"This is a place where time reverses//Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses//Instruments shine on a silver tray//Don't let me be carried away" -Elliott Smith

I've made it to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, but it's just a pass-through and I don't have anything to say yet - so I'm going to talk about the lost children of Vang Vieng.

If I haven't explained it proper, V.V. is an intractable cyclone of hedonism and sin, of alcohol and promiscuity, of mushroom tea and squandered wealth. Our three days felt like a month, and the people we met who had been there for real months had a far-offness to their eyes that spoke extensively of their experience.

It's a bit like Peter Pan if he'd had a nasty toad-licking habit. "I don't wanna grow up..."



For every night in Vang Vieng that you don't pass out drunk, they allocate you a strip of colorful fabric to wear around your wrist. The long-timers have armfuls of them, though most have many fewer than the days they've spent. You get another wristband if you injure yourself substantially. Lots of those. Drunken tubing accidents and other missteps in a place full of opportunities for accidental self-harm.

We re-met a girl we'd already spent time with in Luang Prabang. She'd arrived four days before us, spent all her money and gotten a job at a bar slinging drinks for free room and board (and drinks). We met another guy who had the same story, but had been there three months. In Vang Vieng, it's easy to float and hard to save up. He couldn't afford the flight home or else he didn't want it.

Almost every long-term party person you meet (almost everywhere) has a happy-go-lucky attitude that reflexively blankets a sort of bleak darkness. Sometimes it creeps out. Young people who haven't gone through shit, but have still seen a lot. Shock without the shells. War without the war.



When you sleep with a girl three times in V.V., but don't officially date her, your compadres will sneak a shot of piss into your night of drunkeness. To be fair, you shoulda known better. People sport affairs for an hour or a minute, drifting through the room casual as grocery shoppers. They eat little and drink too much. The days slide together like tectonic plates. They party hard enough for everyone in the world to take it a little easy every once in a while - they've got it well covered.

In Vang Vieng the local Laos whiskey, Tiger, is free. At most bars. Whiskey is free. As in, you don't pay to drink it. They hand it to you - then you drink it. Not sure how the subtle economics of this works, but I guess dependancy instills brand allegiance. Like dollar-cheeseburger day. What a tumultuous and exciting place. How sultry. How ensnaring.

It's not the only place we've met wayward sons and daughters, lost amidst an ocean of cheap booze and party paint (I didn't know what it was either), but Vang Vieng appears to be the internationally agreed upon epicenter. Brits and French, Americans and Canadians and Irish and Finnish and Norwegian and goddamnit everyone comes together to pray at the altar of the shitfaced gods - to pledge allegiance to the flag of the burgeoning-alcoholic. The Israelis are here too, but they've mostly just finished their two years of military service. They have a different demeanor. One Israeli girl said to me, "I think America is like a movie. Like nothing is real." I asked if it was at least a good movie and she shook her head no. I asked if it was the shitty kind you go see just to eat popcorn in the dark and she shook her head again, smiling.



Vientiane - rain today and ligaments of altar-incense smoke floating and melting into the haze. Gongs again in the distance. Flies escaping the rain with me, landing tentatively on my toes and ankles. I met some east coasters, a Laotian sweet-talker, a Korean government man and some southern Chinese folks that were keen on white girls. Ha, who isn't? I saw some nice temples, heard some shit music, ate some decent food and walked around a bit. South, south, south. Tha Khaek, Savvanaket, the islands and Cambodia beyond them. Couldn't boat the Mekong. Gonna expend our water travel getting from Phnom Penh to Siam Reap.

Spirits in the mist. I'm feeling cynical. "Dispatches" isn't helping.

Location:Vientiane, PDR Laos

"Saigon cafarde, a bitch, nothing for it but some smoke and a little lie-down, waking in the late afternoon on damp pillows, feeling the emptiness of the bed behind you as you walked to the windows looking down at Tu Do. Or just lying there tracking the rotations of the ceiling fan, reaching for the fat roach that sat on my Zippo in a yellow disk of grass tar. There were mornings when I'd do it before my feet even hit the floor. Dear Mom, stoned again." -Michael Herr "Dispatches"

It's against the law for a person from Laos to sleep with a Falang until they are married. I mean, they can sleep with each other, but no jiggy-jig. It's plenty frowned upon elsewhere, but this is the only place I've encountered with a law on the books. I wonder where else is like this - I wonder if it works.

