Jesus Wept.

I thought that while I have finally shared with you my last LP, I might just as well share the fruit of another silly project (please understand: I’m about eight beers into this operation; mistakes and embarrassments will certainly follow).

In the summer of 2003, Jeremy Kerner and I decided that we would host a Public Access TV program, one that would feature J.K. and myself as amicable but crack-brained-paranoid eschatological Christian televangelists. It would be called Prayer-A-Dise, and its highlights would include performances by several prominent Christian acts (bands created and portrayed by he and I), as well as some ridiculous infomercials for products and services of a decidedly spiritual strain. We took the endeavor pretty seriously, and attended the Public Access workshop at the local cable provider in Hollywood.

While the premiere episode was never actually broadcast, it was completed, along with material for a second installation. My technological ineptitude is such that I have failed to understand how to render DVDs to any uploadable format; thus, the unfortunate absence of available video. In lieu of this, I thought I might share with you a bit of the audio from the program, as I feel it’s reasonably funny as a series of self-contained little songs and sketches. They are as follows:

Thud of Grace: at the time of this project’s conception, I was sleeping on Jeremy and Cory’s couch, and we all spent some quality time watching the Trinity Broadcasting Network. One afternoon, a particularly animated female evangelist was engaged in retelling the story of Magdalene’s unfair stoning; she referred to the thud of the stones upon the whore’s physical person as a “thud of grace”. And we of course could not just simply let this go. We got drunk and immediately formed a band, Luther Honeycutt and the Sunshine Boys, and in a single evening, we wrote and recorded the tune in its immaculate entirety. Our rendering has nothing whatever to do with Magdalene, morality or fistfuls of whirled pebbles; ours is rather a Revelations-based admonition of consequences concerning the impending apocalypse. The video was shot in Malibu Canyon, and on a basketball court in North Hollywood (I’ll post the video as soon as you explain the process to me).

Tofucious: the Info-Guru: later that year, in autumn, I’d acquired an apartment in Koreatown. As I am virtually unemployable, I set about writing songs and comedy sketches, thinking that I might be someday well-paid for my retarded ruminations. Among the characters I gave birth to around that time was the inimitable Tofucious; a bandanaed old soul who offers Mankind an effective exit from its inevitable ruin through a simple acceptance of a tofu-based sacrament. Like most spiritual compensations, it doesn’t make a grain of sense, but I suppose that’s its point. All shot at my old place on the corner of Kenmore and Beverly.

Footprints: this one was recorded for Episode II, and the well-conceived video was sadly never executed. This piece was to be delivered as a kind of perversion of the original Footprints tale; instead of the Good Lord thoughtlessly carrying the man throughout a period of serious moral transgressions, as he does so reflexively in the original piece, the Lord elects to instead simply drop the narrator, allowing him to fend for himself. Go Fuck Yourself, the lord says. We wrote the song together, with myself as the voice of the protagonist, and Jeremy as the voice of God (you’ll get it). This one was easily the most fun; note my drunken Gilmour-esque solo immediately following the middle-eight; it’s way off, but still a pretty rippin’ lead.

There are other pieces, some of which you’ll later enjoy by way of video; but others that are purely conceptual. There’s always The Scroll Ranger, a metal-detector whose wiring has been modified so as to detect only sacred parchment-based texts beneath the earth's crust.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all of you. Y’all’re the best.

Don't Say I Never Give You Anything.

Upon my return from Guatemala to Los Angeles in the summer of 2003, Jeff Gregory and I immediately began work on a follow-up to our 2000 LP The Skies Are Filled with Information. We plunged right into the endeavor without any pretext, architecture, or even an imagined trajectory. We’d both since accumulated a fairly dense back catalog of songs, and went about the task of selecting what we felt might be a decent collection of appropriately-paired tunes, making demos and preliminary recordings as we went along. We ultimately decided on a considerably shorter album, and settled on ten songs: seven songs of my own, and three of Jeff’s. As our earlier efforts (the LP and following EP) were of a decidedly electronic character, we naturally began by collecting our organically-penned compositions and translating them into a variety of possible synthetic backdrops; essentially, programming patterned chord and rhythm structures that corresponded to the original strumming and tinkering, just as we did with our first LP. It took at least a year before we recognized that the old methodologies were not at all accommodating of the songs themselves.

So we then elected to start from scratch and make a properly-organic record. We enlisted long-time pal and collaborator Cory Flanagan on drums, and he performed beautifully. The synthetic element was relegated to at least a marginal role on this record; little flourishes of synth here and there. And of course the strings are canned; I am without the resources or the discipline to contract chamber ensembles. Everything else is pure: the upright Steinway is played throughout by myself and by Jeff. He and I of course shared guitar and vocal duties, and friends Jeremy Kerner, Jeff Phelps, and Matt Shane lent contributions of guitar and toy piano here and there. Hushdrop John San Juan may or may not be in there somewhere as well.

To make a rather long story short, what you’re about to hear ought rightly to be thought of as the three-year labor of two distinct records: the finished product was preceded by a full-length, awkwardly-danceable electronic abortion.

It was a long, difficult process; at the time, Jeff and I were simultaneously lending our efforts to running a record label. I’d get out of class everyday at 12:35 and take the subway to Jeff’s studio in The Valley, and we’d work most days ‘til midnight or so. Often, Jeff and Lawren would kindly lend me their couch for the night, as recording was always attended by a great deal of Tecate and Jack Daniel’s. The evening would almost necessarily terminate in a cloud of marijuana smoke, frozen pizzas and ZZ Top, and while exhausting, it was always fun. If upon first listen the record presents itself as a relatively stripped-down, minimal sort of photograph, it’s only because we spent such a great deal of time and effort arguing and omitting superfluities.

I suppose there is some requisite element of hubris involved in this sort of post; but I feel that this record is worthy of at least a bit of consideration. And it's been a long time coming. After making several records with a host of bands, it’s the first that occasioned in me a little sigh; it’s the record I’d always wanted to make. I felt I’d finally struck a long-sought balance of complexity and simplicity, between harmony and dissonance, hard vs. soft, and all the rest of it. Lyrically, while imperfect, I do feel that it represents something of a graduation. Not much of it makes me cringe, which, as a lyricist, is about as much as one might pray for. And the production is exquisitely sharp. Jeff insists it’s the best record he’s ever made, and this is, y’know, the dude who made much of Corvette Summer.

