Upside Gone: Down in Saigon

Slice: The Beginning of the End of the Middle

2006-01-24T23:40:00.000+07:00

...and the End of Anonymous

50 Dinh Cong Trang (click to enlarge)

clockwise from upper-left: phuc, euan (freebird), triet (fat black), rinda, alison, mike (mr. nostarwhere who's currently nostartraveling with al), tiana, dave the rave, mat, and shiao ti (phuc's "little sister")

those are the faces and i promise to get out more stories. that last post was partially written before i'd left, but everything from here on out will be written retrospectively about my past few months in saigon. but don't worry, there's still so much to get through:

-tripping by accident in mui ne (can't remember much, but there are some before pictures...)
-oktoberfest
-an incident in the classroom involving "stepping over the line"
-i'll still need to scan some hilarious student artwork from almost a year ago
-rolling adventures (including freak outs (2x: one, the most infamous, the other, i'll probably write about next), and not being ok to teach (2x: halloween and dave's b-day), and phuc's ("little sister"), and the k story)
-a week long thing with phuong's former best friend
-a much more boring thing with a girl i only talked with because i wanted to improve my vietnamese
-the totally unclimactic conclusion to the phuong saga
-last and final sentimental observations about saigon: the ice deliverers, xe om's, "mechanics," whatever else comes to mind

i'll probably start with one of the rolling adventures (so many), but if you'd rather hear about something else, lemme know. and of course i'll try to get more pictures up as mike's been gracious enough to post so many of his, as have alison and rinda.

one more thing: since i want this blog to remain as a document to my time in saigon, and not say, the platform for the (admittedly impressively) cryptic ramblings of a certain anonymous poster, as of my next entry, the comments will be set up so that i have to approve each one before it's posted. so if you have something to say to the 10 people who read this blog, i suggest you say it now.

How Much for That Clam!?

2006-01-22T05:17:00.000+07:00

In Search of Oc, Gai, and the Origins of Celebrity

every night, in every club in saigon, the lasers and strobe lights, which had been feverishly fluttering since dusk, become suddenly disoriented, momentarily lost when the pervasive incandescents come storming in at about a quarter to midnight, arresting the darkness, and bringing the party and its orgy of lights to a halt. and the deafening, seemingly invincible pounding of trance music is supplanted by one of the three standard hip-hop songs. at this point, you and your friends begin planning your escape, you signal for the bill as the second one plays, and, by the middle of the third, you've all paid your share. but before the totalitarian tones of the slow vietnamese pop ballads tackle your ears and torture your brain, you finish off the last of the alcohol in one final "một hai ba!" and depart.

for most, the next destination is one of the myriad outside eateries that all serve the singular purpose of accommodating those who refuse to accept a premature return to sobriety. but of all the "180-something nguyen thai hoc's" and the "that one on nguyen du's", i only knew of one with an actual name -- Oc Gai. according to phuc, and confirmed by several other locals, it's the most famous of these late night refuges. however, you'd never know it from the outside. although i'd been there a couple times before, i would've driven straight past it had dave not told me were already there.

it was a familiar scene in saigon: fluorescent lights illuminated the sidewalk where vietnamese men and women were gathered around cheap plastic tables and sitting (sometimes squatting) on cartoonishly small plastic furniture that's stacked up and stored away once all the customers have left. from the roadside, there is but one discernible difference between Oc Gai and all the others -- the striking presence of a clientele culled from the upper echelon of the vietnamese party scene. spiky, streak-bleached hair, and newly stitched threads in the latest trends signify the wealth of the guys, while the ladies simply let their sheer attractiveness speak to their relative status. i later learned that one, a woman with long black hair and dressed all in white, was an actress in a "well-known" vietnamese film. i didn't know it, or her, but i'm sure her fame is well-deserved because she was pretty hot.

if you were to ask someone why Oc Gai is so popular, one would surely answer that it's the exquisite, exotic, and expensive (but very fair) offerings that attract all these people. yet, among the disenfranchised party elite who flock here after midnight like sea gulls in low tide, what this description applies to depends on who you ask. the gái will say they come here for the ốc -- the snails, scallops, oysters, and other various shellfish. while i cannot deny that these are all adequately ngonlicious, i, and most other guys, come here to feast my eyes on the gái -- the debutantes, waitresses, dancers, prostitutes, and other members of the female species. so it would seem that the shellfish, which draw in the girls that the guys invariably follow, are the ultimate source of Oc Gai's popularity. but could it really be this simple?

i instinctively headed towards the young man waving at me, stopped, and pulled the key out of the ignition. then this motorbike attendant did what all motorbike attendants do: write a number on my back seat in chalk and hand me a ticket. i stepped off the bike and surveyed the cornucopia of beauties. trời ơi! if mollusks were capable of having erections and were attracted to human females and were eaten live, then the patrons here would all be eating a hell of a lot of escargot boners. that's for damn sure.

but my enthusiasm soon faded once i realized i had about as much chance with any of these gem-bearing gai as the bottom-feeder hauling off my motorbike -- my suddenly, frighteningly awful piece of middle-class crap motorbike -- past all the dylans, @'s, and spaceys, and parked somewhere comfortably out of sight. "yeah, just put it next to your bicycle. awesome." i wondered if any of the girls here were at all interested in picking up guys. probably not, as their day jobs likely consisted of squeezing cash out of the richer sex. i'm sure most of the guys and girls here had more money than me, but whatever, you can't buy whiteness, and that's as good as gold here. or at least that's how i consoled myself.

we joined lucy, the legendary barbie/emcee/mother/restauranteur, who was already seated next to something she assured was "just a friend." although it looked like a 30-something year old asian guy, and had driven her there in a mercedes, based on how it dispensed with cash i'd swear it was an ATM. i think the trick is to swipe your hand in the ass crack, and key in your PIN on the nipples with your tongue as if using a rotary phone. regardless, i didn't care much about whether it was biological or mechanical, only that it paid for our meal and didn't speak very much.

lucy was skillfully extracting a large, deceased snail from its former home for the scheduled funeral service in her stomach, and i dutifully joined her in this most satisfying ceremony. fork goes in, snail comes out -- it's pretty simple, but if it's not done right, i was told, then i might miss out on the good stuff at the end. well let me tell you something: that "stuff" at the end is a trail of feces attached to the snail's ass. generally my principles would prohibit me from putting that anywhere near my mouth, but given the circumstances of the snail's situation, i ate it without expecting reciprocation. so is the secret to Oc Gai's success its inexplicable ability to induce such altruistic behavior? probably not.

maybe it's the blood cockle. ok, what are you 4 years old? grow up; blood cockle is a shellfish, and is absolutely nothing like a blood vaginal... and i speak from experience. observe: one begins by placing the thumbs of both hands along the crease of the ridged, clam-like outer shell. then he massages it open with a firm but careful prying, making sure not to let the precious juices in which it marinates spill out. once it's fully spread, he beholds the wet, fleshy bud perched coyly upon its quiescent throne, resisting the temptation to devour the object of his desire in one ravenous gulp. then, when the moment is right, he places his lips around the soft, briny morsel, and uses his tongue to wedge it against the back of his incisors. then he gently (gently!) avulses the delicate creature while simultaneously slurping the pungent soup. his mouth immediately absorbs the bitter punch of iron before being overwhelmed with the savory fish flavor to which one is more accustomed. finally, after recoiling in scrumptious ecstasy, he lets the slippery slop slide sensually down the back of his throat. it's truly spectacular. on the other hand, a blood cockle tastes totally different as i'm sure any cockle connoisseur can tell you.

perhaps Oc Gai's popularity has nothing to do with the food, but its unique selection of utensils -- namely, the safety pin. the last time i stared so intensely at a safety pin, i was about 14 years old, trying to work up the courage to stick it through my ear so i could join the very exclusive "cool kids with their left ear pierced (not the right one, that means you're gay!)" club. i never made it in (it hurt), but now i had a chance to join an even more exclusive club: the "i can use a safety pin to get this tasty little fucker out of its shell and into my mouth" club. after several goes at it, i worked out a fairly efficient method of removing the tiny ốc dừa, coconut shellfish, based on a fiddle-flip-poke technique. (traveler's note: the poke-pull-fiddle-pull-poke-fiddle-poke-poke-poke-smash technique is a dead end street.) it's a lot of effort for a crumb, albeit a delicious crumb, perhaps the best crumb i've ever had. but still, everyone knows crumbs are for bums.

then again so is beer and i certainly didn't let any such pretensions prevent me from drinking straight 'til my bladder was ready to burst. so at some point i made the ritual trek to the trough. by now i whole-heartedly accept urinating into these as being a custom inherent in going out to eat anywhere that caters to locals. (girls are privy to a much more authentic toilet experience. they get to relieve themselves directly into a drain in the floor.) well on this particular evening, i really wish i'd had my camera because i was granted the rarest of opportunities -- a genuine insight into the way real people around here do things. looking down into the aluminum trough, i noticed someone had graciously left me a wet, stinky pile of puke to piss on. trời! i was so excited, i almost peed my pants before i could undo my zipper. a real, actual "cultural experience!" at the esteemed Oc Gai no less! i wasted no time and not a single drop of pee doing what i figured all the locals must do in this situation: try to corral the puke into the drain with a hard, steady stream of urine. it was impossibly awesome, but admittedly, probably not something that most people would enjoy. most stupid people.

upon my return i was greeted by a succession of many casual acquaintances that attended to me as though i were a celebrity. let's see, there was the old wrinkly woman with no teeth who was kind enough to offer mangos and peanuts in exchange for a little money; and the guy practically giving away that stinky ol' cuttlefish; and that deformed, no-leg-having people-ma-bob shoving lottery tickets in my face, crossing his only two functional fingers in the hopes that i'll hit it big. but my best friends were the young boys who'd give out free massages (but only if you don't pay them) and the little girls who always help me woo that special someone with roses (you only have to pay them if you take their flower and start chewing on it. they love that. but don't refuse to buy their flower and tell them you don't want it because it's too ugly, unless you like being cursed at in vietnamese by a 5-year old.)

my friends all came and went after i glanced a friendly "fuck off" to each. apparently the key to drawing a crowd is a convergence of drunkness and whiteness, while the key to being a true celebrity who can sustain that crowd is simply money. as i'm pondering this, i see a package of gum thrust within a foot of my face. attached to the ever-crappy "happy-dent" was the dirty hand of a young girl with lifeless, street-hardened eyes that offered a shallow glimpse into the struggle of a child whose parents probably threaten to abandon her unless she brings home at least a dollar a night. of course, that's assuming this poor, cute little girl even has parents...

"no."
"[insert vietnamese words that indicate she really really needs--]"
"no."
"[insert more viet--]"
"KHHHONG!"

i'l admit my callousness towards those disproportionately less fortunate than me can be exceptional. but in this case, i just didn't want the damn gum. maybe if she was selling memory cards for digital cameras. i could've used one of those. or a nice case for my ipod. that would be cool. but who really wants to buy that stale, flavorless gum?

she started speaking to dave, and he laughed.

"what did she say?"
"she thinks you're gay."
"what the--!? nah."
"yeah."
"...you know what? fuck that."

i looked at her and said to her in vietnamese, "gay huh?" she started laughing. "yeah that's funny." then, i was blasted in the face with a brilliant idea. i gave the girl 20,000 VND, a little more than a dollar, and shook my head when she tried handing me the gum. i said, "dave, tell her i don't want the gum, but whenever she sees me she has to pretend i'm a famous american movie star." she smiled at that and then scurried away.

that was the last time i ever went to Oc Gai and i never saw the girl again. my plan, when i return to saigon, is to pay off every street kid i see and tell them they have to pretend i'm a celebrity. and that is how i'll become as famous as Oc Gai.

