[Philadelphia, 6/4/13] On 2/5/22, a reader, Troy, left a comment: I’ve been living alone in a subsidized apartment on a subsidized pension due to a severe tick born illness. This happened to coincide with COVID, so it’s been weird to say the least. I’ve never experienced this much isolation before and have always considered myself a loner. At times, this is flat out neurological torture and I can feel the lack of personal interaction to my core. I’m blessed to recognize this. I don’t have a t.v. and have recovered enough to walk again in order to relax and think better. I’d rather be back in a shelter with other men than alone in this apartment. The isolation is killing me and I know it.
For several days, I was very listless. This morning, I felt more together so started this piece around 5:40AM. By 10:27AM, I was done.
After lunch and some rest, I had the vaguest suspicion I had written about Elio and Tarzan man before, so I checked. Sure enough, I had mentioned Elio in two articles, in 2017 and 2019, and Tarzan man in that same 2019 piece. Talk about senility.
Their portraits here are most fleshed out, however, so it's not a total waste of time to be reintroduced to them, should you remember the other pieces.
In those other articles, Elio has an assumed name, and his car is a Porsche instead of a BMW, but all other details are the same. In all these cases, I was trying to get the facts right, but the mind sometimes slips.
In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell writes, "Mr Maugham describes a high Chinese official arriving at a wayside inn and blustering and calling everybody names in order to impress upon them that he is a supreme dignitary and they are only worms. Five minutes later, having asserted his dignity in the way he thinks proper, he is eating his dinner in perfect amity with the baggage coolies."
Orwell is clearly recalling the Maugham passage from memory, because several minor details are off. Maugham, "An hour later I went into the yard to stretch my legs for five minutes before going to bed and somewhat to my surprise, I came upon the stout official, a little while ago so pompous and self-important, seated at a table in the front of the inn with the most ragged of my coolies. They were chatting amicably and the official quietly smoked a water-pipe. He had made all that to-do to give himself face, but having achieved his object was satisfied, and feeling the need of conversation had accepted the company of any coolie without a thought of social distinction."
So it was an hour instead of five minutes, one coolie instead of several and they weren't eating dinner. Still, Orwell is essentially faithful to Maugham, and his point is valid.
Well, let's hope I won't describe these two characters again. Don King the boxing promoter said, "If you can count your money, you ain't got none." Similarly, if you can recognize just the titles of everything you've written, you ain't written nuttin'.
Recently, I ran into an Isabelle Pelaud passage analyzing two of my stories, "555" and "Hope and Standard," from my collection, Fake House (2000). I remembered "555," but the other title didn't ring any bell. Once or twice, I was shown a poem I didn't even recognize was mine.
Anyway, my mind should get a much needed recharge soon, for I'll finally go back to Vietnam in early April. The country has just opened its borders to the unvaccinated. Already, I can see myself downing a few Tigers with poets Nguyen Quoc Chanh and Lynh Bacardi in Vung Tau, and no, that's not her real name!
"Here is an interesting bit of information that may allude to a shadow war being conducted in the digital realm. While we do hear a lot about this and that website, both Russian and Euro and Anglo being taken off line by DDOS attacks, we have not heard much about corporate hacking and disablement.
"But it is happening and the feds are keeping it under wraps.
"I work for a fortune 500 company. Two weeks ago, the internal servers crashed. No one had access to email or any network data and all computer programs that require network authentication. Engineering and manufacturing was crippled. Full service was finally restored after thirteen days, with one week completely dark. During this time the corporation made no acknowledgement of the outage internally or externally. And reports on one industry website forum said that posts discussing and commenting on the probably hacking, on reddit and twitter and facebook, had been deleted (by whom?).
"The corporation still has not publicly declared this major breach, despite fiduciary responsibility (legal necessity) to inform investors, and there is no news internally on what the root cause was other than rumours pointing to a hack. In fact, the officially spread rumour is so preposterous as to be laughable. They are blaming an unnamed exec in England for being phished and the hackers gaining access there. But that is not possible because the European branches of the corp were not affected and, besides, exist on their own network that is independent of the corp network. Access from overseas can only be accomplished through a vpn and a web based network mirror. Obviously I am no IT expert and cannot rule out that the hackers could get from england network to USA, but it seems unlikely.
"The only mention of any uptick in corp hacking was a recent bulletin from the FBI on ransomware attacks (which I cannot now re-find the link to). Apparently there have been upwards of 50 attacks since Jan 2022.
"Spooks both here and in Russia all concede that corporate and govt infrastructure is heavily compromised by state backed and independent hackers. Everyone has a finger in the pie for espionage, certainly, and for war, possibly.
