Meet me in a place

I finally spoke to Laura. She said on one hand there was a lot of pain and heartache, from my dad not knowing me on Christmas, to my breakup, to my becoming the head of the family. On the other hand she said there is a narrative of a hero standing up for what he believes in, standing up for himself and his values.

Harm reduction. Protect ya neck.  

I just watched Gus van sants Last Days again. The real-time, slice of life, scenes are calming to me. Like the pace of real life when we are alone. I could breathe again in those scenes despite their sordid content.

The film opens on a man wandering the woods looking for his heroin stash. And yet still, there’s a dark purity to his mission and the way it is told on-screen. A man seeking relief from pain. A singular mission.

I dream of a place where we can meet.

A place where you are comfortable with silence. Where we might sit in each other’s arms and watch shooting stars

A place where you can take refuge in healing practices so when the weight of the past is too heavy you have a light to shine through the dark.

A place where the past and future don’t matter, where the present is most potent.

Meet me in a place like that, whoever you are.

On the other side of here.

Eternal yet unreal

The Center

At the time, there were 20 students living at the Center.

There was Warhol with his crazy white hair who wore patterned vests and Locke who was seven feet tall and looked like the guy from lost.

There was the Snorlax who was enormous and always had a jar of raspberry tea and snored without fail in group and there was Twitch who was skinny and mostly bald with glasses who looked like the guy who always plays the junky in movies.

There was The Woodpecker who had a pointy nose and a tiny mustache who feverishly tapped his plate with his spoon at breakfast and there were The Twins who were bright eyed long haired blonde kids who probably weren’t related and there were also the Wind Bags who were old Chinese men who farted so often and so loud that people avoided standing behind them and there was Shifty who was young and athletic who sat behind me in group and always squirmed around and of course there was The Crazy Cowboy who had a straw hat and beard who pointed a lot and talked to himself and there was The Burner who had big rippling calves and a water bottle covered in colorful burning man stickers and there was the Grouch who was stocky and always frowning who wore grey sweatpants and there was Simmons who had puffy hair and pink yoga pants who was always sneaking off to do pushups and then there was Mr. Goenka our teacher who told jokes and sang like a drunken bullfrog and there was me who would sneak off to write silly things on napkins and you couldn’t tell that we were living as Buddhist monks who had taken a vow of silence if you saw us in a parking lot or at a baseball game except for maybe the twins because they walked really slow with their hands clasped behind their backs.

 

 

Another Day in the Office

The unisex bathroom has a mess of crinkled surveys by the door that say things like, "Rate your unisex bathroom experience 1-10"

The person who brought them must have left in a hurry.

We are 47 minutes behind schedule and every minute costs ten dollars. I swish some of the fake urine around in my mouth first to make her feel more comfortable. The crew waits outside in the fake kitchen. Most of them are probably on instagram.

She spits out another stream but it still doesn’t get the amount of spray that I’m looking for. The scene in the commercial wont be funny without adequate spray. The bathroom is soaked now. Children in Aleppo are dying. Our government doesn’t believe in climate change. The Russians are disrupting our elections.

It’s 2016 and I'm in a unisex bathroom inside of a fake hospital spitting piss all over the walls and Donald Trump is president.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense anymore.

The sun

I touched the sun and it cured me.

I was melting like a stick of butter on a car windshield in august.

The highest resolution picture of the sun ever taken was released the day before and I was recalling the image through closed eyes on my porch when it hit me.

If we’re all made of star dust, our energy comes from the sun, and we are all one, cosmic consciousness etc etc then shit; the sun is the main fucking event. Without it, we would all die instantly.

The ancients had it right the first time.
Or, at least, it’s as much the great magnet as anything else I’ve come across.

Both the opener and the closer. Mother of fire.

Try and look at that picture without a feeling of reverence.

It’s as close to where it all began as we can get.

Each bubble of flame is the size of Texas

Each bubble of flame is the size of Texas

Ice Cream and Libertarians

My grandma is convinced that her children are trying to keep her deaf and blind.

She had a stroke two years ago and her faculties are failing but that can’t be it, that can’t be why she can’t hear or see.