Me Rove Rinda Rong Time (in Haiku)

2006-01-16T06:16:00.000+07:00

she's not korean,
but can't be american.
i think she's so hot.

i like you because
you're so easy to piss off.
that's why you hate me.

i assure you this:
if there's a heaven and hell,
gandhi is in hell.

if i don't see him,
i'll wait for you to call, but
i won't hold my breath.

would i be being
judgmental if i said that
you're too judgmental?

"i won't say a thing."
"linda, you already have."
"matt... you little bitch."

"oh my god! matthew!"
if you don't like how i drive
take mr. xe om.

why did you hate me
for 3 or 4 days a month?
oh wait, i know why.

you're a mobylette.
everyone wants to ride you,
but they'd feel silly.

... ... ... ... ...
... ... ... ... ... ... ...
the silent treatment

between you and dave,
i look to my right and say,
"tôi là bánh mì mỹ!" . . . . . . . . . (i'm an american sandwich)

vegetarian
but when we ride together
i like when you're meat

you're so gullible;
i don't really hate penguins.
how adorable!

The Sống/Chết Game

2005-12-17T08:27:00.000+07:00

a steady pulse permeates the feverish darkness, filling the room with a hypnotizing beat. near the source are a group of people gathered in a circle, all eyes fixed on the one in the center. suddenly, at a moment indistinguishable from all that had come before, a word is spoken:

sống!

life thus being granted - no, obliged - i did what everyone else was doing and began to dance.

within an hour of stepping back into the cold, gray ether of long island, i was whisked away by my sister to my grandfather's house. just days before it was still technically "grandma and grandpa's," but stepping inside i realized the house i was in now was not the "grandma and grandpa's" i remembered. this place which, with the exception of last year, i'd spent every christmas eve in recent memory, had died long before my grandmother passed away.

as a child, the house was endearing in its alien magnificence. i would rush out of the car to get to the door before my sisters so i could ring the doorbell. reaching up, i'd press that warmly glowing button and through the door i'd faintly hear that familiar melody being played on the brass chimes clanging throughout the whole house. a moment later my smiling grandpa would swing both the door and his arms open saying "matty! how are ya my boy!" my grandmother, stepping out of the kitchen, would smother me in a hug while reassuring me i'd been growing. then she used to grab and squeeze part of my face, as punishment for growing i suppose, until the day i was finally tall enough to be out of the reach of her cheek-seeking pincers.

directly across from the front door was a mirror that has showed me to myself, as i was, each and every time i've ever walked into this enchanting baroque palace. mirrors were everywhere, covering the full span of no less than 4 walls and the bathroom door. wherever i went, another me would be looking right back at me - blinking, staring, walking, glancing, dancing, laughing. the one in the bathroom, encased on 3 sides, was my favorite because looking to either side, the room seemed to extend forever, replicating the viewer ad infinitum. once, wondering if my doppelgangers all stayed inside there when i left, i walked outside and closed the door but left enough space for me to stick my head in. then i slowly inched my way in until i could see a million me's peering at and examining each other and me.

next to the steps was a bed of rocks which featured a fountain from which columns of invisible, inaudible, and even intangible water cascaded down. we sat down next to this curious fountain, lit by red lights, to remove our shoes before going into the den. following the clear plastic path in there led to the rear dining room, which was ever redolent with the heavy aromas of my grandpa's cigars. we were required to always always remain on the runner, unless of course i was wearing my anti-gravity socks. the house was so steeped in magic that, at one time, i could even transform the carpet in the den into a swamp and me, the swamp monster, pulling my sisters down from the stairs and into my bog of death.

usually the adults sat on the plastic-wrapped sofa and talked about things that didn't involve lego's, transformers, or videogames while my sisters and i played some kind of game, or rather my sisters did something by themselves while i poked them, pulled their hair, threw things at them, or otherwise bugged them until someone (usually me) got yelled at. on nice days, we were taken down the street to a wondrous, monolithic structure that featured chain walls, metal bars, and swinging rungs navigable by only the bravest adventurers. here we competed in various competitions that would culminate in a danger-laden obstacle course, complete with swirling slides and dungeons constructed of tires, with everything connected by various bridges suspended above a pit of lava.

i always enjoyed exploring, whether it was the school playground, the limits of my sisters' patience, or the forbidden and mysterious upstairs. one day i learned that the stairs where we sat to take our shoes off and the stairs on which we kept ourselves busy in the living room were connected by an exotic half-floor filled with mystical statues and mysterious chairs no one ever sat in. the discovery would forever change my relationship with that house, but at the time i thought so only because it offered me a new way to sneak up on my sisters and scare the bejesus out of them.

but before i ever even made it up there, i cautiously climbed up those burgundy carpeted steps one at a time, and leapt from each one until i got to the top. despite it being only half a flight, the view from 5 steps up was enough to deter me from attempting the jump for several visits. when i finally worked up the courage to do it, i remember free-falling downward, landing hard on the carpet and rolling out of it, but i don't at all remember the crowd of people applauding, vigorously shaking my hand and hoisting me on their shoulders, as surely they must have done for someone accomplishing such a feat.

my father grew up in this house, along with an older sister and younger brother. his sister became estranged from the family following her wedding, which only under rare circumstances is ever discussed. however his younger brother, my uncle peter (perhaps the antithesis of my deceased uncle chris), became a legend among me and my sisters for his extraordinary ability to understand and be a part of our simple, silly little world - our childish delights, our whimsical games, our endless hopes. but he died about 10 years ago from a misdiagnosed and mistreated bout of pneumonia that slowly weakened him, destroying him bit by bit until he finally succumbed to the savage microbe at the age of 34. one premature death begot another, providing the catalyst for my grandmother's metamorphosis into the aloof vessel of gloom and despair we unfortunately came to know her as.

at that time, the cumulative loss seemed to steal from the house some of the winsome spirit that had captivated me as a child, and with the real, physical exit of my grandmother, the house was altogether devoid of its former character. laying now on that once-daunting top step i closed my eyes to shun the light relentlessly streaming in through the curtainless windows, illuminating old dusty furniture in an empty, ordinary room. many of the paintings depicting christian iconography and various jesus chachkas seemed to be missing, but the most curious absence was that of the static electric charge that used to shock me whenever i touched a wall. i miss that. for as long as i can ever remember being in that house i received at least one shock a visit, but now there wasn't even that. downstairs my grandfather was on the phone with a social security agent, informing the united states government they had one less citizen to care for. he was put on hold.

a chandelier placed just in front of the door hung just low enough to separate the lorusso's from everyone taller than 5 and a half feet, i, just barely, being the only exception. i remember using it as an indication of my height, extending one arm as high as i could to try and touch one of the large, sparkling rubies hanging down from it, until one day i did, and realized they weren't actually gems, merely cheap imitations like many of the objects in that house i once believed were priceless treasures. and just like when i reasoned that it was in fact my parents who were leaving me gifts under the tree on christmas, i didn't really care. but the revelation nevertheless chipped away at a beguiling world of artifice i was all too ready to abandon. and yet before leaving the house, the world around me shifted once again when my grandfather, holding up his gout-swollen hand, asked me to tie his shoes for him because he couldn't do it himself. and i did, because that's just what one does in that situation.

by following the others and learning from their experiences, i gradually came to understand the rules of the game. and with that, i became aware of the ever-present threat of immediate and irreversible death. yet we all continued to dance, anxiously watching the one in the middle and awaiting the next command. sống or chết. which would it be?

the first wake would be the worst one i was told. i wouldn't know since i'd only been to one other and i hadn't known the person. i expected hours of quiet contemplation, but when i walked in, there was my mother hugging my older sister, crying, not quietly contemplating at all. she said grandma didn't look anything like herself, and my mother nodded. i've always felt the idea of displaying a dead body is unfair. it's unfair to the rightful, albeit absent, possessor of the corpse who has no say in how they look, which was especially offensive because my grandma was so particular about her appearance. but it's also unfair to the people who, in spite of a deep affection for the body when it was animated, have no special affinity for a rotting pile of flesh.

so i stayed as far away from the casket as was respectfully permitted. a collection of photographs instantly caught my attention, evoking a silent, recursively blasphemous "thank god there is no god" because if there was, and my grandmother found out my mom had done this, everyone who looked at the pictures would be dead and my mom would go to hell. my grandmother absolutely hated having her picture taken, way more than me. pictures are ruthless in their ability to seduce people into accepting them as an artifact of an objective reality. and that's fucked up. being permanent, static, and available for anyone to peruse, pictures lack the subjectivity and privacy of mirrors for which she apparently had such a strong preference. installing a full-length mirror in her casket would have been a much more appropriate homage.

the only pictures she considered tolerable were the staged, "say cheese" photos, which i believe to be the worst kind. most were from special occasions - her wedding, my dad's wedding, and a birthday party. a picture of her parents made me briefly ponder the possibility that i am in fact a descendant of oompa-loompas. most interesting though was a picture of another person i never knew - a young girl sitting daintily on a fence, guarding dreams of grandeur, who looked familiar, but was otherwise a stranger. i could only assume her childhood differed from mine in every respect except in its fleeting chimerical essence. it starkly contrasted with a picture of her from last thanksgiving, where she was obviously caught with a sneak attack "hey grandma!" CLICK. she looked so pitiable with her bird's nest hair, mouth half agape, and eyes that betrayed a pathetic helplessness in having just been raped by a rogue picture-taker. later my sister explained that my grandmother had pleaded with her to delete the picture. instead it was featured front and center at her wake. i shuddered at the thought of her knowing about this.

the morbid curiosity that presumably underlies these bizarre ceremonies soon began to set in, and i awkwardly moved closer and closer to the dreadful thing, waiting for a moment when i could be somewhat alone with it, kinda like at my first school dance, or the prom for that matter i suppose. from several feet away i could see that her consistently reddish, brown hair was cut shorter than i'd ever seen it - another indignity. it's hardly a secret that she always styled her hair in such a way that it made her appear taller than her 4 foot 9 inch stature suggested. in the days when my mom used to drive her to the beauty parlor, this meant a massive perm, but in more recent times simply allowing her hair to be unkempt achieved an acceptably comparable effect. i have to say that the haircut she sported in the casket made her look neither shorter nor taller, just weird, as if she had died and someone said "what this old dead woman needs is a new do."

the not quite life-sized doll dress was as striking as the haircut. i later found out it was provided by the funeral home because my grandfather, unsurprisingly, couldn't find a dress of her own. i guess a blouse and stretch pants are not appropriate casket attire, or alternatively, don't meet the dress code requirements in the afterlife. reassured by routine and banality, her appearance rarely deviated. the blouse was always white and, archetypically, with black stretch pants and a black vest. if she ever wore a colored garment, cream for example, either black or white would be there to complement it in some way. colors, she felt, didn't suit her and thus restricted her image to a very limited number of colorless varieties.

her cooking, for which she was best remembered, was similar in that her 3 most popular dishes - lasagna, manicotti, and my favorite, stuffed shells - were essentially different takes on the same theme, and never changed year after year. but whereas triteness in fashion, no matter how glamorous the clothes may be, soon becomes vulgar, good food falling into an empty stomach suffers from no such pretension. i was always pardoned from having to comment on the quality, allowing my mouthful of food to suffice as a compliment. even standing adjacent her corpse, i knew the realest loss would be that of a pan full of those few, yet invariably delicious, configurations of pasta, cheese, and sauce during the holidays.

