Not Yet Fading Away

CHƯA PHAI


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thả chữ nghĩa long đong 
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để nay mai bừng lại
thấy hồn mình chưa phai

Lưu Nguyễn Đạt
Đất Trinh, Feb. 24/27, 2014

NOT YET FADING AWAY

This morning I stopped marching
That didn't mean I had quit
I stopped because I felt pain 
And my blood had leaked

This morning I came to a stop
Although my body might be swaying
My feet were still firmly on the ground
And my spirit was unbowed

This morning I softly said
Oh comrades, please listen up
If you don't see me back
Have no worries 

This morning I wondered 
Whether I should continue 
The journey is not over
Why giving it up now

This morning I hung up my pen
The dried ink was like a rainbow
Where my words wandered
After I let them go

This morning I turned my head
All I saw was the light 
That reflected off the sites of sandy sediments
In an unfamiliar river that I haven't yet crossed

This evening I'm taking a stroll
In an unbroken sleep through the night
So when dawn arrives 
My soul will not fade away

Translated by Wissai
Feb. 27, 2014

Excerpt of an excerpt of an excerpt

Excerpt of an excerpt of an excerpt (expanded version)

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Denise

.....Yesterday, I got in the inbox a letter from Denise. I didn't quite understand it, but a note of melancholy hit me nonetheless. The letter reads:

"Montréal, le 3ème Janvier, 2014

Mon cher Roberto,

Tu ne liras jamais ces pages que j'écris dans une école sage au vent mouille'  d'automne. Ce n'est peu-être que pour moi, pour te garder un peu; c'est la première fois que je te tiens dans mon décor, première fois que tu me viens au rythme de mes pas.

Ici, les forêts se referment et je te garde en creux dans ma vallée, entre l'étude et le goûter. Tu es dans les poèmes de Cadou que les enfants recitent en chantonnant;

Je t'attendrai Hélène 

a travers les prairies

a travers les matins 

de gel et de lumière 

Pour la première fois, je sais chanter pour toi, quand je décroche ma guitare. Avant je ratais un arpège, ou tu n'écoutais plus les mots qui devaient juste te parler, tu preparais le thé'. J'apprends a te parler dans le silence d'une école.

Tu vois, il n'y a pas qu'une insolence du bonheur. Dans la tristesse aussi, tout semble enfin facile, et c'est si simple de se ressembler. Le monde s'apprivoise, on en fait soudain ce qu'on veut."

(You will never read these pages that I'm writing in a school for kids in the damp winds of the Fall. Perhaps it's only for myself that I look after you a little; it's the first time that I hold you in my scenery, the first time you come to me in the rhythm of my footsteps.

Here, the woods close in on itself and I watch after you in the hollow of my valley, between study-time and snack time. You are in Cadou's poems recited by the children in a sing song voice:

I'll wait for thee, Helen 

across the meadows

and through the morning 

of frost and sunshine

For the first time, I know how to sing for thee when I take out my guitar and play. Thou used to prepare tea before I missed the notes on the piano or when thou wouldn't listen anymore to the words that were fair and just when I was talking to thee. I am learning to talk to thee in the silence and stillness of the school. 

You see, it is not only that happiness contains insolence. In the unhappiness that one also carries, everything seems easy in the end, and it's so simple that happiness and unhappiness resemble each other. The world gets tamed, and suddenly one does whatever one wishes to do."

Denise didn't say she borrowed the words from Philippe Delerm in  La Cinquième Saison. She surprised me with her sensitivity. Her words arrived when I was feeling blue and dejected over human trickery and cruelty and boundless capacity for sophistry. 

I met Denise on Halloween's Day in Las Vegas at Bellagio. We were sitting next to each other in a no limit hold 'em poker game. We were more interested in each other than the game itself. The chemistry between us was strong. The air was charged with electricity. I swear I saw sparks arching that evening. I had goosebumps whenever she leaned over and whispered double entendres. I couldn't help glancing at her pyramids, to her undisguised delight. Red wine loosened our tongues, especially mine. I was more loquacious than usual. Then around the bewitching hour of midnight, she ceremoniously invited me up to her room for "coffee". She was young enough to be my daughter. She also confessed to me that I turned her on and that I looked more like 45 than 65 and she wanted to be a "very close friend" of mine. To make the matter more delirious and delectable and delightful, she spoke French much better than I did. And she was telling me all this in rapid Canadian French. Several times, I told her to slow down so I could understand what she said. She was excited and nervous, you know. Since her English was not good, I had to summon all the French I had at my disposal and told her I could not regard her anything more than a "chère amie" because my son would kill me if I ever got married again. Seven times would be more than enough, don't you think? Come on, I ain't no Liz Taylor. 

In spite of the sensitivity of Denise, as shown by her borrowed words, I don't really trust her after she stormed off into the sunset and went back to Montréal, after I clumsily explained to her in my halting French that I would not, could not regard her anything more than a friend as I had commitments and enclosures and closures. But she knew and I knew the real reason for my failure to really open my heart to her: despite all my eloquent speeches about love and romanticism, deep down in the core of my being, I have lost faith in humanity, in the existence of a woman who would love me unselfishly and fearlessly and who loves me till the end of time even if I am penniless and physically infirmed and incapacitated and impotent and wrecked by self-pity and self-doubt and remorses and regrets. Of all my real amorous achievements and triumphs (unlike the fake ones of the loud-mouthed and shameless liar) and they were numerous as I alluded to in my earlier piece (and they could have been much more numerous if I had not suddenly got cynical), only one woman from Laos who would come closest in my conception of an ideal woman. Unfortunately, she already had a boyfriend when I met her. I could have pursued her relentlessly and she might have dropped her boyfriend for me as she seemed to like me very much,. But I refused to do so out of principle. She was a devout Budshist and so was I. I didn't want her to choose and I certainly didn't want to make her boyfriend unhappy. I never want to be happy over somebody's unhappiness. Her name, unfortunately, was also Laura. So I called her LL (Laotian Laura). I don't see her anymore. I purposely stay away from her. I have principles to uphold. I have my own commitments I have to keep. I have people I have to answer to. Besides, I must concentrate my energy to be financially independent. All these romantic sideshows and distractions are just for those twits and twerps who don't feel confident about their own attractiveness. I am confident about mine. My past records speak for themselves. Do I sound vain and vainglorious and conceited? Do I sound unlike a Buddhist full of modesty and serenity as I am supposed to? You can bet your sweet ass that I am. I am a walking contradictions, an embodiment of contrasts, an avatar of ambiguities. 

At any rate, Denise cried quite a bit after my clumsy exposition and then stormed off into the proverbial "sunset", leaving me "sensible" and calm and pleased and proud of myself beyond measure. I slowly drove home in the morning, and walked straight into the bathroom and took a long look at myself in the mirror to check if I was indeed "beau" and "charmant" as she alleged. Please don't laugh, but after preening and looking at myself from various angles, I must admit that French woman from Montréal had a point and discerning eyes! Today, I stopped over at the 24 Hours Fitness Club after work and signed up for a membership. I used to run and keep myself in a gloriously good shape, but ever since I developed a foot problem in my left foot and had to curtail running, my body has lost quite a bit of definition and vigor. The other reason I had to fork over some money to improve my physique was that I wanted to win a stupid wager about physical fitness (100 continuous push-ups and then 20 chin-ups on my birthday in October) I had with a friend. I hate to lose. I have a lot of pride and ego. The next time you guys see me, you will see a new, invigorating, slimmer Roberto, I promise. Let me tell you, there is no better incentive to keep your body in good shape at the "advanced" age of 65 than hearing a sexy, attractive younger French woman told you that you were handsome, funny, and sexy, if I heard her right. My French was rusty and I was hard of hearing, so I could just probably imagine and heard things that were too good to be true. But regardless of what happened to my hearing, the fact that I heard voices and I heard a speech in French that a sexy, young, attractive woman confessed that she was falling hard for me because of my demeanor, my looks, my intellect, and my basic honesty and integrity, that was enough for me to seriously work on my body and my looks as well as on my French.

I am glad she went back to Montréal, however. That saved me a lot of potential headaches. Anyway, I still remember that wonderful Halloween evening when I first saw her naked. A bold, impetuous move on her part. She looked straight at my eyes while lying in that unmade bed of hers. Then she rose up. Her clothes were on the floor in a matter of seconds. Her triangle was absolutely beautiful, innocent-looking and yet inviting. I asked her to help me. She readily complied. She kept saying I was handsome and sexy, especially my lips. She asked me if any woman ever found my lips sexy. I said, yes, there was another one, up in Alaska. She laughed, for real? she inquired. I said, mais oui, vraiment. We spoke in French. She clung tight to me and called my name, Oh Roberto, Roberto, mon chéri, as she reached the summit. Later, she fell soundly asleep in my arms. I felt peaceful, then, but not now. I just bought a journal so I can talk to her, without her knowing. She is coming softly to me on the velvet of words. She would think I am maudlin and mawkish. I will write to her with music, to tell her about my days and nights, with fresh wounds oozing hurts and blood. I will write neatly, in my best cursive style, with my Parker pen. I will tell her again and again what we talked to each other the first night we were together, how she said she was afraid she might be falling in love with me. I am looking outside. The night is still. The sky is immense and sparkles with stars. All of a sudden, I see her burning brightly in the sky. Flames envelop her naked beautiful body. And she is looking straight at my eyes, like she did the first night, right before she took off her clothes.

Leslie

A magazine reporter who called herself Leslie Lovely contacted me out of the blue, saying that I have generated a lot of traffic on Facebook and my blog due to the controversial, funny, thought-provocative, anger-arousing posts I put up there almost on a daily basis. Her boss wanted her to do an interview with me and so she wondered if I would agree to talk to her. 

I had been interviewed three times before: once by a radio station in New Zealand, once by a TV station in Houston, and once by some stupid guy working for a French radio news outlet. And each time it was a disaster. I came across inarticulate and stupid and ignorant. So this time, with Leslie, I was prepared. I asked her what she wanted to talk about. I demanded the right to edit the transcript. And I wanted the agreement in writing. I also wanted to tape the interview to verify the veracity of my answers. I didn't want any bitch reporter put words in my mouth. Since she came to me, she finally agreed to my terms, albeit reluctantly. 

-Gosh, you have a gorgeous view up here. We can see all over the city, and far to the mountains. Let's get down to business. You think you are smart, don't you? At least that's the impression the readers have of you. 

-I'm cerebral but I'm dumb and stupid in practical living. I can think. I have some moments of awareness and self-awareness. 

-Why and how you write every freaking day, like a man possessed, like a dying man who wants to leave a written testimony behind?

- I wake up every morning, feeling angry and dissatisfied with myself and the world. I want to kill somebody, but of course I cannot do that. I take it back. Yes, I can, but the consequences are so heavy, so expensive, so drastic, so final. So I write instead. I engage in sublimation, you understand? I split skulls with my words. I stab hearts with my tenderness. A man must have a reason to get up in the morning instead of lying in bed and die. I find anger fuels me, activates me, makes me do things I wouldn't do otherwise. Because of anger, I read more, study more, exercise more, and am determined to hang onto my money this time. The last time I had it, I just squandered it. Then I found out, as I should, that people judged me on the basis of how much money I had in the bank and treated me accordingly. 

-Looks like you do all right for yourself. A nice high-rise condo you have, tastefully decorated. You wrote in your blog that you also own a black Lexus. 

-I am getting by. I don't have as much money as I used to, but I am getting there. 

-Let's change the subject. All this talk about money nauseates me. Are you really popular with women as you've been incessantly bragging about that? Isn't there an undercurrent of inferiority complex here?

-Well, I'm not lying. Having known 23 women in the Biblical sense is no big deal. Look at me closely, won't you? Listen to my words. If you were a normal woman, you would like me, too. I simply possess looks and charms and what you call animal magnetism. I give off strong vibrations. Women pick up on the vibrations. Let me tell you something. The number could easily go to 30 and higher. But I was faithful to Harriette. After I met Harriette, there was a whole bunch of women strongly interested in me. I didn't want to lose Harriette, so I was cold to the overtures. Besides, I am tired now, and more difficult and selective. Common women bore me and turn me off, no matter how much they are turned on by me. I've learned my lessons. Actually, I was a lazy man. I did not go out of my way to look for women. I just made myself available to them. I was receptive to their overtures. But you should know there was a time I actively chased after women and I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was rejected left and right. But I learned from my experiences. I didn't let failures undermine who I thought I was. Then, I hit on a formula of success. I haven't looked back since.

-Could you tell us what the formula is?

-No, I did tell my son. I hope he's using it. 

-Did any of the women really love you?

-Four. Two died. One is married. She lives in Chicago. I think of her now and then and wonder how she's doing. 

-Why didn't the relationships last?

-I was bored with them. They had nothing to offer me intellectually or emotionally. They only fulfilled a social need. Harriette was no intellectual, but she sure had a heart. She satisfied me emotionally plus you what.

-I think I know what you meant, but let's not go there. This is a family publication. 

-Is that so?

-Can we talk about Laura? Who is she? She appeared a lot in your earlier writings, but not lately. What happened? 

