty. the real problem is that poverty cannot be abolished by one person, one corporation, or even one nation, but would require the coordinated effort of all governments worldwide. but because the homeless are rarely elected officials, or even represented by such people, it stands to reason that there will always be a child somewhere looking into the eyes of someone avoiding their gaze for fear of what they could be.

the plight of the middle class is both a struggle for social viability and a struggle to cope with the reality that we can't all achieve it, and nowhere is that more clear than it is here.

Dear Vietnamese Government,

fuck you.

fuck you for making me wait in line longer than anyone else on my flight just to get through immigration and then being so god damn polite to me at customs that i can't let my internalized rage stew and fester in me, prompting me to one day vomit some spiteful democracy on you out of nowhere.

fuck you for not putting a lid on all those phony-ass taxis whose cabbies all at once try taking my luggage to their own cab while i say, "khong khong khong khong!!!!! taxi motmotmotmotmotmot o dau? o dau!!!?!?!" only to have a super friendly vinataxi driver help me out and take me home for like 3 bucks.

fuck you for letting dirty little heroin-addicted HIV-infected chronic hugger beggar boy strut around de tham like he owns the place and can look at me whenever he wants. (oh what's that? you throw him in jail sometimes when you feel like it? ok. please accept my apologies then.)

fuck you for requiring only a passport and one sane eye to rent a sweet motorbike so that i can go wherever the fuck i want however fast i want and properly kick it to motorcycle ninja honeys while getting a pleasant, nigh-imperceptible high off sucking in the fumes that permeate throughout every street because it will surely be the death of me and i loathe you for your irresponsibility.

fuck you for somehow preventing me from turning the god damn light outside my balcony off so that i have to wear the sleeping mask i got on my flight from japan to saigon which is 1) not what it was intended for and 2) makes me feel like a princess.

fuck you for all the dirt cheap food that i will no doubt gorge myself on for the next few months and keep it in my stomach because it's so delicious and become obese like a true american hero. just thank your lucky stars you're not an american-owned corporation, vietnamese government, or i'd threaten a class action lawsuit against you greedy, gluttonous fucks so fast it'd make your collective communist head cry dong right into my wallet.

fuck you for calling this a rainy season. not a one flash rainstorm in the 2 days i've been back. what, you think my motorbike's gonna clean itself? what, you think i'm gonna clean itself?. get a friggin' clue.

fuck you for carrying out a police-enforced shutdown of the entire city at midnight every night, even the weekends, cause seriously that's not cool. economically speaking that is. i mean, how are the mafia-owned clubs gonna make a living huh? what are the shaking medicine dealers gonna feed their children now that their customers have no where to shake? ecstasy!? how are the prostitutes gonna learn english if the english teachers don't even have enough time to get sufficiently drunk to offer to exchange services? ever think of that!? and where the fuck are people gonna go when they need a hug? a xe om driver? no thank you. that's not the kinda ohm i know and love at 3 in the morning.

and last of all, fuck you for allowing private businesses that i'll never work at like ernst & young to ban access to my and other blogspot bloggers' websites for no good fucking reason you sorry communist wannabe rotten cunt licking homopussies!!!!


love,
mat

Canada, Japan, China, Heaven, and Global Domination

FLASH NEWS BULLETIN EMERGENCY SPECIAL REPORT: PLANE CRASHES AND IT'S REALLY BORING



so i was up and flying over to japan and my plane ends up crashing in canada. the good news is i survived but the bad news is so did everyone else. how boring is that? and while everyone was bla-bla-blaing about miracle this and canada's so great that i pretty much just walked away and caught the next flight. didn't even call home or nothing. man, in my day, planes used to crash right into people's faces while they were getting some coffee. and would continue smashing straight through the building and end up in the colon of some dude who's seriously having the worst diarrhea of his life and doesn't even know it until his anus is ripped open by the nose of a 747. now that's a plane crash. not this "oh yeah, by the way, my plane missed the runway and blew up about a minute after i got off it" bullcrap. get a life. and when you do, go die in a real plane crash, loser.

anyway so where was i? oh yeah, japan. the extreme boredom from no one dying in a pussy ass plane crash really took it's toll on me so i passed out as soon as i got to my hotel room, then woke up at like 3 in the morning. wide awake, i naturally got up and looked for some beer, but absolutely everything in the hotel was closed. and i mean everything. i couldn't even find a used panties dispenser, or animatronic sex girl, or robot tentacles with which to rape a real one. and this was japan!!!

i realized i'd made a serious blunder in pooping out early, so i returned to my room and looked for some reading material. earlier i'd picked up a copy of the economist, mostly as a joke that only i would get and no one would ever laugh at (including me) but also because it said on the cover that china was about to "enslave the human race" (their impliction, my quotes). i read it, understood 100% of the words with one syllable (except "yuan", "peg", "yield", "bond", "rate", etc.), and didn't believe a god damn word of it. i mean, i understood the fact that oil prices are high because chinese people just figured out that it's much easier to pick up chicks while driving a car than riding a bicycle. and i even understood the fact that they had like 700 billion dollars to blow on pretty much anything they want. and although you can't buy the entire human race with that, definitely africa. easy. even south africa with all those expensive-ass white folk.

but what i refused to believe was that china could ever ever own america (i mean it's not like the u.s. has a massive debt or anything)... untilllll i picked up a copy of the new testament and started reading some of that. and wow, that is some fucked up shit. i think the only people who ever wonder why americans are the way they are - assholes, mostly - are those who have never read the most influential book in american history: the bible, or as i call it, "oh pfffff!!! you read that?!". to be fair, most americans probably have not read it, but more have certainly been exposed to its teachings or otherwise morally influenced by it than in any other developed country. in that same issue of the economist i read that over half of all americans believe that man and apes do not have a common ancestor. that is to say, they believe god (protagonist/antagonist/total dick of the "oh pfffff you read that?! trilogy) not natural selection, is responsible for producing humans, the universe's most magnificent and profoundly special being**.

so as you can plainly see, all americans are idiots except the ones who aren't (you know who you are) and i give the bible an F - - - (triple minus, not a 4-letter word). so while i don't believe that china will enslave the human race (god, with jesus as his man-servant and mohammed as his sexually repressed sex slave, beat them to it), i do believe that one day a whole bunch of chinese people will invade our country and while everyone's home reading their own version of the bible a whole bunch of them will replace the mcdonald's logo with a hammer and sickel but nobody will notice because the colors are the same and the cheeseburgers still have cheese.




**as long as you accept jesus christ``' as your lord and savior cause if you don't, jesus is leaving your sorry ass behind when the bus to eternal bliss rolls on by. and you're missing out cause it's filled with virgins, bro. virgins!! (matthew: chapter 24-25, no seriously...)

``'just replace "mohammed," or "optimus prime," or "star of david" or "gargamel" with jesus if you so please.