knowing how much we loved her cooking, she had already prepared the sauce for christmas when she went to the hospital for a knee operation just after thanksgiving. she seemed to be recovering ok until she started complaining of stomach pains a few days later. unbeknownst to the doctors, microbes had gotten the better of her immune system, and were voraciously eating away at her intestines. soon she was unable to eat and in incredible pain. so 2 weeks after the previous operation, she had another one, this time to remove her badly infected colon and part of her small intestine. she never recovered.

after the surgery her blood pressure fell, unable to handle the massive trauma her feeble body had sustained. for the next several days she was administered an assortment of drugs to keep her blood pressure at a life sustaining level. this effectively over-hydrated her, bloating her to such an extreme proportion that my parents said she was unrecognizable, even more so than how she appeared in the casket. to relieve the swelling, she was administered another drug, which in turn caused her kidneys to fail. meanwhile, pain killers kept her sedated, leaving her just barely conscious enough for her to qualify as alive, though forever trapped in her own decrepit body. a few days later, once all hope was lost, my grandfather ultimately made the decision to let her die.

with no one else in the room, and so close that a musty, suffocating aroma of antibacterial perfume now inundated me, i gazed upon the cadaver. at first it seemed merely disfigured, but the more i looked at it the more hideous it appeared. buried underneath a layer of paint that marked the lips red and eyelids blue was a grotesquely pallid face, wrinkles exchanged for cracks in the make-up. the fragile skin around the face and neck seemed to have been stretched to its limit, as if she'd been blown up and deflated just before she burst. had i pinched and pulled those cheeks now the way she used to lovingly do to me, they surely would have torn from the face. however the most appalling feature of this obscene effigy was the ear, which had slid down nearly to the neck. casually horrified, i stepped away, and waited to leave for dinner.

suddenly realizing i was the only one dancing, i didn't need the one in the middle pointing at me to tell me i was already dead. i felt cheated because i hadn't heard the command, but to be fair, it was said and i didn't heed it. by this point, i had played the game long enough to know that this is simply what happens, and now it was my turn. so in spite of the ecstasy having long since worn off, i stepped to the center, looked at these insane people pretending to be statues, and shouted into the ether:

sống!

and everyone danced.

Enter the Rave

2005-11-30T14:28:00.001+07:00

waiting in this room
as content as i can be
in my safe familiar womb

yet tomorrow slips past me

spinning on a loom
one day this will surely be
my safe familiar tomb

one comfortably uneventful saturday evening in the middle of october, i was, where else, at the cave playing pool with my house mates. sensing someone behind me i turn around, and there's some vietnamese dude looking at me speaking perfect english. that's extraordinary enough for me to straight drop my pool stick, but then he started being like "what's up?" and "remember me?" and acting like he knew me, like we were friends or something. said his name was dave.

now i'll be honest with you here. they all fucking look the same. yeah about half of'em have what appear to be a pair of mammary glands sticking out of their chest but aside from that, i can't tell a single one of them from the other. they all have squished black eyes, straight black hair, no facial or body hair, yellow skin, and they squat and talk like monkeys. and the english name? no help. everyone here's got one. i just met a guy named diamond last night, i shit you not.

but over a few beers this guy reminded me of how we used to go out almost every weekend when he was last in saigon, complete with crazy stories of illicit drug use, courting girls from the back of his motorbike, him getting paid a thousand bucks a month to do nothing, dying his hair orange, and paying prostitutes just to check for so-called "stubs." nothing. he said he used to live in the room right across from mine until he was kicked out for partying too hard (all in perfect english lest i remind you). who? and he said he had even come to my house back in new york a couple times over the summer, and met my parents (who, like me, were amazed at how well he spoke english). so what, my parents are amazed at a lot of things. whatever, he said he liked to party, so after he pinky swore that he wasn't a communist spy, we tentatively became friends again. but it wasn't until a week or two later when someone forced "his medicine" on him that i realized who he actually was: dave the rave.

in the weeks that followed, we reestablished our mutually beneficial collaboration in which he makes the plans for the night and does most of the talking, while i just be american and spend most of the money. (heh... what a sucker.) considering we were a man down without the almighty patty o'nguyen and the city is still on a strictly enforced midnight curfew, the level of rocking-out-with-our-cocks-out (not at the same time) we have attained is totally acceptable. and with a couple more weeks to go, who knows what'll happen.

i'm done working for money, though i promise to work hard recollecting and reflecting on my many untold experiences in saigon, including those in the past 6 weeks. expect plenty of updates from now until i come home.

The Phuc Diju Jussay?

2005-10-20T22:51:00.000+07:00

try saying 'foot.' faster. ok, repeat the word, but replace the last consonant sound with a very soft 'k,' closing your mouth before the offending click can escape. you'll know you're doing it right when your cheeks puff out. now say it in a slightly higher pitch, as if you were at a noisy dinner party and you were trying to get your friend's attention without yelling. "phuc!"

i have 3 different phuc's in 3 separate classes, and whenever i call them by name i'm always mindful of the vietnamese pronunciation, except when i want to express frustration. then i use the american pronunciation, "fuck," as in "what the fuck are you doing?" and "so why the fuck are you late" and "quit fucking around" and "fuck, you do the next one." i sympathize with these phuc's because, as you may know, i'm no stranger to people mispronouncing my name. it's quite common for students to say my name in that higher pitch i described above, which in vietnamese means something like "lunatic." i figure if i can take being called mental, they can surely withstand a nominal likeness to the english language's most infamous 4-letter word.

i've hung out a few times with the eldest phuc, an extremely impressionable but nevertheless cool guy with whom i share a sardonic sense of humor and a perverse passion for pool. he'll be in seattle before the end of the year, so i asked him how he thinks people will react to his name. well aware of the impending controversy/confusion/hilarity, he believes it would be best to just adopt an american nickname, like 'luke' or 'mickey.' (i'd have offered up 'razor,' but i'm reserving that awesome title for my first born.) instead, i suggested he wholly embrace the vulgar nature of his name. when somebody asks him what his name is, he should let out an uncamouflaged f-bomb. "yeah, my name's FUCK, fuck nagooyen" (nguyen). he didn't like that idea at all.

so anyway, phuc, along with every other vietnamese student i've ever had, can be hard to understand sometimes. like last week when he asked me out of nowhere about 'conservate,' with the vowel sounds all over the place and accents on the wrong syllables. typical of what i go through on a daily basis, the exchange went something like this:

"kuh-SA-vat."
"sorry?"
"kunh-SUH-vat."
"huh?"
"kun-suh-vate."
"again?"
"KANH-suh-vate."
"uhh... can you write it?"

...

"ohhhh... yeah. conservate. that's not a word."

my ears have by now adjusted to the idiosyncrasies of the vietnamese version of spoken english, marked most distinctly by a pervasive disregard for accurately enunciating the last consonant sounds. (juice guy anyone? "yeh, thah one chee omeleh an one mango smoo-ie.") and i'm reasonably good at deciphering their b's from p's and g's from c's, which they often don't distinguish clearly. so if one of them asks me where he can find "pig cocks" i won't send him somewhere that sells "big cogs" (though it might not be all that much of a disappointment).

as long as the students stay within the boundaries of a normal conversation, i usually understand what they're talking about. but when they try using low frequency words without context or knowledge of the correct pronunciation, i often have to cycle through a number of similar sounding words to guess what they mean. this becomes quite tedious after a while so if i think it's important, i'll take the time to listen, but often after the second or third time the student repeats it, i have to just acknowledge whatever they said with a simple "ok" or the ever ready "really?" or occasionally an utterly unthoughtful "hmm... interesting." and there's always that old standby the smile-nod-and-move-on which i assure you, judging by their silent dejection, is as inconsiderate and condescending here as wherever you're from.

but today my patience paid off when one of the slightly stuck up high school girls stood up and asked me if she could leave. since i was mid sentence i said "no, wait a second" and continued my inquiry into what another student was saying. she remained standing for a moment until one of her friends said she was sick and had to use the bathroom. in the 4 seconds from when she had first asked me to when i looked at her again, she had contorted her face into such a comically exaggerated expression of agony that i just smiled and waved her by. as soon as she left, one of the older guys said something directed at me that made some of the students around him laugh. i thought it was a comment regarding the lesson so i said:

"sorry?"
"dorra."
"huh?"
"dorry."
"... what?"
"dah-orry."

at this point i'd have just said "ok" and gone on with the lesson, but the boys' giggles and the look of disgust coming from one of the girls signaled to me that this was worth knowing.

"sorry, just say it louder."
"she has DIARRHEA."

of course. once i understood what he was referring to, his mangled meaningless mumble-jumble snapped into the verbal symbol for shit pouring out of someone's ass which, much like people getting smashed in the face and crotch in Dodgeball, has been empirically proven to be pan-culturally humorous.

i can understand why a student would have trouble pronouncing 'diarrhea' what with all those r's and a rogue h. it's gotta be french. but earlier in the day i was baffled when one of the engineers from hanoi, minh, the unanimous winner of the whiny bitch -- excuse me, 'complainy-loo' -- of the year award, asked me what 'jarn' meant. I was surpirised not because i didn't know what he was talking about, but because i couldn't believe he was pronouncing it like that.

"sorry?"
"jarn"
"what?"
"jarn"
"...jarn?"
"yes."

the word was 'yarn.' it appeared in one of the questions on a practice exercise we were doing in class, and i had been explaining what it was for at least a minute before he asked me. it was obvious he hadn't been paying attention so to prove my point and embarrass him a little, i started writing some words on the board: "you," "yet," "yellow..." [shoulda just written 'yes' in retrospect] but before i could finish he said "ah see," and showed me his electronic dictionary which said exactly this: yarn - jarn.

"what is this?"
"the pronunciation: JARN."

i started laughing. "minh, it's wrong. that thing is useless. 'y' is a 'yuh' sound not 'juh.' look at all these words."
"i know but i think uhh you're wrong."

and he was serious, which made me laugh even harder. it was at that time that i remembered all the hanoi students speak with the northern accent which uses "zuh" sounds instead of the southern "yuh's." so i asked all the hanoi students to pronounce the words on the board and they all said the words with a half 'j'-half 'z' kinda sound (but they had to've been humoring me to say "ju" when i know they all usually say "you"), while the southerners had no problems.

i was still reveling in the absurdity of the situation when minh finally admitted i was right, but only after seeing someone else's electronic dictionary with the correct pronunciation. of course i wasn't gonna let him off that easy so i then went on a minute long spiel thanking god that i was right because i'd thought for 23 years of my life i'd been mispronouncing all those words. making sure the irony escaped no one, i suggested they all drop out and instead watch mtv for 6 hours a day, and spend their money on expensive pocket dictionaries and candy.

let's see, what else happened today? someone wrote 'matt suks' outside my door. that was very nice. it was before the above incident occurred, so i originally assumed it was my colleague/housemate/australian/functionally illiterate friend euan, but the spelling was too good. hmmm, was it phuc in my SSP class, the confused 15 year old high school kid not yet aware he'll one day be a raging homo? well at the time, i figured it could be anyone...

"hey fuck, did you write that outside my door?"
"what?"
"you know what. don't play stupid with me, fucker."
"i don't know what..."
"look i know you fucking wrote it."
"..."
"relax man, i'm just fucking with you."
"...teacher, my name is phuc not 'fuck.'"
"that's what i said... ok. everyone open your books to page uhh..."