So anyway, here is Holding Hands With Prince Vacuum, in it’s entirety, for your scrutiny, criticism, and hopefully, for your enjoyment.

The Prints of Whales

42

Hand of Evil

Olly Olly Oxygen Free

Different Plane

Running Backward Fast

M is for Memory

Observation Alters

Invisible Soldiers

No Such Thing

A New Career in a New Town.

My first week here in Eureka was spent living in a hotel, maundering about town in despair, waiting for property management companies to phone me with some good news. I drank as much of the local beer as I could manage, and enjoyed locally-produced television commercials, the sort of which feature the proprietor and his family stacking presents in Christmas-elf regalia, or the staff of some retail store dressed as farm animals, or whatever. It feels a lot like my hometown of Peoria; much of the blue-collar social character is the same. There is a pronounced element of white trash here; abject, homely women with poor dentition and too many offspring, those who think it permissible to wear an insulated flannel beneath an oversized Raiders jacket, the type who sees no transgression in walking publicly with a pungent, half-smoked Marlboro Light tucked behind her ear. The architecture is much the same, though here there are many more Victorian homes, and a charming little downtown area. Only it’s, you know, on the ocean and nestled within the redwood forest. And I’m a complete stranger here.

And then there are the hippies: few things unnerve me more than persons who cling steadfastly to a manner of living or a system of ideas but cannot offer any argument of their philosophies beyond inanely-rhymed, platitudinous slogans. They fail to comprehend that their little gestures toward establishing individuality, whether in the fields of ideas or in fashion, do little else but overtly reinforce their absurd uniformity; I’m no zoologist, but they appear to look, think and act alike. When they are not begging for money or cigarettes on the sidewalks, they sit self-righteously on corners with cardboard signs that censure commuters for driving cars and eating meat. In my estimation, these worthless stabs at protest obviously constitute a colossal squandering of precious caloric intake that easily eclipses the sins of omnivorousness committed by ordinary, well-meaning car owners. I do not own a car, but they can fuck themselves all the same.

There are actual seasons here, and tonight it is freezing. In keeping with Local Ordinance #615-23, I have grown my beard to meet minimum length requirements. But I will risk the threat of a fine by refusing to comply with unjust legislation that requires me to smoke marijuana, engage in impromptu hacky-sack circles with strangers, and get my hair professionally dreadlocked by part-time glassblowers.

I barely made it to the end of Palahniuk’s Choke; some trusted friend ought to explain the value of nuance and shade to this man. Celebrated as he is, I view Chuck as the Jerry Bruckheimer of contemporary fiction; he locates little catch-phrases, clever little lists and twists and other trite devices, and repeats these techniques ad nauseum throughout the length of the text. At the risk of sounding pedantic: extreme hyperbole and exaggeration cease to be effective when they alone constitute the core of a given work; he’s like that annoying kid in the lunchroom, religiously driven to grossing out the others. Anyway, it is stenciled from precisely the same template that produced Fight Club, and should bore the shit out of anyone who can distinguish good writing from “a high-octane thrill ride”. Sorry Charlie.

I saw a large herd of elk, about twenty-five of them, grazing not too far from my house. I stood about eight feet away from one of the three bulls, and it was something special. I’m roughly twenty minutes from the National Park, and will probably spend many of my weekends up there, among the trees. The trees here are the largest and oldest living things on earth, comparable only to the sequoias in King’s Canyon to the southeast. To sit against a thing that has been metabolizing consistently for three thousand years, if fully considered, is a pretty dizzying thing. Before the living Christ and the living Buddha, this here critter was enjoying its adolescence. It appears stolid and inert, but yet it is not; the quick scale of our immediate perception is incapable of appreciating the long dynamic flux of this beast. Our apprehension of trees is essentially autistic. I am reminded of several passages from Whitman’s incomparable “Song of Myself”:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much?

Have you reckon'd the earth much?

&

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

And I no more than anyone else. It is when I get out of the house, out among the trees that I remember the full effectiveness of nature, its indifferent ability to erase my trivial worries. You climb a hill in the morning and remember that you have a body, you lose your breath somewhere upstream and your pedestrian concerns are immediately supplanted by a sensation that does not translate easily into words. Awe is among its components, as is a kind of wordless, healthy anxiety. It’s that thing which good poetry works so tirelessly to approximate. But as Huxley noted, by way of Korzybski, even the finest of recipe books cannot compare to the worst of meals*.

I don’t know a single soul here, and find myself extremely lonely. That I can’t afford to come home (wherever that is) for Christmas only adds to this dullness. There are several good bookstores, and a nice little boardwalk that runs along Humboldt Bay; you can stroll in the wind and watch the little fishing vessels taxiing in and out of the marina. But these are rather poor substitutions for real human contact. Said another way, there’s nobody here to go drinking with. Whoever they are, they say that the act of drinking alone is a sure symptom of alcoholism. This little nugget of sagaciousness was probably the invention of some humorless, shit-brained Christian who likely has never enjoyed an original thought throughout the entirety of his dolorous little joke of a life. Some people are so foolishly concerned with health and wholeness and positivity, essentially with life-extension, that they neglect to perform the emotional leg-work required to understand why life is even worth living, to say nothing of extending it. These are difficult questions, and necessarily require the intercession of liquid courage; it loosens the tongue precisely because it first loosens the mind. As Kierkegaard so well understood, to be human is not a fact, but a task. And I feel somehow enriched, like something approaching truly human, when I expose myself to ruin.

The Extropian nerd-types will write excitedly about recent developmental horizons in life-extension technologies, but they must answer: why? What will you do with an additional two hundred years? Will you spend your bonus centuries sitting before a computer, salivating through an abstract fog of miniaturized devices and the poorly-feigned moans of amateur pornography?** Nonbeing may be less rich in content, but as a volitional selection it does at least not fall within the categorical parameters of pointlessness.

