the quickest moments are in the wait [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 7:23pm
trying to find normalcy in the normal is so hard, given that normal can be some crazy shit.
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onemoreone [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 1:35am
can’t put it into words anymore. i need to find an answer and this place is not holding it for me. why can’t i ever find peace? why am i such a fuckup?

all i ever wanted was to be happy.

guitar riff - self repose uncountable [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 1:26am
i didn’t go to work for a month
i didn’t leave my bed for eight days straight
i haven’t hung out with anyone
and if i did, i’d have nothing to say
i didn’t feel angry or depressed
i didn’t feel anything at all
i didn’t want to go to bed
and i didn’t want to stay awake

from the start of this blog it was always about Vietnam, but then again, was it really? change the country, help the people, change the world, feel beauty inside the innards of my bones, learn about my roots, and all that bullshit. but i was just running, from everyone and everything. mostly myself. people don’t like to face their demons… so in college i used to sit and watch everyone around me, finger pick their fuckedupness and be smug in the fact that it wasn’t me.

i see the world in caricatures and now my own is catching up to me. escape in the moment is one of the most exhilirating things ever. grabbing a handful of clothes and boarding a plane, zipping from country to the next - it’s fucking nuts. but when the dust settles and you’re sitting in a quiet room, wondering what it is that you’re doing, you realize you were just running from yourself. i can’t even go back now.. everything seems so superficial, so banal. how do you face 9-to-5 and McDonalds when you see Vietnam under the skin? i can’t even face myself anymore.

on the road my motorbike screams murder, murder, murder and i push it with all i’ve got left in me. the needle shakes violently close to 80km/hr, the engine shakes violently, my whole fucking being is shaking violently because that’s the only way i can get my thoughts into alignment. i pass men of all shapes and sizes with attractive young women sitting on the back, prostitutes in dresses and revealing clothing and christ, they all look so normal. there are the dirt peddlers, brown dusty jackets flapping lightly with their dusty caps and commodities strapped to the back. i know all of you.

i go by the old aqueduct, where i used to sit and watch bits of trees and trash troll by. memory, how thick you are and what a noise you make when you return. i pull onto the sidewalk running the length of this pseudo river and prop up my motorbike. down to my right is a couple hidden beneath a tree, to my left an arching bridge to connect the two banks. i sit on my motorbike and stare at the black sludge. the smell of raw sewage. two dank rats appear from under a block of packing foam, the kind used to hold a stereo within a cardboard box. they rummage around the trash along the sloping banks, and then disappear. a ways out in front of me there are some squatter shacks. half of the shacks rest on part of the bank and upon other houses, the other half hanging over water and held in place with long wooden poles. the poles disappear into the water yet seemingly connect back in the reflection. different shades of brown and grey, sheets of metal in various stages of rust, overlap each other on the sides of these shacks. they are the walls in themselves, discarded metal that wouldn’t even be considered usable scrap in the US. the pale street lights fade at this part, where the shacks begin along a smaller connecting waterway. the makeshift homes are abodes to squatters and the absolute lower class. it looks like a dirty floating island.

someone is sweeping the front of their store, behind me. swish swish goes feathery soft like my imagined past. there is a strange smell to this place. at this point i fear almost nothing, not even death.
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. [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 10:06pm
how did it get to this point?
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pearl casualties [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 10:11pm
i am close to hugging the dirt streaked yellow wall along the side of this wet road, cold concrete below me in patterns of redundant wavy lines and dark grey grooves. rain has washed the dirt off the sidewalks and onto the streets, bringing the grime from one place to another. my vision is almost taken away by the alternating bright spots of florescent lit stores stands and the sucking blackness. a girl pushing another girl in a wheelchair creeps up to the metal table in front of me. the tables are so low and the stools so small that my knees stick up awkwardly, getting in the way of my long arms and making it hard for me to eat the Banh Cuon. a shadow runs across me, over my face and down my body to the ground, the old couple in front of me blocking part of the floresecent light coming from the stand. the stand is just two women with a small glass display, food stacked in big containers and pastel colored vietnamese words painted on the glass. the girl in the wheelchair is a beautiful girl of no more than ten. her skinny arms hold the tickets and her head holds a round hat. they push past and the girl stares at me for a moment, finding something odd about my face, and like that they’re gone. wheels creak silent.