Sex with a Cave Girl: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

2005-10-13T20:54:00.000+07:00

occasionally consciously, but more often unconsciously, we compare the estimated value of certain actions in deciding whether to keep with the status quo, or risk one of an array of other actions. it's a technique known as a cost-benefit analysis -- the scale used we use to weight out all rational decisions.

for example, if i asked why you were reading this sentence, you'd probably say that you thought this might be the sentence in which i detail my sexual exploits with a slutty primitive hominid. or perhaps you'd say you're desperately bored. but i'd say you're reading this simply because you believe the benefit of its knowledge exceeds the negligible cost of time and energy you just spent reading it. but what if you were wrong? in fact, you've been duped again and i never actually had sex with a cave girl. would you continue to read, or would your reevaluation deem this blog unworthy of your time? before reading the next sentence, maybe you should navigate to your favorite porn site and invest a bit more time and energy for guaranteed (and potentially copious) returns. surely that would be a better use of the next couple of minutes than to risk reading another dull, pointless blog entry.

yet you continue reading this. oh my rational reader, i'm certain you have way too much free time on your hands. you need a hobby. have you ever tried pool? ok, but have you ever tried playing it all the time? well maybe you should. instead of watching that simpsons rerun for the gazillionth time, reciting each line word for word and laughing not for humor's sake, but only out of habit, you can try pocketing 7 like-patterned balls and the 8-ball while your opponent does the same... all the time. [be forewarned: it really can be time-consuming, as once you've started a game, it's impossible to stop in the middle of it, and once the game has finished, "yes" is the only proper response to "another?" so pretty much the only way to end a session is if the ever-worsening carpel tunnel in your cue guiding hand disables you or your partner's girlfriend says he can't play anymore.]

i used to play at a few different places until rationality kicked in and i realized that one was far better than the others. despite the ever-present clientele, there's usually a table available, and there are even different kinds such as snooker, billiards, and both american and english-style pool tables which are all in excellent condition. the cues match the quality of the tables and are rarely misaligned, let alone broken. both drinks and food are available and, along with the use of the table, are quite reasonably priced. though, as a self-confessed pool junkie, it would be absolutely worth frequenting based on these criteria alone, i'd be remiss if i failed to mention that there are no less than a dozen scantily clad female employees who stand around waiting for that glorious moment when you shout their call to duty: "rack'em ladies!" or just begin throwing the balls very loudly on the table (they don't like that). and hey, don't have a partner? point to one, point to a stick, done. but don't be surprised when she 7-balls you cause these girls play like it's their job... and it is.

so naturally, if i'm not working, sleeping, or eating there's a good chance you can find me at 'the cave,' an apt name if ever there was one since, according to my imagination, daylight has never penetrated into the vortex within. people have been known to lose afternoons, evenings, even entire days holed up in there, mesmerized not just by the allure of sending each ball to its mesh coffin, but by the bevy of sexy spectators all eager to be impressed by an authoritative break, a well-calculated bank shot, or a clever quip delivered eloquently in their mother tongue -- none of which i am capable of doing consistently, if at all.

yet i continue playing here. it offers something of a time-killing trifecta: competition with a minimal amount of physical exertion; girls whose job it is to make sure you don't do anything except play pool and ogle them; and beer whose sole job is for you to drink it. hell, what more could i possibly want? well sir or madam, if you said 'absolutely nothing' you'd be absolutely wrong. the economists and consciously rational minded alike would all choral in unison that a better question to ask is how can i improve the cost-benefit margins of my leisure?

after much consideration, my evaluation is that fucking would be the most cost effective way to spend my free time. unfortunately i spend so much of it at the cave that i don't have any time left to go out in search of that ever-elusive -- uhh how to put this... squish-hole-with-titties monster. so, being the anointed 'laziest person in need of sex ever,' i've tossed around the idea of courting a cave girl. the obvious route was immediately proposed, which is offering my english teaching services in exchange for a chance at getting in one of the girls' pants. seems reasonable until that total buzzkill the cost-benefit analysis offers its irresistibly logical advice. observe:

on the one hand there's getting it on with a sweet looking asian honey who probably hasn't been with too many guys before, if any. that's a pretty awesome plus-side. since there's no need whatsoever to explain this any further, let's just value the absolute benefit completely arbitrarily at about 482,913.0004.

now let's consider the costs. first, i already teach english about 30 hours a week. i know you 9to5ers are thinking that's not so bad, but believe me, i'm not sitting in front of a computer during any of those 30 hours (administering 'sit-and-reads' yes, but even then i have to be marking or otherwise appear teacher-like). being both educator and entertainer (yes), as well as disciplinarian (ok not so much disciplinarian) takes its toll. on top of that is prep time, which if i'm serious about teaching this girl english (i'm not) then i'll have to have some kind of lesson plan (or not). and honestly, who wants to do their job when they're not getting paid for it. of course you'd say, "but she's paying you with the most widely accepted currency in the world: hot fresh pussy, the gold standard of vaginas." and i'd reply, "good point" and concede that this is probably my weakest argument so we'll value this cost at a mere 0.0003.

ok so let's assume i agree to sit down with her and educate her as best i can. cave girls don't speak english. any. perfect, right? 1-on-1 with a beautiful girl and i don't even have to engage in meaningful conversation! shouldn't this be on the benefit side? well not if i realize that i'm the only one thinking of it as a date. she just wants to learn english which, without any previous knowledge, will undoubtedly be a nightmare. not only is teaching elementary grammar mind-numbingly boring, but you can't even imagine how ridiculous, and often a bit demeaning, it is when you have to listen to and correct shit like "i eat hamburger. what you like eat?" for an hour or two. especially if all i'm thinking about the whole time is how much i wanna do her. "oh really? i like to eat fur burger. shall we take a break and have a quickie?" so it'll suck cause she won't really understand me, but at least... she won't understand me. estimated cost: 913.

which brings me to my third point: if the only way i can bust a nut around here is by offering to help some poor girl learn english, then i should really just give up in life cause that's really pathetic. why don't i save myself all the time and effort, and straight up give the girl money so i can borrow her hole for a few minutes, which would still be sleazy, but at least i could console myself in that i didn't just coerce sex out of a student. so yes, i draw the line at 'total scumbag.' that being said, i still wouldn't rule out anything on principle alone, so i'll approximate the value of this cost at a relatively hefty 482,000.

if you've been keeping score you know that so far the benefits outweigh the costs by a mere 0.0001. but there's still one more cost to factor into the analysis: the risk of rejection which, unlike the others, is extremely variable. some days i'm zen and don't give a fuck, or rather, i'm completely aware of and accept a not necessarily imminent, but nevertheless inevitable, death, and thus act to maximize my happiness by ignoring oppressive and essentially negative thought processes such as concern for how others perceive me and unrealistic expectations of others. on these days i'd value the risk of rejection at no more than 0.000099999, totally leaving me in the black and thus ready to get it on with a cave girl. but then there are the other 364 days of the year when i'd value it at 482,913.0004 which, when added to the other costs, is precisely double the estimated benefit, placing my default options strictly within the red realm of complacent inaction. and thus secures me the title of absolute pussy.

The Education of Ms. Alongadingdong

2005-09-20T22:30:00.001+07:00

one of the perks about living in a third worl -err.. i mean developing- country is the wonderfully cheap labor. now don't get the wrong impression; i'd never exploit that labor to make shitloads of money in the global market - mining diamonds in africa or producing t-shirts and sneakers in asia or exporting wives in eastern europe, for instance. but i would be totally willing to hire a vietnamese woman to keep my room tidy (and balcony), do my laundry (including ironing my shirts), sweep all 4 floors of the house (mop at least once a week), wash the dishes (don't forget to bring down any i've left in my room), clean both bathrooms (and i mean clean), don't talk to me or make eye contact (unless initiated by me), and of course, make my bed 6 days a week for no more than 3 bucks a day. i know what you're thinking: "isn't that a bit much?" well it's split between 6 people so at less than 50 cents a day, i'd say she's a bargain!

but unfortunately, you really do get what you pay for. in the ten months we've lived in the house, we've already gone through four maids (cleaning ladies, housekeepers, indentured servants, whatever). two were fired: one, for requesting more money; the other for taking the last few drops of tiana's super special expensive shampoo, and may (or may not) have stolen some spare change from mike and alison. the other two both quit because one found it "too demeaning" and the other, our first, who talked to herself incessantly and always rearranged my legos regardless of whether or not they were in sexually explicit positions, according to the grapevine, "hated" us.

so that brings us to number 5: bong. i think the nicest thing i can say about her is that despite being straight from the countryside, she doesn't have a totally fucked up bumpkin mug. oh and i like the fact that her bicycle hardly takes up any of the space reserved for our motorbikes, unlike our former maids. and unlike the last one, she doesn't bring her 6 year old son to the house to help her out. so she's great, except that we're the first family she's worked for since moving to the city, and popping her maid cherry has kinda made a mess everywhere: clothes ruined from bleeding, plates with food stuff still stuck to them, toilets generously decorated with logs, etc.

a total bonghead for sure, but no one wants to be bothered with finding another replacement so we've decided to try guiding her a bit. what follows is based on a list of grievances and recommendations the house agreed upon a few nights ago. i hope tiana (or a kind reader with extensive knowledge of vietnamese) can find the time to translate it.

dearest bong,

you're not a very good maid, but i believe you can vastly improve your skills as a housekeeper by heeding my advice:

1) lucky for you, ice doesn't make itself, or you'd be just about out of a job. listen, my drinks have to be ice cold. got that? maybe where you're from a semi-chilled drink straight from the refrigerator is acceptable. or maybe you're unfamiliar with this whole refrigerator thing, which wouldn't at all surprise me because you didn't seem to know how to flush a toilet before coming to our house. but whatever it is, stop wasting time cleaning the damn ice cube trays and definitely definitely don't put them away in drawers. get a friggin clue, bong.

now because i'm a nice guy, i'll help you out. ice is really really cold water. so cold that it's hard. it can be made in just 2 simple steps. the first step consists of filling the ice cube tray with water and putting it in the freezer. yes, the colder part of the "electric cold box." upon completion of the first step, you should proceed immediately to the second and final step, which is to wait. oh yeah, and don't eat our ice.

2) maybe it's unfair to chide you about something you seriously might never have seen before so we'll give you a pass on the whole ice thing. but goddammit, what the fuck is the matter with your nose? my clothes smell like rotten jock strap, and i know they didn't smell that way when you got them. and it's not just my clothes that reek; everyone in the house has got a bit of a sour milk odor emanating from them and it's making me sick. take note of this: clothes should be returned to us smelling better than when you receive them. simple enough, right? i mean, what the hell are you doing anyway, washing our clothes with bong water? [note to tiana: the pun may not translate but include it anyway.]

but don't cry about it. try this: first, scrap whatever concept of "clean" you learned in your village. from now on, sniff each garment before putting it in my closet and then sniff your arm pits. if there is even a remote similarity, put that shit back in my hamper and start the process all over again, but this time use more detergent.

3) where's my blue and yellow striped button down? last week it was my cotton khakis and now it's this. bottomline: it's unacceptable. find it, fix it, give it back, or buy me a new one. i don't care that you'd have to spend your entire month's salary on it; it''s the only way you'll learn. it's called tough love. and yes, we do love our bongalongadingdong.

i know there are 6 people in the house, and sometimes you get confused with who owns what, so i'll make it a little bit easier for you to keep track. first off, any item of clothing that seems either freakishly large or, conversely, pygmy-like, goes straight to euan and tiana's room. the same goes for anything sex-related that turns up in the wash. second, i don't wear women's clothing. and even if i did, it would be impolite to assume i did, so don't leave any g-strings in my room. if anything, we can sort it out later.

ok so that leaves me and mike, and here you have some options. you could just not be a moron and remember. or you could learn our distinctive smells: mike's is a poignant, sea-breezy musk, tempered by just a hint of oak in autumn; i, on the other hand, smell like baloney. but given that your olfactory senses are decidedly, shall we say, unrefined, perhaps we should train some goldfish to help you remember which clothes are mike's and which are mine. but it's coming out of your salary. [by the way, mike, if you own a pair of boxers featuring dogs jumping through hoops and fetching things, it's in my closet.]