-She was my incubus for a long time. Thirty-three long years. I finally got rid of her in 2005. She has not got into my dreams since. There was a time, especially during the third and final year of the relationship, I thought the world of her. I could have died for her. I loved her that much. I thought she was a better human being than I was. I also thought she loved me. But I was wrong on both counts. She was simply more intelligent than I was and came from a family that had some more money than mine did. That was all. If I ran into her today, I wouldn't even look at her. To me, she was already dead. Dead in my heart. Indifference is a sign of death of love. In a way, she and Anita shaped me into who I am today. 

-Who is Anita? Anita Ekberg?

-Don't be silly. Anita Pasado, that's who. A ghost in the past. Because of her, I've tried to improve my mind and body. A long, sad story. I can either talk about her for days or I just clam up. I prefer to not talk about her now. 

-Do you like sex?

-I thought you told me you worked for a family publication.

-Yes, but you still can talk about sex in a sanitized, dignified, not salacious fashion, can't you? A man's sexuality says a lot about himself, psychologically speaking. I was sent over here to interview you because you are a very interesting man. You have been arousing, no pun intended, a lot of interest in you. Our readers want to know everything about you. So would you answer the question, please. Do you like sex?

-What kind of question is that? Of course I like it, but not as much as my women would like me to do. I find it boring after a while, not counting dirty and inconvenient and tiring. Sex is only beautiful if there is love involved. And I realized that the women didn't really love me. They loved themselves. They used me as a tool to love themselves. So I guess that was one of the reasons why the relationships didn't last. Harriette did love me, however. With the totality of her heart. May she rest in peace. I miss her terribly. Why did she have to die before I do?

-Do you lie?

-Another interesting question. Of course, I do, only when I have to (chuckling). I don't make a career out of it as some, scratch that, as most people do. I am generally a forthright, honest person. I want people to accept me and love me on the basis of who I really am, not who I pretend to be. In my writings, however, I've taken a lot of poetic license. I let my imagination and wishful thinking run wild. 

-It seems to us you are awfully proud of your writings though you have not gathered them in book form and publish them. Why not?

-Because I am a coward who has no faith and confidence in his abilities. Most of what I have written are trash. Only a few poems of mine may endure. 

-You are tackling Wittgenstein, a very tough row to hoe. Why? 

-I approach philosophy in an amateur, dilettante sort of way. I pick up a bit of wisdom here and there so I can feel good about myself. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche are the only two philosophers I am trying to digest. I have tried to understand Wittgenstein for a long time, but made no serious efforts until now. Wittgenstein talked about the death of philosophy as traditionally conceived. He talked about language. The two areas interest me, 

-You come across as angry, immature, old man. Why? 

-I don't know. That's who I am, I guess (chuckling). I have ego. I have pride. I cannot stand people who are ignorant and stupid but think they are well-informed and smart. I just cannot stand them. Those people have no intellectual courage. They are poseurs and liars and cheaters. I am not. 

-Does anybody love you right now, given that Harriette is dead and buried and gone for over a year now? 

-Yes, besides my wife, there is at least one, but she does not really understand me, so there are problems. There's another one that's piqued my interest, but there are vastly complicating factors involved so I ruled that one out, too. And then there's another woman living far away who's taken a keen interest in me, but she appears to be a very bad cheapskate, much worse than me, so that won't fly. I have enough money to last me until I die, but I won't share it with cheapskate women. I would share it with fair-minded women, though.

-Are you a happy man?

-Much better than I used to. I don't think of suicide and homicide much anymore. 

-Why is there obsession with violence? 

-Because I am a violent guy. That's how my brain is constituted. But I am also capable of gentleness and compassion and love. The woman in Florida named Sassy knows that. I am trying to write violence away. It's working, albeit slowly. 

-Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Wissai. I am sure, no, I hope that the readers will find this interview interesting. 

-Listen, are you free next week? Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?

-I am sorry. I can't. I am a lesbian.

-I thought so (chuckling) but I wanted to make sure. Please allow me to ride the elevator with you down to the street. May I do that? It's been splendid talking with you. 

Three weeks later, Leslie Lovely, the strange, weird, sharp-tongued journalist who worked for a "family publication" called me back and begged for another interview. This time, she said her employer would offer me some financial incentive. Naturally, I asked her what the financial incentive entailed. An eight-day first class cruise for two around the Society Islands, airfare included, or $13,000 in cash, she informed me. I gave her the routing and checking number of my bank account.

She showed up, doll-like, with tasteful make-up---slight rouge, almost indiscernible eyeshadow; with a low-cut white blouse, sporting a jade pendant between two nice pyramids topped by perky, pointed nipples, hardly covered by sheer white bra; and stylish jeans on top of expensive-looking shoes, enhancing her statuesque shapely figure and height of around 5'8". She dressed as if she went for an informal date with an artist. I liked what I saw on her, but I didn't dispense any flattering remark after giving her a quick-over with my appraising look and sporting a most friendly smile on my still drop dead gorgeous, chiseled face.

I offered her a choice of tea and biscuits or wine with an assortment of nuts. She opted for the latter. It was Thanksgiving eve. Dinner time. I didn't invite her to dinner. I never gave a woman an opportunity twice. She didn't say anything about the view of the city this time. Lights were already all over town. A big globe of full moon was on the rise over the mountains in the west. Instead, she asked me if it was okay to look at the books on my bookcase which was lined up against the wall in the living room.

-You sure have a lot of interesting books. You read all those?

-No, they are for show. 

-I thought so.

-Leslie, I don't really care what you think. Are you here to talk about me or about you?

-What's eating you? You sure are not friendly this evening. What's wrong, honey?

-Don't "honey" me, please. So are we proceeding with the interview or you're preferring with chitchat over sweet nothings?

-Okay, Mr. Wissai. Please tell our readers in ten words who you really are. They want to know. And I want to know, too. I've been intrigued.

-Poet-philosopher-writer-hunter-poker player who loves taking risks. 

-Elaborate, amplify, elucidate, clarify, please.

-Look, after being able to put food on the table, I'm not interested in hoarding money for rainy days. I'm not terribly intelligent. I know that. Everybody knows that. But I am always attracted to the idea that I am different than most, better than many. My ideas are different. My values are different, maybe even better. Very few humans impress me. I look at my fellow men and I see mostly loud-mouthed monkeys, neurotic chimps, and defective, stupid, greedy, lying humans. I don't want to be like them. I can be like them, but I don't want to. That's the difference between me and most human beings on this planet. You can write that down and take it to the bank. So I read, trying to know who I am and what was out there beyond the noise and the din. I wanted to write poems for a long time, but I couldn't because I was stupidly bogged down by rhyme and meter and all that shit. Then one day about 15 years ago, I got a breakthrough. I ignored all the rules. I just concentrated on the rhythm. And I have not looked back since. About being a hunter, any moron can be a farmer. All you need to do is to follow the rules and the weather and the politics and you survive until retirement. Then you really start to live. For many it's too late. Most monkeys are proud of that regimen, however, at least outwardly. They skimp and save for rainy days while their life is slipping away from them. I could not be a farmer, not for long. I have a temperament of a nomadic hunter. I hunt dangerous carnivorous beasts, besides easy herbivores. I feel alive when I hunt. I feel a rush of adrenaline when my life is in danger and a calming, satisfying feeling of triumph when I bag a prey and carry it back to my tent. Hunters usually don't have a respect for farmers, for easy, safe living. I am not rich, but I am not starving either. You can see that.

-Yes, I can see that. Like I said last time, you seem to do all right. 

-Let's talk about love. It features predominantly in your writings. 

-What's there to talk about? I wrote about love but I don't believe in it anymore, after being mistreated by whores and douche bags. I don't know women. I gave an impression, even bragged, that I knew women, but I didn't. I still do not. 

-Do you love any women right now?

-Are you kidding me? Are you hard of hearing? 

-What's wrong? 

-Nothing's wrong. It is what it is. I don't believe in love anymore. No women love me. And I love no women. That's fair. That's an equation. 

-Are you feeling lonely then? (Leslie gave me a seductive smile. She bent forward, fingering her pendant, watching my reaction. Her pyramids were in full view. The nipples were fully erect and inviting.  I leaned back, giving a sigh)

-I am too tired from hunting to feel lonely, too disillusioned and angry to feel horny. In fact, I feel like killing some woman, maybe two or three right now.

-Really? How exciting! Do you really? Or just a thought, an idle thought, and not really an obsession?

-As I told you the last time, killing is not hard at all. It's dealing with the aftermath, that's hard. 

-Are you prepared to deal with the aftermath?

-I don't know yet. But right now, I don't give a shit about love and loneliness. I just don't.

-Mr. Wissai, honey, yes, I am calling you honey, please allow me. Tell me what's going on. Can I help? I really mean that. Fuck! Can't you see I am being sincere here? I didn't tell you it was I who badgered my boss into going back and getting another interview with you.

-Leslie (I was sighing, once more. I looked away, at the moon now high above the mountain. I could see the snow on the mountain summit reflecting the moonlight. It was quite a lovely sight), certain realities just dawned on me. A midget bitch called me names. I was suppressing the anger. Now it's rebelling, demanding me take immediate action. I told it to wait, telling it that in hunting you must learn to wait for the right time to strike and that you must maintain silence. You don't want to alert and scare the prey away. Talks and threats are cheap. 

-Roberto, I hope you don't mind if I call you you by your first name. You've been calling me Leslie. It's only fair, right? All what you just said excited me beyond measure. Do you know that? Nobody has talked like that to me. Nobody. You're the first one. I smell blood. I smell passion. I smell pain and anger. Deadly combustion. The result is either jail time, even death or "great literary works"'(sic!) in the waiting. Of course, I want literary works, not a mundane court trial, then long prison term. That would be too boring, too predictable, deep down, although it looks exciting at first, ratings would go up. I would profit tremendously. I could write a book about you. No, honey, you are too good for any bitch. You don't have to stoop down to their level. About the midget bitch, she is not worth your trouble. She is scum. She is human trash. A cheap parasite. She is not even self-supporting. She is living on charity. And yet she has the stupidity to be proud of herself. Of what? She can't fuck, can't cook, can't read, can't understand what's the fuck going on with the world because she's half-assed literate. She should just roll over and die like a little bug that she is. I understand you were lonely at one time and she was your plaything for a while. But you are okay now. You have money again, health, good looks, and talents. Forget the bitch. Let's go to the gym and work out. I lied to you the last time I was here. I am no lesbian. I am a full-blooded heterosexual woman. I like you a lot. In time, you will like me. I guarantee you that. Don't be shy. Let's go. But first, I need to go to the bathroom. Honey, please show me where it is.

When Leslie came back from the sojourn in the bathroom (she stayed there for a long time, at least half an hour. I didn't know what the fuck she did in there. Either she had a very bad case of constipation or she was playing game, testing me if I became impatient and then knocked on the door, asking what the hell was going on. I didn't do anything. I stayed fixed in the living from, "thinking". She could have dropped dead in there for all I cared. I was in my violent misogynistic mood), she was surprised that I just looked at her with my eyebrows raised. She sheepishly smiled. I silently pointed to the chair, indicating that I was not in any mood to go anywhere. Not yet. Then I opened my mouth,

-I was thinking of what you had said about the midget bitch. Her name is Lund, by the way. That's my nick for her, very pregnant and gravid with meanng. Look it up. You must be a linguist, well versed in many languages, to know what it means. The other nick I have for her is VAW. Exotic, but mundane. If you can figure what that means, that would make my day. Anyway Lund/VAW Is just a very stupid bitch. She didn't understand me at all. She thought she would make me angry and mad with her fucking cheap insults. She didn't know by doing so she travelled into a fucking dangerous terrain. Everything looked so fucking clear in hindsight. She was kicked out of an association of exiles. She quarreled with her neighbor, screaming bloody murder at the top of her voice in the dead of the night, waking the whole fucking neighborhood up. Her neighbors called the cops. They and the ambulance arrived, sirens blared off, the whole fucking scene of mayhem and black comedy. She held a lowly job which paid barely above minimum wage. She has no job now. Who the fuck would want to hire her? One must be stupid and crazy to hire her. The woman is a ticking time bomb of troubles and annoyance. She speaks broken English. She does not know shit about anything, except sitting on her ass all day watching TV. She is living on the kindness of humanity. Her relatives disowned her because she quarreled with them. She quarreled with everybody. She is a fucking parasite, and yet she had the gall to criticize me for being a lousy lay in bed, and of my erratic income for being a hunter! I am self-supporting. I don't live on handouts as she does. I play the stock market. I am into consulting. I make money in poker. I am financially independent. I have money to travel, to go anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat. Lucky for me, I didn't show her what I had in the bank, otherwise I would be more upset now. I didn't want to tell her that I was a stud in bed with Harriette out of the kindness my heart. I didn't want to tell her I performed poorly in bed with her because she had a lousy, unsexy body and she didn't know how to excite a man (At that time, Leslie interjected, saying, "I do! I do!", I smiled warmly at her). I'm telling you, she is a walking defnition of failure in every sense of the word. Her ex-husband beat her, chasing her all around the neighborhood. She had to take refuge in a neighbor's house. She is a midget but has a very big mouth. She was full of Midget Complex. You no doubt wondered why the fuck I went out with her. She chased after me, not the other way around. I am a man. I want to experience life, high and low. As simple as that. Anyway, I'm tired of talking about the bitch. Let's go. You said you like me, heh? I have that effect on women. Don't be so bitchy and tart-tongued, all right? I am in no mood for that. I want to relax, taking things easy. 