"My take on it, in consideration of the radio silence from the Corp and Govt is that the hack was a malicious act by the Russians. It could not have been malware because we would already know what they stole. Nothing has been stolen or leaked or deleted, so far as anyone knows. This hack was merely a show of power to the USA that the Russians could, at the press of a button, bring every corporation on the NASDAQ to a grinding halt. Imagine what would have been the fallout if they had deleted all of the server databases. . ."
“On 3/6/22, Kiev announced that +20,000 people from 52 countries have volunteered to fight for Ukraine.”
Brain washed or just plain stupid people are their own worst enemies. I was reading some comments today on Facebook and there is a whole litany of Americans who want to get WWlll on, because they fear that Russia has to be wiped out or the world will end in tragedy. It’s a cult that won’t be stopped.
I think we are entering some sort of self-destruction mode, both in the micro and the macro level. Society is disintegrating, and individuals as well seem to want to efface themselves. Nothing else can explain the clear desire many people seem to have to start a new world (nuclear?) war in "support" for a corrupt country that just yesterday no one except corrupt politicians and shady businessmen cared about, and most still can't find on a map.
I am a loner. I am only later in life, now, feeling loneliness but it isn't extreme. I've got some excellent rabbits as companions and they provide all the social stimulation for which I have need. I've been married 3 times, still am to the last one and after a saga not worth talking about she may be home soon, after years abroad. If she does get on the plane soon and manages to get here I'm pretty sure I am going to be wishing she hadn't before long. Rabbits are easier than women and I'm old enough I don't need to fuck my companion, so they're adequate.
That's how social I am. It is like food or exercise. There's a certain amount I need to be healthy and other than that I've got more important things with which to occupy my beautiful mind.
People, the human kind, are mostly fuckwits and I've got a low tolerance for fuckwits. The few who are not fuckwits are my friends or will be when we meet so that's about it.
Hello Linh. Two stories in three days, quite the treat! Very much looking forward to your next adventures in Vietnam.
Ps. Used to follow you on Unz. But then you disappeared. So did CJ Hopkins. And others... So I no longer visit Unz. But managed to find you again so all is well. Out of work for a year and a half now (unwilling to be masked) so can’t buy you a coffee each month. Pity. Things might change but am doubtful.
You are being too hard on Elio, maybe. He was born rich (rental apartments), tall and handsome. So he doesn't need to do anything really. Good things just happen to beautiful people. Car, girlfriend, leisure time. He will probably inherit a fortune. He probably has his mates, and sees them during the weekends. Isolation it is not. 😄
I too am a loner. The type that feels alone in a crowd. On occasion I have run into someone whom I click with but that seems to be a rare delight. Mostly I run into some whom I can listen to while toning down my wit lest it falls flat. At many parties in the early days I hung out with the keg and the walls just observing. Before that I was the one who didn't run to observe a school fight thinking there was something wrong about doing that.
I didn't try very hard at school. I felt they were setting me up for more of the same. A life in some building under fluorescent lights with a lunch in a scenery of buildings. I read books about Jim Bridger and Hugo Glass.I was going to do that! Except I found I didn't like killing animals or skinning them.
Then I found out about gold mining and I figured that's what I am going to do! And that's what I did! I went to the Yukon with three hundred dollars and floated down the Big Salmon River for two months. I found $160 dollars worth of gold which I sold to a used car dealer in Whitehorse that bought gold on the side. It was enough to pay for my way home! To me this was a sign of success!
The next year I bought a dredge with two high school buddies and we pulled 7 oz's near Elk City Id. To me, but not the others, a sign of success!
I then ended up alone on the M. Fork Yuba. Eventually a group of guys showed up from the streets of Philly. One named W. Konopka became a friend. He told me how he erased graffiti for HUD in Philly. He said it didn't work and he just started X-ing out the graffiti. He told me car antennas were a good self defense weapon! All of them were pretty bad at mining as they weren't particularly motivated.
This guy http://www.nomenugget.net/obituaries/jan-%E2%80%9Cjano%E2%80%9D-kralik was a mile above me on the Yuba back in '86. This is where I heard, up close what I think was Bigfoot! The thing was loud! like a mix of an elephant and a Howler monkey! It was mind blowing! I wrote this on UNZ but Ron aka Don Unf ridiculed me for not thinking it might be a Chupacabra!
Linh, thank you so much for this "Big Picture". It does justice to see these scenarios from a different perspective. I'm the last apartment on the edge of town next to a scruffy golf course and the town cemetery.
Yes, it disturbs me me how quiet the streets here can be. On a hopeful note, the adventurous kids can have free run of the place in relative safety. The freedom is here but so many been conditioned to ignore it in favor of "trivial pursuits".