4) speaking of salary, according to tiana, you want to move in because, supposedly, your roommate has been having sex with her boyfriend while you're in the room and that bothers you. first, let me just say that if that really is the case, then you're moving into the wrong house. but i think you just wanna save some extra cash by freeloading off of us and you know what, it's not gonna happen. i mean sure, we could be totally charitable and let you sleep in the vestibule on the roof, or next to the washer machine behind the kitchen, or underneath the stairs. but where would the ants sleep? the cockroaches? i'm sorry, bong, but they've been here a lot longer than you. and they clean up after me all the time. and i don't pay them shit. or rather, that's all i pay them. so unless you're willing to accept an alternative form of payment for your janitorial services, sorry, but there are no vacancies.

5) you should learn to speak english.

best of luck to you,
mat

The Real Life Cautionary Tale Of Khanh Nguyen

2005-09-18T16:18:00.000+07:00

beepbeepbeep BEEP BEEP beepbeepbeep

khanh dropped his whistle and eagerly reached into his pocket to grab his nokia. the message was displayed before his eyes could even focus. though he knew exactly what it would say, actually seeing the words caused something in his gut to erupt and it took everything he had just to swallow. when he finally caught hold of himself, he ran down the street to get his motorbike, abandoning his whistle and arm waving duties at the intersection. the day he'd been waiting for had finally come.

on the way to the hospital he was overwhelmed by a wave of emotions. in the past year his life had transformed in a way no one could have ever predicted, and it was all thanks to one girl - diem. he thought back on that fateful night not yet one year ago when she flew past him on a white honda spacy wearing a hot pink, skin tight ao dai. she was statuesque with smooth, milky white skin that sharply contrasted with her long, black streaming hair. never had he witnessed a more breathtaking beauty.

his jaw was still agape when two young men drove up and attempted to snatch her purse. without thinking, he sped up and kicked the side of the would-be thief's motorbike which knocked them off balance and caused them to crash head on into the back of a cyclo driver. the accident killed the poor old man and one of the guys on the motorbike. the other was paralyzed from the waist down and reportedly committed suicide last month by tying himself to his wheelchair and rolling off a bridge straight to the bottom of saigon river.

from this terrible tragedy a wonderful, if unlikely, relationship blossomed between diem and khanh. she was spectacularly beautiful and from a fairly wealthy family. poor khanh, however, who dropped out of high school to work in a dog meat restaurant, had only an old dilapidated motorbike to his name. yet diem saw in him an unusual kindness that trumped her urges for a man that could shower her with money. over time, this simple mutual affection forged an unbreakable bond between them, and together they found solace in simple pleasures such as strolling hand in hand through the park or sitting near the river to gaze at the stars.

they ate as meagerly as they entertained themselves, settling for dishes of nothing but rice because diem was a strict vegetarian. she helped him get a job working the night shift at a local tofu processing warehouse, where he often brought home chunks of nourishing bean for his precious queen. then one day, word of his heroic deed reached the local police chief who offered khanh a job as a traffic intersection manager which he accepted immediately. that night, he told diem the good news and they joyfully celebrated by uniting in the most sacred of sexual unions for the first time.

9 months later here he was, driving like mad to be with diem at this momentous consummation of their storybook relationship: the birth of their first born. it had been rather obvious just a few weeks after their having made love that diem was indeed bearing a child, as her waistline had expanded in accordance with her appetite. however, far from disappointed, khanh was reinvigorated with a grand sense of paternal responsibility, the likes of which he had never before felt. the well-being of the unborn child soon became the focus of his every thought and action.

though it was difficult making ends meet, he believed his faith in god would help him through the scrape-to-get-by times. he continued to work both jobs and regarded every dong as a single brick in the foundation of his family's future. he made sure diem was always well-fed as she steadily gained weight, and otherwise saved up as much as he could. after about 6 months, they had just barely enough money to move into a dingy, 2 bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city, and they couldn't have been happier.

when he reached the hospital he ran in and was directed straight to the delivery room. his eyes lit up when he saw diem, as if it were the first time he'd ever set his eyes upon her. except now she was almost a hundred pounds heavier: her eyes were sunken in behind her big, baggy cheeks; laying back, her chin multiplied to match the layers of flab in her torso; and her legs were so thick that he now had nowhere else to sit but on her thighs whenever they rode together on his motorbike.

nevertheless, he loved her, and gave her a kiss on her big, squishy forehead to reassure her, but just at that moment she let out a noxious puff of bowel perfume. this signaled to the doctors that she was ready to give birth, so khanh quickly stepped out of the way. "wow," he thought, "this is it." all of his hopes and dreams were about to be brought before him by the good lord himself. what would he say? "welcome khanh junior! looking mighty strong!" or perhaps, "hello there little diem! my miniature angel!"

he couldn't help but think about his own parents, who were both killed when a militant vegetarian detonated a bomb at the family slaughterhouse. what would they say if they were still alive? what would they think of their son's life now? how would they feel about his vegetarian wife?

and before he knew it, it happened. but what he was expecting to see come out of her impossibly stretched vagina, namely, a tiny human, did not. instead he looked in awe as fat began spewing from her into an ever-growing mound of lard, which looked like the kind you would find on an uncooked piece of rump roast, or at the ends of a rack of prime rib - the whitish, gelatinous, chewy kind that is responsible for giving the choicest meats their undeniably delicious flavor. this continued to ooze and gurgle out of her vagina like mayonnaise through a firehose, piling up and overflowing onto the floor. then, inexplicably, diem began scooping it up by the fistfuls and greedily shoving it in her mouth, all the while mumbling something that sounded like "num-nums."

the doctor's exact words were, "i'm sorry mr. nguyen, it's a fat... just fat." khanh stood and watched silently until remarking, "that's it. that's the last time i ever do her in the butt."

-the end-

Brother, Can You Spare a Dong?

2005-08-07T12:27:00.000+07:00

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,

2005-08-06T11:22:00.001+07:00

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

2005-08-04T17:10:00.000+07:00

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.

What Happened To Devon's Eye?

2005-07-04T00:20:00.000+07:00

a) in the spirit of july 4th, his blood boldly declared independence from the tyranny of his face.

b) strapped for cash, he agreed to do a facial for the women's porn site menstrualbukkake.com.

c) his queer eye for queer guys ruptured instantly upon seeing the hordes of shirtless homos at fire island.*

d) terrorism. fucking terrorism happened to his eye. 704. never forget.

e) reenactment of that classic moment in the american revolution when sam adams chucked an empty 22 oz. at his buddy paul revere who tried catching it with his eye.

*which would explain why he's so happy

i'll post the whole story sometime after i write it and before you read it. in the meantime, check out dev's awesome but chronically unupdated blog.

Limited Time Offer

2005-07-01T11:48:00.000+07:00

now you too can let everyone know how upset you are that your girlfriend had an abortion. this timeless 100% cotton t-shirt even includes the official franco-vietnamese hospital logo where phuong murdered my unborn child. just leave all your credit card information in the comments section and wait.

also available:

"i fucked a vietnamese prostitute and all i got was this lousy HIV"

Abortion Is NOT a Victimless Crime

2005-06-28T02:29:00.000+07:00

sometimes people ask me if i've ever killed a baby. "no," i always say. "that's fucking barbaric and i would never do that." but i do know this girl who killed a baby once. and it was my baby!

so a few weeks after i do this girl (responds to "foooo-ng", also "honey" and "ching chong whheee hhoooo AAAYYYYY!!!") she says to me, "i don't kotex long time." so of course i'm like: "huh?" and she repeats, "i don't kotex. i'm worry." so i say, "ok ok relax. i'll buy you more kotex, but geez don't cry about it. you look like you're about to cry. why are you crying? what, you need it right now?" and she responds, "NO! i think uhh... i have baby." at that moment, no words existed in the entire lexicon of human language to express how i felt. so i gently raped the delicate silence with a barely audible "no way." but the next day she went to the doctor and he confirmed what i've always kinda suspected: my jizz really is magical. and yes, mat anh nguyen-lorusso was indeed conceived from a hate fuck.

my first thought was: "wow. i'm actually fertile!?" i thought my penchant for rubbing my balls on the tv screen every time i saw christina aguilera had totally schiavoed my boys. thank god i was wrong about that. "atta boy!" i thought. sperm number 8859237409291 made it and you know what? i was fucking proud of'em. i felt like sticking my hand up there, wrapping my finger around the little zygote and slapping him hard on his undifferentiated clump of cells of an ass, but she was wearing pants.

yeah i was already shedding my old deadbeat dickhead attitude and taking on my new role as a dickbeating dadhead. but then she was all "bla bla bla i'm too young this and bla bla bla my mother kill me that and bla no money bla bla bla blatt, and asked if it was ok to kill it. to kill my baby boy! who the hell did she think she was? god!? ummm yeah, last i checked god wasn't a 22-year-old vietnamese chick having sex with me. i mean what right does she have going off and killing babies all willy-nilly like some kind of modern day genghis khan or fucking stem-cell researcher? ok so it's inside her. so what? so was i and i'll be damned if she tries killing me!

and then she showed me the sonogram of the 5 - 8 week-old fetus which i've taken the liberty of scanning and now present to the world for all to see.

he was beautiful: predominantly vietnamese features including yellow skin (though you can't tell because this is a black and white photo) and slit-like slanty little eyes, but blessed with some of his father's trademark characteristics: a football-shaped head complete with easy to grip hair for our carrying convenience; a cool, highly distinctive bump in his nose that will no doubt be all the rage since michael jackson's pervertedly puny proboscis has thoroughly disgusted mankind of late (the squished, flared nostrils he gets from his mother); the clinical term for his left eye is "lazy" but i think it's just a phase, like when all you wanna do is stare at the side of your nose all the time while someone else does all the work looking at stuff (maybe he just needs something more interesting to look at than a placenta); while most 5 week-olds don't even have heads yet, as you can see, our special little guy is already sprouting a lucky tooth of his own, just like mom and pop (hell, maybe we'll combine our secret nicknames for each other and call our boy snaggle-puss... it's short for pussy); and then there's that awesome club foot that'll make him a natural at golfing. can anyone say "hole in one?!"

i was overwhelmed with the potential of this thing. we could enter him in baby beauty contests and baby golfing tournaments. or maybe he could be the spokesbaby for the antiabortion movement. and if none of that worked out we could offer him up for one of those baby eating competitions. for a price of course. fuck, we could have more kick-ass babies and i wouldn't have to work another day in my life. and when the boy's old enough to walk i'll never have to mow the lawn or get up to go to the bathroom ever again. "this is the best thing that's ever happened to me," i thought. and to top it all off, he's got a 100% certified giant american penis. lord knows how that happened!

and then it dawned on me. how did that happen? there's no way i'd have believed his sluthole mother if it weren't for all the striking similarities in that sonogram. but when i looked closer at it, i realized that his "giant penis" was neither giant nor a penis, but actually a smaller conjoined twin with no arms or legs and a disarmingly pleasant disposition. as i later learned or made up, the twin was the result of exposure to agent orange, though, oddly enough, what was there of the fractionally formed quasifetus was 100% american... and gay, taking over poor mat anh organ by organ beginning with his penis.

it was horrible. so i gave her about $70 which she used to pay the doctor for his services and to purchase baby killing juice. she swallowed the anti-mat anh elixir in one gulp just as she had swallowed so many wannabe mat anhs (i'm lying, she doesn't really like to swallow). and that's the story of how phuong killed my baby.