We went to the gym and then to a Thai restaurant called Lotus of Siam and had a grand time. She picked up the tab on her expense account. We talked just about everything under the sun. With Leslie, I felt free and uninhibited in thoughts and language. I didn't have to watch out for the social "etiquette". I just had to be myself and I was. 

We dated on and off for six months. We fought and made up and fought again. Then she wanted me to spend time with her and her friends in Tahiti on a vacation. I declined, saying that I didn't feel like "bourgeois" enough. From Tahiti, she send me two poems two days apart. 

Sea of Love 

Dost thou ever remember once I told thee

When I first saw thee, I felt like swimming in a sea

Of love. Thou just smiled that sweet smile of yours

And said nothing. Well, I'm having that feeling once more.

A guy just swam by and my memory is triggered.

He looked so much like thee and I remember

How I felt like floating in a sea of love by thy side

Little did I know that all thou did was to make me cry

Where art thou now, the man of my past?

I'm swimming in a sea near Tahiti and my sadness suddenly is vast.

The sea I'm swimming is not the sea of love at all

Rather, it's the sea of loneliness I often feel when walking in a mall

One of these days thou wilt die 

One of these days thou wilt die 

Maybe the one to go first is me

If that's the case, would thou cry? 

And ever wonder why I loved thee?

But if thou goest before I do

Without ever saying thou lovest me, too

Forever and ever I would rue 

Well, the one who "went first" was her, I sadly report. Her return plane went down as it approached Los Angeles. All on board perished. I was stunned. First Harriette, then Anita, and now Leslie. I must have the touch of Death. All the women who really cared and loved me died not too long after they had confessed their affection for me. Now I feel like I am being jinxed and hexed. I am afraid to go on a date and to fall in love......

Roberto Wissai/NKBa'

Feb. 23, 2014

On Aggression in Poker

On the nature of aggression in Poker

The following piece is taken mostly from an article written by Stephen Bloomfield in the magazine Ante Up. Poker has many parallels with Life. Timid, risk-averse humans don't usually thrive in life, especially in war combats.Neither do they play poker as the game requires aggression and killer instinct. Kyle Siler of Cornell University recently published Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker in the Journal of Gambling Studies. Siler established that poker is largely a game of skill. Additionally, Siller based his findings on an analysis of database of millions of hands played online in six-max no-limit poker. 

Siler finds poker is "a complex strategy of skill and luck, rationality and intuition, mathematics and psychology, fraught with uncertainty over outcomes, best practices and their relationships to success."

The study finds that tight-aggressive style is most profitable for most people whereas loose-aggressive play produces the best results for a limited number of players and the worst results for a much larger number of people. 

The study also suggests that as folks move up in stakes, competitive edges shrink. 

As Man is a flexible, highly adaptable animal, he can be taught to cultivate aggression. Military training of raw recruits is all about instilling aggression and discipline at the same time. Likewise, poker's skills which include aggression can be learned. 

Richard Nixon financed his campaign for Congress partly out of the winnings he made during his service in the Navy. Harry Truman was an avid poker player. Nixon ordered Christmas bombings over Hanoi in 1972. Truman didn't agonize over the decision to drop atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He didn't hesitate to sack General McArthur over insubordination. Don't mess with aggressive poker players. You don't know what to expect from them unless you are a dedicated poker player yourself. 

Wissai

2/21/14

Egypt's "Rhinoceros" Allegory

Note by Wissai: beware of mass hysteria, the supposed "infallibility" of the Bible, pernicious effects of Fear, and failure of critical thinking. 

CAIRO — The third anniversary of Egypt’s 2011 revolution passed late last month, and I’ve just finished rereading “Rhinoceros,” the 1959 play by Eugène Ionesco. For someone living in Cairo these days, the parallels between the Romanian-French playwright’s mid-20th century parable about the rise of fascist and Stalinist conformity in Europe and the growing — if not absurd — mass hysteria surrounding the rise of Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi are striking.  

Café windows are covered with posters of the man who overthrew the elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, and who is already seen as the next leader of Egypt. In central Cairo, you can buy chocolates featuring his picture. All day long, TV channels run excerpts from his speeches mixed in with patriotic hymns. At a recent wedding party at a luxurious hotel facing the Nile, guests started hitting the dance floor as soon as the D.J. played “Teslam al ayadi” (“Bless your hands”), an old nationalist song that many Sisi groupies have turned into an ode to the man, even setting it as the ringtone on their cellphones.  

The Egyptian friend who brought me to the party described this Sisi-mania as “a real epidemic,” a virus afflicting even the once-rebellious youth who filled Tahrir Square three years ago. 

A few days ago, outside the courthouse where Mr. Morsi is on trial, two girls had proudly strapped military boots to their heads in a gesture of submission to Field Marshal Sisi — like the characters in the Ionesco play who, one by one, grow bumps on their forehead that end up turning into rhinoceros horns. 

The first time I read “Rhinoceros,” I was in secondary school in Paris. My teacher told us it described the roots and danger of fascism, and how an ideology combined with a conformist mind-set can reshape people’s minds. The play, a classic of the “theater of the absurd,” was a vivid allegory of the upsurge in totalitarianism across Europe, and the conformity, fear and collective psychosis that came with it. 

“Fear is an irrational thing,” says Le Logicien, a character in the play. “It must yield to reason.” 

In Act 1, the sudden appearance of several rhinoceroses in a small town in France raises more fear and suspicion than fascination. By Act 2, people start becoming contaminated by the “rhinoceritis” bug. That’s the case of Botard, one of the characters. After fighting the epidemic, even calling it “monstrous,” he ends up growing a horn himself. By the end of Act 3, all but one character, Bérenger, have turned into beasts. 

Today’s Egyptian liberals and leftists mostly remind me of Botard. After resisting the manipulations of the military for two and a half years, many of them finally succumbed to its will, despite suffering pressure and humiliation. Like Botard, they seem to have lost their sense of resistance. 

In parallel with a heavy crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and revolutionaries, the cult of Field Marshal Sisi has reached a level of collective madness. In mid-January, as Egyptians were invited to vote on a new Constitution, polling stations turned into pro-army rallies — with fanfare and candies — while opponents were kept away from the show, hiding in their little corner.  

On the TV, newscasters have metamorphosed into agents of the official truth. The army is fighting terrorism. Doubters should watch their backs. Field Marshal Sisi is the man of the hour. 

Comforted by the mainstream trend, and giving up on their individual free thoughts, many Egyptians take this narrative for granted. Dudard, another rhinoceros of the play, summarizes it perfectly: His desire, he explains, is to join the “universal family.” 

In some ways, the widespread propaganda resonates as a bad version of absurdist theater. Last month, a puppet character featured in a Vodafone commercial was put under investigation after someone accused it of secretly passing on terrorist instructions. Even my daughter’s well-educated and polyglot pediatrician contracted the virus. To him, the army is doing nothing else than protecting the country from a big “American plot” to weaken the region by destroying the military forces.  

Ironically, the newly turned rhinoceroses of Egypt are the same ones who used to accuse the Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters of being nothing more than a bunch of sheep. “You have to go with the flow,” one character in the play explains. 

Of course, Egypt has its unique story. It is a country where people have grown up with real love for the army and a nostalgia for the blustery nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. But there are definitely patterns inherent to other fascist states: the blind submission to authority, the persecution of those who think differently, and the tendency of unifying around a common enemy, in this case, the Brotherhood.  

For many, putting on an awkward rhinoceros horn is more comfortable than risking losing everything in the name of freedom. 

On Jan. 25, the anniversary of the revolution, I followed the few hundred ex-revolutionaries who had gathered in front of the Union of Journalists while facing off against tear gas volleys. A few blocks away, tens of thousands of rhinoceroses had charged in the very symbolic Tahrir Square — where activists had confronted President Hosni Mubarak’s forces three years ago — cheering on their new hero, Field Marshal Sisi.  

In the middle of the crowd I recognized the journalist and activist Khaled Dawoud. Once an opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is now a hardcore critic of the army. But to many Egyptians, he is an alien. I asked him if he still had hope for his country. “Yes,” he replied with no hesitation. “As long as I see these young people in the streets, the revolution is not over.” 

Saved by his love for another character as well as his devout belief in critical thinking, Bérenger, too, manages to resist the stampede. 

“I am the last man left, and I am staying that way till the end! I am not capitulating!” says Bérenger before the curtain falls. 

  Delphine Minoui  is the Middle East correspondent for Le Figaro.  

Book Chapter Four

Part Four: Poetry

Thus section is a compendium of poems written or translated by me that I deemed of value and attested to my claim that of all the Vietnamese that I personally know, none would come close to me in the handling of the English language in terms of poetic expressions. 

Rượu và Em

Em hỏi thật anh giữa em và rượu?

Thì anh ơi, anh sẽ chọn bên nào?  

Câu hỏi buồn nghe đơn giản làm sao!

Trong một phút anh đi vào bối rối.

Nếu chọn em nghĩa là anh nói dối!

Còn rượu ư? …Anh thấy thật sai lời.

Rượu và em là nắng rớt mưa rơi.

Mà mưa nắng suốt đời luôn tiếp nối,

Rượu trong chiều còn em thì trong tối

Rượu và em là gạch nối của đời anh

Nếu bây giờ em lại hỏi anh!!

Thì anh bảo em đừng cho anh ngốc nghếch

Nếu vì men lắm cuộc đời chấm hết!??

Thì trong yêu thiên hạ chết cũng nhiều

Rượu và em là hai nỗi nhớ đáng yêu!

Nếu được chết:

Anh sẽ chết một chiều bên em và có rượu.

(Khuyết danh)

Booze and You

Please tell me truly, between me and booze, 

Which one would you choose?

Your sad question is not simple as it sounds!

It sent me straight into a realm of quandary

If I say I chose you over booze, that means I just lied

But if I chose booze, that would go awry

Booze and you are like sunshine and rain

One follows the other without end

Booze is for the evening while you are for the night

Booze and you are the links of my life

So why you ask me I have to chose between you two 

Please don't take me for a fool

Yes, it's true one can die from too much booze

But haven't you heard love can be a snooze?

You and booze are the loves of my life

If I have to die,

I want to die in an evening full of booze and you 

Quick Translation by

Wissai

March 1, 2014

CHƯA PHAI

sáng nay tôi ngưng bước

không hẳn là bỏ cuộc

chỉ dừng lại thấy đau

và thấy mình chảy máu

sáng nay tôi đứng lại

hai chân chưa khuỵu ngã

thân hình dù buông thả

nhưng trụ cột vẫn là

sáng nay tôi nhắn khẽ

bạn đồng hành hãy nghe

nếu không thấy tôi về

xin đừng lo lắng nhé

sáng nay tôi tự hỏi

mình tiếp tục hay thôi 

cuộc hành trình chưa nối

sao đã vội buông trôi

sáng nay tôi gác bút

mực nước khô cầu vồng

thả chữ nghĩa long đong 

lúc hạ huyệt xuống dòng

sáng nay tôi ngoảnh mặt

chỉ thấy ánh phù sa

trên con sông xa lạ

một mình tôi chưa qua

tối nay thật chậm rãi

hãy ngủ trọn đêm dài

để nay mai bừng lại

thấy hồn mình chưa phai

Lưu Nguyễn Đạt

Đất Trinh, Feb. 24/27, 2014

NOT YET FADING AWAY

This morning I stopped marching

That didn't mean I had quit

I stopped because I felt pain 

And my blood had leaked

This morning I came to a stop

Although my body might be swaying

My feet were still firmly on the ground

And my spirit was unbowed

This morning I softly said

Oh comrades, please listen up

If you don't see me back

Have no worries 

This morning I wondered 

Whether I should continue 

The journey is not over

Why giving it up now

This morning I hung up my pen

The dried ink was like a rainbow

Where my words wandered

After I let them go

This morning I turned my head

All I saw was the light 

That reflected off the sites of sandy sediments

In an unfamiliar river that I haven't yet crossed 

This evening I'm taking a stroll

In an unbroken sleep through the night

So when dawn arrives 

My soul will not fade away

Translated by Wissai

Feb. 27, 2014

Fire In The Blood

Somebody told me

You're the lady with fire in the blood

And he meant not just the whiskey

What the man said was so right

One look at you unleashed the flood

Of emotions that I had bottled up inside

Tonight under the starry, starry sky

My mind keeps thinking about you

I'm wondering if my heart is being true

Or it's simply my imagination that's running wild 

At any rate, I'm letting you know

I just briefly met you 

But I can't get you out of my stupid mind

Feb. 28, 2014

Wissai

canngon.blogspot.com

Translation of Pham Cong Thien's famous poem, Stanza #8

The following poem, taken from "Ngay Sinh cua Ran" and named "Bat Nhi" (Not Two):

Mười năm qua gió thổi đồi tây

Tôi long đong theo bóng chim gầy

Một sớm em về ru giấc ngủ

Bông trời bay trắng cả rừng cây

Gió thổi đồi tây hay đồi đông

Hiu hắt quê hương bến cỏ hồng

Trong mơ em vẫn còn bên cửa

Tôi đứng trên đồi mây trổ bông

Gió thổi đồi thu qua đồi thông

Mưa hạ ly hương nước ngược dòng

Tôi đau trong tiếng gà xơ xác

Một sớm bông hồng nở cửa đông.