She’s grown far too accustomed to seeing the doctor to have her youth restored but now, even with great hearing aids, there’s not much that can be done.

I love my grandma mind you. Right now, we’re having ice-cream in a mini diner they’ve put together for the geriatrics in her nursing home. A resident of the home is behind the counter shuffling around cartoonishly slow to get our ice-cream. He says he volunteers there to stay busy. He tells me how he hasn’t seen his grand-daughter in three years. My grandma offers him her glasses and says, “Try these and you won’t see her at all.” That must be where I get it from.

His daughter is married to an air-force engineer. A woman in the hall outside the diner told me her son is also in the military. I’m reminded how so many people in New Hampshire, where my grandmother lives, go into the military. Live free or die is the state motto. So many questions. I’ve only seen two black people in New Hampshire in the 10 years that I have been coming here. Suddenly it starts to all make sense. Why is New Hampshire home to libertarianism? Why had so many people here voted for Trump, someone who promised to essentially dismantle the government?

When I sat down in the airport pickup van on the way into New Hampshire I was met with a familiar face. Ken, the crusty old New Englander who would always pick me up. He  looked back at me with his humorless, bald on top, long in the back white mullet and flashed me a smile that lasted only a millisecond before he put it away. Better get rid of it before it really catches on. He wasn’t taking any chances.

I knew what would come next, our usual slate of small talk. So small that it usually only lasted 2-3 seconds before an unusual, warm, enduring silence, would envelope the car.

“How ya doin Matt?.”

“Hey Ken, can’t complain.”

He shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do ya any good.”

This is as far as it always goes. In the ice-cream parlor I thought about Ken and looked at this man behind the counter who’s son-in-law was in the military. Nobody I’ve met in California has ever told me that their family members’ are in the military. Everyone does in New Hampshire.

Nearly everyone I meet in New Hampshire has that, self-reliant, dismissive, independent approach to life. It’s no wonder these people don’t want universal health-care or a safety net for people they’ve never met. They can barely smile at strangers, let alone talk to them. They care about their families and their community and they bust their asses out there. My uncle spends half of his days in the winter breaking his ass just to exist. Cutting down trees on his property, chopping wood, shoveling, ice picking, feeding the stove, keeping the pipes from freezing, are just a few things he does on a daily basis. It goes on and on. He’d do just about anything for his friends and family though. 

It’s too bad trump’s friends all seem to be the scum swamp feeders he promised to rid the government of.

The illusion

His shirt says, “duct tape can’t fix stupid, but it sure can muffle the sound”.

I’m on a plane to Tennessee to see what “is beyond the wall” of the illusion or what we call Maya in Buddhist/yogic scripture and the silver backed hefty man standing over me’s t-shirt is cracking abduction jokes.

I better not take the red pill while he’s around. Too late.

Im reading Eve babitz talk about her love of taquitos and I’m reminded of the passion I once felt for writing. “With sauce so good you could eat your father.” Those must be some damn good taquitos. She laments that if Janis Joplin had gone for taquitos instead of shooting up that faithful Sunday afternoon in Hollywood she’d probably still be alive.

I must be doing something right heading into the Smokey Mountains to do an ancient sacred ceremony with a man who looks like an Indian Santa Claus because hey, I’m writing again.

My orientation on the spiritual path feels like I’m reading a book where I’ve lost my place. I don’t know how far I’ve gone or how much left I have to go.

Maybe, If I can just spin fast enough I’ll careen out of orbit and land somewhere new.

Two steps forward.

One step back.

And do the do-si-do

Foxy

The Fox

The Fox

It's midnight at the Phat Khat hostel in the mountains of Nepal. Foxy AKA Gandalf the munted is falling over my porch furniture. 

He says, to no one in particular, "Fuck off mate" and waves his staff around. 
"Always talking traffic. Road blocks mate. I'm tired of it"

Im not convinced that he isnt some sort of multi dimensional wizard time traveler smashing himself with booze just to stay grounded in this dimension. The evidence cannot be ignored.  