Hi everybody,
For several days, I was very listless. This morning, I felt more together so started this piece around 5:40AM. By 10:27AM, I was done.
After lunch and some rest, I had the vaguest suspicion I had written about Elio and Tarzan man before, so I checked. Sure enough, I had mentioned Elio in two articles, in 2017 and 2019, and Tarzan man in that same 2019 piece. Talk about senility.
Their portraits here are most fleshed out, however, so it's not a total waste of time to be reintroduced to them, should you remember the other pieces.
In those other articles, Elio has an assumed name, and his car is a Porsche instead of a BMW, but all other details are the same. In all these cases, I was trying to get the facts right, but the mind sometimes slips.
In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell writes, "Mr Maugham describes a high Chinese official arriving at a wayside inn and blustering and calling everybody names in order to impress upon them that he is a supreme dignitary and they are only worms. Five minutes later, having asserted his dignity in the way he thinks proper, he is eating his dinner in perfect amity with the baggage coolies."
Orwell is clearly recalling the Maugham passage from memory, because several minor details are off. Maugham, "An hour later I went into the yard to stretch my legs for five minutes before going to bed and somewhat to my surprise, I came upon the stout official, a little while ago so pompous and self-important, seated at a table in the front of the inn with the most ragged of my coolies. They were chatting amicably and the official quietly smoked a water-pipe. He had made all that to-do to give himself face, but having achieved his object was satisfied, and feeling the need of conversation had accepted the company of any coolie without a thought of social distinction."
So it was an hour instead of five minutes, one coolie instead of several and they weren't eating dinner. Still, Orwell is essentially faithful to Maugham, and his point is valid.
Well, let's hope I won't describe these two characters again. Don King the boxing promoter said, "If you can count your money, you ain't got none." Similarly, if you can recognize just the titles of everything you've written, you ain't written nuttin'.
Recently, I ran into an Isabelle Pelaud passage analyzing two of my stories, "555" and "Hope and Standard," from my collection, Fake House (2000). I remembered "555," but the other title didn't ring any bell. Once or twice, I was shown a poem I didn't even recognize was mine.
Anyway, my mind should get a much needed recharge soon, for I'll finally go back to Vietnam in early April. The country has just opened its borders to the unvaccinated. Already, I can see myself downing a few Tigers with poets Nguyen Quoc Chanh and Lynh Bacardi in Vung Tau, and no, that's not her real name!
Linh
Hi everybody,
From a comment left at my blog:
"Here is an interesting bit of information that may allude to a shadow war being conducted in the digital realm. While we do hear a lot about this and that website, both Russian and Euro and Anglo being taken off line by DDOS attacks, we have not heard much about corporate hacking and disablement.
"But it is happening and the feds are keeping it under wraps.
"I work for a fortune 500 company. Two weeks ago, the internal servers crashed. No one had access to email or any network data and all computer programs that require network authentication. Engineering and manufacturing was crippled. Full service was finally restored after thirteen days, with one week completely dark. During this time the corporation made no acknowledgement of the outage internally or externally. And reports on one industry website forum said that posts discussing and commenting on the probably hacking, on reddit and twitter and facebook, had been deleted (by whom?).
"The corporation still has not publicly declared this major breach, despite fiduciary responsibility (legal necessity) to inform investors, and there is no news internally on what the root cause was other than rumours pointing to a hack. In fact, the officially spread rumour is so preposterous as to be laughable. They are blaming an unnamed exec in England for being phished and the hackers gaining access there. But that is not possible because the European branches of the corp were not affected and, besides, exist on their own network that is independent of the corp network. Access from overseas can only be accomplished through a vpn and a web based network mirror. Obviously I am no IT expert and cannot rule out that the hackers could get from england network to USA, but it seems unlikely.
"The only mention of any uptick in corp hacking was a recent bulletin from the FBI on ransomware attacks (which I cannot now re-find the link to). Apparently there have been upwards of 50 attacks since Jan 2022.
"Spooks both here and in Russia all concede that corporate and govt infrastructure is heavily compromised by state backed and independent hackers. Everyone has a finger in the pie for espionage, certainly, and for war, possibly.
"My take on it, in consideration of the radio silence from the Corp and Govt is that the hack was a malicious act by the Russians. It could not have been malware because we would already know what they stole. Nothing has been stolen or leaked or deleted, so far as anyone knows. This hack was merely a show of power to the USA that the Russians could, at the press of a button, bring every corporation on the NASDAQ to a grinding halt. Imagine what would have been the fallout if they had deleted all of the server databases. . ."
Dark days ahead, indeed.