Something tells me it happens anyways. Laws, like windows, are made to be broken. Especially laws about fucking.

I'm drinking coffee with sweet milk and recovering from an intense night. The power is out because it rained for eight hours yesterday and the river rose four feet. Four feet puts little at risk. It happens often enough that most structures are safely out of the way, or at least outfitted to handle the rise.

It sparked a story from a new Laotian friend, of when the river rose fifteen feet in July of this year, covering the first floor of her house in six feet of water on the wrong side of the river to get help or supplies, stuck on the top floor and unable to swim. For two days. I trucked across the bridge with her to unplug electronics and move anything ruinable off the floor. When I crossed the bridge, the stone footpath on the other side, normally dry, was river-water past my ankles. After, we headed back to the other side, which has a large embankment and most of the stores and businesses, making it the safer side. We played eight ball with a dark and drunken Brit until the rain stopped and the waters receded early this morning. It could have gone either way.

We asked why we couldn't tube the river yesterday and the Australian who owns one of the local drunk shacks said, "just a little rough today, don't want anyone dying this year, bad publicity, that."

Dead power lines and dead business and dead tourists, god bless. Too much water here, not enough there. Garbages filled with edible matter and starvation prevails. Intelligent design. This is monsoon season and that's why I cant have a damn fruit shake this morning. Stupid electric blenders. I bet the grapes would have been fucking sour anyways. I joke because it stopped raining.

The storm sweeps in from the mountains like a tantrum - a patter then an uproar. It makes rivers of the streets, waterfalls of the roofs and muddy death of the river. My pool game was off all night.

Location:Vang Vieng, PDR Laos

"A crazy dream//you done me wrong//you left me long//I couldn’t stand a chance without you//You said that love was dead//and in my head//I just couldn’t believe it." -Daniel Johnston

I had a dream I was hosting a party and I fell asleep early. Someone did some nefarious shit, so I kicked everybody out. Wandering around trying to find the stragglers, the house appeared to me as a maze containing every place I've ever lived. It was Astor, Castro, Covert, Page and Morning Dew. The kitten from the eco-lodge was there. As were my brothers and my sister and my whole family and others I recognized. But they all had to go.

A girl approached me and took me by surprise. She told me her name was Fifteen and she appeared to me as a conglomeration - unsubtle haunts of every girl I've ever known. I told her she could stay.

We were estranged so we caught up. She was dark and sharp and funny. We kissed and made love and then she left too.

I recall the curve and warmth of skin under my fingers, I recall the leaving, I recall the enticing white of understanding smiles.

Vang Vieng is the Laotian center of narco-tourism and river tubing, but otherwise a pretty sleepy place. A treacherous combination. Several tourists die every year when they are swept away in the river while trying to tube down it. Usually it is very late at night. Usually they are quite drunk. The river rushes through the town at a humbling speed, particularly this time of year at the end of monsoon season. It's a rich muddy brown from the collection of mountain soil.






Across the river from the main tourist drag, late night bars offer regular drink menus, but when flipped they reveal a "happy" or "funny" menu. The place we went had a "happy and funny for you" menu. Mushy shakes, ganja garlic bread, and mister "o" tea. That would be psilocybin mushroom smoothies, marijuana garlic bread, and poppy-pod tea, if you're not privy. Pretty much government sanctioned, or so it seems. An odd place.

The drive down here from Luang Prabang offered some of the most ego-shattering views I've ever seen. It reminded me of a conversation I had with an Israeli architecture student while observing the immense church in Hanoi, St. Joseph's Cathedral, opened at the onset of French colonial control of Vietnam. She observed that religious structures are built to make you feel minuscule in relation to the presence of god, communist structures to make you feel minuscule in relation to the state, and wealthy folk's houses to make you feel minuscule in relation to their wealth. The natural wonders of the world aren't constructed at all, but in relation to them, our human works are trite and insignificant - as are we.



