It's a perfect encapsulation of the inner conflict of the time - the strife between East and West, the unrelenting discord, and the gentle, hard-won denouement at the end. In poetry, there is resolution!"

Chung Nguyen, Umass-Boston

From "Serpent's Day of Birth"

Over my homeland gently blew the winds

For over ten years winds blew across the western hills

I struggled to follow a scrawny bird's flying shadow

One early morning you came back with a lullaby

White clouds hung low over the forest trees

Now across eastern and western hills the winds blow

Over the homeland's parched meadowlands down below

In my dreams you still stand at the door 

While I stand upon a hill amidst the blooming clouds

The winds blew across the hills of pine in the fall

I left the country in the summer rain, going against the flow

I was pained by the rooster's plaintive crow

A rose was blooming in early morn at the eastern door

Wissai/NKBa'

HỒN THƠ

ARS POETICA…between the dark and the void

Pablo Neruda

giửa bóng tối và hư vô bất tận

nửa tiết trinh và dư ảnh bình minh

ao ước nghẹn góc tâm linh chân tịnh 

khát khao chăng chỉ nhung nhớ ngàn năm

gương hoen tối mùi phong rêu trong trắng 

hoa không hoa gió trượt ngã lòng sa

thân ướp lạnh giường đêm xưa kê vắng

em không em mà tất cả đời ta

hồn thơ dại vụng về bên nắng mới

lời không lời mà sao mọc chơi vơi

ta hỏi lại em từ đâu bỗng tới

mà hồn nhiên đem tia sáng vào đời

lòng thế kỷ mong manh từng nguyện vọng 

mưa hơi mưa giọt đọng cuối triền miên

em quay lại đường về mây còn mỏng

nước còn đây chỉ vắng vợi người hiền

Lưu Nguyễn Đạt

Đất Trinh, March 19, 2013

Between the dark and the endless void

Exist half the virginity and the lingering dawn

The suffocating wish of a piece of the soul at peace

The yearning miss that is a thousand years old

Dark mirror and the musty smell of white moss

Winds slip and slide on flowers that look like no others

Refrigerated body lie in bed in a deserted night

You unlike others occupy my whole life

Crazy, clumsy lines of verse arrive in new sunshine

Words like no others rise like lost stars in the sky

I ask you again where you came from

And brought with you rays of sun into my life

My fragile desire that goes on for a century

Mists of rain condense into eternity

You turn back onto a road where clouds still not thick

Water is still here waiting for a kind-hearted soul

Translated by Wissai

March 20, 2013

(To be continued) 

 

Book Chapter Three

Part Three: Metaphysics and Epistemology

Unlike Bertrand Russell who turned to philosophy with hope of finding certainty, Wittgenstein  was drawn to it by a compulsive tendency to find answers to a question such as the following:

"Why should one tell a truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?"

Wittgenstein was both admired and feared for his relentless pursuit of truthfulness. A sister of his once wrote to him, saying that he was a great philosopher, and his written reply was, "Call me a truth-seeker, and I will be satisfied."

In many, many ways and fundamentally speaking, I am a truth seeker. That does not mean I don't lie. I do, mostly in my fiction. Harriettte also lied consistently but her lies were white lies, while mine have been very dark. But that didn't mean she was immoral. She was the most moral woman I knew. The only person that does not lie is my friend Omar. He's very weird. He is made differently from us, having a heart as big as the sky. I told him I feel like a big brother to him, trying to protect him against the evils of the world. He is very innocent, thinking everybody is as sweet and trustworthy as he is. But he is not diplomatic nor eager to please. He just does not talk much and he trusts people. Now Harriette is dead, Omar is my anchor and connection to morality and sweetness. Harriette was my answer to the nature of Love and Wittgenstein is now being my connection to Truth and Reality. 

Take the issue of God. As I said earlier, it is my firm conviction that God is a concept made up by Man. He is conceived in the image of Man, not the other way around. And those who disagree with you are imbeciles and idiots, at least in metaphysics. 

I dwell on the absurdist; I confront the nonsensical of the convention-bound, rule-oriented society and its denizens; I go to the jugular of life: its true meanings, its challenges, and how I am going to embrace those meanings and meet those challenges. 

In the process/quest of fulfilling those aspirations and inchoate imperatives/values which are markedly different from most of others, I invent and reinvent myself through the pursuit of risks, physical sculpting of my body, and relentless improvement on my mind. The last five years of my life have taken a frenzied devotion to the spoken Word and its manifestations: daytime speech and nighttime writing of poems and short stories where occasionally there are flashes of epiphanies and transcendence that make me quietly cry of joys, and shudder in amazement of self-validation. In the end, if we have honesty, we will meet ourselves in the road to discovery prior to our rendezvous with Death. If during our journey we have a life companion who understands and loves us unconditionally, and children who love us and appreciate what we have done for them, then our life, no matter how undistinguished it may look to others, to us it has a private fulfillment of passing on our genes and quiet acceptance of what life actually is.  

(To be continued) 

Book, Chapter One

Part  One: Love and Friendship

So, Anna, you've been telling me to write a book. You've been saying that I do have within me to be a writer of "fiction". I'm following your advice; I'm listening to your exhortation; I'm forsaking self-doubts and prudence. 

Today is a beautiful day, not to die as some American Indians warriors of yore exhorted their fellow tribesmen in their upcoming battle against the encroachment of the rapacious Christian whites on their ancestral lands, but to write, to unburden myself, to settle scores, to leave traces of myself to posterity.

Of course any man (or woman) who fancies that he can write has a big ego and pride. I've seen that day in and day out, even with those who are barely literate and hardly spell; with those with their boring, insipid, bloodless stories, but somehow garnered a little "fame" in their closed, shut-in, uninformed diaspora communities. I have read their stories and I couldn't finish them. Little souls and little minds generated little works which left no impact on me and on the world at large. Right now the only Vietnamese writer with any international standing whose corpus has steadily grown with the passage of time is Dương Thu Hương. Her novels have been translated into French and English, and several others. At least enough people thought well enough of her that in Wikipedia you could read about her in ten languages whereas I searched far and wide on the Net for references about a vicious vixen and all I found were pitiful, self-promoting materials which left a big, yawning chasm of boredom inside me. 

Henry Miller wrote books that are mostly ostensibly "autobiographical". Most "critics" didn't care for his books. They called them repetitious, self-indulgent, coarse, and obscene. A few, mostly avant-grade poets and painters and rebellious artistic souls, (such as Lawrence Durrell and Norman Mailer) adored him and called him a "genius". Late in his life Henry Miller befriended a number of Vietnamese "men of letters" (Phạm Công Thiện, Võ Văn Ái, and a poet living in Paris after the fall of Saigon in 1975 whose name I no longer quite remember (Thanh Tâm?)--I just remember that he wrote his poems in French and translated them into beautiful Vietnamese and that he published and printed the slim book of poetry himself) and they all seemed to be fond of him. I wish Miller were still alive now so I could ask him what he would make of my "literary productions". I would hazard a guess that he would not contemptuously dismiss them as a vicious vixen did in the "Review of Emergent Literature" two summers ago when I was on a cruise on the River Nile. A friend of mine brought her "review" to my attention. He asked me what I thought of the "review". I said, "What "review"?  I don't read sick, unbalanced words from a sick, unbalanced, self-impressed mind. The only English writer of Vietnamese descent whom I really respect is the young writer Nam Lê whose debut collection of short stories floored me. The book earned a number of true, bona fide, respected literary prizes from respectable, long standing establishments, not from junk, self-promoting organizations. One story was widely anthologized. He was sympathetically interviewed by the infamous, feared, and noted New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani."

As I said in the preface, I am finally writing a "book" and this is the one. Hopefully, I will finish it before I die. I know for sure a coterie of female fans and friends of mine will read it, if nothing else than to see if I included them in my "narrative". Of course, they will be, but always under disguise and fictitious names to avoid lawsuits. This is not going to be a book of kiss-and-tell, folks, full of salacious, titillating, sordid details. No, this is to be a "serious" book about "serious" subjects and issues. I am going to make it fun and readable. Whether I will meet my objective remains to be seen. 

Anna, I have resisted your encourage to write a "book of fiction" until now because I know it's very difficult to write one that's meaningful and memorable. The reader must care about the protagonist, if not identify with him. The reader must also be transported into a realm/world that he does not wish to leave. And most importantly, the reader must feel transformed, maybe a bit wiser or more beautiful at the end of journey. A writer is a good one when his readers want to meet him face to face and thank him for being in this world....

Henry Miller once said that to write is to get toxins out of one's system. I can relate to that. I also write in order to find myself and to make sense of my existence. Finally, I write so I would not kill myself and others. So what if I sound self-conscious and stiff? So what if what you are reading is not Art, not Literature, not true Fiction. I write mostly for myself and for Anna. She wanted a book from me. So a "book" she will get.

Writing the way I do is an invitation for ridicule and mockery. I am well aware of all the pitfalls of writing about oneself, but I can't help myself. In a way, all my words bear a stamp of an ill-disguised journal and memoir, a trek through memory lanes and a willful reconstruction of what could have been. I write to save myself from myself, rather than to fight against oblivion. And I don't really give a fuck what the vicious vixen thinks of my words. I don't give a fuck about what she has written anyway. She has been too stupid, too ignorant, too self-impressed to merit any concern from me. Let her uninformed, stupid, unlettered acolytes sing their praises of her. I bet she will not even get a footnote in literary history. I am sure of that. So far, no literary critic or book reviewer had deigned to mention her "books". 

And who would be my readers? Who would care to read about my journey? In the end, as always, I write only for myself. I am my only and best reader and critic. Anyway, here I go, once again, the 20th time. This time I will stick around.

A memoir usually starts chronologically and with all the details of David Copperfiled crap. In my previous attempts, I did just that. But I somehow felt unsatisfied and unfulfilled revisiting my life that way. This time, I opted for the Pulp Fiction route, via the alleyways and byways of flashbacks and associations. The account will be confusing as hell. I am a confused man, living in hell most of the time, the hell of my own creation through ignorance, pride, and odd preoccupation and flirtation with self-destruction. Often times, I wonder if I am afflicted with some kind of mental illness as I seem to go against the flow, too often and unnecessarily so. But then maybe I am not sick after all. The following paraphrased words of a successful risk-taker have been a source of comfort to me: 

"I liked to take risks, but I liked to win much more. My whole being cried for victory. I hated defeats. I couldn't stand to lose, in whatever endeavors I found myself, I had to emerge as a winner, as a survivor. I enjoyed the moment of triumph. I had a lot of hunting and killing instinct inside me. That was why I never regarded my taking chances as a form of self-punishment. Not consciously anyway. I had to win, I told myself. That was my mantra. That was always in my favor.

We all have destructive urges. We eat too much, drink too much, even talk too much. Gambling is no different. It is a challenge to overcome. Others have failed at overcoming this challenge and end up destitute, but not us. We are better humans. It's part of man's nature to stand stubborn in the face of challenge. And many of us feel compelled to create challenges whenever none present themselves. This is not wholly unhealthy. All champions share this trait. They drive themselves forward. A person who skydives is tempting fate. He earns the exhilaration of feeling alive after a dive. But his activity is only healthy if the subconscious payoff is survival and not death.

We must learn to modify our flirtations with danger. Our psyches must be geared to dueling with fate while assuring ourselves that we have the best of it. We must recognize we have destructive urges but these can be a life motivating force to be controlled by us." (Bobby Baldwin, an executive of MGM Entertainment)

At any rate, I am now engaging in a very public debate with a less than honest dude about patriotism. The debate is unhealthy and does me no good, yet I went for the bait like a moth irresistibly heads for the light in the night. This is not the first time I debate about patriotism. Several months and moons ago, I got into an argument with another dude about the same topic. I walked away from that debate with a decidedly unflattering impression and opinion of the "debater", just like I am having similar sentiments about the current guy who foolishly decided to cross swords with me. So, you see, I am not a man who likes to run for a popularity contest. Rather, I am a gent who revels in controversies in a search for truth and myself. You probably speculate that perhaps I have not been loved. Au contraire! I would loudly protest.

