Unnecessary Pipe Trench Excavation

Archive for January, 2010

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

And so you die, and the world is left just a little more wanting than it was before, or so I feel — even though you were in this world but not really of it, I suspect. Strange that I should be so saddened by the death of someone that I never met, who wrote a handful of books and short stories before I was born. But like so many youths, you spoke to me through Holden — here was someone who wasn’t phony (to use Holden’s term); here was someone who actually understood. In a world overwhelmed with bullshit, here was a sliver of truth. And unlike so many youths who go on to acquiesce to or otherwise be absorbed by the seemingly inherent phoniness of adulthood and maturity, you carried the banner until your death at 91. You retreated in the face of overwhelming odds to your “cabin in the west” much like Holden yearned to do, choosing solitude over surrender. You fought the good fight in your own way until the end; for this, I salute you.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it.

You never sold the movie rights to Catcher in the Rye; never let it be raped and ransacked by Hollywood. You never let it be cheapened for the quick, easy money. You never sold it out — cliché, I know, but nevertheless for this I am ever thankful (unlike myself and so many others, you learned from your mistakes). So I shudder to think what might happen to your creation now that you are gone. Who will protect Holden from the phonies now? Who will pick up your banner now that you have dropped it?

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So, I took my life in my hands today and took my first ride out of District 1 solo, all the way to District 7, which sounds farther than it is. It is actually only a few miles — about 5 or 6 kilometers, according to my cyclo driver friend Den. But the only option I had for a route was on major thoroughfares — imagine 3 or 4 lanes of road clogged with motorbikes and the occasional smog belching bus or truck, and the odd cab (and taxi drivers here drive like they do all over the world). Then consider the fact that this is Southeast Asia, where the rules of the road are different and largely unwritten.

Oh, and I forget the odd pedestrian and street vendor pushing their cart along the road.

In fact, you see people doing things all the time that would get them killed in a place like the U.S. But here, everyone does it and everyone expects it, and it works. The trouble for someone like me is, understanding is one thing, putting it into practice is another. For example, you’ll often see people running lights here, and turning left into oncoming traffic — but sussing out when you can do such things and when I can’t is where things get tricky. I suspect it’s just that I’ve been conditioned for years not to do such things; my instincts are the exact opposite of the locals. Furthermore, often times when I react to a situation and ride defensively, it’s usually the wrong thing to do — it’s much better to placidly ride on like the Vietnamese do, and let the other guy doing something crazy just do it.

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So I’ve been in Viet Nam a week, having spent most of that in the backpacker section of District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, which is pretty much an international circus — fun, but rather crazy. I’ve turned down so many touts, xe om drivers, ladies of the evening (and in some cases ladies of the afternoon) and various other peddlers in the neighborhood so often that half of them just look at me and smile and wave and don’t bother with the sales pitch. The other half shake their head and look away in frustration and disgust; it’s inconceivable why a rich American would want to walk somewhere when has a choice to do otherwise.

But I guess I’m like Larry Darrell in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. I’m content to loaf in the corner cafe with my books and interior monologue; no I don’t need xeroxed pirate copies of the latest Dan Brown opus or Lonely Planet Laos; I don’t need my shoes shined or my sandals repaired. No, I don’t need a xe om ride somewhere. A massage? No thanks, I don’t need a massage with or without a happy ending. Yes, I’m sure she’s very lovely and very young, as you say, but no thanks. No, I don’t need “boom boom” either. Yes, I’m sure she’ll do everything, but no thanks, no boom boom today – some other time, perhaps.

Heck, most of the working girls now ride up to me if they see me walking down the street at night (I’m big enough and tall enough that I must be a foreigner), hop off their motorbike, walk up to me, begin their sales pitch, recognize me, laugh, mock me — “ah, you go with me ’some other time!’” — and hop back on the bike and ride away. I should add that most people here looking to make a buck off foreign tourists are actually pretty easy going. I always smile when I refuse and say “no thanks” — I’ve even learned to say it in Viet — to show that there’s no hard feelings and no loss of face, and almost always, the smile is returned and they back off (plus it’s cute when the working girls act all pouty and sad). Sure, there’s a few that push the hard sell (and I confess there have been a few lovelies I’ve been hard pressed to say no to), but they are the exception rather than the rule.

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But I don’t think he would recognize the Saigon I’m coming to know.

So, I’ve been here three days and a few odd hours, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I’ve experienced of Ho Chi Minh City a.ka. Saigon. I’ve tried a couple of times now, but there is just too much going on — the food, the history, the people (both the lovely, amazing Vietnamese and the 20-something backpacker crowd, not to mention the assorted goofy tourists), the sing-song language (which I find alternately soothing and fetching when women speak it and amusingly odd sounding when men speak it), the omnipresent motorbikes, the city that’s awake and partying to the wee hours and yet awake and moving before the sun — it’s too much to absorb and elucidate effectively in such a short time.

We should also bear in mind that I arrived on the weekend of celebrations for the calendar New Year (Tet, the lunar new year celebration here, isn’t for a month or too yet). In short, I landed in the middle of a huge party/circus. At least that is what it felt like. Or perhaps I fell through Hunter S. Thompson’s looking glass (this is what it felt like my first night here, wandering around). Furthermore, I know that what I’ve seen of Saigon so far — District 1, essentially — is not representative of the city as a whole, much less of Viet Nam (from what I gather Hanoi, for example, is very different — as much as Atlanta is from New York, or LA from San Francisco, for example).

So I guess for now I’ll stick to an interior monologue for now. Getting ready to come here was even more overwhelming than what I found on upon arrival; who would have thought getting rid of all of one’s worldly possessions would be so hard? It turned out to be exceedingly difficult, and even involved getting screwed over by a charitable organization (not to mention T-Mobile). For the rest of my life I’m going to do my best not to acquire anything more than what I can carry on my person. Stuff = complication, one way or the other. No baggage of either the physical or mental variety is my motto for life.

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