This particular place is for me a strange place to be; I am accustomed to warmth and friends, to a cacophony of strange dialects and clogged freeways. But then to be is a strange place to be. I wonder what I’m doing here, and then I temper that question with the larger: how and why is there a here for me to be in? What the fuck is the universe doing here? Or, if you prefer, what are the multiverses doing here? But this must all by now have the ring of familiarity. I sit out on my new porch, seized by insomnia and smoking cigarettes at three A.M. It is completely silent. I observe couples of stubborn, bumbling raccoons and the failed furtive attempts of my new neighbors to peep on me through little rents in their curtains, and I remember the old “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” episode of The Twilight Zone, a wonderful little meditation on collective paranoia. Their suspicions are probably right on the mark; I am searching and I am signaling. For what, I cannot yet guess.

Eureka

12/14/07

*paraphrased, as my books remain in boxes.

**on a related note, for a little foray into the dystopian horrors of life-extension, Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, while not his best, is certainly worth reading.

The Day Nobody Died.

I awake in my hotel, stunned, around four A.M. I'd fallen in with some unseemly Nigerians that evening, and we'd roamed from bar to bar around the little Saigon tourist ghetto 'til around two. I am barely able to function, and this is apparent in the eyes of suspicious airport security staff; my breath must've smelled about like that of Lazarus on Opening Day of his short-lived Comeback Tour. But it is worth it to fly domestically and spare ourselves the horror of thirteen hours aboard busses and hydrofoils. We arrive on Phu Quoc Island around seven A.M.

Thankfully, there is nothing to do here. The surroundings here are so exaggeratedly picture-perfect that one feels compelled to do little more than sit and drink and stare. There are large populations of four-inch winged rhinoceros beetles that are wonderful to watch and blurs of mosquitoes at night that are not so fine. We have a private cabana at a little seaside resort; the beaches here a powdery white, there is no surf, and so the green waters lap very gently upon the little berms. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of elderly Ensure-guzzling German vacationers virtually guarantees that I will remain well-insulted from any temptation to engage in depravities.

But come to think of it, there is little to do anywhere. Every year, I scout out a number of visually-stimulating destinations, go to them, and then proceed to the same things I'd do anywhere: read, write, drink, eat, and argue. As amusing as it always is, it has a certain ring of inertia. I am somehow reminded of collecting action-figures as a child; I would half-reason to myself that no actual "playing" could commence until I'd completed my collection to some satisfying degree. So I would obtain the necessary figures and their counterparts, the accessories, the ships and shuttles and the self-contained play-sets. And I would then sit back in horror and watch as the long-sought fantasy abruptly dissolved: I would place certain figures in their respective vessels, or plant various adversaries facing one another in the sand, and come to the difficult realization that they did absolutely nothing. I would then make some embarrassing and pathetic effort to animate them or to approximate their little dialogs from the films or cartoons, and it would make me frown and sigh and relegate these playthings to the back of the closet. Perhaps this is not an apt analogy, but it feels just about right.

I read Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip; I've read maybe some eighty-percent of PKD's work, but somehow missed this one. Because of its title, I erroneously assumed it to be among his earlier works, and thus, non-canonical. It's about as great as anything from this period; funny, philosophically-challenging, and able to negotiate the soliloquies of numerous characters with reflexive ease and elegance. Its backdrop is very near to that of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which chronicles the woes of a lunar penal colony. But it's his introduction of several ideas regarding the subjective apprehension of time among autistics and schizophrenics that interested me, as they echo a few thoughts (silly thoughts, perhaps) that occurred to me while living on the banks of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I later by accident discovered that David Bohm asked questions that were nearly identical to my own, which of course made me feel a little better.

While living in San Pedro de Atitlan, I made the acquaintance of a German named Ona, who'd lived there for some ten years. Ona dressed in long draped robes, wore a long beard and walked with a Gandolph-esque staff around town. I ordinarily scoff at such pretense, and we could not have been more different. But I found him to be sagely and even-tempered and we became fast friends. I would run into him around midnight; he would be calmly sipping some herbal tea at le creperie and I would arrive shit-faced and looking for some intellectual arm-wrestling. And he would happily oblige me, never lecturing or judging; his rebukes were never severe in inflection, he would correct me with a chuckle and a warm smile. The independently wealthy tend to exhibit this sort of mild temperament. He did not always win these little debates, but I felt the man could concede a point, which I suppose is in part what makes one sagely.

Ona had a couple of beautiful houses along the bank, and would regularly invite us over for dinner; he is a raw-foodist, and so we would dine on little concoctions of papaya, tomato and avocado, without salt. Salt, he informed me, ought to be shunned, as it prompts lasting erections in the male. Go figure. He was in possession of an eclectic library of books, and introduced me to the thought and theories of Wilhelm Reich. We would sit under candlelight on little bamboo rugs and very quietly debate for hours all manner of things within our scope: Heidegger, Jung, war, capitalism, shamanism, Free Love, telekinesis, and so on.

On one evening I felt it safe to share with Ona the problem of time that I'd alluded to previously. The problem is this: massive elementary particles in a vacuum have a particular rate of decay. I don't have the precise statistics immediately at hand, but let's say it is this: a single proton, insulated from interaction with other fundamental particles, will decay; that is, slip entirely away from existence at a measurable age of roughly 1.8 billion years (or whatever it is), give or take a few. My concern is twofold; first: how does time make itself "felt" by this object in a vacuum? It is not being impacted by any forces of natural erosion, nor any other form of degeneration. In absence of interfacing with anything of a material nature, how does it "know" that some or any time has lapsed? It is the ages-old problem of action-at-a-distance; essentially like the problem of gravity, and locating the proposed but yet-elusive graviton. Latent and spring-loaded within a thing that barely even possesses dimension is a capacity to respond not to the whirlwind of other extended things, but to the immaterial force of time itself. Protons cross a measurable temporal threshold, divorced from ordinary physicality, and then simply vanish of old age, and this is not a theory. And this brings us to my second concern.

Into what or where do they vanish? One need not look exclusively at proton decay; in everyday particle collisions performed at the world's accelerators, impacts yield a host of super-massive particles with a lifespan of a few billionths of a second. Pions and muons jump briefly into this world through such particulate train wrecks, and for a slight moment, the balance of things is upset, as the collision yields more matter than was originally introduced. It is as if you throw two baseballs at each other at near light-speed, anticipating nothing but shattered fragments of the two balls, but instead end up with a net mass of eight full baseballs. As soon as this abominable violation reveals itself, it immediately recedes back into nothingness, and therefore maintains the balance required in our second Law of Thermodynamics. But it is important to note that for the sparest of moments, that law is effectively violated. Raw being collects into our world to taunt us with its origin and then tracelessly exits; it might be the nearest affirmation we have of ghosts.

