My "Development"

My "Development"

In these last days on this planet I've been reflecting on my life, trying to come to terms with it, have peace, and be ready to say both good bye and hello once more to all things terrestrial, hence my repeated reflections on the subject that is me, me, me.

I don't know about other humans, but to me, one thing that has nagged and gnawed at the core of my being is my awareness that I must and should be of the type that is not mediocre, ordinary, humdrum, dull, and boring. I have seen up close the lives of several cowardly and common monkeys and I don't like what I've seen. Self-deception sickened me. Mediocrity brought tears to my eyes and made me yawn.

At the age of eleven, all by myself I realized that God, as commonly conceived by humans, was a fiction. At the age of twenty-three, I began suspecting that Romantic Love was a fiction, too, at least for me although not necessarily to me. My heart was bigger and more sensitive than most. I am about to hit sixty-five years of age, and my perceptions of God and Romantic Love have not changed. 

I never worshipped money nor power. I like the arts and philosophy. I respect artists and philosophers while I view merchants and politicians with distaste. I always try to do things that few are able to do because they just don't have a fucking ability and temperament. As I said before, mediocrity brought tears to my eyes and made me yawn. I have known so many self-important, but mediocre monkeys. They don't look pretty. And they have really nothing to write home about. After they die, nobody knows about them. They are just like a piece of shit on the roadside, at first stinking, then dried up, and eventually washed and blown away by the rain and the wind. They leave nothing beautiful or striking behind, except their genes, but barnyard animals can do that, too. Having offspring is no big deal. 

So I read and studied and reread. Now, I have been challenging my "peers", acquaintances, and friends if they know as much about book knowledge as I do;  if they know as many languages as I do; if they can write as lyrically and cogently as I do; and if they understand the subjects of philosophy and history as well as I do. I have not yet met anybody who can translate from Vietnamese poems into English as beautifully as I do. Yes, I am arrogant, but I know I am rare and beautiful. I am no mere man. I am dynamite. I am not a picture of mediocrity. Don't come too close to me. You may get blown up along with me. 

I have been an immigrant for most of my life, two-thirds of it. I have come to terms with displacement, loss, discrimination, and anger. I have learned to seek refuge in library, the building of knowledge and true power. Immigration is reinvention. I have reinvented myself. I have forged myself a new identity to deal with a feeling of estrangement with my fellow men, for whom I have had a mixture of pity and contempt. I called myself Roberto Wissai. I invented a hero for my fiction, Omar Sabat, based mostly on my conception of who I should be. Omar is the first name of my best friend, a good Christian and a very caring high school math teacher. Sabat is the take-off from Anwar Sadat, an Egyptian president assassinated for making peace with Israel in return of the captured Sinai Peninsula. Ba is my first name in Vietnamese. Omar Sabat in my fiction is my alter ego. He is much more of me than Omar the math teacher in real life. He is my way to deal with the rising tide of manic-depression, of bipolarity. Through fiction and poetry I have tried to bridge the unbridgeable. Through the medium of my adopted tongue, English, I have tried to find joy and pride. Unlike many immigrants, I don't suffer from language barrier. But I suffer from the ignorance and stupidity of common monkeys and defective humans who think they understand me. How could they, when they don't even have a feel for the English language, a language to which they have exposed for over thirty years? They have tin ears and scattered brains. Everyday I read their stupid, ignorant chatter and self-important prattle on the Net and I throw up. 

Yes, I do know---Buddha was not the only one who knew---that they and I are all interconnected, but I can't help but feel superior and disdainful to them, especially when they try to lecture me or tell me that I am cowardly for not replying to their stupid, insulting, ignorance-filled emails. As I often point out, stupid is as stupid does. Stupid monkeys do stupid things; they can't help themselves. Stupid monkeys and defective humans ironically don't know they are stupid. They think they are normal, even clever simply they have managed to survive. They think survival is a big thing. They forget about real accomplishments of which they have nothing, zilch, nada, rien, nichts. I have an old and ugly monkey sitting on my right hand right now. For the past hour, it has been yakking non-stop in a monologue about everything under the sun. It looks stupid and sounds stupid, but of course it does not know that. I hope to you, I am not old and ugly monkey. But if I am, so be it. To each his own. 

Thus spake Roberto Wissai