Im eating kale and my dad is hallucinating

This time I'm going to stray from my usual style of writing and do a classic stream of consciousness "blog post"

Why do you ask? Because I need to document something in real-time rather than turn it into a piece of writing. 

The you being the bots that crawl through my website and drop links to their own domains. 

Robots, my biggest fans.

There's something dark and cartoon-like about the fact that the majority of my 'readers' are robots selling sex toys. How fitting. 

And so:

I was visiting back home yesterday minding my own business eating kale and listening to new age spiritual self help podcasts when I sensed something was wrong. Something other than my usual existential confusion. I took my headphones off and heard a mumbling sound coming from the door. I got up and carefully opened the door. There stood my father, 77 years old now, and he was almost in tears, calling me Richard.

I figured out what happened later and I still can scarcely believe it. I hold so much compassion and love for this guy and it pains me to even write about this now but I feel as though I must. 

Lets try for a moment to understand what it can be like to have Alzheimer's disease. For my father it manifested thusly:

You wake up from your nap in your room and don't know where you are. Not only that, you don't recognize your room nor do you know who else is in the house. You get up and go to the hallway looking for answers. Inside, you feel a tug. There is something important you must do. There is someone somewhere that you need to find and get answers from. They'll know what to do.

You approach a door and knock politely. You're embarrassed and you don't want to intrude on anyone until you figure out what the hell is happening.

Who knows who is behind the door.
You knock again but there is no answer. So many questions, so many unknowns.

Suddenly you recognize the door.

Your vision darkens.

You brace yourself against the wall. You've done something horribly wrong and that's why the door is closed. They won't talk to you because of what you did.

Images of your past flash through your mind. An encounter you had some time ago when the Alzheimers first started surfaces. There had been a misunderstanding between you and a friend that you couldn't remember. He's behind the door. He doesn't want to talk to you. 

You knock again.
You're sorry. 

"I'm sorry Richard. I'm sorry for what I've done."
There's no answer.
"If you're mad at me I understand. I was confused... and I..."

Nothing.

"I'm so sorry Richard..."
The dark door looms.

You despair. There's nothing you can do. It's too late... You're alone. 

And then. That's when I open it. 

I was really shocked to see him in such a state when I opened it. I tried to sooth him and sit with him afterwards while he calmed down. The door had become a literal symbol of his inability to communicate properly and his fears had manifested as punishments for his disease. Yeah, like a god damned bad acid trip!

I told him he had done nothing wrong and that everything was fine. While I was assuring him he didn't actually know who I was. I wanted to be upset at him for this but what can you do? Chastise someone until they remember who you are? Ohhhhh yeah, you're that fucker son that's always yelling at me. The silver lining was his absolute elation when he realized everything was actually okay.

These episodes of confusion are constant and cyclical. The unknown can be exciting but it can also be terrifying. If you ever have a loved one with this condition I implore you to remember, it's not their fault. They can't WILL themselves to remember or figure things out. I think the best thing you can do is assure them that everything is okay. Blaming them for forgetting you will only stress them out and make everything worse.  

I believe in free will and I think the most important choice we have is how to react to the suffering in our lives.  

No one makes it out of here alive. We might as well get along and enjoy the time and the peace we have while we're here. Amirite?

Matt

Christmas in Vietnam

Uncut wood railings and wide cushioned seats. Sea water lapped against a retaining wall below the porch. A wheel to spin for free drinks. Christmas in Vietnam.

My pool opponent was a British man, stout like a barrel with a shiny round head like a bowling ball where tufts of hair clung to the sides for dear life. He looked like the archetypal history teacher everyone had in high-school. I stood back after we made our introductions while he bent over to eye the table as if to say he wasn’t sure he trusted it. There was little I trusted in Vietnam either. God knows we didn’t deserve their trust. 

“We were growing Canola. Acres and acres of it for nearly forty years in northern Britain.”
He spoke without looking at me.
“I think it was Spring when we found it. It had the orange label on it… unmistakable. Agent Orange. One canister of that in the wrong place could take out a city.” He looked at me suddenly, which punctuated the statement with a challenge to disagree with his assertion.