Love is my middle name. Roberto Amor Wissai (RAW) here is at your service. And he's spilling his guts out for the world to see. I have been in and out of one romantic adventure after another since the age of eight. At last count, I've been married seven times, and have had romantic liaisons with 23 women. Right now, there are three women who want to marry me, but only one is relatively well-off, unfortunately, and she does not seem to relish the prospect of sharing her wealth with me. Not that I am a gold-digger, mind you, but I am not going to marry a destitute woman either. Be real! That's why I am holding out for better prospects. Even at the relatively advanced age of 65, I can afford to wait as I am a handsome devil and have a way with women you never dream of. Women flock to me like bees to honey. Am I bragging? You can bet your sweet ass that I am. As I hinted earlier, I am no ordinary man. I am a cannon with words, yet sweet and vulnerable at the same time. Sadly, with all these women around and hovering over me day and night, I still feel sad and lonely and misunderstood, and I am not sure if I understand what Love really is. I am blaming it on TTAD, the first female that made my heart quiver and quaver when I was only a lad of eight. Digression: since I am writing this so-called book in a blog, one reader who happens to have a sweet spot for me just emailed me and formally lodged a protest that while she may love me, she would never consider marrying me. I fired back an answer to the effect that I would never humiliate and degrade myself so much that I would walk down the isle with her. Whom did she think I was? I might be crazy, but I was no fool. She was good enough as a long-distance friend, a distant old ship in the vast ocean. She would never be an elegant yacht close by. Does such a reader exist or I just made her up to spice things up and make me look good and credible? I honestly don't know. In the excitement of writing this confession, I have got things and people mixed up. Reality and fantasy keep colliding and causing unstoppable Big Bangs in my puny, little mind. 

Yes, TTAD was the acronym of her full name. An aristocratic name it was, don't you think? The Cherry Blossoms of The Ton Family. That was how her full name would be known if I translated it into English. For short, I just called her AD. In my playful moods, I called her Em Đào Của Anh (My Little Cherry Blossom). In response, she called me "Mi Amor Roberto Wissai". I once disclosed the reason for my unusual name to a bunch of nitwits who didn't take me at my word, and demanded to see my birth certificate. I made an offer to these incredulous "birther" ignoramuses that they had to take me a fine Italian restaurant at my own choosing if they wanted to see evidence of my royal roots. They stupidly agreed and lost the wager. My father was an Italian aristocrat and adventurer who ran into my Vietnamese fiery mother on high seas during an Atlantic crossing cruise. I was conceived in one of those storm-tossed nights during the crossing. I grew up in a large family (14 children, but only 8 could make it into adulthood). My mother's roots were in the Mekong Delta. Our family lived in Saigon where I was sent to an International School where the medium of instruction was English with heavy exposure to French as well.That was where I met AD and she immediately captivated me with her exquisite Vietnamese spoken with an imperial and imperious accent. We spoke to each other in Vietnamese during recess and after school while we were waiting to be picked up by our chauffeurs. She was breath-takingly beautiful, with blemish-free, smooth oval-shaped face, sparkling with bright, large eyes and two dimples while sporting long hair cascading to the length of half her back. She was vivacious, friendly, and always at the top of the class whereas I managed to crawl along at the bottom. She didn't mind the discrepancy in grades between us. She even tried to tutor me, with no success. I supposed she was drawn to me because of my exotic looks, height, friendly disposition, and irrepressible humor. I was the class clown. She always laughed and giggled at my jokes. I always have a weakness for any girl and lady from the former Imperial City Hue because of this early exposure to AD.

My idyllic time at the International School came to an end when I turned eleven because my family's fortunes took a dive. One day, my mother told me I had to attend a Vietnamese school where the tuition was much lower. She would rather see me go to one of those Viet public schools where there was no tuition, but I goofed off too much during my "salad days" that I couldn't pass the entrance exam. Anyway, I would never forget the day I told AD after class that that day would be the last time I saw her. She cried when l said the following last words to her: "Je t'aime. Je t'aimerai toujours, ma petite." I did and still do to this day. She set a standard for all others to follow. 

I was a mediocre student until 9th grade when I discovered philosophy and history. Overnight, I decided to be a great man like one of the heroes and philosophers I read about. I hit the books in earnest and tried to pursue a catch-up game in acquiring knowledge. I am still far behind and I have not given up on my dream. When I was seventeen I was selected as one of four three students in the whole country to attend Grade 12 in America. That year was a momentous year of my life, a watershed year. But before I tell you about that year, I have to interrupt all regular programming in order to address the big news on hand, the cold, brutal harsh reality that intruded into our ordered, ok, maybe disordered, but nonetheless truly insignificant lives: the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals on Pakistani soil in a military town, barely 100 kilometers from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.

His violent death didn't bother me. It had been a foregone conclusion. It was the aftermath frenzied, spontaneous jubilance of American mobs engaging in anthem singing, flag waving, and primal chanting of "USA, USA" that bothered me for its lack of dignity. A more subdued, solemn acknowledgment that justice had been rendered would have come across much better to the eyes of the Islamists and Muslims throughout the world and hopefully would have started a process of resolution and closure. Instead, the juvenile display of unrestrained jubilance over the death of a human being, no matter how evil he was, was unChristian and offensive to Muslim sensibilities and sensitive folks. It was not so much the holier-than-thou attitude, as the lack of awareness that grace and dignity would go further in relations, even with enemies, than self-righteous revelry. We should respect our enemies even if they don't respect us. Eventually the enemies will see us for who we are, and hopefully change their attitude. 

I'm having a hard time to narrate the year of 1966, the year that I already called the most momentous of my life. This morning as I was awakened by an ill-timed phone call, I waxed philosophical about the very definition of life: the reproduction of a patterned process of chemical reaction. Life is just a cross over of a chemical process where a pattern keeps repeating itself (reproduction). The universe itself is nothing but a chemical process.

Enough of this sidetrack. The year of 1966 saw a full awakening of my sexuality and emotional attraction for the opposite sex. AD was still in my mind, but I had not seen her for years . She only served as an inspiration for me to study and to dream about. There was one girl in the group that went with me to America. Her name was Agnes. She went to a French lycée in Saigon. She had an oval face and was quite pretty and of course, she had long hair. Of course, she was a good student, like AD. Unexpectedly, writing these words has been a tough slough for me. Maybe that is a way my mind is telling me my suffering is deep and my disappointment immense. It so happens that today is the Mother's Day. Agnes is not the mother of my son. And she never will be the mother of any children I have or will have. At one time in my life when I was young and green and stupid and naive, I wished she were. Now I am glad she is not. I am typing this on an iPhone as I walk around in the park in the sun. The desert air is fresh and warm and the sun shines brilliantly above. Winds from the west, crossing over the mountains and descending into the valleys and making the molecules of my body dance. I feel calm, serene, and a bit wiser. I just threw away the phone number of a librarian into the trash bin. I don't believe in romantic entanglements and complications anymore. Not at my age. I made a vow to stop at the number of 23. I forced myself not to flatter my ego and test my attractiveness and desirability to women. I didn't wish to bring pain and suffering to others. I didn't want to say things that I couldn't deliver. I do have a sense of responsibility. The sorrow that began with Agnes is deep and indelible. That does not mean she was not useful. Because of her, I forced myself to study in earnest French. English as a subject was tougher going, but my years at the International School and the year spent in America did help. At the tender age of 17, I was introduced to Chekhov, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Nathaniel Hawthorn, not to speak of T.S. Eliott and W.H. Auden. I didn't know what the hell I was reading. I was struggling with the mechanics and structure of the English language and its vast vocabulary, let alone the suggestive meanings behind the words. The more I struggled with the language, the more determined I was in mastering it. I studied day and night. I didn't go on dates although I had plenty of opportunities and my hormones were raging. I remember I once spent a weekend with a family sailing in the lake of Michigan and walking in the woods near their cottage on an island in the lake. Their young daughter of 16 was beautiful and she sported a low-cut shirt and a pair of short shorts, revealing breath-takingly beautiful, budding breasts and shapely legs, and driving me delirious and drunk with sexual excitement. I kept glancing at her breasts while she nonchalantly chatted away the afternoon, jumping from one topic to another. 

I was still a virgin when I returned to Vietnam in July 1967. The year in America did wonders to my comprehension of the spoken English. I also developed a taste for reading in English. I also picked up on my own some rudiments of German. My parents asked me what I wanted to major in college. Without hesitation, I said English. They were crestfallen. I explained to them that I had this crazy idea that I wanted to be really good at English. They were not happy at my decision, but they didn't nag too much. College life in Vietnam was medieval, boring, and unchallenging. I spent most of my time reading philosophy and brushing up on my French and German while enjoying a tumultuous love affair with Laura, a high-school classmate of Agnes. 

You know what? I am so glad that I am still lucid and capable of rendering my thoughts into words. This morning an asshole sent me a request to take his fucking name off the email list. The motherfucker had an honor to receive my wondrous thoughts because I just hit the "Reply All" button when I made a comment. The motherfucker typically felt self-important to write to me. He just could simply hit "Delete" button to deal with unwanted emails. Fools are plagued with a sense of self-importance and sly insults. They are so fucking stupid that they think they are smart. By sending me a stupid request like that, the motherfucker got his rocks off by thinking that he got me annoyed. Well, I was and much, much more. From the very beginning since I first laid my eyes on him I knew there was something fishy and odd about the midget. Assholes like him make me want to reach for the nuclear button so they would join the cockroaches in the conflagration of Hell. At any rate, where was I? Ah, I remember now. I was talking about Laura, that flat-faced bitch who caused me so much suffering. But in the final analysis, most of the fault lay with me. I was stupid and naive and idealistic. And it took me almost 40 years to realize so. Once I saw the errors of my conception and perception of Love, I had some peace. The bottom line is that Love is conditional and very much commercial in nature because the individuals involved are concerned about their own survival and benefits. To put it bluntly, one only loves another person when and if it is conducive to one's well-being and survival unless one is sick in the head like I am. Once again, I did get inspired to really work on my French and English just to keep up with Laura. Also, I became a poet mostly because of her. I had to deal with pain somehow. I am breathing more slowly now. I am trying to regain my equilibrium. 

Facts are simple and clear. They are what they are. But nitwits don't accept that. They have to inject their own biases and prejudices into them. Take the Book (Byblos, Biblia, Bible, I don't bother to add here the Vietnamese word since it offends my sensibilities so much. Saintly Scripture, my ass!), for example. It contains some verifiable facts, but it has far more baloney and bullshit stories than a man like me can stomach. Yet hundreds of millions, if not billions, of nitwits believe in the literal meanings of those bullshit stories about miracles and resurrections and the like. How can you explain that crazy and stupid phenomenon unless you want to lend credence to a theory that the feeble-minded nitwits need fairy tales to help them go through life. You just can't argue with stupidity and sophistry. In the end, you just shake your head and walk away with a mixture of contempt and pity for undeveloped minds. 

So, I zipped through the episode involving Laura, without bothering to touch on the gory details of courtship, the three-year bliss, and the shattering lies and bullshit that preceded and followed her dumping of me. I often wonder if I still love her. I don't think I do, but I am not sure. At any rate, as mentioned earlier, I don't believe in Love anymore. Not really. I've seen too much selfishness, too much preoccupation with self, too much self-righteousness to fall for that myth again. Love has to be gentleness and acceptance and caring and sacrifice and endless giving. Love is not an expectation of reciprocity, not peevishness, not temper tantrum, not defensiveness, not sarcasm and gamesmenship. Love is constant and patient forgiveness since deep down we understand the person we love and the values and attributes he/she possesses. That person may no longer love us or has never loved us, but if the values and attributes he/she once possessed are still there, we should continue loving that person. Just because our love is not reciprocated, it should not wither and dry up and blow away. That kind of love is not love. It's called commercialism and bartering. It's called cheap and crass. Yet, all too often what we offer as love for another human being is nothing but a cheap, easy instrument of exchange.

So, we open our minds to understand, and our hearts to accept and maybe to love. Love is impossible without understanding. But sometimes even though we understand, we can't bring ourselves to love the person because he's so evil, so obnoxious, and so stupid for us to be bothered to open our hearts, because the person disrupts our sense of peace and is a threat to our equilibrium and sanity. We thus walk away in indifference and relief from such a person because his presence, his very existence, his words, and his deeds are so disgusting that they are no different from a pile of stinking shit. Nobody in his right mind would come near a pile of steaming, stinking shit and poke his fingers into it and plays with it. Similarly, no right-thinking human would come near a loathsome, obnoxious, disgusting person. Yet, despite having this insight, I purposely behave in an manner that makes me appear unloveable. Why? Perhaps I am looking for a love that is rare, constantly forgiving, and eternally patient and sweet? Admittedly, I have tried to be more pleasant and socially acceptable lately. I have been less confrontational and belligerent. I have learned to be quiet and undisturbed. May the wisdom in me gently guide me to peace.

I've been mouthing off about love, but I know much more about love's flip side, hate. And right now, I am working on my body and my spirit to prepare myself for the day of reckoning when I must deal with the Midget, the Monkey, and the Coward. The Big Mouth, the Arrogant, and the Hypocrite are not on the distinguished black list yet, but they soon will be if they keep up their antics. Those who fucking attack me without any provocations must pay a price sooner or later. Life, in essence, is very simple: avoid troubles, but when troubles visit you, you don't run away. You deal with them. Omar, my best friend, once told me that. I retorted, "But, Omar, you complicate life with that attitude of yours. Why don't we just walk away." Omar just doubled over, laughing and said, "Roberto, I never told you not to walk away. Feign retreat, but don't ever forget. And always be ready to strike. Don't be a weakling, especially mentally."

