This is, I don't know, the fourth or fifth day out here, on
my vacation, and I am already sick of the almost forced need to be happy, to
enjoy and to be seen to be enjoying the sun the sand the beaches the wind in
your hair the water on your back, all seen by your eyes through the glasses of
perception of your travelmates, almost like you are waiting for mother nature to sneak up and
slap you on the back and go, in a broad, unidentifiable accent, 'chao,
motherfucker!'
Walking through these touristy areas breathing in the sights
and sounds of a culture put out on display aggressively assaulting your senses
from everyside till you are overwhelmed, it is almost like you did not leave
the sea when you came away in the morning- it is very much there all around
you, raging, seething with a sub-surface anger that manifests itself in
plaintive sing-song 'very good t-shirt sir! very chip!' and 'hello pliz comin'
and 'lookin free' and so on and so forth.
Last night they were lighting candles and putting them in
beautiful cardboard floats and sending them off in the water. Make a wish,
stranger. Your deepest desire fulfilled for ten thousand dongs and served with
a smile.
What is it like to live in a city inhabited by tourists? To be the
only permanent denizens of a place whose largest population is comprised of
transients? How does it feel like to be in a place seeped with hundreds of
years of history where ironically the longest attention span is not even three
hundred seconds and each building is more years older than that? Does it make
*you* feel like you are history now, friend, left behind by a world which has
not time for you, which is only willing to grant you thrity seconds of
attention before the next shop, the next float, the next chinese lantern, the
next ancient temple grabs its attention; and to be subjected to this day over
day over month over year, a hundred times a day, way too many times a lifetime?
##############
The advent of the digital camera has turned us all into
assassins, armed with our point and shoot-ers, we look at the world through the
eyes of carl zeiss and pointing our guns with reckless abandon, impale memories
with fingerstabs for harpoons. A million five second memories saved on a
thumbdrive, shared and deleted when they become irrelevant. We don't save
memories in photographs anymore, 4608 x 3456 pixels, somehow seem wanting when
given the task of recreating a history, at least in those aspects of history
that are not seen but felt, allowed to suffuse to the soul via fingertips. And
we have lost that sense of creating history...we assasinate places we go to,
people we are with, the food we eat...and we bring back scalps. A life of been
there, done that, got the t-shirt to show for it moments.
Some cultures held the superstition that allowing your
photograph to be taken, you ran the risk of letting a piece of your soul be
captured. I wonder what they would think about it today, of the very
soullessness of what we have reduced the exercise to.
###############
I want.
A better computer.
More holidays.
Infinite supplies of beer.
More books.
Friends.
Liver failure.
World peace.
Individual peace.
To write a novel.
And a book of poetry.
Hallucinations.
More sleep.
In no particular order.
##############
I have spent five days now in this country, visited 4
cities, eaten more sea food than I could ever have imagined myself eating,
taken off my vest in front of more than a hundred people, spent more time in
choppy seas and drunk more sea water than is good for one person (choppy seas
would be mildly active seas to those of you who swim, to those who don't, like
me, well...waves taller than oneself twenty feet away from shore qualifies as
choppy), been accosted for 'massages' thrice and once come to the attention of
a group of particularly toughlooking vietnamese
youths drinking in a store who, by the looks they gave me, might have been
contemplating beating the living daylights out of me or merely serving me my
cigarettes, either of which going by what I have seen of this country would
probably have been served with a polite nod of the head and a cheerful 'hello!
Looking free, very chip, you like you open heart, no like no pressure'
accompanied by the ubiquitous smile (In the event, I got my cigarettes, served
to me by a exceedingly pretty, almost fragile young woman with a little finger
swathed in bandages who only charged me 10000 dongs extra, which considering
the time of the night, and the kind of muscle she had for backup, was pretty
cheap, I guess).
#############
And then there was a town of casinos that outlaw all stages
of the human condition except happiness or pretend happiness, brick and mortar
and steel and shiny glass edifices to forgetting. A town where the second taxi
driver I met told me stories of parents who forgot their infants in taxis and
then spent hours trying to locate them. Sometimes, this world makes a mockery
of urban legends.
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