I had done some reading on Agent Orange after I saw so many people with deformities in Saigon. Agent orange is a poison that was used during the war by the US under Kennedy in Southern Vietnam for ‘deforestation’. The code word for the mission was “Operation Ranch Hand.” Millions had been exposed.

“When they finally showed up to the farm to get rid of it, they dug a huge pit, put the canister in it, incinerated it, then they threw in all of their gear, and then they incinerated the incinerator!”

He racked up the balls with an air of studied precision. This was a man who did things right the first time.

“You can see it’s effects everywhere in Nam,” he added before he leaned over and nailed the break so hard the balls crashed into each other in mid air as they dashed around the table.

 “And during the war they said ‘it wasn’t poisonous’.”

His eyebrows darted up his head and held fast when he said poisonous. There they waited for my response like soldiers at attention. I agreed that it was an awful situation. Buying a few cards from a deformed woman the day before had relieved some of that guilt but only for a moment. Both the guilt and the relief were undeserved. It wasn’t my fault that Vietnam had happened but what about the current wars? Aren’t we somewhat responsible for our government’s actions?

Tim would say that we are responsible for ourselves first and foremost. If you can’t take control of your own life, how can you be held responsible for others? 

Old Tim was a hair past fifty and had been running the family farm without help from his siblings for twenty years. He was a sturdy, dependable man: the kind of guy whose word meant something. He hadn’t left the UK in his whole life because he’d also been responsible for taking care of their bed-ridden mother. She had just passed away and his siblings had come back looking for their inheritance. He’d been forced to sell the farm to appease their greed instead of continuing on with it like he’d hoped to do. Any resentment I detected when he told me this seemed only to be for show. He had dealt with it, and he harbored no guilt of his own.

“My son has been coming here for years to kite surf.” He said as he missed for the first time. Finally it was my turn.  

I made my shot and circled the table. There was a dance area and a dj booth across the room where music was playing low. It was still early and we had the place mostly to ourselves.

“Lord knows I’ve bought enough boards to outfit a whole school. Might as well try it for myself. I’ll go tomorrow if I don’t get pissed tonight.” This stopped me. I looked at him to see if he was kidding but there he was with an assured smile on his face. Kite surfing is extremely difficult even for the young and able bodied. I asked him how long he had been in Vietnam.

            “I landed in Saigon two weeks ago and stayed there until yesterday. It took me all of two weeks just to get my feet under me. All the trash everywhere, the people, the chaos. Everything was so… different. Culture shock I guess you’d call it.”

Tim was an activist and an environmentalist. His friends made fun of him for picking up trash around his neighborhood to which he would respond. “What? Do you expect the people who tossed it to come pick it up?”

As we finished the game the bar filled up. Dozens of Russians in red shirts with santa hats stood at the bar with their gorgeous counterparts standing back in patient clumps. The lights dimmed and slowly the people who couldn’t resist the pulse of the beat crawled out onto the dance floor. I was one of those people. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tim still sitting at our table at the far end of the bar sipping his pint. He watched us with a silver smile. The smile said, “It’s never too late.”

 

Hanoi Part II

As soon we crossed the block, the dogs all turned back. All bark and no bite. Sorry, you'll have to get your action porn fix from The Hobbit 9. Did you guys notice that they did a whole new series of Spider man? Having lived through 3 iterations of the same series I am starting to feel old. It's too bad that hollywood is run by risk management business types. "The first series worked out why would we risk something new and interesting?" Dull fucks.

Okay, back to Hanoi 

After running from the dogs we hopped on the back of a Vietnamese guys motorbike who we spotted smirking and beckoning to us in the shadows. My friend and I gripped each other laughing nervously until the 3 of us made it back to town. The driver was laughing too although I can't be sure why.  

The next day we all decided to get a tour. I am not a fan of tours in big groups. The silly questions, the waiting for people, the impersonal lecturing, it grinds my gears. We forked over a few extra thousand Dong (One US dollar gets you twenty thousand dong) and got a private Hanoi food tour for our group of 6 and I highly recommend it.