I was busy bragging and boasting about my preoccupation with foreign languages and forgot the underlying Freudian reason for doing so until I read in the news that Colin Firth, the actor who got an Oscar for his virtuoso performance as a stuttering monarch in the "King's Speech" is now ironically developing a stammer in real life. That reminded me that when I was a young child, I had a severe speech impediment. Not only I stuttered badly, I also mispronounced words. I got that from my father and now my son also has the problem but only when he is nervous. I still can't pronounce and articulate certain sounds, but I hardly stutter now. I think with years of being laughed at, I developed an ever-ready aggressiveness, bordering on truculence and belligerence. More importantly, the intense efforts of making my thoughts known verbally somehow awakened all latent language skills, making me more attuned in  the finer point of language acquisition. I thus developed and have maintained an interest in languages and linguistics.

"Roberto, You're smart, but not sensible," said an acquaintance of mine the other day. I said, "Pleeease, tell me something I don't know." I was exaggerating, of course. I'm not sure about my being smart, but I'm positive that I'm insensible, way damned insensible. What else to explain this exercise in fictional memoir, this bellyaching about everything and nothing, that turning down of romantic and sexual offers from nice, decent female admirers, that insane wager I'm having with a friend. I'm betting with him for a hefty $5,000 that on my birthday in October of this year, I will weigh 155 lbs and be able to do 100 push-ups and 20 chin-ups. I have only 9 months left from the deadline and as of now I'm weighing 162 lbs and doing only 30 push-ups and 5 chin-ups. I'm in serious shit. Yesterday, I foolishly accepted a dinner invitation to a nice buffet. And I pigged out. So today, I'm starving myself. My body is rebelling and cursing me out. Thus far, today I have consumed one bowl of brown rice, a tiny amount of boiled chicken with a small carrot and a cup of cabbage, an orange, and a banana. I must stay away from food for the remainder of the day and night. On top of that, I must improve my physical strength.

I am sensible now, however,  at this very moment. There's something Freudian when people degrade themselves with salacious jokes. What do they try to accomplish? Approval? Fitting in? Proving that they have a sense of humor? Well, I am the one who has a very good sense of humor. People tell me so all the time. I make them laugh, relishing at my original, striking one-liners and unexpected observations. And I do have plenty of sex jokes as part of my repertoire, but I don't tell them in mixed company or in public. I only tell them to a select intimate friends. I know better. I have done enough acts of self-degradation with shameless bragging and lecturing and showing off my arguing skills. 

I am sensible now because I just woke up from an insensible dream. Well, most dreams of mine are insensible, but the one I just had was bordering on the pathological and the absurd because it involved Laura. I already told you I didn't love the bitch anymore, but why did the fuck she crop into my subconscious? Why didn't the bitch die and disappear for good? Worse still, the dream was a recurring one. Like 99% of the dreams about her, I saw her on the street, so I rushed over asked her why she left me. She would just smile and kept on walking. And of course, I woke up, as usual, feeling sad and stupid and angry at myself. 

I am sensible now because I have to in order to survive. A woman young enough to be my daughter confessed to me that I turned her on and that I looked more like 45 than 65 and she wanted to be a "very close friend" of mine. To make the matter worse, she spoke French better than I did. And she was telling me all this in French. Several times, I told her to slow down so I could understand what she said. She was excited and nervous, you know. Since her English was not good, I had to summon all the French I had at my disposal and told her I could not regard her anything than a " chère amie" because my son would kill me if I ever get married again. Seven times would be more than enough, don't you think? Come on, I ain't no Liz Taylor. 

At any rate, she cried quite a bit after my clumsy exposition and then stormed off into the proverbial "sunset", leaving me "sensible" and calm and pleased and proud of myself beyond measure. I slowly drove home, walked straight into the bathroom and took a long look at myself in the mirror to check if I was indeed "beau" and "charmant" as she alleged. Please don't laugh, but after preening and looking at myself from various angles, I must admit that French woman from Montréal had a point and discerning eyes! Today, I stopped over at the 24 Hours Fitness Club after work and signed up for a membership. I used to run and keep myself in a gloriously good shape, but ever since I developed a foot problem in my left foot and had to curtail running, my body has lost quite a bit of definition and vigor. The other reason I had to fork over some money to improve my physique was because I wanted to win the stupid wager I had with a friend. I hate to lose. I have a lot of pride and ego. The next time you guys see me, you will see a new, invigorating, slimmer Roberto, I promise. Let me tell you, there is no better incentive to keep your body in good shape at the "advanced" age of 65 than hearing a sexy, attractive younger French woman told you that you were handsome, funny, and sexy, if I heard her right. My French was rusty and I was hard of hearing, so I could just probably imagine and heard things that were too good to be true. But regardless of what happened to my hearing, the fact that I heard voices and I heard a speech in French that a sexy, young, attractive woman confessed that she was falling hard for me because of my demeanor, my looks, my intellect, and my basic honesty and integrity, that was enough for me to seriously work on my body and my looks as well as on my French. 

So, I suppose the theme for today is sensibility, rather, my struggle to be sensible in the face of cruelty and absurdity and farcicality. And I'm happy to report that I'm making some small progress. Like yesterday, I decided to take a high road in my reaction to a lowlife's desperate baiting of me by means of despicable carping and sniping words. The little twit and cheap womanizing twerp just dug his own grave of disgrace by his meandering, incoherent, rambling babbling of nonsense. The reader would look at his words and see clearly for who he has been: a little guy with a little soul with his gargantuan struggle with words to say about little things. One cannot expect big things out of a little guy with a little heart.

Was I bent out of shape because of the stupid behavior of the little twerp? Not really, I was annoyed but not upset. His stupidity annoyed me. I thought he was smarter than me, but it turned out he was more stupid than I was. I was calm today despite all the disappointments. I just kept my mouth shut and read my little handbook on Tibetan Buddhism. I want to get back to dreams. That would be more interesting than pontificating about twits and twerps and assholes, don't you think? Besides having recurring dreams about Laura, I used to dream about Agnes, too. I invariably dreamed that I was looking for her house in a certain neighborhood, but I couldn't find it. If there was ever a dream that was gravid with Freudian undertone of unattainment, this was it. And yet it took me more than 10 years to realize so. Once I did, I stopped dreaming about them . Apart from the usual dreams about having vehicles stolen or showing up for exams without having done any acts of preparation, there were two other dreams which used to occur with some regularity, but not anymore. I used to have dreams of extreme violence, some of them were so graphic and real that when I woke up, I had to wreck my brain to make sure I didn't actually commit all those acts. The other dream category was very odd. I would dream that I was naked walking down the streets and was very embarrassed to find myself in such a state. I would always wake  up and was relieved that I was merely dreaming. I am 65 now (as of 2014), and so far I have had 8 dreams that involved sex, one of which was about sexual intercourse, with a real sensation that intromission did take place. The fact that I rarely had dreams about sex says a lot about me. When I was in my late teens and early 20's, I used to dream that I was trapped in elevators or had to walk through fields of excrement or got lost in some kind of building. Those dreams said something about me, too.

When I was 21, I got my first bachelor degree. A year later, I got another one. I also managed to get a scholarship to study overseas for a graduate education in Public Adminstration. The subject matter was excruciatingly boring. I spent most of my time reading magazines and novels and journals of psychology and books of history and philosophy. I was doing my Ph. D. when Saigon fell to the communists. I had an opportunity to get to the U.S. so I married a vixen. Once an asshole asked me how I got to America. I told him the facts involved. There was no need to lie. But the fucking bastard later used that info to claim that I don't really love Vietnam because I didn't return to Vietnam but went straight to America. He taught me what evil was like. Well, I am a firm believer in karma. Unpleasant, dreadful things have happened to the asshole.  That's why I've tried to stay on the right path. I am even trying not to hold evil thoughts in my head. Indifference is bad enough. I meditate on the nature of misfortune everyday. It's not so much what happens as to how we react to what happens. Curb desires. Be loving, unselfish, and peaceful. I am a late bloomer. I discovered the virtues of nonviolence, gentleness, and forgiveness very late in life. I even backslide occasionally, but I am committed to higher impulses now. I even try to stay sway from greed because I know it's a source for suffering. I've seen that happen to so many people. I try to think what Siddartha would do if he were in my shoes. I try to think about private sins and public humiliations. One leads to the other. I try to stay from women who offer themselves to me. I don't have much money or power, so those women would be only delusional. I wonder if they really love me and take care of me willingly if I'm disabled or mentally incapacitated. I ask myself if they really know what love means or they are just after my body and the little money I still have. That was why I turned down that French Canadian woman's declaration of affection. I was flattered, but I didn't really believe her. I thought she dramatized her feelings. If she really cares about me, she will come back. Real love is impossible to walk away. I know. Trust me, I know. It took me almost 35 years to get rid of Laura in my mind. Even so and even then, I sometimes wonder. The long and short test about love is unselfishness and sharing, especially of money. It's very simple and reliable. All other tests and measures are just excuses and talks. Once again, I should know what I talk about. I've been victimized so many times. That's why I'm working my ass off to save money for rainy day because I've a distinct feeling that I'm one of the most lonely persons in this world, despite all the women who are interested in jumping into the sack with me. Thrice bitten, forever shy. I've to go back to sleep. Lack of sleep makes me maudlin and feel sorry for myself. The secret and not so secret wish to be loved makes us weak and dream of the impossible. Be strong and firm and realistic. That's what I tell myself everyday when I wake up. I feel like crying right bow. I am so sentimental.

Yesterday, I got in the inbox a letter from her. I didn't quite understand it, but a note of melancholy hit me nonetheless. The letter reads:

"Montréal, le 3ème Janvier, 2010

Mon cher Roberto,

Tu ne liras jamais ces pages que j'écris dans une école sage au vent mouille'  d'automne. Ce n'est peu-être que pour moi, pour te garder un peu; c'est la première fois que je te tiens dans mon décor, première fois que tu me viens au rythme de mes pas.

Ici, les forêts se referment et je te garde en creux dans ma vallée, entre l'étude et le goûter. Tu es dans les poèmes de Cadou que les enfants recitent en chantonnant;

Je t'attendrai Hélène 

a travers les prairies

a travers les matins 

de gel et de lumière 

Pour la première fois, je sais chanter pour toi, quand je décroche ma guitare. Avant je ratais un arpège, ou tu n'écoutais plus les mots qui devaient juste te parler, tu preparais le thé'. J'apprends a te parler dans le silence d'une école.

Tu vois, il n'y a pas qu'une insolence du bonheur. Dans la tristesse aussi, tout semble enfin facile, et c'est si simple de se ressembler. Le monde s'apprivoise, on en fait soudain ce qu'on veut."

(You will never read these pages that I'm writing in a school for kids in the damp winds of the Fall. Perhaps it's only for myself that I look after you a little; it's the first time that I hold you in my scenery, the first time you come to me in the rhythm of my footsteps.

Here, the woods close in on itself and I watch after you in the hollow of my valley, between study-time and snack time. You are in Cadou's poems recited by the children in a sing song voice:

I'll wait for thee, Helen 

across the meadows

and through the mornings

of frost and sunshine

For the first time, I know how to sing for thee when I take out my guitar and play. Thou used to prepare tea before I missed the notes on the piano or when thou wouldn't listen anymore to the words that were fair and just when I was talking to thee. I am learning to talk to thee in the silence and stillness of the school. 

You see, it is not only that happiness contains insolence. In the unhappiness that one also carries, everything seems easy in the end, and it's so simple that happiness and unhappiness resemble each other. The world gets tamed, and suddenly one does whatever one wishes to do. "

Denise didn't say she borrowed the words from Philippe Delerm in "La cinquième saison". She surprsised me for her sensitivity. Her words arrived when I was feeling blue and dejected over human trickery and cruelty and boundless capacity for sophistry. In spite of the sensitivity of Denise, as shown by her borrowed words, I don't really trust her after she stormed off into the sunset and went back to Montréal, after I clumsily explained to her in my halting French that I would not, could not regard her anything more than a friend as I had commitments and enclosures and closures. But she knew and I knew the real reason for my failure to really open my heart to her: despite all my eloquent speeches about love and romanticism, deep down in the core of my being, I have lost faith in humanity, in the existence of a woman who would love me unselfishly and fearlessly and who loves me till the end of time even if I am penniless and physically infirmed and incapacitated and impotent and wrecked by self-pity and self-doubt and remorses and regrets. Of all my real amorous achievements and triumphs (unlike the fake ones of the loud-mouthed and shameless liar) and they were numerous as I alluded to in my earlier piece (and they could have been much more numerous if I had not suddenly got cynical), only one woman from Laos who would come closest in my conception of an ideal woman. Unfortunately, she already had a boyfriend when I met her. I could have pursued her relentlessly and she might have dropped her boyfriend for me as she seemed to like me very much,. But I refused to do so out of principle. She was a devout Budshist and so was I. I didn't want her to choose and I certainly didn't want to make her boyfriend unhappy. I never want to be happy over somebody's unhappiness. Her name, unfortunately, was also Laura. So I called her LL (Laotian Laura). I don't see her anymore. I purposely stay away from her. I have principles to uphold. I have my own commitments I have to keep. I have people I have to answer to. Besides, I must concentrate my energy to be financially independent. All these romantic sideshows and distractions are just for those twits and twerps who don't feel confident about their own attractiveness. I am confident about mine. My past records speak for themselves. Do I sound vain and vainglorious and conceited? Do I sound unlike a Buddhist full of modesty and serenity as I am supposed to? You can bet your sweet ass that I am. I am a walking contradictions, an embodiment of contrasts, an avatar of ambiguities. That's why you will never fully understand me while I can read you like the palm of my hand. I am beyond your imagination while I know you are just a run-of-the-mill liar and coward. I know you well, you little twit.

