Tuesday.04.27.04
question [ ] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 11:59pm
we dehumanize ourselves.
if you’ve seen the things i’ve seen, you wouldnt drive so carefully. you’d hold onto the handle until it reached 100 km/hr, until the dull soundless pain ends with a magnificient crash of metal on flesh and flesh on concrete.
all around me are familiar faces
worn out places
worn out faces
bright and early for the daily races
going nowhere
going nowhere
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the speed of sound [ ] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 2:55am
i drive so fast on my motorbike that i have this feeling it’s only a matter of time before this blog suddenly stops getting updated. i’m not sure what it is, i can’t put my finger on it, but my regard for safety and common sense has gone out the window. or it could be that i’m over-confident in my ability to pick up on my surroundings.. driving in Saigon is like trying to predict the course of colliding atoms. people move as one uncongealed mass, a school of humans, and you kinda have to predict 20 steps ahead as you drive. the dynamic changes, each motorbike is a scenario in its own and has its own variables. this is what happens when you endure four years of computer science in college. i drive so fast that even the hotheads are beginning to give me cursory glances, the new dumb idiot in town who doesn’t care about being splattered on the street by the smallest mistake. i gotta say though… it’s some exhilirating shit going 60 km/hr down a road that knows no rules, people coming at you from the opposite direction because they don’t feel like using the correct lane, all your troubles swept behind you in a fury of gasoline exhaust and rumbling engines.
he came into the office, stumbling and reeking of alcohol.
“shit, you drank again?” someone exclaims. he’s been downing a beer a day, maybe more, and i fear him alcoholic. i try to say something to the other kids but it’s the way things are. they say, “what can you do? if he wants to drink are you going to hold him back?” they leave a man to his own desctruction if he desires it, because it’s his damned right. right?
i’m a walking contradiction. crippled hands grope me from behind pale yellow bars and on the other side i’m handed forms and asked about business. the smell of feces and the icy blast of an air conditioner which costs more than what most people here can hope to make in a month. a child with an enlarged head and poisonous looking boil on his back hip eating chips of paint as i try to slap it away from him, and a communal conversation about what-ifs and the future and making it big in Vietnam’s new market. the nurse yells at him to sing, SING goddamit and he sits back, his gigantic head holding gaping eyes, and he sings, sugary voice puncturing upwards with melodic stabs. short raspy breaths. i hate business, because it dehumanizes, and yet i am immersed in it, find myself fighting both a battle in the dust fields of starry eyed cripples and a flood of paperwork, for money, for money. within a year’s time i may have taken part in bringing a company to multi-million dollar status, or i may still be just another washed up dreamer back in the states to continue doing what it is fate wants me to do.
yesterday seems so far away, and the months before i arrived on Vietnam’s bittersweet soil seems like lifetimes past. my days are spent shouting, laughing, brooding, and wondering at what’s to come in these crazy, crazy times.
damn, i know this song.
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