R.I.P. Mat Anh Nguyen-Lorusso
(from either march 10 or april 2 to sometime in early may...
i can't really remember)

Saigon to New York: Perpetual Sunrise

2005-06-21T21:27:00.000+07:00

i was a stranger, surrounded by japanese like a raw fish or a new tentacle-rape comic or a used panty dispenser, and felt just as uncomfortable. flying into the sunrise, the sun hung low in the sky for most of my voyage home on a june 10th that began 36 hours before it ended. but what felt truly strange about this journey was that i would have preferred the company of a plane full of vietnamese charlies, commoners and communists alike, rather than these alien japs. and yeah, contrary to popular belief there's a difference you god damn racists.

yes i've come a long way. in the 8 months i spent in vietnam i learned that asians, indeed all people, are like rice. at first you think all rice is the same: squished (almost squinty-like) pellets of starch grown for the consumption of the starving masses. no style, no flavor, no reason to expect this boring old bowl of rice to be any different than the last. but then you discover that there's not only white rice, but also yellow, and there's even more of it than white rice. and even though you suspect that they're quite a bit dirtier and you can't understand what the fuck they're saying with their sing song hong kong fooie way of talking, you're just so damn tired of white rice that you scoop up the smaller, more resourceful yellow rice, shove'em into your mouth, and chew'em until your belly's full of those tasty little fuckers. then you check your watch, say you've got somewhere to be, and go. and that's pretty much how i feel about people.

sorry, metaphors get mangled when i'm hungry, but luckily it wasn't long before i was flying over the enchanted island of consumer electronic ninjas and tree spirit automatons. at first i was excited about being in japan, if only to transfer flights, but when they're fucking feng-shui houses and fuel-efficient sub-compacts came into view, i became overwhelmed with an urge to drop an atomic bomb. well, not a real one. maybe like, a giant water-atomic bomb. some kind of... hydrogen bomb.

the bong of a gong reverberated throughout the plane when we touched ground. fuck the japanese are big. or at least that's the way it seemed coming from vietnam. i distracted myself from the horrible realization that i would once again be considered a malformed midget by buying some candy, and then spent the worst 800 yen i ever spent in my life on a pitifully uninformative issue of newsweek (the future of television my ass). then i sat down in a robot chair that tried convincing me to spend 100 yen so it could vibrate me. naturally, i slapped it across the head rest and moved to a less forward chair to take a brief nap before my plane took off for jfk.

the 20-something hours i spent sitting in an airplane were comfortably uneventful, due in no small part to my prime real estate next to a window and an absent seat to the other side of me in both flights. the biggest event of the whole journey was when the guy sitting a couple chairs next to me got smacked in the head by the passenger in front of him who was apparently quite eager to recline his seat. shitake! the time i didn't spend sleeping (most of it) was spent cursing out that ricoculously expensive newsweek until i figured out how to work the monitor with a little over an hour left til arrival. then i watched the end and beginning (in that order) of million dollar baby, hoping the whole time that hilary swank would become pregnant and give birth to a million dollars as clint eastwood exclaimed, "jackpot!" but the plane landed before i could catch the middle so i guess i'll never know.

i slid past customs without a hitch, which was rather fortunate because i had a whole bag full of communism that they never even checked. say goodbye to your "free markets" and "free speech" and "free samples" all you suck-ass americans! ahhhh but my disdain for freedom instantly subsided when i saw both of my sisters and blatt holding up a sign with some random gook talk on it (tinh tu danh tu!) yes, welcome home indeed. hugs all around and, when my parents returned from either pooing or peeing, a second round of hugs. as we made our way past all the fatties to the quad-wheeled enclosed personal transportation units so common on this side of the planet, i anxiously waited for someone to make the inevitable comment about the extraordinary weight of my largest suitcase so i could unleash something i had been sitting on since somewhere in the pacific. no, not a wretched bubble of slow-stewed stool. a joke. behold!

"how else was i gonna get her past immigration?" then i kicked the suitcase and said, "you ok honey?."

classic, aging beautifully like a dry californian bordeaux. it was good to see that the people, places, and jokes haven't changed too much. we went to john harvard's for lunch, a restaurant somewhere between the applebee's/chili's fare and a fancy pants place, but then again maybe it's just the cloth napkins. there i ate approximately 6 bites of a massive chicken sandwich (even the chickens here are fat) on a plate overflowing with a farmful of fried potato sticks. kenny lake showed up a little while later and we exchanged our impressions about our recent teaching experiences. i told him how lucky i felt to be teaching there, working with students and teachers who i knew not as such, but as friends. he told me about how he'd told a student that he'd end up in jail one day after the toocoolforschool 9th grader called him a faggot, and then about the fidgety black student whom his observer advised him it wasn't ok to call a "jungle boy" when he had actually called him "drummer boy."

fuck i love this place. it didn't feel at all weird to be home, once again surrounded by family and familiarity (though i'm sure my sentiments will be different the next time around when i leave the nam for good). sure the people here look different and don't speak with vietnamese, or australian, or south african, or korlean accents, but they still make me laugh. and yeah my house is surrounded by grass and trees, not jeans selling, ban xeo making vietnamese, but i still have a comfortable bed to sleep in. the only thing i've found that will truly take some getting used to is being able to understand ambient conversations.

"that house on maple, on the left just before four winds, has a beautiful lawn."
"yeah, it really looks great. i see the man out there almost everyday."
"it must be the fertilizer. you know, i'm using a different brand for the first time. i just had no luck with that scots."
"i know and you can definitely tell. i think this is the best the front lawn's looked in ages..."

[5 minutes and billions of blades of grass commented upon later...]

"ok well it's almost midnight and i'm pooped. goodnight, mom. goodnight, dad."

upside-down again for the next 7 weeks.

How To Take Off Your Pants In Front Of Your Boss And Not Get Fired (Or Promoted)

2005-06-04T17:30:00.000+07:00

"what if i can't play my song?"
"not gon' happen. shut up and drive, fool."

thoughts of dissidence often creep in from the region of my brain responsible for preventing behavior that may result in humiliation. but i've found it's best to ignore it. yeah the song was key. i had my whole routine mentally choreographed, and i was sure i wouldn't disappoint with the theatrics i had coordinated with it. i was psyched.

welcome to the jungle
we got fun 'n' games
we got everything you want
honey we know the names

flying down hai ba trung street to rendezvous with my boss and some of her friends, another annoying internal naysayer nagged me, this time to slow down. since getting a motorbike a few weeks ago, i've been told by almost everyone that i drive too fast. personally i believe this to be an oxymoronical impossibility since the bike probably couldn't reach 50 mph going down an icy hill and rarely, rarely goes faster than 25. but phuong had told me earlier that day that she didn't want to see me ever again in part because of an incident involving supposed "recklessness" (my word, obviously not hers) the night before while driving her motorbike. but i was late, and i still didn't have a name.

uhhhh hank.... something
hank spank.
nah, too masturbatory.
hank... huge.
hugo hank.
ugh... forget hank.

with a flick of the wrist i quickened the pace towards my destination.

i really coulda used another half hour of preparation, but the day was now approaching its state-imposed midnight curfew. despite texting me a final goodbye ("forget me takecare urself. u'll go american happy fun!") phuong had showed up at my house at precisely 9:30, just as she has almost everyday for the past 2 months (further explanation another time). i left the mirror and killed an hour and a half with her both cooing and accusing. then when her mother-imposed curfew arrived, she went home. "now i go to bed and you too," she said and i mock-obediently nodded my head. i only had 20 minutes to get dressed and practice my moves one last time before heading out. it took me nearly that long just to get a decent knot in my tie, and it was then that i regretted spending so much time earlier that evening shaving my balls and trimming my pubes.

...if you got my money honey
we got your disease
in the jungle, welcome to the jungle
watch it bringya to ya
cha na na na na na na na knees, knees!

i turned the corner and spotted the sign: "juice," our usual saturday morning breakfast spot or, alternatively, occasional nighttime drink spot. but i would neither be eating nor drinking anything here tonight. i walked in, greeted the staff as i walked passed them, and headed upstairs to the third floor which had just been cleared out for the party. i met teana, my boss, who immediately informed me that they didn't have the cable to hook my ipod up to the stereo. shit. no guns.

welcome to the jungle
we take it day by day
if you want it ya gonna bleed
but it's the price you pay...

the only music they had was... well, it wasn't 'welcome to the jungle.' i could barely hear it playing on the stereo and i thought it sounded campy at best and, at worst, totally buttfuckingly gay. teana asked me if i still wanted to go through with it.

...and you're a very sexy girl
that's very hard to please
you can taste the bright lights
but you can't get them for free...

ok decision time. i believe there are two ways to approach these types of situations. most people, as a matter of addressing the necessity of any given decision, have a tendency to ask "why?" as in: "why is my boss asking me to take off my clothes and dance with her friend?" however, i believe that often the more appropriate and equally valid question is "why not?" invariably this leads to riskier and more frivolous behavior which, to me, form the monumental moments that make life worth living.

you know where you are?
you in the jungle baby
ya gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieee!!!!

but neither of these approaches could convince me one way or the other so i asked myself a third question as a last resort: "what would jesus do?" and i do believe jesus would strip for his boss, especially if god was a sexy 30-year-old korean chick with a few hot friends all expecting a piece of man-meat to ogle. so i did as the lord would do and said "fuck it," threw on the aviators, strutted into the room as i declared class to be in session, and started dancing all up on the bride-to-be.

...in the jungle
welcome to the jungle
feel my, my, my... my serpentine
i... i wanna hear you scream!

the shirt came off, the only snag being a stubborn button on the sleave. then i broke a glass while chasing her around and that's when i knew it was a party. the black tie remained on while i continued to pump and girate my junk, making sure i shook my ass near my boss. i had just taken my belt off as the first song ended and one of them asked me if that was it. of course i had one more surprise left, so i waited for the next song and then went for the pants. when the moment was right, i dropped my trousers like a choir boy to reveal the piece de resistance: hot pink elephant underwear, the trunk fully filled (...with the help of a sock) and drooping down halfway to my knees. i swung it around for a little while and then called an end to it, in all, dancing for no more than 5 minutes. i said, "the name's johnny dangle. thank you, and goodnight," and made a prompt exit.

and when you're high you never
ever wanna come down, so down, so down, so downnn, YEAAHHH

i drove back home at a leisurely pace and wore a lightness of being on my face. my experiences in vietnam have reinforced my belief that happiness comes when expectations are abandoned and whatever life has to offer is taken with open arms. i felt reinvigorated and quite satisfied with everything, if slightly uncomfortable as all that dancing had made the g-string ride way up my butt crack.

This Is Not an Update

2005-05-13T15:32:00.001+07:00

i told you so.