But how we try, how we try.

We're heading out from here in a few days. South and south and south to Cambodia. I've said this before and been proven wrong, but I anticipate a vacuum of connectivity. If I'm not posting, I'm still writing and I'm still shooting. I hope you miss me.

With love,
-isaac

Location:Vang Vieng, PDR Laos

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home//walking a road many men have gone down//I'm seeing your world of people and things//your paupers//and peasants//and princes and kings." -Bob Dylan

We flew in on Laos Airlines and had a pleasant and uneventful flight. I'd heard it was a dangerous airline so I was frankly a little disappointed that nothing caught on fire even a little bit. The plane made funny noises and the in-flight meal was a little underwhelming - but I was expecting a Wright brothers bi-plane that you had to pedal like a bicycle, I was expecting jet-fuel explosions. If you ask me, that would be the way to go. Fast. Exciting. Nothing left but a few charred bones and a bit of ragged flesh. Let the monsoon rains bury me in Luang Prabang.



This town in the north of Laos is incredibly beautiful - nestled into the mountains that surround the Mekong River, hills speckled with temples and the streets full of monks and Chinese tourists. At four in the morning you can hear bells toll and chantings curl and moan like smoke.








There were some "frequently asked questions" on the back of one restaurant's menu. My favorite was, "Where are all the monks going?"



(The answer was, basically, "Doing people stuff, you stupid falang.")

Of an evening, a night market sprawls on either side and down the middle of the main street for almost a mile, people set up and sell crafts and weavings. I bought a big "fuck off" knife for ten dollars. Down one alley there are food vendors with fresh spring rolls, grilled meat and fish, and dollar-a-plate buffet with noodles and vegetables that I will sorely miss.

The city is vibrant and substantially under-construction.












There is a curfew here, same as Vietnam. Loosely enforced for people, but strongly monitored for businesses. After midnight everything closes down excepting the bowling alley I mentioned last time. They have some arrangement that let's them keep it open until four in the morning.

So we went to the goddamn bowling alley. I kept screaming, "over the line!" when someone's toe would slip, and there was a lot of talk about how Walter wasn't wrong, but that he was undeniably an asshole. Afterwards, we shared a tuk-tuk home with some nice fellow bowlers. I had some strange light in me and set off preaching the word of Christ in a bellowing voice. Just your humblest servant, Reverend Blood, traveling and spreading light with my associate Father Phlegm, and our dear horsekicked cousin, Brother Bile. We also do hip-hop themed christenings. It was really inspiring. Even Alfie thought so. After the ride, the driver looked at me and said, "Fuck you." Insisting we had ripped him off before we had paid him. Bowling by default. What a world. What a world. I don't think he liked my sermon.



(Cat in a hat - if I'd had gloves it could have been kitten in a mitten.)

Luang Prabang is the second most populated city in Laos and it's still pretty damn small. A simple Falang Reverend, for example, couldn't get away with, say, murdering a tuk-tuk driver over a five dollar grift and driving his rig to Cambodia. Still tempting.

We met an English ex-pat that runs a little eco-lodge we're switching to from our hostel. He's an odd duck, but I like his style. Very laid back. Likes to tell stories. He told us about the carpet bombing in Laos. The Ho Chi Minh Trail zagged between Vietnam and Laos when it was active, and we dropped bombs here every 8 minutes for several years. You can visit the caves where the Laos people hid. Half the bombs didn't blow when they hit the ground and to this day there are parts of Laos that you aren't allowed to walk through. Too risky. Too much unexploded ordinance.

To get to our new digs, you have to cross an old bridge with a footpath on either side for pedestrians. It drops a hundred feet down to the Mekong.








People are friendly here, but again, we are constrained to a particular chunk of town. Laos shares a lot with Thailand and our nickname has jumped the border. As we passed a mother and her baby, the mother smiled wide and grabbed her kid's arm, shaking it in a wave to us while saying, "Hello Falang!"

Oh my, the waterfall.











We stopped at a Mung village after visiting the waterfall - we swam, swung, ate fried rice and then went to the single poorest place I've ever been. There were a dozen kids or so, asking for 100 Kip. A little over a penny. We were brought there as though they were an attraction. A stop on the tour.