At any rate, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on the little twit at the expense of somebody else. So she called me and complained that I had not paid her any attention. I explained to her that I was busy explaining myself to the twit. She said, "Fuck him! You're wasting time on the pompous prick. He's beneath you. Why are you talking to a piece of shit? By the way, are you making any money lately? No? What's the fuck you're doing, Roberto? You're stupid or what? Concentrate and focus on making money. Stop arguing with the little bastard." Guess what? I was busy talking to her on the phone and didn't pay attention to my driving and I ended up rear-ending a Lexus at a stop sign. The ensuing traffic ticket, the insurance mess, the repairs, and the emotional turbulence I experienced over the insolence and haughtiness of the traffic cop took a toll of my serenity. I am now madder than hell, and I'm going not to take it anymore. I'm going to talk to the twisted twit in person and let him know what I'm thinking of him. Oops, perhaps I already did, in the damp, dark recesses of my mind.

I am not going to answer to Denise's email. She disappointed me quite a bit. I thought she was honest and direct, but it appeared that she was merely an unaccomplished woman looking for a Sugar Daddy. I am glad she went back to Montréal. I still remember the evening I first saw her naked. A bold, impetuous move on her part. She looked straight at my eyes while lying in that unmade bed of hers. Then she rose up. Her clothes were on the floor in a matter of seconds. Her triangle was absolutely beautiful, innocent-looking and yet inviting. I asked her to help me. She readily complied. She kept saying I was handsome and sexy, especially my lips. She asked me if any other woman ever found my lips sexy. I said, yes, there was another one, up in Alaska. She laughed, for real? she inquired. I said, mais oui, vraiment. We spoke in French. She clung tight to me and called my name, Oh Roberto, Roberto as she reached the summit. Later, she fell soundly asleep in my arms. I felt peaceful, then, but not now. I just bought a journal so I can talk to her, without her knowing. She is coming softly to me on the velvet of words. She would think I am maudlin and mawkish. I will write to her with music, to tell her about my days and nights, with fresh wounds oozing hurts and blood. I will write neatly, in my best cursive style, with my Parker pen. I will tell her again and again what we talked to each other the first night we were together, how she said she was afraid she might be falling in love with me. I am looking outside. The night is still. The sky is immense and sparkles with stars. All of a sudden, I see her burning brightly in the sky. Flames envelop her naked beautiful body. And she is looking straight at my eyes, like she did the first night, right before she took off her clothes.

It's quite obvious that I  afflicted with an ego problem, and not mercantile obsession. I am not as much keen to make money as to be loved by women. Having a lot of money does not give me a serene, peaceful feeling as I am showered of attention by members of the fair sex. And that means I am inveterately stupid and have not learned from experience. Deep down, I am a flirt, albeit a shy and honest one. Anyway as I interacted with the women, I couldn't help imagining that was how Laura must have carried on with her new beau. The realization tempered your enthusiasm and brought a much-needed wariness. Life is essentially a game where one has to play by certain rules to win. Having said that, I recall an asshole once disclosed that it was okay to hit opponents below the belt because the objective in life was to win at any price and at any cost. I shuddered when I heard of that disclosure. And I have stayed away from the moral leper ever since because I am not ruthless enough. I still believe in fair play. Anyway, despite all the annoyance lately, I have managed to stay above the morass of moral depravity. I have a lot of pride of who I am. Like last night, as I was about to fall asleep, the phone rang. And the caller ID was blocked. I picked up the phone anyway. It was she. I was surprised, but I was not elated. In fact, a wariness rushed into my being, ready to protect me 

She said, "Hi, can we talk? 

-Hi, but gee, you know what the time right now, right? Fuck, it's almost one in the morning, Janie.

-I know, sorry, but I can't sleep, and I was thinking of you.

-Thanks a lot, I wish you had done that five years ago. Anyway, what's up? Did Joel leave you as I said he would? Or is it another heart-rending story of how life was unfair to you. I'm sorry, but frankly, my dear, I no longer give a fuck. Not anymore. I made up my mind about two years after you left, that you don't mean shit to me. Do yourself a favor, don't call me again because I would hang up on you. Bye!

And I did. And I felt sad and sorrowful despite the bravado I had just put on. I once cared about Janie. I wanted to save her. I felt sorry for her. But I soon discovered that I was the one who should be pitied. I was naive and stupid and didn't realize love was just a fucking (pun intended) game. I recently met a French-speaking video poker gambler who has been on a massive winning streak. She won $400,000 over 4 long Memorial Day holidays. She has houses everywhere, even on a little island in the Caribbean. I told her she had better quit now, right away, at once, and immediately if she wanted to preserve her wealth. My words fell on deaf ears. She said she had a "system" and she was "beating" the casinos for over 27 years. I couldn't believe my ears. I didn't believe her. Knowing that she loved the limelight and attention, I deduced she would have made her "success" known to the press and thus the whole wide world. Since there was no such news, she just tried to show off she was wealthy while in fact her wealth is in fact disappearing because of her addiction and her delusions. I tried to help her, but since she was delusional, i walked away. You can't help somebody who does not want to be helped for whatever the reason(s). The more I know about humans, the more I realize all of them carry within them at least one seed of self-destruction. The seed will germinate when the circumstances are right. I know my limitations and my own seeds. Meanwhile I am working on yourself, being mindful of my own illusions and delusions, talking the lessons from Lao-Tsu, Buddha, and Nietzsche. The two Asian sages taught you the virtues of moderation and non-attachment while the poor German taught you just about everything else, including all the attractions and pitfalls of power, morality, love, and vanity. This morning I got out of bed, feeling strong and serene and tall, not sad nor small. I will conduct and carry yourself with dignity. My words will be measured and compassionate. I won't beat the blockheads, the uninformed, the vain, the inarticulate and uneducated but suffering from a delusion that they are articulate and educated solely because of some certificates, the sophistical, the cowardly, and the selfish, with my verbal two-by-fours. I will be gentle and I will be kind while establishing that I am the intellectual boss and that they are fortunate that I take the time to teach them how to think and argue.

Having read what I just wrote the above, I realize I am nothing but strong and serene. I am indeed sad and small. I have a long way to go. I was not proud of what I wrote. There was still too much anger, too much sadness. Agnes and Laura, and now Annie affected how I wrote.

I dreamed of KL last night. This was my third dream in 44 years. I kept my affection hidden. Once in a blue moon, it comes out in dreams. Yet when I woke up, the image of Laura appeared and I felt sad. I vowed to myself that I must regain my wealth, work on my body and mind. I keep making the same mistakes in reading people. And my compassion seems constantly misplaced. Watch my words. Seal my lips. And be more gentle with myself and others. Forgive and forgive and forgive. Stay away from evil people. I am not strong enough to deal with them. 

Watch my words, seal my lips. Be gentle to myself and others. Those are my mantras. There are humans who can't reason, can't see the errors of their ways or are too weak to change for the better. On the other hand, there are people like LL who are unselfish and full of kindness. My lack of attention to a string of emails of Denise led to her epithets-filled text messages. Thanks to those messages, I got to know her true nature. This morning, as I meditated, memories of Laura rushed back and made me realize that love was a game and I was ill-equipped to deal with it. Remember, don't try to break the mold or to swim against the tide. Most humans are just common. Work on yourself, not on others. Be kind-hearted, but don't harbor a Messiah Complex because you are not strong enough to save anybody. As Flannery O'Connor once famously said, "the life you save should be your own." I am  trying to save mine. I have reached a point in my life where I find out that what I thought was important turned out to be trivial and ephemeral. So I now aim for peace, knowledge, and love. Also, I no longer want to be great. You simply want to be a good, peaceful person who is no longer consumed by hate and anger. Just as Denise vainly and sadly denounced me and loudly asserted for the respect that has eluded her, I have a feeling what people dislike most about you is what they hate about themselves. My words about animals, cowardice, pontification, lying, irresponsibility, and lack of patriotism all hit home because they were all true. I wrote from the heart. I wrote about what I feared the most. My life is an effort to be what I know I can be, an answer to what is good and noble inside me. I have this vague, but intense wish to be open and vulnerable, but past pains and sufferings have taught me to be patient and indiifferent to the wish. A man's life is the sum of his experiences and the lessons he learned from them.

I got a letter from a vicious vixen the other might. I didn't know what prompted her to reach out for me after she had walked out in a huff and wandered into the wilderness of self-righteousness and the wilds of the frozen tundra of Alaska in the middle of winter. She begged me to reply to her. I obliged her:

"You would never really understand how I felt about you and thought of you. You viewed me from the lenses of practicality whereas I looked at you and life from "impossible dreams". You thought I was a greedy married man who wanted everything while in fact I was and am a lonely man trapped in a snare of my own weakness and sentimentality. My "farewell" letter was a test and your reactions showed deep down you cared more about your own self, your hurts, and your desire to hurt me back, than an investigation of what drove me to write such a letter. 

I have regained my peace. As I said, I would rather dwell on the beautiful, the kind, and the gentle sides of life while trying to block out from my mind your hurtful, harsh language. I am the type of person if once I address a woman in endearing terms, I cannot switch to terms of contempt even when I am angry. I would rather scream and yell to express my anger than to use contemptuous words because those words are ugly and have no place between a man and a woman, even if they are never romantically involved. Words have a way to tell the world who we really are. 

Believe it or not, deep inside me, I am a very gentle and soft person. The hard, clumsy exterior is just only my poorly adapted defense.

I hope you finally got some peace of your own. While it's highly unlikely our paths ever cross again (the magic was gone for good; your vicious side glistened and glimmered and shimmered in the sun), I always wish you the best of luck in the remainder of your solitary travel along the road called life. "

Of course, she wrote back to me and this time she signed her name instead of tersely putting down "me". I already deleted her annoying and self-righteous and stupid reply so I cannot reproduce here. I vaguely remember it left a sour taste in my mouth and an unexpected surprise at how ordinary and common her values were. She talked about her pride of being practical, her low opinion of my tendency to have dreams, and the justification of her display of contempt for me. After reading her reply, I asked myself how I, a person of learning and sensitivity, would and could ever be mixed up with a coarse midget of crass and crabby values. My only answer was that my loneliness blinded me of her crassness and crabbiness. On the other hand, I was glad that I didn't get in that deep a relationship with her. She taught me one thing: I didn't know shit about bitches!

So when my longtime, almost asphyxiated, fixated aficionado called me and inquired about my latest cardiac tests, I told him about her. He exploded, "How many times I told you to get rid of the fucking bitch, the stupid, impoverished, poverty-stricken dumb ass, good-for-nothing midget? Stop taking her calls. Don't text-message her back. Completely ignore her. She is scum. She is shit. She is just plainly no good. You hear me?" I meekly and softly sighed, "Yes, Victoria. I meant Victor." He slammed the phone on me. The asshole still uses an almost antique dialed land phone that he inherited from his mother. In this age of Internet and smart phones and tablets, he owns no computer and relies on a typewriter for formal written communications. I call him Dinosaur Victor.

Where am I ? How did I get here. Where's the "He" that started this meandering narrative, this thread of self-confrontation, this wild and crazy exploration and examination of the dark recesses of the human mind in looking for the forces of attraction and destruction.

I am 65 years old. A Spanish song is saying love kills. Oh pleaaaaassse, I am saying to myself, tell me something I don't already know. Yes, love is a fucking funny thing, especially to a guy like me. And so is sex. 

I met a whiskey-soaked, starry-eyed girl in a bar in Tennessee

She later took me to a motel room for a ride

When it was over, I was black and blue and could hardly see

Ever since, I haven't been able to drink her off my mind

I once lay next to a  divorcée on the beach

I had to put up a fight for my life

When it was through, my sanity seemed to be out of reach

She not only blew me all over, but also blew away my mind

As I am lying in bed, alone, and depressed

I think of all the girls and women that have come and gone

I would have to tell you this: "Okay, I confess

I slept with them all, but no one made me moan and groan

Like the way I do with you, sweetie.

Don't you believe me? Go ahead, make me swear

Don't you see that I love you till eternity?

You're the only one that I really do care."

I once took a lad under my wings and counseled him the "Art of Love". I said, " Son, the Art of Love ain't no different from the Art of War. You must do unto others as you wish they do unto you, and that is, with passion and imagination. You have to weave a parachute out of words, sweet and tender words. You talk to them in a slow, soft, baritone voice, telling them not you want to say, but what they want to hear, while looking straight into their eyes, and acting all sincere and gentle. Remember the difference between a truth and a lie is as light as a feather. Don't rush things. Love is like sex and wine. The longer you get there, the more satisfying it gets." Guess what the lad said to me? "But, master, if you're so good with women, why you are always by yourself in the weekend, and I never see you with any woman?" I blushed, "Son, haven't you heard 'those who don't know love to teach'? Never mind." 