Ona fell into near hysterics, laughing on and on, saying that I am confused and that this presents no difficulty whatsoever. But he of course could not properly account for either of the two troublesome epistemological discrepancies I'd pointed out. Nobody can. But by all means, enlighten me. Anyway:

It is four days later and we return to the Hotel Lien Ha in Saigon; it is a pretty fine hotel, with a working lift and a covered pool on the roof. It's nestled in a narrow little corridor of bars and restaurants, and is considerably different than Hanoi; this hotel does not lock its doors at night, as some do. Bars and such shut down when the last man can no longer stand. Throughout this passage can be seen the hordes of fat old white westerners with their little Vietnamese prostitutes in tow. I suppose it should not nauseate me; they require sexual intimacy like anyone else, but find it nearly impossible to acquire in their home countries. They are out of shape and past their prime, and their modest successes as businessmen will fail to impress any but the most repellant women in the west. I pity them, but they nauseate me all the same.

I make some effort to write at a few of the outdoor cafes, but it was not meant to be; the hawkers and dealers collect around me like clouds of flies on the faces of those withered old National Geographic women. "Hello my friend?" they say. Cocaine? Ecstasy? No, mon ami, these well-worn neurons can handle no more stimulation than is provided free-of-charge by the city itself. But thanks. My insomnia returns with a vengeance, and the few dreams I am able to have are not of the usual abstract and colorful variety, but are instead uncomfortably mundane in character. Which makes me want to sleep even less. It feels as if an extremely boring individual, one who relishes long afternoons of filing and the CNN Market Report, has made off with my dreams and attempted to balance the deficit by lending me his own. In the event that this individual is presently enjoying this essay: I'd like them back.

So I dodge as well as can be expected the late-night degenerate scene in Saigon by spending some time in the company of the ass-backward snore-a-thon that is Vietnamese state-controlled television. The Vietnamese have a wonderful method of producing voiceovers for western films; they simply screen the film (edited for content), and the voices of all characters are read aloud in the flattest monotone by a single Vietnamese woman. The original dialogue is not subtracted from the audio track; she simply babbles the script without inflection or dynamic in an attempt to drown out the actors.

We again take to the streets and share a table with a German named Marcus; after some four half-gallon jugs of bia hoy we all decide to roam the alleys; not the ordinary streets, but down the dark little half-avenues that barely separate the open-face homes. A few blocks into the labyrinth and we are invited by a merry band of locals to share their home and their beer. They are thoroughly plastered but can manage a bit of English, and so relate a number of stories from the war and of why they so detest the North. On this point they are immovable; I mention reconciliation, make some effort to introduce a bit of levity into an increasingly prickly exchange. They respond with graver epithets and offer us a bit of their laughably-bad weed. We say goodnight and thank them for kindly sharing with us their home, and they present us with a bill: fifty dollars for the beer. We offer them ten and stumble home, slightly disheartened.

On the plane back to Taiwan I am seated next to a small older Vietnamese woman. She is reading Victor Hugo and is a practicing Caodaist. Caodaism is a kind of synthesis of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity, and they have beatified everyone from Gandhi to Oscar Wilde. And Victor Hugo. She carries with her a large plastic bag decorated with a little smiling yellow cube and the Zoloft® logo. I wondered about how much Zoloft she could fit into that bag. She says her faith alone has the capacity to liberate mankind. I say I doubt that, but maybe Zoloft might do the trick. But there was one day, I tell her, just a single day, sometime in the 1980s, when nobody died. Not a single recorded death on earth in a twenty-four hour period. Scout's honor, I say.

In an Airplane over the Sea,

11/16/07

Escape From Nha Trang.

Disclaimer: what follows was composed somewhat hastily and in a little cloud of general frustration, and I have little time for editing or revision. Thus, any remarks that paint Vietnam or any of its inhabitants in a less than favorable light ought rightly to be brushed off as unfair, exaggerated, mean-spirited inventions. I will get back to more sincere, committed insults as time permits.

I'm sitting on the roof of my hotel in Nha Trang beneath a little wooden canopy. This hotel boasts an envious sea view, but you wouldn't know it from here, today. This is where one comes to enjoy brochure-green seas and all of the related activities, but I wouldn't know much about that either. The rain has been ceaseless, and demonstrates no symptoms of slowing. The rain is a non-particulate, undifferentiated curtain of cold water falling a few feet in front of me, and the face of my laptop must be wiped off every thirty seconds or so. But these are my favorite sorts of days; I relish having nothing in front of me, and a decent excuse to just sit and stare and think. I abhor schedules and secretly court cancellations. Sure, I can feign disappointment and say things like "Oh that's too bad. I was really looking forward to seeing those Koreans perform at the Central Library" and so on, but I'm happiest when I'm just left alone. So I invent a new superhero named Br-ion Atoms. He bravely returns from the present to the Summer of Sixty-Nine to deliver us from the evil machinations of the budding rocker whose namesake he shares. I also form an impromptu Irish cover band called Zeprechaun, who specialize in waltzing sea shanty renderings of Zeppelin tunes. Several minutes later we disbanded; shoulda known we'd never get far.

I made some effort to read from Artaud's Heliogabalus; it is at moments amusing in its exaggerated profanity and repeated accusations of royal buggery, but overall an incomprehensible and unreadable piece of shit. It occurred to me that I might know something more about decent literature than those fuckheads who crafted reviews for the New York Times sixty years ago and that my backpack maybe ought to be relieved of all the tedious French prose weighing it down. I then gobbled up Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280; it was so refreshingly good it made me feel delirious and thankful that I was not born in France.