Apparently, there's a name for it, for poverty tours - poorism. Fuck me.

Brawn had some cookies to offer up, and the kids practically came to blows over them. I didn't take photos and I don't have any commentary.

Tomorrow, Vang Vieng, then keep pushing south. We'll see the rest of Laos, enter Cambodia to see Phnom Penh and Angkor Watt and then head back to Bangkok. By then I'll be seeking a suitable conclusion for the Asia leg of this journey.

Goodnight Laos. I'll keep you with me forever.

Location:Luang Prabang, PDR Laos

"Holdin’ on//ten years gone" -Led Zeppelin

Fuck me. It's the 11th of September. 2011. It has been ten arduous years since the same day in 2001, when we were assaulted. The only substantial event in decades where the warfare we bring to so many was brought to our own soil. I'm not anti-American. I love our country and the people who populate it - at least to some extent. And to say the least, the people who died that day were not by any rule the ones who deserved to go - but can I get really real here? Can I waste your time and get really fucking cynical for just a minute? I can wait until you're done beating off, come back when you're ready.

If there's something like a god, it's not going to save us. The punishments are indiscriminate. Without intrinsic value or meaning. Without lesson. Get over it.

We are a disturbed nation. A city on a city on a city at the bottom of a hill of mountainous proportion that looms unflinchingly above us. Our priorities are skewed. Our attitude is unsustainable. If a vast number of people, or a couple crucial ones, don't recognize the fact that we are a flagging power, that we need to learn to play with others, and soon, we're going to start a big war. A new war. A fucking truly un-winnable war. Hi! Drug war, war on prostitution, war on jealousy, war on crime, war on smut, war on faithlessness, war on unfaithfulness, war on terrorism. This is world war three. Play nice, now.

In the meantime, Afghanistan is as un-winnable as they come. How about some diplomacy and patience you fucking warmongers. At the least, how about some military command. How about some goddamn oversight and compassion.

I'll say it. I'll fucking say it if you make me. I've been an Obama supporter for as long as I could manage, and blessings, sir, Mr. President, you did what you could. It wasn't enough. The opportunity was primed, and yet to no avail. It's not all your fault. America didn't give you a chance. The mistake you made was giving America the chance it wouldn't give to you. What did you learn from Clinton? Don't get blow jobs? No, fuck that. How about, don't spend your slim and valuable credibility with this country on an acceptable second term project in the first goddamn term? Universal health care would be nice, but it can't cure nuclear apocalypse, can it? Sorry, sorry, maybe that's covered in the next draft.

Reagan, in his last moments in office, left a note for Bush the First, that said, "don't let the turkeys get you down." It's true. There will be turkeys. I say, sometimes the turkeys gobble a bit of truth. Don't miss out on it.

I'm proud we've made history, sir, I am. And when I tell people in Asia I'm from Chicago, they excitedly say, "Obama!" Where once they said, "Michael Jordan!" Shit, it seems a bit trivial, don't it? We'll see.

But, as a lovely and intoxicated girl from Manchester scrawled in pen on my arm tonight, before slipping on the bowling alley floor, hitting the ground hard and getting embarrassed, "I HEART AMERICA DESPITE ITS MANY FLAWS." I wish I could make these things up.

Right after she fell, my friends and I realized it was midnight and it was the eleventh of September. How apropos. How horrible.

As a crucial side note, it is the anniversary of the birth of a dear friend, who I miss terribly and will see shortly, and the death of a dear and unwarrantedly kind Asian dwarf hamster. You live in our hearts, Justice.

I'll tell you about Laos tomorrow. I'll share my silly pictures and stories of getting grifted and asinine articulations tomorrow. I'll start titillating and stop preaching after a long sound sleep. After you've read this and let it stew a bit. Good flavor comes only after a nice, long stew.

Eat your heart, Obama. It will give you strength. And it won't serve you in our star-strangled land. You aren't a bad president, but you aren't the great one we needed.

Location:Luang Prabang, PDR Laos

"I want to live//I want to give//I've been a miner for a heart of gold." -Neil Young

This post is not for the faint of heart. Last night was heart-breaking. It made my chest flutter. More heart puns to follow.