Our guide was exceptional. Her name was something I had trouble pronouncing but she was ready with a solid nickname in the can. Cherry, was just about that size, with thick black rimmed glasses, twinkly eyes, and a smile the size of a hub cap. We began our tour at the side of a busy intersection. For our group to cross the street she instructed us to put our hands up to the side like trees and yell (in a happy go -lucky tone) Sticky Rice! She winked and promised us that this technique was tested and proven. She hasn't lost anyone yet. I'm still using it weeks later. 

Once we got our sticky rice crew situated we were off. Soups, noodles, dumplings, rice dishes, deserts, drinks, nothing was safe from the Sticky rice crew. Cherry's enthusiasm and cheer was almost unreal. You couldn't talk to her without catching her contagious smile.

My favorite thing she showed us was a back alley bar that served sunflower seeds and egg coffee. Egg coffee was a revelation for me. I'm lactarded so I've never been able to enjoy a creamy cappuccino or latte without painful repercussions. In walks egg coffee. Oh egg coffee, silky smooth nectar. Thick and voluminous like a metaphysics book and gilded like pure honey. According to our Cherry, egg coffee is whipped egg yolk and sugar scooped on top of an espresso. You eat it with a spoon and then you order another one because it's egg coffee and you can't have just one.

At the end of the tour Cherry brought us to a Bia Hoi stoop. You basically go to Bia Hoi to drink the cheapest beer in the world on a barbie sized stool in the street. My knees were up near my head but hey I was drinking home brewed beer for 20 cents a glass in a busy intersection, what more could I ask for? In Hanoi, it's the best way to watch the torrent of people, salesmen, and bikes fly by.

Now that the tour was done we pressed Cherry about her life in Hanoi. She went to college and studied business at the behest of her strict parents but she didn't like it. After school she couldn't bring herself to continue on that path and so she stood up to her parents. She told them that what really made her happy was to give tours of her beloved city. They were shocked and revolted but she did it anyway with all of her sweet little Cherry heart. Having done it for a while now, they were finally coming around to see how happy it made her. Now she is saving up to try to move out and start her life on her own. After hearing this I made her take a shot with me. We pooled some dong together and gave her a fat tip. Sweet Cherry wouldn't even take it, we had to force it on her. Bless her little cherry heart- definitely a master in the making. 

So if you ever hear someone yell "Sticky Rice!" that's probably Cherry giving a lucky new group a tour with locomotive enthusiasm in her favorite place, Hanoi.  

That night we laid low but since everything closes at midnight, we were still out for the final curtain call. Vietnamese are early to bed and early to rise but since so much of their retail economy is driven by tourism, many street vendors and bars have a funny system to avoid the cops. After midnight the police will typically patrol around and make sure everything is closed. That night, we happened to be at a street food stand that sold Bahn Mi sandwiches and beer. A signal was shouted and one after the other, every bar and vendor turned off their lights and started putting things away. Sandwiches were wrapped up, gates closed, drinks stowed, and arguments settled. Then the police cruised by.... and then everything lit back up. Sandwiches out, beers cracked, positions restated, and gates rolled up. It's quite a sight. 

If you go to Vietnam, I definitely recommend spending some time in Hanoi. Keep a look out for Cherry too if ya do and for god sakes don't miss the Egg Coffee.

Next: Christmas day in Mui Ne

Half a man

Right now Jerry Sanders is more intimately engaged with plumbing than a homemade water heater in Thailand. That’s saying a lot because our Jerry was a plumber.

His position in his rotoprone bed makes him look like a swimmer mid dive except he is riddled with tubing instead of slow motion water droplets. He has a feeding hose to eat, a catheter to use the bathroom and a ventilator tube to breathe.

Without these tools helping him Jerry would be dead.

In 1987 Jerry’s son told him that if he didn’t stop drinking he wouldn’t talk to him anymore.

Jerry kept drinking.

Jerry’s neighbor asked him to stop leaving the TV on late at night so loud.

Jerry didn’t listen.

Jerry was thinking about how much time he had to get to the liquor store on Recida Avenue before it closed. When Jerry’s wife asked him for a divorce Jerry hardly noticed. He didn't talk to her much anyway.