the couple in front of me is a man and a woman. they crouch, ready scowls beneath their plain faces, hair mildly wild and free flowingly uncouth. off to the side sits a small skinny old man wrapped in a light windbreaker, cap pulled tight to the front. he is sitting calmly upon his motorbike seat and watching the people cast shadows off of themselves, the road, and everything else the florescence deems necessary to grace with its touch. i don’t know what i’m doing here, but neither did i know what i was doing back in America. just one place to the next, people passing by like my own life before my eyes in the darkest moments. dark, but never without the sub-bright glare from the stands and stores and occasional shopping complexes, reminding you that the human race will live beyond you in all its ugly self-preserving glory.

i am sick and desperately want to get better.
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[] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 4:13am
how deep can you go before the world lets go?
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exit terms [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 12:12am
i pull open the drawer and pluck out the headset resting on some plastic bags. to the laptop i lumber, and into the small machine i plug this headset. the connector slides in smooth and firm with a click to show that it’s in. technology, how precise and right you are.

i use an internet telephony program to call home. i would like to talk to my parents, who i haven’t had direct communication with for the past few months. fuck, i haven’t spoken or written a word to them. something makes me want to hear a familiar voice. i would like to speak with my mom or dad.

no one picks up, and i call my sister. no answer. she must be in college. i wonder what she’s studying, what project she’s working on. it must be so fresh, being in a classroom doing things you feel are right, creating and moving with the guidance of older people who claim they know better. she goes to school in New York City, a place near my home. it doesn’t feel like home from here, and i doubt it’ll feel like home when i’m back in a few weeks to visit everyone.

i miss Phan Thiet and my students. i think a part of that is missing the past, because those kids have changed and so have i. i miss my friends in college, who seem to have drifted away to a point where i can’t reach them. i can’t seem to reach anyone these days, but i guess it’s because i moved away from it all. i doubt things would have been the same if i had stayed. everyone moves apart… onto other things, bigger things, other people.

i miss my students and now i realize i miss the experiences of creating, seeing and hearing. when you’re in one place for too long you begin to stagnate to the rythm of the place. some places move fast, some places move slow. this place, this dank fragrant up down city of Saigon that I am in, it moves deep. i never had a home… i’ve changed so much from day to day, month to month, year to year, that what was left of me that called home ‘home’ has gone. home is like happiness, and happiness is like language. fleeting, formless, fatally indefinite. home lays in memories that aren’t quite clear anymore, in historical feelings implanted in electrical signals that get brought up so many times they’re worn out to inaccuracy.

i’m going to Hanoi in a few weeks. to visit some friends, meet with some people, see a relative. then i will be back in America, to look over my life in the past year as if i’m looking at a newspaper clipping. and before i have a chance to understand, i will be back in Vietnam. a circle within a circle within a circle……….. how do you explain this?

i can’t.
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open entry [] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 6:36pm
must…bite…down…tongue……

….must….remain…civil………
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[] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 8:22pm
i am moving

i will do something

i am the enemy

nothing left.

some people talk a lot of shit, yet they’re exactly what they hate. you go and spend that money. at least i am at grips with my hypocrisy.

i’m out to change and the beauty will come with each life, mine being the most mundane but it’s all i got.
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[] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 3:04am
dog meat shhh don’t say it so loud someone might hear
look out for the motorbike! slight crash, a moment of pause, then a falling down, fuck he ripped his shirt and he’s got a red mark on his chest
dark roads, familiar faces, warmth of family laughter
almost, not quite, i
you love your son but you’re not happy? dip the spoon into the Pho soup
might be ok even if i’m not. we didn’t have the opportunities you did

cut to smiling, diagnosis?

as long as i keep moving…….
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[] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 3:59am
a long time ago i was on a train bound cross-country, from New York to Cali, three straight days of mountains and perpetual motion and waves of odd people coming on who were Americans and i guess i was american too. it’s funny how we think back to the things that mean something to us, but we can’t always understand why those things meant something to us in the first place. i am in Vietnam, and i wasn’t meant to see some of the things i saw, because i didn’t live their lives, the vietnamese. these people, faceless and without identity, they all talk about finding your roots, about learning the language your parents bore on you and blah blah blah well they don’t know shit. i’m so far from American and never was i close to Vietnamese so i’m where i was when i left, just floating dead on in the middle. i chose this path for a reason, because i knew i couldn’t leave even if i wanted to, not until i found everything, until the truth came out painful, from wounds that have to be disturbed over and over again.

human beings, eyes like glass, gone, and skin scabbed from needle marks, acting like animals because they’ve lost the will to be human anymore.

some of them are children, younger than you can ever imagine.

i’ve lost my innocence and sense of justice in this place, and i’m still alive, barely. you don’t know the danger of seeking truth, and if i am still alive i will tell it to you, entry by entry.