We collected a group and went to Snake Village, a part of town where a cluster of restaurants specialize in...damn, the name takes all the mystery out of it.






Here's the layout. A big cage of snakes as you walk in, the proprietor pulls one out and you can hold him and stroke him, whisper sweet nothings into its snake hole and gently apologize for what's about to happen.

They bring Mr. Slithers to the table and slide a sharp knife into its belly. Someone, in this case several someones, Alfie and Brawn included, open up the snake with a quick slash. They drain some of the blood into a glass of rice wine, then push the heart so it protrudes from the gash. Then, you bite the heart out of the chest and swallow it, still beating - they cut into the gallbladder and drain the bile into another glass of rice wine. You'd think Mr. Slithers would be quite dead, but he's still moving at this point so they smack the head on the ground and do him in. It's all terribly ceremonial. It also happens to be the most brutal fucking thing I've ever seen.













Nothing goes to waste. It's very Navajo. They serve you five dishes made from every part of the snake. Cheese and milk are rare in Asia, so they sauté the bones until they soften and mix them with meat and eat it on rice crackers with chili and soy. Calcium!

Snake ribs, snake steak, and one dish involving the skin, which as our guide artfully put, really brings the whole experience home. The first dish is cerimonialized with a toast and a shot of snake-blood wine. The second with bile wine. Every dish thereafter with a shot of plain rice wine. The alcohol purifies you for each dish and celebrates the glorious life of Mr. Slithers who generously offers his flesh and bones and bile for your sustenance. As it happens, you also get very smashed.






(Blood wine)






(Snake steak)

Afterwards we went clubbing.














So surreal.

Hisses and kisses.

Location:Hanoi, Vietnam

"But now we got weapons//Of the chemical dust//If fire them we're forced to//Then fire them we must//One push of the button//And a shot the world wide//And you never ask questions//When God's on your side." -Bob Dylan

Let's do the pity list. First of all it's raining so I couldn't go see Uncle Ho's preserved corpse...and that makes me a sad panda...

My sleeping hasn't regularized, but it has gotten better. I gouged a small canyon out of the back of my leg on a bolt protruding from a bus seat, which has become infected and makes my leg pulse heartbeats when I step. I caught a chest cold in Cat Ba, a heat rash from sweating all day that makes it feel like I have slivers of glass stuck in my back, and in the last three days I've broken two pairs of sandals. Two. Two pairs of sandals. The first from normal wear and tear, the second because I was wearing a cheap pair as large as I could find. Much much too small.

There isn't a decent taco in this whole city, the shower heads are all pointed at my chest, I have to crouch to climb the stairs at our hostel and everything comes with a taybalo tax. OH THE HUGE MANATEE.



But, I found baby powder for my back, iodine and bandages for my leg, I'm eating a giant bowl of pho tai (half-cooked beef noodle soup) for my chest, I found a new, shitty, too-small pair of sandals for my poor giant feet. And fuck the rain. I'm still in Vietnam. I'm still alive. Life could be considerably worse.



Someone asked me if I'd seen any half-American, half-Vietnamese people, and if they were willing to talk about it. Truthfully I haven't seen any, but I asked the Internet. Man, that guy knows some horrifying shit.



During the war, it happened a lot - sons and daughters, many born of GI's and prostitutes. Light skin and round blue eyes if the soldier was white, darker-skinned with tighter and curlier hair if they were African American. Vietnamese are very conscious of genetics and they stood out from the crowd at birth.

Some were killed. Abandoned at birth, aborted before. Left on the steps of orphanages. Shunned and ostracized if they lived at all. Cursed and deprived of education and training. At first, neither country would take responsibility for these orphans - the American Defense Department calling them "bad elements," and the Vietnamese derisively referring to them as "the children of the dust." In 75', fearing a massacre of Amerasian orphans, Ford airlifted 2000 orphans to the US. The first of these flights crashed, killing almost 150 people, mostly children. In 80', the US instituted an amnesty program allowing Vietnamese of mixed birth to be brought by their relatives into the US. This sparked a black market, where wealthy Vietnamese would essentially purchase the child from a poorer mother, using them to come to the states. Overall, a travesty. Some 3% managed to track down their American parent, but most live each day with the mystery.