Now Jerry is strapped upside down in B Wing of San Francisco General and his penis is about to be ripped in half.

Jerry won’t mind having half a penis because he won’t feel a thing. Jerry is only forty-seven but he managed to consume enough alcohol in his twenty year drinking marathon to stock the bars in Reno for a week.  When Jerry was a teenager he used to joke with his friends about filling his bathtub with vodka infused jello.

Now Jerry has no friends he can joke with about jello bathtubs. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to because he is hanging upside down with his stomach cut open to relieve the growing pressure in his rotting organs.

Before he was brought to the hospital in a coma Jerry would sometimes run into his neighbor Sam when he took out the trash. Sam was a graduate student at UCSF who always wore ill-fitting hooded sweatshirts and jeans from the girls section of various thrift stores.

When Jerry talked to Sam, Sam would wince because Jerry spoke very loud and aggressively. Sam would do everything in his power to end the conversation and flee back to his apartment but it was difficult because the hallway to the garbage bin was narrow and he would often find himself trapped. Jerry spoke loudly because he was usually so inebriated that it was difficult for him to even hear himself at normal volume. Sam knew this and would try to stand back away from him when he spoke. However, for Sam to be able to get around Jerry he would need to get closer to him.

This paradox was the source of much anxiety for Sam when it came time to take out the trash. A full trashcan became a trigger for this anxiety and to this day, when his trash is full, his heart rate goes up. More often than not his trash-can will sit there, full, for days without being emptied. Recently he even bought another one to help him avoid running into Jerry.

On May 22nd 2014 when Jerry’s rotoprone bed rotated to release the pressure in his organs, his penis got caught in the wheel mechanism and tore in half. Fortunately enough for Jerry, he has been unconscious for a month. The doctors, following their protocol, sedated Jerry enough for him to go unconscious in April in order to replenish the functionality of his insides.

Insides that he has so mercilessly demolished with whiskey for nearly a quarter century.

Once unconscious, they tried their best to repair his damaged body under sedation. They will only attempt to wake him up once they deem his organs fit for work. Until then he will remain under heavy sedation in a dreamless sleep.

Jerry is aware of none of this.

The last thing he experienced was a gulp of bourbon on his lazy boy in his apartment. He took a piece of ice into his mouth and swished it around. Unbeknownst to him, this was one of the few sensations he allowed himself to enjoy. Now Jerry will never feel anything again.

In June one of the nurses took a picture of Jerry suspended upside down with a hole in his chest and half a penis and sent it to her friend who works at a gallery. He slipped it into the pile of small photos they sell at the front as postcards. Most of the photos were of a work depicting the many shades of "teal". 

Now Jerry is locally famous. More so than he ever was when he was conscious and retained both halves of his penis. You can see enlarged pixelated versions of Jerry in the gallery now where they serve shrimp skewers and drinks at six o'clock. There's no whiskey though so Jerry probably wouldn't go there. 

 

 

Hanoi Part I

Soon after Bangkok I booked a trip to Vietnam to catch some old college friends. The big city in the north is called Hanoi and that is where I found myself after a hellish situation with my visa. The first thing I noticed about Hanoi in relation to Bangkok was the size and architecture of the buildings. Bangkok is filled with opposing cultures and architecture, from bamboo huts to enormous modern condo structures. Hanoi, on the other hand, is less modernized and is largely composed of two story buildings with commercial storefronts in front of EVERY building. At least, that’s what I witnessed in the 3 days I was there.  

The streets in Hanoi are narrow and the traffic is incessant. There are virtually no traffic laws or signals. When crossing the street you literally just have to walk/run into moving traffic. It’s as if a handful of gravel was thrown into a blender: people drive on opposite sides, on the sidwalks, and they run, stop, and speed through all manner of unholy traffic situations. Miraculously, in the four days I was out and about, I did not see one accident.

A lot happened on this leg of the journey so to keep this post manageable I am going to focus on two Masters. One in this post and the other in Hanoi Park II. By Master I mean, someone who knows who they are, and is comfortable. Masters don’t settle for the mundane, they are curious and excited about what life has to offer. They don’t subscribe to the conditioning and boundaries of society- they create their own. These are the people I seek out, to hear their stories and to learn from them.