My voice trailed off and I stared into empty space which so resembles the void within me. I said goodbye to the young man and staggered home under the weight of loneliness. I opened the apartment's door and the emptiness of the room sucked me into its vortex. I plopped down on the sofa and instinctively reached for the remote on the coffee table. My cell phone rang. I looked at the number. A name went with it on the screen. It was the Midget. I said, "Hello." She asked, "Do you still love me?"

After a long silence, I sucked in the air and sighed, "Not really, not anymore." Then I clicked off the phone. I felt like shit, but I knew I had done the right thing. To ease off the pain of "conscience" that was tugging at my heart, I swallowed two Ambiens. I was drifting in a fog of forced sleep and unlocalized pain when the phone rang. "Did you tell the bitch Midget to get lost yet?". "Yes, I did, honey, just like I told you I would." 

-You did the right thing. She was no good for you. Besides, she didn't know her place. She was stupid, vain, and thought so much of herself and not enough of you.

-Listen, Harriett, do we have to go through this again? I did that for you. I really didn't want to cause any pain and suffering to her or to anybody, no matter they desereve that or not. A loss is a loss. I knew what it felt like to be dumped. I was dumped once, maybe twice. I don't know. It was a long time ago. I finally got over the horrible memories, the terror of pain and uncommunicative shame. I know that she asked for it, that I deserve better, that I deserve you. But I would rather close this chapter of my life for good. I don't want to talk about her anymore. I made a mistake. I was lonely. I thought she was a decent, caring, unselfish woman; I didn't know she was selfish, rude, and vengeful. Anyway, pain should not happen to anyone, but maybe we all learn from it. Love is not an easy thing to have. We must work hard for it. I think in the end only wise, kind, loving people really know what love is. Other people only experience the ersatz kind. That's probably why we have all kinds of separations and divorces. Love is like money. To get it, a lot of it, one must work hard, very hard, at it.

-Roberto, I love you.

-I love you, too. Now, I have to go back to sleep. I have a lot of things to do tomorrow.

-Such as?

-Honey, please, I need to go back to sleep. I'll call you tomorrow.

It's been some time since I last revisited my life. I thought I would not bother to mention Laura, but some recent developments now make it worthwhile to examine in depth this painful episode of my life. In some ways and indeed many times I have wished that I had never met her. I met her in my freshman year in college. One day she came to me and asked to borrow lecture notes. She had been sick the week before. It is indeed a struggle to write these words, not because you had nothing to say, but because the memories I deemed once beautiful are probably merely a romanticization stemming from immaturity and impracticality. So, in the interest of sparing myself of further signs of stupidity, I am going to gloss over soapy, childish, ridiculous memories and concentrate on events that have forced me to grow up, no matter how belatedly. Nah, I just can't do it. It is not so much the lingering pain that stopped me in spilling my guts as the farcical manner of her dumping me. Now I am facing the potential of a similar farce. 

My latest forays into sociological and anthropological experiments are about to be over. I have discovered that you are weak and sentimental. I am much better off to stay in your world of reading and body-building. I came up with the joke which jibed with the theme of Gift of Gab. Two  women met. They talked. 

-You're quite a garrulous girl. In fact, you've got a gift of gab. Was it how you got your man?

-Yes. I talked him into submission.

I made everybody at the dinner table double over with laughter. In a moment of vanity and weakness, I sent to everyone I could think of. That won't happen again as now I know everybody was über-serious (what is going in this world? "you need to laugh a little, joke a little, cry a little, love a little [repeat, 'little', not 'much', 'much' is stupid and dangerous, touch everything lightly, even with tragedy, life is essentially a joke in a strange and unfamiliar language) without fear. I didn't think the joke was risqué. It was, subjectively speaking, hilarious as hell, if hell ever can be funny.

We all march to different drummers. I temporarily forgot that. And that was ok I forgot. Now I remember that and I have recovered. Armed with a newly found sense of absurdity and stoicism, I brushed off the brush-off and I moved on while trying to remember that tact can be a difference between life and death, success and failure. Love is to learn not to be self-righteous. 

The following words are more applicable to me than anybody else. I'm mentioning them in order to show I am not blind of my shortcomings and my tendency of  backsliding to old habits:

The way to increase the size of the positive energy field around us is to eliminate revenge and condemnation while cultivating love and forgiveness. 

Many people who think they are superior to others tend to become self-indulgent and self-centered and thus are harsh and cruel in their assessment and judgment of others. It is in fact their smallness that makes them think they are big. 

True superiority is quiet and very moderate in its expression if it has to make its presence felt. Superiority is much better acknowledged than loudly insisted. Tooting one's horn is crass and childish. We are no longer children. Please stop acting like them. As St. Paul gently reminded us, once we reach adulthood, we should leave our childish ways behind.

I wrote the above after going through a meditation of the nature of annoyance and anger. I was not trying to justify myself at all. What I was doing was to show I had not only awareness of others, but also of myself, and to establish a dialogue with myself about the necessity to confront reality, which is what it is, not what we wish it were (most humans tend to have an over-inflated view of themselves, and I am one of the worst offenders). 

After so many words spilled on paper, I don't think most people understand me at all, which is kind of surprising, but that's okay. I often think my personality is a litmus test of the character of others. In other words, how others respond to my somewhat unusual personality reveals, unwittingly to them, their normally hidden character.

Old age should not be used as an excuse for an obstacle to growth. Such an attitude is a cover-up for cowardice and lassitude. Growth comes from an awareness and then a courage to change for the better. Once again, some persons who take pride in thinking outside the box, they tend to rely on cliches and trite expressions in their search for escape hatches in order to save face.

Despite articulating quite clearly what I wanted to say, I could not help but think of the disrespect that Agnes and Laura once had for me and my own intense annoyance with the Houston Midget for his cheeky email. His stupidity once again proved sometimes assholes would hang themselves if we just give them a rope. I have quite a distasteful feeling for him now. I would chalk that one for part of experience.

Today is Friday. The third day of the new year à la Gregorian Calendar. The weather is gorgeous where you are. Blue sky, fresh, cool, invigorating air and windless in an early Winter afternoon on high plateau somewhere in North America. She's bitching and bitching incessantly. On the beautiful day like this! She doesn't know how to live. In fact, she's dying, slowly, of boredom and discontent. Ignorance is perilous to one's existence. I should know. I was ignorant for a long time. It was a miracle that I survived. On the other hand, what saved me was that I was endowed with a sixth sense. No, not the same kind of sense in the movie starring Bruce Willis in 1999. I didn't see dead people. Rather, I saw the death in living people. And I saw through people and the bullshit they possessed. I'm not saying that I'm a profound kind of guy or something like that. I just happen to have a big mouth and a lack of inhibitions to go with it.

On New Year's Eve, at a party, some dude pontificated that beauty in a woman wasn't everything. He would rather have an ugly, but virtuous woman for a wife. Other dudes and all the women chimed in and expressed their agreement. I was the only guy at the party who remarked that what the dude said was hogwash. An ugly woman would be unlikely to arouse a man, hence she would contribute to the matrimonial malaise. In sexual matters, virtue is not a necessity. Beauty is only skin deep, but deep enough for you. Yes, you're a shallow kind of guy. And opinionated. Like sex, religion and politics are full of lies and myths, in your biased, subjective, shallow points of view. Take the issue of God. I think God is a concept made up by Man. He is conceived in the image of Man, not the other way around. And those who disagree with mr are imbeciles and idiots, at least in metaphysics. I think politics attracts mostly liars and power-hungry scumbags. I chuckle (inwardly, of course. I am vain, but not very stupid and rude. I normally don't laugh at people's opinions, no matter how unfounded and stupid they are) whenever a white dude angrily voices his conviction that Barack Obama is a lying, incompetent communist Muslim who's bent on destroying America. I don't really know for sure if Obama is incompetent and communist, but I think he is surely a socialist and is bent to redress some social inequalities in America. All politicians lie in order to obtain power. But some (like Obama) are motivated to help the poor who don't really have a voice in the political process except their votes. Admittedly these politicians help themselves more in the process, but it is a win-win  scenario. The liberal, caring politicians get power and become rich while helping the poor. It is likely most of them would remain poor, but some manage to rise above poverty and actualize their potential. Everybody, rich or poor, deserves a fighting chance. All too often the poor don't have a chance. All the doors are blocked because they are poor, mostly through no fault of their own, but simply they were born into poverty. The sins, the faults, the shortcomings of the parents should not visit upon the children. The rich need no help in fighting for their interests. I despise those motherfuckers who scream hatred and obscenity at Obama but open their hands to accept government help when they are out of job. Real political convictions must be translated in actions. Talk is cheap. Yes, I voted for Obama, twice and was proud of that. I agree with his social programs. At heart, I am a socialist. 

Okay, I am not a politically correct guy. I don't really give a fuck about what scumbags and assholes think of me. If you had a means, I know what you would do with them. I don't even consider them as humans. Anyway, my words hit them in the polar plexus, and leave them gasping for air, like fish stranded on land. My words are unrestrained, affecting, raw and honest, designed to shock and awe with their particular pitch of pain, suffering, and private truths. I am a magus with words, at least that's what I call yourself in moments of unbridled vanity.

The other day, somebody asked me what the meaning of life was! I looked at him as if he came from Mars:

"Seriously, dude, what's the fuck? Life is life, you know. We just live and in the process lie through our teeth every fucking day without having any sense of shame, then one say, we get sick and die or we get run over by a bus or hit by lightning and die. That's what life means to all the scumbags and assholes in this world. More developed humans get a rush from life by being war correspondents, risking their limbs and lives to get the truth out. And others toil to help out their loved ones, friends, and even strangers. Life is whatever we do to make us feel good about ourselves. I do wonder may times, however, if scumbags and assholes do feel good about themselves or if they are like me, they do possess a conscience and their conscience torment and torture them, especially late at night. I am not a perfect guy. Far from it. Now and then I do stupid things that I am not proud of. My conscience lets me know that I ought to be ashamed of myself and I am. But I am not a scumbag or an asshole. I am not into denial or evil like them. 

I tend to fall in love quite easily. Love is the meeting place of truth and understanding or is it fantasy and delusion? I think in my case, it is too often the case of fantasy and delusion. 

I am ashamed to admit that I grieved more when my first love walked out on me than when my parents passed away. Somehow the hurt was more intense. And then the world collapsed on me when Harriette collapsed in my arms and died of a heart attack. Since her death, I've been numb. Grief is the manifestation that you really feel sorry for yourself. I am beyond self-pity. I am stunned and stunted by bad luck. 

Somebody asked me the other day if I was uxorious. I told her to check that with my wife. She is in the best position to know.  My life is a battleground between fiction and reality. Recently I did some cleaning of the inbox of my emails. That brought up a lot of painful and  hard angry memories. Most humans are truly trash, deserved to be burned up. The longer I live, the more I am disenchanted with most the human race. They are simply not as "good" or honest or "knowledgable" as me, but too stupidly proud to accept that fact. As I said a few seconds ago, I don't even consider them as humans. To me, they are trash and filth. But I wouldn't know that until I really got to know them. They were pretty good actors and all thought highly (sic!) of themselves although they had no real hard basis to do so. But I suppose they had to lie to themselves so they could live. Two short, ignorant, poorly read, u nattractive, untalented and quite unintelligent bitches once demanded from me evidence that I was superior to them in Intelligence and Knowledge. I couldn't believe my eyes when they wrote to me requesting evidence. They were so fucking blind about themselves, about the fact that they were fucking, absolutely mediocre nobodies. I cannot be like them. To me, facts and truths are everything.

I just learned a new German word. It's called "Weltvertrauen" (trust in the world). It's very difficult to live without that trust, but that's what I must do, day in and day out, now I finally realize I am all alone in this world and Love is a fiction. That's why I've written so much about it. I write so I can deal with the Fiction. I use fiction to convert the Fiction into a reality I dream about. It dovetails neatly into what you asked me earlier what the meaning of life was. We must create a purpose, a meaning for our life. In a world where there is no love, no trust, we must believe, imagine there's one. Life is impossible without hope. All my love adventures were founded on hope, on illusion."

It may be high folly of me to claim I am full of love and lovability. But I do know this: I am only in love with those who are lovable. If you are old, ugly, ungracious, untalented, sarcastic, self-deceiving, stupid and delusional, penurious, short, fat, and poor guy, no woman in her right mind would want to be in your company. So the moral of the lesson is that we must know who we are and should not harbor any illusions about our nature and make-up. If you are prone to cheap sarcasm and insults, you must give up any hope of finding a mate. Don't be bothered to do so, because you will never find one. And please, don't say anything about the ladies in my life, because you don't know a fucking thing about me and my secret weapon. I am far more than what meets the eye. You don't know anything about me as you fancy you do.

Sometime ago I attended a reunion of Vietnamese AFS alumni in Las Vegas. I had to admit although I tried to remain calm on the outside, inside me a storm of long repressed memories rushed back and tormented me. I was low-keyed and unassertive until the issue of poetry translation came up. The changes made of my translation were inappropriate and I let the organizing committee know of how I felt. Anyway, life is, among other things, about memories and things that could have been. 

Yes, what you're trading is more than a story, less than a work of art. It's a search for peace and closure and acceptance before I close my eyes for good. Truths come in many shapes and forms. The key thing is we all have to be ready for them when they come. 

(To be continued)