So I find little tarp-covered stalls at which I can sit around and sample the local cuisine; the food in Vietnam, and particularly throughout Hanoi, has been almost consistently exquisite. The best meals are spicy, noodle-driven affairs featuring spoonfuls of fish sauce and some unidentifiable meat, served on sidewalks throughout the city. When eating street food, you dine at little plastic children's tables hanging from curbs, a grown man balancing on tiny blue plastic seats originally intended to accompany the Easy-Bake Ovens of five-year olds. The rain comes up over your ankles, you sniff your bowl and wonder about the origin of those nebulous sinewy things floating in the broth and about all those recommended vaccinations that you somehow couldn't find time for.

The Vietnamese are omnivorous in the truest and most complete sense of the term; they eat anything and everything. If it crawls, wiggles, patters, swims, scurries, gallops, or otherwise demonstrates motility, they will happily kill it and make it taste great. I am a rather adventurous sampler of cuisines, but there are limits; I fear canines might view me unfavorably after detecting a bit of their own material in my breath or pheromonal emissions. Vegetarians would be immediately shit-shocked and appalled by this place and likely fly home immediately.

Now with respect to being hassled by locals hawking their wares, Nha Trang is the worst in Vietnam. Any sort of direct eye contact, however brief, is interpreted as a signal that you wish to purchase something. So every few feet one is bombarded with offers of postcards, marijuana, motorbike rides, island trips, chewing gum, handicrafts, and so on. After enduring "Hello, you want buy something?" for the five-hundredth time in a single afternoon, I feel like replying "Yes: I wish to purchase a cloak of invisibility, so that I may walk your streets unmolested". Or maybe we could convert a couple of these rickshaws into makeshift Pope-mobiles.

I have overheard a number of tourists, primarily those of the Euro-liberal variety, discussing at length the general disposition of the Vietnamese. It is the same sort of mawkish fawning over a people that one reads in guidebooks: the Vietnamese are so kind, so trusting and trustworthy; their little hearts are just spilling over with love, and so on. To my mind, these sorts of bogus generalizations are as poorly conceived as those of a more derogatory variety. In short, there are assholes everywhere, and try as you might you will not locate an ethnicity on earth fortunate enough to have evolved a gene that effectively works to produce asshole-free offspring.

What the guidebooks do not tell you is that as a Westerner you are essentially viewed as a kind of bipedal ATM. It is assumed that you are in possession of an unlimited wellspring of money and it must somehow be wrested from you. Once the bill has been paid in full, observe closely as that classic guidebook smile fades abruptly to a featureless complacency. And this fact adds to the difficulty of gauging the sincerity of most persons. Perhaps a better means of measuring their disposition might be to observe how the Vietnamese treat one another, as opposed to their treatment of tourists; they treat each other like shit, barking orders, reprimanding, cursing, and then of course turn back to your table with an immediately reconstituted smile. Their own interactions are punctuated with a terseness and rudeness that they assume is concealed from those that do not speak the language, but the meaning is all the same painfully apparent.

The rain in Nha Trang mellows a bit and we elect to go drinking and dancing at some lame-ass seaside complex. I accidentally shit my pants (I'm told some do this intentionally) while chatting up some hot French couple and was forced to pitch my soiled drawers into the waste can. This did not prevent me from staying to take in the performance of some third-rate cover band that butchered a number of our national treasures. Here we absorbed Kathryn, in whose company we would spend the next several days. I cut my bare feet on some glass and left in the wake of my enviable ass-shaking an irregular pattern of bloody hoof-prints by which I could be easily traced from the dance floor to my hotel room.

Kathryn phones us early in the morning and we agree to spend the day at a local spa. She arrives at our hotel an hour late. We spend the day drinking and confessing in the mud and mineral baths; in no time at all we are old friends. Kathryn is intelligent and drinks like a hobo and generally a uniquely impressive person. We all feel more affluent than we actually are and eight hours later we retire to a bar near our hotel, and the little group acquires a fourth appendage, Travis. Together we book an island-hopping boat tour departing the following morning and then say goodnight.

To my surprise, our two additions not only remember our reservation but arrive early in the morning. The sun comes out and the shuttle takes us out to port where along with some twenty-five others we board Mama Linh's boat and set off to explore the bay's islands. As usual, they are a mixed bunch: obnoxious jockstrap Australians who board the ship pre-inebriated, Spanish hippie-types replete with the obligatory piercings and phony-ass tribal tattoos, painfully beautiful Dutch girls, and so on. The vacationing Vietnamese men are the worst; the do not swim or demonstrate a willingness to participate in any fashion, they sit in neat button-up shirts and stare all day like expressionless chain-smoking peeping toms. The western tact of not staring directly at persons for uncomfortable lengths of time has been wholly lost on some Vietnamese; they apply their eyes lasciviously to the women and correspondingly with contempt to the men, with less reservation than they would grant a garden of statues.

Following a few beers we drop anchor off the coast of an island that features a little coral reef and enjoy some twenty-foot dives from the roof of the boat. I make some brief attempt to snorkel but cannot get the hang of breathing exclusively through my mouth; I panic and swallow liberal amounts of saltwater. A few minutes later the boat rolls out into the bay to accommodate the exit of another vessel, and the group is swept some hundred meters away by an ocean current. We are left without explanation to tread water for some thirty minutes; I am gripped by fear but held afloat by a kind of organic pragmatism, as it is just imprudent to freak out with one hundred feet of water beneath you.

After lunch and a thoroughly ridiculous performance by the crew, who apparently double as the house band, our next stop is to what the Vietnamese consider an aquarium. It is an appalling little aquatic Guantanamo that ought to be shut down immediately; majestic sea turtles flop about in dingy tanks of a size unfit to accommodate a few goldfish, other plus-size sea critters, most with a body mass exceeding my own, treading green water, doing nothing and staring through the unclean glass as blankly as the Vietnamese who put them there. It is a sad joke of a place by any civilized standard and certainly has no place in the itinerary of drunken island-hoppers. We complain mildly and then push off to mid-ocean.

By now the group is sufficiently drunk to begin negotiations, to graduate from eavesdropping to interjection. I naturally fall into the orbit of big-breasted, bikinied European women and make some effort to enchant them with vaulting tales of my accomplishments in Hollywood, but of course carefully trivializing the more impressive associations so as to augment their overall effect; it rarely fails to produce the intended result. So we all get a little drunker and spend some time playing around with our respective infatuations. We drop anchor in open water and a little floating bar is then established a good thirty meters from the ship. The bar and its attendant are anchored via a sturdy rope. We dive in with our little flotation-donuts and are immediately swept out by a current several times stronger than the one alluded to previously. It is an alarming thing, so strong that you can feel the water swishing through your toes, same as you'd feel it if those toes were dipped in a rough stream. A minute later we watch the boat recede to a small point as we are swept out several hundred meters, and a general worry washes over us all.

