Free Face Love

[Vung Tau, 8/22/24]

At the café on General Uprising, the owner got audibly excited over atrocities on his cellphone. Sitting two yards away, I could make out a man thrown from a cliff, then a corpse dragged by a pickup truck. Of the hooded man having his throat slit, I only heard the owner describe to his brother. They both laughed. I have barely sipped from my black coffee without sugar. It was still dark.

“What country is that?” I asked.

“Myanmar.”

To my right, Pale Face started to drone, “It’s the Chinese. Like the Russians, they always interfere with their smaller neighbors. We’re lucky because of the Capitalists. They provide a counterweight to the Chinese. In Myanmar, they had that lady.”

“She’s arrested.”

“That’s right. In these places, it’s nearly impossible to establish democracy. You may last a year or two before they get rid of you. Your only option is to escape to the USA. No one runs to Russia or China.”

Behind me, Tank Top’s fat son was mowing them down, as usual. He won’t stop until everyone on earth is dead ten times over. On the TV screen, someone was singing about an ARVN soldier missing home.

On the street, that black dog with a limp hobbled by. Fat, he must be fed by the butcher shop on the block. Beyond their dangling cuts of beef were Mary, Joseph and a crucified Jesus high on a wall. A glance into any Vietnamese home or business instantly reveals if the family is Buddhist or Catholic.

Leaving earlier than usual, I walked past the Evangelical Church on Ba Cu. South Koreans established it. Around two dozen people were attending its daily service. In Kukes, there’s an Albanian speaking Korean missionary. I only know this from visiting that remote town. Unlike Koreans, Vietnamese don’t try to convert anybody to anything. In Malaysia, I was asked by a Chinese woman, “What is your relationship to God?” My high school buddy, Brian Robertson, said exactly that the last time I saw him, +30 years ago in Philadelphia.

I wanted to chat with a 68-year-old man in an alley, but his café wasn’t open. It’s been in that spot for 40 years. After four Pfizer shots, his strength, eyesight and memory seriously deteriorated then, a few months ago, he suffered a stroke. “I didn’t know,” he told me last week. “I was scared. Everybody was scared.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t die.”

He nodded.

“Just make sure, brother, your kids and grandkids don’t get shots. They absolutely don’t need them. I got none!”

The egg sandwich man was also not there. Several times I had walked by his stand, only to see his wife. When I finally caught up with him yesterday, he said that he, too, had suffered a stroke. Upstairs in a darkened room, his morbidly obese hikikomori son was playing video games or looking at porn. Disabled from a traffic accident, his other son just breathed.

At the corner of Ba Cu and Nguyễn Kim, the spaghetti lady hadn’t set up. When all the kids are back for school, her business will pick up. In the early 70’s, my breakfast treat was mostly fried flour cakes in soy sauce, sometimes with an egg, or raw papaya with beef jerky strips. Don’t confuse the last with the much fancier som tam of Thailand. Now, urban Vietnamese kids want sushi, hot dog, hamburger or spaghetti in red sauce before school. Costing less a buck usually, these Viet versions are far from what you’d expect. With sodas and fried chicken for lunch or dinner, too many Viets are becoming sumo sized. At least there are no eating contests here.

I crossed paths with an old, whiskered man who had no more to sell than paper tissues, cotton swabs and maybe toothpicks.

For at least two years, a Vietnamese American reader has consistently challenged my bleak assessment of just about everything, war in Ukraine, crises in Europe or the economy in the US, Vietnam or globally. Everywhere he looks, it’s only business as usual. Everything is fine, he insists.

Just days ago, he suggested I go to Hồ Tràm, a glitzy oasis for rich Saigonese and foreigners. Since I’m only paying around $270 a month for my room, there’s no way I would cough up even one fourth of that for just one night in Hồ Tràm. A quick check on Agoda should tell you everything about how it’s going there. A $326 room at the InterContinental Grand Ho Tram is now just $114, and a night at Holiday Inn Resort has been reduced from $215 to $82. Most Vietnamese wouldn’t pay even $63 at Le Palmier. So the last is not too unreasonable, but I can’t stand snob hangouts.

Any political writer is a polemicist, but I’m primarily a recorder of the banal. I notice trivia and paint obscured subjects. In Blood and Soap, I’m only half kidding, “He ignored public fascinations with movie stars, athletes, statesmen, revolutionaries, mass-murderers and poets by writing well-researched, footnoted and illustrated biographies of bus drivers, cashiers, beauticians, filing clerks, plumbers and roofers.”

In Paris Spleen, Baudelaire writes, “Enfin! la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même.” Finally! the tyrany of the human face has disappeared, so I will only suffer by myself. You can’t get funnier than that crank. The poem is called “One in the Morning,” however, so motherfucker was out all day. Charles roamed like few others. Newly installed streetlights and straighter streets helped.

To recognize the tyranny of the human face is to acknowledge its frightful power. Though one should be leery of any artist so beloved by the Satanic elites, Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present ensures her immortality. In a red dress, she stared at strangers, one at a time, across a small table. These simple encounters reduced many to tears. Never before have so many fled from the beauty, sadness and magnificence of human faces.

As for opinions, just cancel my mug if you think I’m so full of it. Do I care to argue against those I find absurd? Not really. Just pointing to them every so often is more than enough.

Hakeem Jeffries, “President Joe Biden is a heroic, patriotic and transformational figure, and he will go down in history as one of the greatest public servants of all time—that much is clear.”

It’s clear you can only say such shit as a moron, to morons, but whatever, man. I’m just babbling in the deepest darkness. Now, it’s time for some boiled pork with assorted vegetables and herbs, wrappred in rice paper and dipped in fermented fish paste. Two bucks that will cost me! How did I become so blessed?

[Vung Tau, 8/22/24]

[Vung Tau, 8/22/24]

[Vung Tau, 8/22/24]

[homeless Philadelphian just released from a hospital after being hit by a taxi, 8/6/11]