fists clenched, that’s how you go into fights. when it’s over you wipe your brow, sit and breath, bask in the act, and then get up again, fists clenched. i chose to fight alone, and alone i’ll fight. i am not a good person, and i am not fighting for the world. i am just fighting for myself. i miss you all, but you all were merely actors in a play. i wish i could come to grips with that, the fact that i too am just another actor, in a just another fucking play.
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thoughts on the grill [ ] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 12:08am
looking back on this blog i’m quite surprised at the length. this thing is crammed with words, words repeating, sad words, happy words. i think to date only a few people have read the entire thing and i wonder what they think about it all? their vision of London and Vietnam has been given through my eyes, a faulted human just like every other fool out there.

i had been working on a business plan for the past 6 weeks and finally finished. me, the computer science major with aspirations of wandering the world teaching english, i wrote a business plan that, after everything is said and done, will number close to 40 damned pages. the business plan is for money, for investment money, so a group of people can spend money in order to make more money. so they can buy shit they don’t need and die in a better state than the one they came through. i remember getting paid, and for some reason money struck me as horrible. the smell, the look, the idea of people stepping over each other just to get a piece of it, made me sick. and as entrenched as i am in business right now, money still digusts me. i spend money to make money, i spend money to eat and pass the day, and i feel guilty everytime i do. the only time it feels right is when i take everything in my pockets and shove it into some street kid’s hands. but when you think about it, that money isn’t doing shit. nothing does anything.

there’s a janitor woman here who always wears the same light blue shirt and pants. she looks almost like a doctor in the pale uniform. i see her throughout parts of my day, sweeping the stone floors or cleaning some other part of the building. she smiles a lot and talks to everyone. people would call her “nhie^`u chuye^.n”, someone who gossips and is intrusive with her need to know. sometimes i think she’s a spy from the powers that be, making sure our company doesn’t do anything excessively wrong. and other times she’s just the janitor lady, her life imagining itself into my mind. she watches the television in the glass house when she’s free and comments every other minute, sort of like my mom. i’ve been here more than 4 months and i don’t even know her name.

my relationship with my cousins and uncles has slowly settled into an ambiguous state where i’m not sure if they hate me, see me as a fool, or accept me as the one who’s right. when i first came here they slacked off all day, chatting online, doing as they pleased. no one dared to say anything because they were family. and somewhere along the line, among the fucked up things i saw and experienced, something snapped and everything changed. at first they welcomed it.. knew that it was what needed to be done. no more messing around int he office while people worked. put in some help when help’s needed. but after awhile, the responsibility lapped them. there’s a distinct difference in how the vietnamese view life. if given the chance, they’d coffee their days away, spending what little money they had on things that could never make them more money. once, i had moved towards this idea. take life easy, smell the roses, relax and enjoy the sunset. you only have one life to live right?

and then the dirty child hands came, the gaunt faces of grandmothers and grandfathers begging, 15,000 prostitutes with wasted futures. those who didn’t choose their lifestyles, and those who did, and a conglomerate of confused motorbike honking. in college i read a lot, felt i could do something and change the world. you don’t change the world… the world changes you and what you become after affects the world. affect.. not change.

today a girl came in to start work as my assistant. in a few more weeks another person will come and the three of us are going to try to get this place called Japan to do business with our company. it’s so complicated, so crazy, so simple, so sad… this world we live in. i know once my blog held objective descriptions of faraway places and the faces of sad little children. i haven’t seen the orphans with the broken bodies and devastated skin for more than a month. i abandoned them, because i didn’t have time, because of business. 6 months ago if i had heard this, i would never believe it. i am still fighting goddammit, i am still fighting… the nights pull past midnight and i’m still fighting, still believing that change is possible. the methods have changed but i’m still here.

a few days ago a small child fell asleep and put his tiny feet over my legs. just the sleepy hum of rain on a car, an old friend, and a moment without the pain. my past often comes to me and it’s odd that they seem to push me farther everytime i visit them. i remember the stupidest details, like laying on top of a frozen lake among snow, running through a forest at the peak of night, watching an amazing meteor shower from the top of mountain clearing, stupid little jokes various friends have shared with me and i with them. i remember the pain i inflicted on others, the fucked up shit i did, the good shit i did, the times i felt human and the times i felt like nothing. i imagine everyone else ot be the same but i have no right to speak about anyone else. my blog.. it’s become nothing. i want to understand all of this… put order to chaos of seemingly irrelevent experiences that lead up to an equally irrelevent existence. what the hell is the point of anything?

my past often comes to me and keeps pushing me away. as if it wants me to move on.
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