A Brit abandons his life-saver and begins paddling furiously and futilely toward the safety of the boat, yelling "bloody hell" and so on; in doing so, he inadvertently punches me in the face and I draw blood. And nothing better compliments being stranded in an open-ocean current in the South China Sea like an open wound. So I then liberate myself from the life-donut and attempt to swim exclusively with my right arm, as my left is concerned with keeping my wine above water like some unclean Olympic Torch. People are justifiably beginning to panic; they understand that the tour operators are drunk, and that we all look alike to them. We form a long human chain and tether ourselves to the bartender, and after some difficulty are slowly pulled in.

The remainder of the evening is just as you'd expect; a marathon exercise in unwholesomeness. And I'll spare you the tautologies; I wish I had the discipline to spare myself. Anyway, there are several scenes missing; three little shadow people somehow manifested under my beach chair around two A.M., attempting to make off with my wallet. To my mind, the attempted robbery had all the symptoms of being sanctioned by the bar, as I vaguely recall a few staff members standing under the light, laughing. I chase them down and decide that the Vietnamese may be trusted about as far as I can throw them, which, for the record, is roughly three feet. They are a tiny people, and don't cost the biceps too much. I also remember dragging a woman up five flights of stairs. There are other little splices which I recall lucidly, but cannot mention; it would be in poor taste to make public the nightly humiliations of others, but with respect to self- embarrassment, my insouciance is clearly without much limit. Or maybe it is a kind of covert self-aggrandizement. Either way, it beats watching television.

The next day is spent entirely in bed, without leaving the hotel room. I am not a capable poet, but all the same I offer the following as a little distillation of the day's thoughts:

Let us see just what sort of day we are dealing with

Let us sift through last night's wreckage, separate the good from the bad

As if there were any good

Let us determine just what it is that has occurred here

Bring in teams of forensic scientists to separate the real from the imaginary

Lord knows what sort of damage has been done

I'm pretty sure there is a broken window somewhere

And I don't know where that cut came from

Let's get showered and attempt to straighten this thing out

There are holes in my record of things

And one in the door

And most of the evening is on the cutting-room floor

Maybe there's someone I can call

Let us figure out what time it is

Let us scurry about in search of evidence, and then hide it

I would like to reschedule this disaster

We should probably open a window

But keep the blinds drawn

Let us secure our wallet and passport

And make for the train come dawn

So I sit on the balcony of my hotel in Dalat and feel absolutely no sense of foreignness. I feel disbursed and distributed and like I might be anywhere; you come from nothingness abruptly into somethingness, and if you're lucky you're able to give this some thought before the cycle is completed. Some will insist that a nowhere is still somewhere, and that neant to which one returns ought to yield some personal existential comfort, solely on the basis of its familiarity; these folks do not fathom the difficult lessons and truths of biology. The nothingness from which we come and to which we return is pure and barren and must not be categorically confused with any notions of persistence or presence. But it is remarkable the degree to which we tirelessly endeavor to reveal such universally despicable truths.

The city is shrouded in a little diaphanous fog and I think, "I am on the other side of the world", and wonder why I detect no immediate impression of disconnection. I then correct myself by thinking, "other than what?" I do not have a side of the world; I have stopped taking sides. I have several large boxes of books in a storage locker in northern California. You move around enough, your parents die, and the once-fixed idea of home begins to dissolve. But I will sever transmission before it turns sentimental.

Saigon

11/09/07

The Road South.

Early Monday morning in Ninh Binh, and it has been decided that we will rent a motorbike to cycle ourselves around the northeast province. I was quietly against the idea from the very beginning; I have not driven a car in ten years and should not be permitted to operate any motorized device beyond a computer. There was of course the now-famous Beard-Trimmer Disaster of 2005, but I'll not go into it. Anyway, I suppose that women are said to be attracted to motorbikes, and so against my better judgment and without a second of experience, I elected to pilot the thing, rather than being necklaced with the award of World's Biggest Pussy.

My defeat was quick and short but maybe worth mentioning. I informed the boy that I had no inkling of how to operate this particular machine, and he consoled me that it "is easy, no problem. You go". He made several gestures intended to indicate the location of the gearshift, the throttle, the brake and so on. I have recently adapted the habit of nodding my head affirmatively in response to things that I in fact have no comprehension of, and so it is possible that many of my instructor's poorly-Englished admonitions were not taken to heart. More likely is that he reflexively assumed that most grown men are able to contend with a machine as unchallenging as a motorbike, as all are in his country, and felt it might be safe to allow me free-range of the vehicle's commands. In short, I put the thing in gear, cranked the throttle and rode a spectacular and unintentional wheelie through the street before wiping out seconds later with the bike on top of us. A crowd of onlookers pointed and laughed; the only thing more bruised than Jasmin's legs is my manhood. I shook my fist at the bike and cried "Old Foe, you've not seen the last of me". I will attempt this feat again in a place better-suited to wheelies and injury, and avoid those locations so obviously conducive to ignominy.

Ninh Binh is dubbed as being rather like Halong Bay, but with the karsts instead jutting up from broad green rice fields as opposed to from the open ocean. As the paddies and surrounding villages are thoroughly flooded, the immediate impression is much the same. We take a small vessel down a river that ordinarily runs like a little artery through the paddies but has since burst and presently consumes them. The operator of our little vessel has no arms and so commands the oars with his feet. The little river winds beneath a number of prominent karsts; because of the water level, we are instructed to lie down on the floor of the boat in order to negotiate the passages without head injury.