Some of the discrimination has dissipated, the heritage is even celebrated by some. But it is still a trope and a negative stereotype in some minds. I picture Michael Scott from The Office , "God, you're so exotic....was your dad a GI?" Thirty years makes comedy from tragedy.

The answer is no. I haven't seen any. Very few remained. But if you find them, I think 30 years has taken away some of the sting. At least enough to tease out their story.

The words fill my head and fall to the floor. If God's on our side then he'll stop the next war.



Note: I took a lot of this information from a Smithsonian Magazine article I found. Read it here if you want the whole story. It's fascinating and devastating. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Children-of-the-Dust.html

A beautiful mash up of the song I quoted, "With God On Our Side," performed by Bob and Joan in two different performances, oddly omitting the verse I quote, which happens to be my favorite. http://cache11.stormap.sapo.pt/dld/5c870ea6148171b57bd0f2e8356a6ef3/4e684596/vidstore03/videos/5e/87/5c/498383_eRZCJ.mp4

Location:Hanoi, Vietnam

"Oh we could go kick down some doors together//Stay out 'til morning, sharp as knives//The new war will get you, it will not protect you//But I will be there with you when you turn out the light." -Spoon

This trip has cost a lot.

$50 USD is 1,000,000 Vietnamese Dong. So baller. So confusing. A nice expensive breakfast is 60,000 (I'm treating myself to a bacon and egg breakfast burrito at a cafe in Hanoi, whaaaaaat?). Since you can get an awesome sandwich with pork and pâté next-door for 15,000, you feel pretty ripped off until you remember it's a little less than three dollars. That your tasty sandwich is 75 cents. Fuck. You. San. Fran.

Dollars come and go, and my trip will have cost some of them, but it has cost more in what Newbuddy calls "transactional costs." These are difficult to quantify. On the road, it means wastage. Things that cost less money, but take more time. For a short trip (or any trip) it's crucial to learn basic wastage calculations.



(Newbuddy)

The first fly in the marmalade is that sometimes wastage leads to something you would have missed otherwise. Obviously this is impossible to know for certain, but a cautious balance must needs be struck. Planes are faster than trains and busses, but the latter give you time to meet people and to see the country cascade by. It takes a couple hours to fly to Laos, but it's a relatively pricey ticket. It costs 25$ to take a bus, but it takes 24 hours and apparently getting visa'd up at the border is a hassle. But what if we miss a guy setting fire to a monkey? Or a monkey setting fire to a guy? Damnit!

I barely fit into the seats on the busses, so for me, that small descision has been made. I can do 8-12 hours, but 24 is a stretch - or a cram, or something.



Back at home, I've extended the definition to include the devastation you leave in your wake when you leave. Lost friends, lost jobs, lost love. Fuck, this gets expensive. The hope is that high transactional cost leads to high transactional gain. But it's a gamble of the riskiest sort and the market sucks right now. The house has the odds. So far I'm satisfied with my trade off.

This trip has cost me a business and a job, some friends and acquaintances. It has cost me several delusions including the one that was letting me stay and stay placid in San Francisco - the delusion that I was content. It has cost me a relationship that seemed strong until I prodded at its edges and it dissolved like a sugar cube under a wet, red tongue. It has cost me a lot of patience and the benefit of some doubts. It has cost me a bit of optimism. It has cost me some of my cynicism. It has cost me a lot of my fear.



Thank Blog for this project to keep me centered - even if it falls on deaf ears or blocked ears or no ears at all. At least Zeno likes it, so fuck y'all.

After Asia, I'm meeting a friend in Istanbul for a few days. Then I'm going to San Francisco long enough to line up my ducks. I'm packing into my 2001 Passat and I'm driving until I learn whether there's somewhere on the continent that I want to live. I'm thinking about photography MFA's. If you reside in the states or Canada and I love you, leave me a message and I'll stop for a visit. See some of you soon. Everyone else, eventually.



Oy! Brother Jacob. Glad you had a nice burn. Wanna help me drive some? Lubya.