Dreaming on the Floor: A Day in the Life of Jesus Manson

2005-04-17T13:14:00.000+07:00

"i knew a man once... who said 'fuck all them religious books.' he said 'gimme 10 minutes and i'll tell you all you need to know about the world... about life.'"

he spoke slowly to imitate the southern style, but if i listened closely i could hear the mangled remains of a new york accent. occasionally he looked in the general direction of my face but never made direct eye contact with me, or anyone as far as i know. and in between every phrase he let out a loud gust of air through his nose to make room for the next recollection which resided near the threshold of oblivion. he'd already downed a few beers (the only reason he was talking to me) when he asked me if i believed in god, and i told him that i kinda did, but not at all in the biblical sense. he agreed with this vague "religion" of mine and explained to me why he thought the bible was bullshit. it wasn't because of all the bullshit allegories, psalms, and revelations that canonize complex issues into a righteous extra-value menu and make happy meals out of life's unknowables. and it wasn't even because the book is like thousands of years old. i'm pretty sure he just thought it was too damn long.

to half the inmates at the prison he stayed at he was known as jesus because of his quiet, introverted nature and physical appearance: a slender frame, long face, brown hair and transparent eyes that at times seemed to bear the burden of mankind's sins. to the other half he was known as manson, partly because he told them he was there for murder, and partly because if you took a second look at him you'd see through his scraggly beard that his face was pock-marked to shit (from chronic acne), his nose was crooked as if it had been broken at some point and never fixed (or perhaps was broken again), and, if he looked you at you (he wouldn't, but if he did), you'd see he had crossed-eyes that had seen all, and even partook in some, of mankind's sins. so to make things easier for everyone there he became known as jesus manson. my sisters and i, however, knew him as uncle chris, though when i spent a week with him in tennessee last year, he requested i call him "brother" chris, but not out of a fraternal bond so much as the title of "uncle" just made him feel uncomfortable.

while i was there in the valley of trailers, dusty pick-ups, stray dogs, and locusts letting out a deafening buzz to end their loneliness, the local newspaper had reported about some meth labs that were busted in their county. his response came between drags of an ever present cigarette, "gimme the alcohol and the weed 'cause i don't fuck with that methamphetamine crack cocaine shit." no one would deny that he always took the high ground, as in everyday after he got dropped off from work, he got really high off the alcohol and the weed and listened to frank zappa, talked to his 3 "pooches," watched reruns of cheers, and eventually passed out on the bed of dirt and dog hair that covered his coveted reclinable chair in the den part of his parent's trailer. at some point in the night he'd awake from his self-induced stupor and walk 10 paces (15 or more if staggering) to his room where he masturbated himself to sleep. (i only know because i could hear the bed creak rhythmically from my spot on the sofa next to that chair.)

the sound of the alarm clock every morning must have been absolutely horrible, but not as bad as the patter of rain pounding away on the thin tinny roof, because that meant he'd either have to work in it, or worse, not work and miss out on his 50 bucks for the day, as was the case this morning. he hobbled around tenderly looking for his cigarettes and mumbling something about "'nother day in the life." the rain had abated and he was awaiting word from my other uncle, his boss, to find out whether or not they would be installing doors and putting up siding that day. after a couple cups of coffee and a few cigarettes, work was finally called off in expectation of a heavy downpour. later that morning, my mother left to go visit my grandmother in the hospital, but he didn't want to go with her. he said that the lawn needed to be mowed, which it did and it wasn't yet raining, so she left without her baby brother.

i'm not sure if he was drunk before he mowed the lawn, but after he finished and came back inside the trailer from his shed-turned-shrine-to-getting-shitfaced, i could tell from the degree of eye-crossage that he definitely was. so i probably shouldn't have said "sure" when he asked me if i wanted to go shoot his gun, but i was really bored and this seemed to be one of those cultural experiences everyone needs to have when they travel to the outskirts of civilization. i followed him to the shed where he kept the gun my aunt cindy had given him as a birthday gift, and in the countless disputes since then had advised him to kill himself with it. he insisted on almost a daily basis that he wasn't afraid of dying, repeating several times that old cliche about how "y'ain't ready to live, 'nless yer willin' to die." in fact he told me more than once that when my grandmother died he'd put a bullet in his head because he "ain't got nothin' to live for." so it struck me as odd when he walked cautiously up to the shed and checked underneath the ramp before entering it. i asked him what he was doing and he said he was checking for copperheads. the self-proclaimed "dead man walking" (though "staggering" would be more appropriate) actually had a deep-seeded fear of poisonous snakes.

he emerged with the little 5-shooter and some empty beer cans that he set up on a fence post behind the shed. i became concerned once he started waving the gun around with the safety off trying to shoo the dogs away, but it passed quickly when i saw how bad his aim was. wait did i say pass quickly or rose sharply? either way, when he handed me the gun i took a few shots, reloaded once or twice, and then put it down before i killed anymore microbes floating in the air surrounding the general vicinity of that bulletproof can. he mumbled something about the gun being a piece of shit and offered me a beer as we went inside the shed to sit, talk, and listen to the zap.

at this point i knew the day was a waste and he was levels above me so i asked him if he smoked weed which he of course did, though he said he wouldn't buy anymore after this because it made him stupid. it turned out to be crap weed but it got me stupid as promised. i asked him all kinds of questions about his life and he answered every single one with the shameless honesty of a man on deathrow but without the dignity. i pointed to the lump of pused-up skin protruding about an inch from his neck and asked him what it was. he didn't say anything - just took out his pocket knife and said, "go ahead, cut it." i declined, and that was the end of that. my mom later told me that he had had it for a while and had to cut it sometimes to drain it, but it always grew back. no one really knew exactly what it was.

we were still high when we ran outta beer. so i probably shouldn't have said "sure" when he asked if i wanted to go with him to pick up more, especially because it'd just started to downpour, and i knew that the reason he had served time all those years ago was because he had had a head-on collision with a young black guy who, according to legend, was just as drunk as he was at the time but "knew some people," or perhaps just simply knew people. after that, he couldn't get a driver's license or say that he worked because all his money would've gone to the "nigger boy," so he relied on my aunt cindy's husband to provide him with work and drive him everywhere.

unless he needed beer, in which case he just hopped in the beat up oldsmobile parked on the front lawn and drove 10 minutes to the general store. the car stumbled down the twisty road as he swerved through the sheet of rain, announcing our arrival to the old men sitting on the porch by letting the car come to a stop on the curb. i don't remember what happened after we got back to the trailer. just that at one point he stood up, swayed unsteadily for a moment, and then fell over, taking out a pot of flowers and a chair on his way down. i came to his side to see if he was ok, but he was already snoring so i just left him there... well, until i heard the sound of my mother's car pull up a few hours later. i jumped up from the sofa and nudged him with my foot trying to get him up but he was still dead asleep so i ran back to the sofa before my mom walked in, and did my best i-don't-know-what-happened-because-i-just-woke-up face when she saw him and asked me how long he'd been there like that.

i let him lay there, collapsed, at peace dreaming on the floor because i knew that's how he preferred it. "i'ma masochist," he once slurred through a mutter. "i know pain... but i won't hurt anyone else." he had tried to create a self-containing bubble of lament to avoid having any obligations to anyone though everyone could see the bloody mutilation of his self-inflicted torture. he felt that when he fucked up he was only fucking himself up, and was utterly unapologetic to the effect his meaningless waste of a life had on the few others that cared about him. when my mother helped him up and brought him to his room i'm certain he didn't give a single thought about her concern for him because he didn't even muster a simple "thank you" for the pizza she brought home for us to eat. and actually, the real reason he stayed home that day was because he said he hated hospitals, especially when someone he cared about was in one and, according to him, he cared more about his mother than anyone else in the world including himself. so the last place he wanted to be was by her side in her time of need. yeah, he was the kind of delusional pauper that can deny pleading for pity while uncontrollably shaking an empty coffee cup at you; and can profess to have love for another without really sacrificing any bit of his love for himself; and proclaim to have a meaningless life without being able to pull the trigger.

but i'm not at all passing judgment on him. to be fair, he was dealt a shitty hand. lifetimes ago he'd had a fiancee who one day up and left him, and he never recovered from it. i remember her being dumb but sweet, complete with a lazy southern drawl. my mother told me she had been abused by her father when she was young, and was drawn to chris by his gentle nature before she left him for an old boyfriend. when we were talking about girls (the closest we came to broaching the topic of love) he declared, "i like'em short and skinny... and ugly. that way if they leave me... my heart ain't broken." he told me he'd "dicked all kinds of girls" in his life, mostly when he was a teenager, though he said he had since found out he was sterile and hadn't been laid in 10 years. to help him overcome the shame and embarrasment of his shortcomings, he had perfected a caustically self-deprecating sense of humor. he said, talking about the acne that covered his whole body, "my back smells like bad pussy. i smell worse after taking a shower than i do... going in." and he said that if he ever won the lottery, an opportunity to achieve any lifelong dream, he would simply go to a "titty bar in hawaii."

his default decision was to do nothing to better his life, only to make it tolerable, and witnessing the consequences of this attitude left a lasting impression on me. and when i left, i knew that would be the last time i'd ever see him, though i didn't expect him to go out the way he did. he stopped working a few months ago due to an illness that left him bedridden yet unmotivated to see a doctor until just a couple of weeks ago. his doctor told him the reason he had been feeling like shit for the past few months was because his body was ravaged by cancer. he was told he had 2 weeks to live, but he didn't tell anyone. the doctor's estimate was right, and he died on the morning of my mother's 50th birthday. because he requested to be cremated immediately my mother and father bought a plane ticket and left the following day to join the three other people who were planning to attend the service.

i was curious as to how a man could condense an eternal lifetime of knowledge into 10 minutes. so i said, "sounds like a bargain. what did he say?"

"i dunno," he replied taking a sip from a can of bud. "i never had 10 minutes."

of the two, i was the only one laughing. unaware of the irony, he gazed downwards searching for the relevant bit of information to complete his unintentially humorous anecdote, and for a moment i felt alone.

he finally added, "don't live far from here neither. been meaning to pay him a visit... when i have the time."

Shit, the Shit, and Why Almost People Love Wet Dreams

2005-04-15T10:23:00.000+07:00

another 4 weeks of teaching vietnamese students "english" has passed (unlike 5 out of 10 of my SSP students, though it wasn't my fault... i swear) and you know what? it's a pretty cushy gig. i walk in, do the damn thang, and go home. i mean at least until someone hires me as the chief product tester at a sock factory or whore house, or perhaps both. though it would be tragic if one day i accidentally fucked a sock and stuck my foot up some ho's ass. i mean...

