Thoughts on the way to the bathroom and back

Thoughts on the way to the bathroom and back:

I hate to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. You are sound asleep. You are totally oblivious to your surroundings. You might just as well be dead. In fact you look like you are dead, except the color of your face is not pallid and you are breathing deeply. All of a sudden some long drawn out weird dream takes place and then it occurs to you that you have to drag your tired, lethargic body to the bathroom in answer to the call of nature. Most people go right back to sleep and wake up fresh as a daisy in the morning. Not me. I have weird thoughts from my way to the bathroom and back. And I just had several a few minutes ago.

I would scream bloody murder and swear to …God? No, I can’t. I am an atheist. OK, I would swear on …my dog’s grave and to… the stately beautiful oak tree outside my house that if I see another diatribe about “Chổng” (slang for lonely, invented by Vietnamese students studying in New Zealand) in this forum, I would shave not only my head but all the heads I meet in the streets because I would like to get rid of all the lice in this world so I would no longer experience feelings of puking lousiness. The truth is I cannot stand to see yet another sophomoric attempt to make the banal sublime, the trivial momentous, the meaningless meaningful. Maybe the writer of diatribes about loneliness cannot make art out of life, so he tries to make his life into art.

It could be true at one time in that faraway land we once were lonely because we were suddenly cut off from our families, because the Kiwis didn’t want to hang out with us, making us feel very much the strangers in a strange land. But we are no longer teenagers. We all have spouses and families, and thus all these harpings about loneliness sound so tiresome and artificial. That reminds me of an old cliché that you are what you write. Le style, c’est l’homme. We can pretty safely guess a man’s character by what and how he writes. If all he can offer is trivia, then we must reach the inescapable conclusion that he is trivia incarnate or at least his mind is full of nothing but trivialities. I would rather see a dog pissing at a tree or a monkey scratching at its armpit than reading yet another diatribe from a man in his 6o’s yelping about loneliness. I would rather read about why a man believes in God or how he develops herpes or what attracts him and what repulses him in a woman than listening to a grown man moaning about loneliness. It is not dignified to cry, sincerely or not, about loneliness. It is simply not decent, just like one does not walk around in public with a shirt on, but is bare below the navel. It is frankly obscene and out of place.

I also don’t like needless cryptic oracular pronouncements. If one wants to say something, just spell it out. There is no need to appear more profound than one already is. Also, endless pontification is bad. And so is posting sex materials on the Internet, especially when you are in your 60’s. Maybe you cannot get it up anymore without the aid of Viagra, so you have to compensate. Mind you, I am not a prude. I believe in eroticism and I do have a sense of aesthetics, but I find indulging in the titillation of prurient thoughts quite crass. I don’t find the image of a female human urinating funny or sexy.

I am not saying because I’m getting old and thus don’t find the female form appealing anymore. Quite the contrary, I don’t have any thrombus in my heart. I still find succor in the female beauty as long as it is not commercialized or obscenely posed. I still find the following lines smotheringly charming:

Phải chi đêm ấy đừng mưa
Phải chi đêm ấy đừng đưa em về.

I wish there had been no rain that night
I wish that night I had not walked you home

CanNgon
August 27, 2009