When I arrived at the Backpacker Hostel there was a pub crawl in its early stages. My college buddy was there with a Canadian guy he had met in Laos. I had woken up that morning at 3am to get to the airport, and had to deal with an abundance of Babylon bullshit at customs so when my friend and the Canadian handed me a beer you could say I was ready to laugh or cry. Then the floodgates opened and the bar crawl began.

A big hairy Australian who worked at the hostel led the crawl. He had just lost a bet in a card game and subsequently had to put on the clothes of his successor. She happened to be a petite blonde in a dress so you can probably imagine what that looked like, a lot of stretched material and tangled hair. The Australian brought us to another hostel that was basically a night-club. From there we went to an actual night club with a dj booth, several bars, hookas, and a number of twitchy Vietnamese. By now we had gathered numbers and drinking momentum. The Canadian had somehow found himself a colorful Mexican looking poncho which added to his “Dude” like appearance in accordance to the scruffy beard, flip flops, and cigarette that perpetually hung out of his relaxed jaws. He is the first Master of Hanoi. For those of you who haven’t seen “The Big Lebowski,” you should first, be ashamed of yourselves, and second you should watch it. It’s Cohen Brothers comedy at its best.

The Canadian was similar to “The Dude,” the main character in the movie albeit not physically. The Canadian is tall and skinny with combed back dirty blonde hair and a perpetual warm smile that is not consigned to just his mouth, his whole face smiles. He is supremely positive whether he has just gotten his wallet stolen, been shut down by a lady of interest, or collapsed headfirst into the gutter. He isn’t worried about what will be or what he should do. Whatever happens, he approaches it with a smile and an affirmative nod. In my experience this is much easier said than done. I know meditation instructors who don’t have this much alacrity towards life.   

After using the bathroom I spotted him across the bar with one of the Vietnamese in the club who was particularly jittery. The Vietnamese guy kept rolling up his sleeves to flex and then he would laugh hysterically. I’m not sure if he was making fun of the big bros on the crawl or if the weird little pink bags he was sucking on and peddling to everyone had pushed him over the edge. The Canadian, my college friend, and I stayed until close, about 12:00am. That’s when the police drive around Hanoi shutting down everything from food carts, to markets, to night clubs. Many have lookouts at the ends of streets to warn you when they are coming. It’s normal to see a whole block go dark all of sudden when this happens. When the cops pass, it will light up again. This can be very entertaining when you’re drunk. At our club, however, they came in full force and shooed everyone out.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about a bar crawl. Bar crawls full of drunken westerners abroad are like embarrassing drunk uncles at Christmas dinner but there is some significance to this in relation to what I observed of the economic structure of Vietnam so bear with me.

After the cops kicked us out rumors of the “mafia bar” circled through the group like STDS in a whorehouse. Before I knew what was happening a group of us was led down a series of dark alleys. As the alley’s got darker and more eerie people began to fall back and go home but The Canadian, my friend, and I, dared forth. After hopping fences, ducking under alleyways, and crossing a highway on foot, we found ourselves at the side of a river. You could see the lights on in one building; nothing else as far as you could see was lit. Thumping music wafted out of the seedy cement structure like fumes out of a tailpipe. Outside, food carts, and nitrous balloon hustlers waited for us. Inside, there were two custom built bars, a pool table, a small dj table, and a strange back alley room. The host told us that an organized crime group ran the bar and that they paid off the cops to run their clandestine operation whenever they wanted.

In the back alley room, under dim blue light stoic Vietnamese families sat bobbing their heads. I saw more than one baby rocking back and forth on a bouncy lap at 2am to house music. It was there where I met another Master in the making who I ended up running into several times throughout Vietnam. But she is another story.

At the end of the night my college friend and I tried to find our way home but after turning down several alley’s we realized that we were lost. I heard barking by the river and saw shadows darting between the trees. The wild dogs were closing in and we were unarmed, in the dark, in Nam. 

Stay tuned for Hanoi Part II