"welcome to my class!" by this time, i'm well known among all the students as "crazy matt," though i've asked them to just call me mat. yeah i'm the teacher that starts class late and finishes early. yeah i'm the one that'll pass you as long as you're not certifiably retarded or boring (the 5 who failed were certifiably absent way too much). yeah and i'm the one whose class you go to if you want to watch a short, goofy american dancing to ecstasy music with his students. but on calm days if you look in my class you might just find me bobbing my head to wu-tang, mouthing the words while the students read along to the lyrics. and i'll spend several minutes talking about a line like:

first thing's first man, ya fuckin' with the worst
i be stickin' pins in ya head like a fuckin' nurse

this gem from odb's got it all: slang, metaphors, similes, and, my personal favorite, dirty words. this past session i wanted to make sure my "idioms in conversation" class understood the fine line between something being "shit" and "the shit," though i'm not quite sure they understood. i can't blame them though because the vietnamese equivalent, cut , means only one thing: feces. and there are no articles, so everytime they hear the word, they picture a big steaming pile of excrement. but ever since i told'em that "shit" could mean practically anything, whenever i ask them to use slang to describe something the word "shit" is inevitably mentioned. "yes clothes can be 'shit,' but with the way you're using it, it sounds like the person's actually wearing a shirt made out of... shit" i'm certain, however, that they know that being shit-faced isn't usually good, but it's better than eating shit or smelling like shit, and really that's the important thing.

i'll admit that i've taken it upon myself to educate the youth of vietnam in the ways of english, or perhaps more specifically, american vulgarity, but at least i didn't teach them about masturbation, right? ...right? nahhh, they taught themselves (or each other) way before they ever met me. it became somewhat of an obsession among the upper-level students after one student misunderstood an assignment and wrote an entire essay about self-gratification. the topic came up almost everyday in my SSP class despite my best efforts to do nothing about it. it got to the point where they were talking about it more than i was actually do- well no, that's not true. but if someone got up to go to the bathroom they were going to masturbate. when i asked them to come up with sentences using the grammar we had learned then someone would inevitably be masturbating in an adjective clause or simply conjugating all over the place. one day we were talking about heroes and how people look up to them (not at them) when one student noted that a hero may be someone who masturbates a lot. i told him that he must be the greatest hero of all time and he agreed. then he pointed to another student and said that this other student admires him so much that he always looks at him when he masturbates.

maybe because the school is 95% male or maybe because they're almost all between the ages of 16 and 24, but everyone, even the girls, seemed to love this topic. i started slang class off one day with a whole bunch of "yo momma" jokes and told'em their assignment was to insult the mothers of their classmates. some of the gayer students refused because they said it was "impolite" or "terrible," so i said they could compare anyone to anything as long as it made me laugh. most of the shit they came up with would have gotten the student laughed at rather than punched in the face if they ever tried using it in a real situation, but some were pretty funny. i liked this one: "yo momma's so fat, her shit makes the whole world stink." ("shit" really was the word of the day in that class for 4 consecutive weeks.)

but the crown for mastur-metaphorator went to the same student who wrote about my "lucky teeth." his read: "[that girl] is so sleepy she's making me have a wet dream." like everything he wrote it doesn't really make sense, but it's funny nonetheless. then about a week later, we were listening to a song and a student i'd dubbed "dick" (for short) had fallen asleep. the students next to him started laughing because he'd left a puddle of drool on the lyrics sheet, and one of them astutely pointed out that he had just had a wet dream. to this student i gave the highest mark for the day and let the dick bathe in the shame of a wet dreamer.

so what if i fuck around sometimes? these students study english for 6 hours a day 5 days a week, and i figure they need a little entertainment in that time. but i always help them with whatever problems they have, even in english. for example, "almost." see, they think "almost" means some quantity between "all" and "most." ie: "almost people had fun at the party." this confuses a lot of students so i told them why this is wrong. i explained that things that are almost people are not fully human. i wanted to say: "some people say that niggers are almost people, though others believe they're not even close to being people - they're actually animals." but they wouldn't understand that because they're not racist like my ignorant american ass. no, they're nationalist. so i just replaced "niggers" with "cambodians" and then they all understood.

slang is on hold for the time being so starting monday i'll be teaching the only other subject i know anything about... no not masturbation: lying. well, it's called "drama," or some shit like that and it's really just for speaking practice. but if it goes as well as slang i'm sure almost students will think it's the shit.

peace y'all 'mout.

The Legend of Patty O'Nguyen (In Limerick)

2005-04-05T07:56:00.000+07:00

there once was a playboy named patrick
who met up with the playful boy matrick
the two met a third
though dave was a nerd
he could chill with us if he used chapstick

we played pool nearly every evening
though nary a soul in saigon could defeat'em
but for one lucky break
off an unlucky break
i slipped, scratched my chin, n'almost beat'em

there once was a young man from jersey
with girlies he was always so flirty
they called him dep chai
which must've been why
he got pussy like goldfish got thirsty

a barbie named lucy was quite the catch
but at first it seemed her name didn't match
a vietnamese
though hardly a tease
she was apparently named after her snatch

he wanted a dancer from paradise
unaware she was really a parasite
'cause after they'd roll
she'd look like a troll
so from then on he wished she was outta sight

we assumed he had the largest between us
though his little brother had never seen us
from lucy to thuy
he 'ven gave it to nhi
his big fat american heart

Bugs Crawling All Over My Brain

2005-03-22T16:09:00.000+07:00

yesterday i sat down to digitize undoubtedly the most upside-gone-defining experience i've had yet, only to discover a colony of ants had invaded my laptop, scurrying in and out of nearly every interface and orifice. after unplugging their support line, the power cord, i spent nearly the next hour shaking, and flicking, and squashing, and stomping as many of the increasingly creepy critters as possible, trying to rid my computer of a potentially deadly infestation instead of my brain, which actually needs it more. in fact, i was thinking about taking off work this week to both catch my breath and catch up on this blog which, at this point, is so back logged i'm afraid i may not remember or have time to write about everything that's been going on.

i think i've gotten most of the bugs outta my motherboard, but i still feel'em gnawing away at my medulla oblongotta. though before i can write about what happened last weekend (related to the "deeply disturbing" event of 2 weeks before), i hafta write the conlusion to phuong, and then continue with the hanoi adventures. and then some time after that i need to post what's going on in the world of teaching vietnamese students american slang. and yes, you'll love it.

i'm expecting things to calm down a bit soon, so hopefully i'll have more time to write about the day to day shit which is no less interesting, but gets lost in the priorities list.

so here's a pic of me saying what's up to the sisters from the roof of the strangest building i'd ever been in - still all kinds of fucked up...

think about it, that could be you i'm talking to. but unfortunately for your sorry ass, it's not. i have no idea how someone from outside vietnam can call my cellphone, but i'm sure that if you just dial some random number of digits that exceeds 7 but is less than say 15, i'm sure sooner or later you'll get through to me. godspeed, peace y'all. 'mout.

An Amusing Confusion from Boozing Illusions

2005-03-18T14:25:00.000+07:00

our first stop was a bia hoi, a popular spot to be in vietnam, particularly in hanoi. i have no idea what hoi means, but i know that bia is really the functional word here. i can't remember what you call it in english, but it's like a grating, grainy-tasting golden water with a layer of foam on top that tickles your upper lip when you tilt the glass and pour the curious concoction into your mouth. there, a billion bubbles burst on your tongue, stinging the taste buds and forcing you to swallow these intoxicated-state-inducing toxic waste suds – an enchanting experience that is at first intriguing, soon exhilarating, but eventually nauseating… until one becomes thirsty for another frosty, frothy glass and, at about a quarter a pop at these places, who can afford self-restraint?

not me, that's fo' goddamn sure. so a couple dollars later i hobbled outside where i wobbled awaiting the others. the street was wet, lit in colorful spurts of impressionist gleams and glistens. it was quiet aside from some cheery chatter and the dreary splatter from cars near and far tearing water from the street as they sped spitting by. a sigh revealed the cold, bare body of the air in front of me which promptly redressed and smacked me across the face for being so fresh – an incessant backhand that offhand actually left me refreshed. there was something familiar about all this and then i recognized it: i had been transported back to the brisk, bitter streets of new york from nearly a year before, which instantly gave me a distant adoration for this temporary habitation.

the manifestations of en why sea continued when, after a short cab ride, i found myself on a lame-ass boat blasting some kind of house music, or maybe it was a house-boat blasting lame-ass music. whatever it was, it was a cheap imitation of the floating labyrinth bumpin on the hudson, but a welcome reminder of those times, and within minutes of boarding it i welcomed yet another reminder with a casual 5-finger hug when someone returned from the bar with a glass of carlsberg for me, which i sipped and guzzled between giggles and chuckles, chilling with friends filling me in and waitresses filling me up again. something else reminded me of home too – white people, specifically, of the young hot female variety which was most unexpected because most, if not all, of the expat clubs i know in saigon are either frequented by an older crowd, or have been infiltrated by too many hookers who repel foreign girls as if they were an education. [ed: ohhhh! take that, all you blog-reading english-speaking asian whores!]

i spotted one girl there, apparently diggin my style from afar, that could have been either or – by that i mean she looked like a chink which, given the circumstances, placed her in prostitute territory, but dressed and carried herself like a typical white chick. and by "carried herself," i mean doing her best imitation of someone with dignity while lazily swaying and leaning against whatever she could so that her drunk ass didn't fall over. but, to be honest, i'm not really sure because at around that time, i was devoting an inordinate amount of my brain's resources to making sure my mouth emitted some minimal level of intelligible sounds, a wasted effort as i was about to fi–

"excuse me. did you say something about chinks?"
i turned mid-sentence and it was her.
"what?"
"you said something about chinks."
"chinks?! no...?"
"no, chinks."
"yeah i know, but i din't say anything about chinks!"
"not chinks! CHINKS!"
"NO I… listen, i doh-no what yuh talking about, but i really din't say anything about chinks. ok?"
she looked confused which made me even more confused, so i "huhhed" the kind of "huh" that obviously means "what the hell is the matter with this drunk bitch?" to a few of my friends who were all standing around looking at me incredulously. "CHICKS you idiot!"
"ohhhhh…" turning back to her, "no, i dun thing so. why?"

from the 10 minute or so conversation that followed i discovered that one, she wasn't an asian professional, just some amateur american slut, and two, she was even drunker than i'd thought. how embarrassing for her.

Be Water

2005-03-15T12:30:00.000+07:00

i remember sitting in that doctor's office less than 5 months ago looking at a map of vietnam for the first time - well the first time i cared to understand its geography - and saw the entire flower-shaped nation colored an alarming orange except for two tiny spots, one towards the bottom of the stem and the other almost centralized near the petals. a botanist's handbook would surely advise one to steer clear of this flower, because according to this map, the uncolored dots marked the only places where deadly diseases were not considered rampant threats to a western traveller's health. so of course i took notice of these two havens - the one in the north was called hanoi; the other, ho chi minh city. i wound up in the southern of the two, but knew that one day i might find myself in hanoi because despite my adventurous nature, i sure as hell wasn't gonna be trekking through that dense orange fog of tropical-flavored fevers and diseases.

so for tet, me and the posse (including upside-goners alison, carrie, mike, dave, and craig) bypassed the jungle in a soaring metal hazmat suit, leaving the suffocatingly warm, stale air of saigon behind for the untold riches of fresh breathing sustenance in the dew-soaked pistil of vietnam, hanoi. i was promised a cleaner, less noisy city with beautiful architecture, chill people, and cool, wet weather and, from arrival to departure, hanoi did not disappoint in these expectations. strange enough, i may have been most content with the fact that it rained almost everyday and was breath-identifyingly cold at times. you see, i'm writing this a month after having returned and water has yet to fall from the sky in saigon in 2005. the nights are barely cool enough to wear a light jacket and every day smothers in heat - exactly like the one before without even the slightest hint that the following day will be any different. it's a bit unsettling when the only precipitation to form is the perspiration on my nose and forehead. so i was understandably giddy when we touched down in hanoi to see rain again. then sat mesmerized during the cab ride to the hotel, wistfully watching the windshield wipers winking, whisking away the wetness on the window. oh what a wonderful way to wait - water washing, singing swish-swashing by revolving tires evolving along a wire a million tireless miles, longing listlessly while chilling blissfully, nestled in this silly vessel listening.

when i arrived at the hotel, i dropped my suitcase and backpack on the floor, grabbed my black adidas earwarmer, put it on upside-down (or right-side up, depending), and hit up hanoi for the first of several memorable nights in the capital of vietnam.

stories about chinks, dog meat, scrabble, torn tree branches, and chicken flu to follow.

untitled

2005-03-07T07:16:00.000+07:00

this entry is a temporary place-holder for what happened this past weekend. 2 events: 1 disturbingly spiteful experience involving phuong, and the other... just deeply disturbing. though the story is incomplete at this point, and may even just end up being too fucked up to write about (trust me i want to, but this really is a story i should never repeat... ever), i'll definitely let y'all know what happened in person. shit, and i still haven't written about eating dog yet...