We head south, crossing the DMZ, and enter the former capitol of Hue. Much of the city is still underwater from the typhoon; it brings to mind some fucked-up, third-world Venice, with half-submerged tourist-toting rickshaws substituting the gondolas. Six hours later we board a bus for Hoi An. As it turns out, Hoi An was just the sort of Vietnam I was looking for: charming cobbled lanes along a river and a delectable regional cuisine, without the cloud of noise and exhaust one is greeted with in Hanoi. As the city is famous for its hundreds of tailors, I purchase three new custom-tailored suits that I will rarely wear. Then again, I am advancing in years and people are dropping like flies, and I don't want anyone gossiping about how Paul always wears that same old suit to every burial. You fall into your thirties, and you begin to notice death; they die all around you, they fall into their cold little destinies and expire without any fucking explanation. It is frustrating.

I take a cooking class and learn to prepare a number of dishes. While eating the dishes I'd just prepared, a cat jumps up onto my lap; I imagine him transmogrified into one of those fractaled nightmare felines painted by Louis Wain throughout his later, troubled period. The cat had a big pair of furry balls dangling beneath his asshole like little Christmas tree ornaments and I thought about preparing him too. I spend several long evenings drinking the shitty red wine of the Dalat region and writing on the third-floor balcony of the Phuoc An Hotel.

Day five in Hoi An, and we figure we'd best not wear out our welcome. We beat it on an evening bus south to Quy Nhon. Of the long caravan of busses headed south to Nha Trang, we were the only persons bound for Quy Nhon. To pass the time, I assemble a selection of my favorite words from the Vietnamese lexicon. These are common terms and they appear nearly everywhere. The winners are: Bang, Bich, Bong, Bung, Dan, Dang, Dich, Dong, Dung, Hang, Hung, Long, Phat, Phuc, Quoc, Tan, and Van. Certainly the owners of the shops Ban My Dung and My Hung Son must wonder why so many westerners pass by giggling like stoned freshmen.

At 1:00 A.M. the driver hustles us off the bus and deposits us on a dark and deserted street in the rain eleven kilometers from town. This is evidently the only way to get to Quy Nhon and certainly must be why no one comes here. Some motorbike drivers come by and agree to take us into town for a small fee. I am fatigued and uncertain and we roll for miles through unpopulated areas, it is raining and our gear is soaked and naturally I imagine that they'll drive us to the countryside and shoot us both in the face and take our money. I ready myself for impending doom as well as one can and remember that it's been a hell of a life. Thirty protracted minutes later we roll up to the hotel and wake the sleeping concierge; we tell him of our reservation and he steadfastly insists that it does not exist. And so we shrug it off and are finally left at the Hotel Saigon Quy Nhon, easily the best and most expensive place in town.

Now the guidebook suggests that this city is "considerably less frequented by tourists", which is precisely why we selected the destination. I tire of listening to busloads of rich Europeans exchanging complaints about the prices or the service in this place or pointlessly whining about the weather in another. But we are the only tourists here, and in my estimation, it feels as if we're the only tourists who've ever been here; it is a lonely, stranded sort of sensation, but not without its own accompanying excitement. No one speaks a lick of English, save a few words from the concierge, and walking the streets we are gawked and laughed at like some anachronistic Christmas parade float in June.

We spend the next day cycling some twenty kilometers out to a pair of ruined Cham towers; I rode perhaps the gayest bike ever manufactured; it was painted a pastel pink and had the wussie-bar frame and a little basket. It was an emasculating little pedal but I enjoyed it all the same. The locals poured out of their homes to watch us ride by, and I smiled and waved like a good celebrity. We later duck into a heavily-populated outdoor tavern, much like the bia hoy institutions of Hanoi, but a bit larger. All eyes are on us; but they are full of curiosity and entirely without malice, and so after several drinks I feel quite comfortable. Coming out of the lavatory I am intercepted by a table of eight young drunk locals; they speak a few words of English and insist that we join them. I accept and we drink several more pitchers of the local brew.

An hour later these folks demand that we retire with them to a local karaoke bar; I'm beginning to grasp the significance of karaoke in these cultures. It is a kind of interface, a Universal Adaptor, a means by which persons of linguistically disparate nations might participate as equals and communicate via the foundation of popular music. So we acquiesce to another adventure and roll off on the backs of motorbikes, gritting our teeth in the rain and again hugging the torsos of drunken strangers.

Nha Trang

10/27/07

Halong Bay.

In the little minivan I learn that our entire expedition throughout Halong Bay will be spent entirely in the company of the fifteen misfits with whom I'm presently stranded; they are young and old and we are of course the sole Americans. Nobody says a goddamn word and I worry a bit about how we'll endure the next three days at sea with this poorly-paired batch of strangers. We transfer from land to our boat, the S.S. Whatever, and shove off into the South China Sea.

Our first stop after settling into our respective cabins is a series of sea caves; you disembark at the island and hike along a little guided tour. Our guide narrates the experience, lending silly superstitious anthropocentrisms to stalactite formations and what not. As I would rather hear a more scholarly meditation on these geological wonders, any proper account of their formation, we elect to go about on our own and secede from the group. I suppose I am bothered by the fact that the denizens of nearly every place to which one travels expect one to take an active interest in the native culture, in their stupid customs and beliefs. I have no wish to observe some half-hearted presentation of any inane traditional dance. I would rather be drinking than listening to some mumbo-jumbo tale of how the volcano was formed from the tears of the Great Mother. It is not enough that you shell out thousands to lie in peace upon their beaches; you must also visit the sacred sites and endure their empty blather and juvenile cosmologies. I look at the temples and the ruins and I'm glad that they are ruined; they were repositories of bad ideas and so earned their extinction. Maybe someday tour groups will be led throughout the ruins of Hollywood and will be told of the things that were sacred among our people. They will be shown the crumbling facade of The Gap and Carl's Jr. and T.G.I. Friday's and they will stand there obsequiously and speak in little whispers about the resonance and energy of the place. "You could definitely feel a presence", one will say. But I digress.

Once we sat anchor in the bay, things changed abruptly. It is remarkable to witness the slow cohesion of strangers, and how effective alcohol serves as a catalyst for this kind of very sincere bonding. Alcohol is a wonderful thing. It strips us of so many suppositions and proprieties and identities. Little alcoholic eddies of affinity begin to form in twos and threes across the deck, and things begin to get comfortable. After a number of drinks we dive into the bay laughing, and I'm immediately alarmed by the strength of the current. After an exquisite dinner and several more drinks, it is decided that I am to be the icebreaker; the first to sing karaoke. I select "Ebony & Ivory" and I fucking deliver; the older German women are quite enamored of me and my singing, and insist that I pursue it professionally. I tell them that I'm several steps ahead of them, that I'm rather famous in the States and well on the way to becoming the next Hassellhoff. I made out with a sixty year old woman, sang "Stairway to Heaven" in its entirety, and it's there that my memory of the evening fortunately terminates.