Linh
“On 3/6/22, Kiev announced that +20,000 people from 52 countries have volunteered to fight for Ukraine.”
Brain washed or just plain stupid people are their own worst enemies. I was reading some comments today on Facebook and there is a whole litany of Americans who want to get WWlll on, because they fear that Russia has to be wiped out or the world will end in tragedy. It’s a cult that won’t be stopped.
I think we are entering some sort of self-destruction mode, both in the micro and the macro level. Society is disintegrating, and individuals as well seem to want to efface themselves. Nothing else can explain the clear desire many people seem to have to start a new world (nuclear?) war in "support" for a corrupt country that just yesterday no one except corrupt politicians and shady businessmen cared about, and most still can't find on a map.
Linh
After reading this, the song "Eleanor Rigby" was ringing in my head. Both were mesmerizing, yet painful.
Bill
It looks like Freddy Mercury of the band Queen, in his butch period
I am a loner. I am only later in life, now, feeling loneliness but it isn't extreme. I've got some excellent rabbits as companions and they provide all the social stimulation for which I have need. I've been married 3 times, still am to the last one and after a saga not worth talking about she may be home soon, after years abroad. If she does get on the plane soon and manages to get here I'm pretty sure I am going to be wishing she hadn't before long. Rabbits are easier than women and I'm old enough I don't need to fuck my companion, so they're adequate.
That's how social I am. It is like food or exercise. There's a certain amount I need to be healthy and other than that I've got more important things with which to occupy my beautiful mind.
People, the human kind, are mostly fuckwits and I've got a low tolerance for fuckwits. The few who are not fuckwits are my friends or will be when we meet so that's about it.
Hello Linh. Two stories in three days, quite the treat! Very much looking forward to your next adventures in Vietnam.
Ps. Used to follow you on Unz. But then you disappeared. So did CJ Hopkins. And others... So I no longer visit Unz. But managed to find you again so all is well. Out of work for a year and a half now (unwilling to be masked) so can’t buy you a coffee each month. Pity. Things might change but am doubtful.
You are being too hard on Elio, maybe. He was born rich (rental apartments), tall and handsome. So he doesn't need to do anything really. Good things just happen to beautiful people. Car, girlfriend, leisure time. He will probably inherit a fortune. He probably has his mates, and sees them during the weekends. Isolation it is not. 😄
I too am a loner. The type that feels alone in a crowd. On occasion I have run into someone whom I click with but that seems to be a rare delight. Mostly I run into some whom I can listen to while toning down my wit lest it falls flat. At many parties in the early days I hung out with the keg and the walls just observing. Before that I was the one who didn't run to observe a school fight thinking there was something wrong about doing that.
I didn't try very hard at school. I felt they were setting me up for more of the same. A life in some building under fluorescent lights with a lunch in a scenery of buildings. I read books about Jim Bridger and Hugo Glass.I was going to do that! Except I found I didn't like killing animals or skinning them.
Then I found out about gold mining and I figured that's what I am going to do! And that's what I did! I went to the Yukon with three hundred dollars and floated down the Big Salmon River for two months. I found $160 dollars worth of gold which I sold to a used car dealer in Whitehorse that bought gold on the side. It was enough to pay for my way home! To me this was a sign of success!
The next year I bought a dredge with two high school buddies and we pulled 7 oz's near Elk City Id. To me, but not the others, a sign of success!
I then ended up alone on the M. Fork Yuba. Eventually a group of guys showed up from the streets of Philly. One named W. Konopka became a friend. He told me how he erased graffiti for HUD in Philly. He said it didn't work and he just started X-ing out the graffiti. He told me car antennas were a good self defense weapon! All of them were pretty bad at mining as they weren't particularly motivated.
This guy http://www.nomenugget.net/obituaries/jan-%E2%80%9Cjano%E2%80%9D-kralik was a mile above me on the Yuba back in '86. This is where I heard, up close what I think was Bigfoot! The thing was loud! like a mix of an elephant and a Howler monkey! It was mind blowing! I wrote this on UNZ but Ron aka Don Unf ridiculed me for not thinking it might be a Chupacabra!
I can't believe Ron thinks Chupacabra's are real!
It ain't all bad being a loner.
Glad you're rested enough to write another excellent essay!
Linh, thank you so much for this "Big Picture". It does justice to see these scenarios from a different perspective. I'm the last apartment on the edge of town next to a scruffy golf course and the town cemetery.
Yes, it disturbs me me how quiet the streets here can be. On a hopeful note, the adventurous kids can have free run of the place in relative safety. The freedom is here but so many been conditioned to ignore it in favor of "trivial pursuits".
Thank you Linh.