We awoke best of friends, and began drinking immediately; eight of us, the best of us, were to defect from the group, and sail on to Cat Ba Island. We boarded a smaller vessel and docked at the National Park, and spent a few hours cycling through the rain forest. We then kayaked out among the limestone karsts; it's easy to get lost out in this dizzying labyrinth of spires jutting up from the sea. At some points the view of the surrounding karsts was so consuming and so overwhelming that I felt I might just go ahead and die, and I began to hyperventilate, and then paddled harder in a single direction. I later dove into the sea off the coast of Monkey island; minutes later, I stood in the middle of the ocean, next to the boat on a limestone crag just beneath the surface. I informed our guide, also named Kang, that I'd escaped death or paralysis by a margin of about twenty inches, and that diving here is probably not the wisest of ideas. He laughed and smiled, which is what most Vietnamese do when they've no fucking clue what you're saying.

We dock at Cat Ba Island, and spend the evening drinking together, as a group. We effectively assume control of the hotel's restaurant, displacing the other patrons with our drunken ramblings and loud music. They are a two-fisted, foul-mouthed batch of pro-Labor Brits and Aussies and we get along famously. They give me shit for being American and I tell them to go fuck themselves and that football is for pussies, and so on. I also tell them that I am for the war in Iraq, and that a further incursion into Iran sounds just fine to me. This opinion is greeted with much booing and is of course just a bullshit fabrication, but I feel duty-bound to disagree with nearly everyone, and particularly with groups that chant some horseshit mantra in unison, even if that mantra is probably right on. Such is my burden. We later migrate down the strip to another beachside bar, and the mission continues. I boast of my ass-kicking abilities as a pool player, and then realize mid-game that I can no longer walk. But neither can anyone else.

We receive the exceedingly painful seven A.M. wakeup call and rendezvous with the group; they are already drinking. I am still severely inebriated, but after a bit of arm-twisting I concede that it would be better to stay drunk than to endure their jabs hungover all day at sea. And so the party resumes, and we get closer than ever, and it is reflexively assumed by all that we will remain friends for life. Eight hours later, Jasmin and I are the first to be dropped at our hotel in Hanoi; being drunk, we neglected to properly exchange information. We promise to shower and again come together at some pub to take in the rugby match. We passed out immediately and slept for ten hours and never saw them again.

Hoi An

10/21/07

Sapa.

We took the 9:20 train to Sapa, and did our best to sleep through nine hours of clangor. The drugs were somewhat effective, and the persons with whom we shared the sleeper car were just fine. I read from Sartre's The Reprieve, and it bored me to shit. On the whole, Sartre was a very poor novelist and should have limited himself to longwinded ramblings on the character of that which is entirely without character. His works lack the slightest kernel of humor, and any account of being ought to include the very thing that makes it tolerable. Anyway, it's no way to write a novel.

Sapa is a mountainous town straddling the Chinese border, and is home to a number of indigenous hill tribes, notably the Black Hmong. We spent the day hiking through the tallest peaks in Indochina, through dizzying green terraced valleys and through various Hmong villages along the river. However easily amused, I am not frequently astonished; I live in California and am accustomed to natural wonder on a grand scale. But these stepped valleys are a masterpiece of human engineering, and other architectural marvels, pyramids and such, seem to me insignificant in their shadow. We retained a learned young guide named Kang; I can only infer from this moniker that his parents were avid appreciators of The Simpsons. Kang taught me how to say prick and shit in Vietnamese and a number of other fascinating lessons I've since forgotten. At several points along the trek I was again forced to confront my chronic acrophobia, crossing shaky makeshift suspension bridges over deep mountain gorges. It always exhilarates me to proceed in a direction that is entirely counter to my instincts.

Oddly, many of the Hmong women speak a bit of English, a talent they've obtained from recent years of exposure to flocks of tourists. And the uniform of the Hmong women is startlingly hip; with their cylindrical headgear and patterned legwarmers, they'd look just as at-home on some Tokyo runway. I observed them manufacturing and coloring these garments by hand from the hemp and indigo crop that they cultivate among the rice and the opium. As the Hmong believe cameras are able to actually steal one's soul, most of my photographs were obtained either surreptitiously or through bribe. It is remarkable what a few dollars can do to change one's beliefs.

The Hmong belief in the extraordinary ability of digital cameras to act as avaricious soul-gobbling deities prompted me to think of ghosts, and why it might be that humans are almost universally afraid of them. It is quite more in keeping with our condition that we should be considerably more afraid of an absence of ghosts, rather than maintaining any childish trepidation of their presence; the bulk of human history and effort has been thrown behind an attempt to affirm a posthumous persistence of identity, toward establishing any little strand of evidence that might suggest some post-physical continuation. Yet ghosts, perhaps more so than any other entity (or more likely, non-entity), are most closely associated with evil and are generally regarded as a thing that ought to be kept at bay via any number of dances, rituals, medicines and other little methodologies. In the immortal words of Ray Parker Jr.: I ain't afraid of no ghost.

I slept well, and in the morning read an essay on anarchism. I thought about the uselessness of anarchism, and of doctrines in general. I thought about sending proponents of anarchism on a plane to Somalia as a succinct demonstration of just how useless their doctrines are. But I am tired of people and don't really care enough to teach anyone a lesson.

Another night train and we arrive again in Hanoi at four A.M. The Ambien® has not yet worn off and all the hotels are closed. The next hour is spent banging on doors in darkness and attempting to wake various proprietors. No one speaks a word of English, and despite ten years of training in Los Angeles, this lack of available correspondence is beginning to weigh on me. Jasmin's disposition is generally less rigid than my own and she is able to negotiate such difficulties without being phased. We eventually succeed in rousing a hotel staff worker sleeping in a lobby, and the roar of Hanoi rises around me just as abruptly with the sun.

Hoi An

10/18/07