A million congratulations and a trillion happy returns to my dear cousin and his blushing bride. Thanks for understanding how much I needed this trip. Glad you've found each other.

-Isaac

Location:Hanoi, Vietnam

"Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?" Mickey Mouse Club Theme Song

I'm going to try to be upbeat. Then I'm going to fail. The last posts have been downers, but it's difficult when negativity is just a more engrossing read than the pretty Swiss girls and the weather and the three homies' sleepless night on Halong Bay when they kissed every star on their little star noses.

Actually, that last one sounds interesting. A balance is nice.














My iPhone got taken, potentially from my hotel room. Whatever, no big loss. It was dated and I have an upgrade. But our new buddy's wallet got stolen while he was on the boat with us to Cat Ba. I think it was the crew. He kept his passport separate, thanks be, but still a huge hassle. It was all terribly suspicious. Nevertheless, not the end of the world, but keep an eye on your shit up here in the north.
I'd like to relate two stories that aren't mine. They're Alfie's. But they illustrate the remaining tensions from the Vietnam War so well, that I am going to post them. The war that they call the American War.

So. We fucking decimated this place 40 odd years ago. They "won," but even more than usual, nobody fucking won. There are children in Vietnam, born in the last couple years, that still suffer from the effects of the arsenic and dioxin that was in all the shit we dumped here. They lack arms. They're born blind. They get leukemia and cancer at an exaggerated rate. It. Is. Fucking. Horrible. I'd take PTSD.

If you fought there, if your dad fought there, I genuinely don't assign any blame to the soldiers. All due respect, they saw horrible shit, they were scarred for life, of course. And in retrospect, the VC were doing some pretty inexcusable shit themselves. But our quagmire accomplished almost nothing politically and the innocents in Vietnam suffered much more than the soldiers or politicians. I gotta side with the hippies on this one. But if one of you fucking long-hairs spits on another soldier I'm going to kangaroo-kick your teeth down your throat.

Some people here are too young to give a shit about a generation old war. This makes it easy. Then we're just stupid tourists. I can do that. Some Vietnamese, mostly of a certain age, clearly hate us with a vengeance. Some are content with simply grifting us for every dollar they can - smiling to our faces and mocking us the moment we turn. So, there's a spectrum. Just like anything anywhere. Let's do away with these broad stroke generalizations - "oh, the Northern Vietnamese hate us, oh now they've forgiven us, oh but they resent us, oh now we're friends again." It's not that simple. It's never that simple.






Right, right. Alfie.

So there's a nice gentleman we affectionately call Moleman. He has a huge distinguishing wen with wispy hairs that sprout out from its position on the bottom of his chin, and he sells chips and cold drinks to tourists now, down the street from our Hanoi hostel. But at the time he would have been fighting age. Alfie noticed he had some war commendations on the wall in his little shop, and asked him if he fought in the war. He said yes, with a proud smile, and made a machine gun with his hands and started firing at the wall with a chattering of his teeth. Then he turned on Alfie and started firing his machine gun at him. Then he stopped and laughed.

This wasn't a vindictive or aggressive act. Not strictly speaking. He was pleased with his service. Just a shocking reminder of how odd it must be to sell snacks and cold drinks to Americans, when not that long ago he was given orders to kill every one of them he could find.

The second interaction was on Cat Ba Island, across Halong Bay from Hanoi. We were sitting on the pier late at night and Alfie got into a pretty long conversation with an ex-military guy who lived there on Cat Ba. They were talking about the war when the guy starting talking about American bombardments. "Saigon, Da Nang," he said, "very very bad."

Alfie stood there, unsure of how to respond. The man had become morose. Finally, he looked up, as though seeing Alfie for the first time.

"You're very young," he said. And waved away the moment with his hand.

I do not begrudge them their sadness, nor their anger and resentment. I don't even mind getting grifted here and there. But I return to that stare. That follows you down the street or drives you out of the restaurant. A stare that suggests that I came here myself and killed your father. Disfigured your child. I feel terrible that this happened, I do. And I apologize.

But I wasn't fucking born yet.

Location:Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island, Vietnam

"Time marches on//time stands still//time on my hands//time to kill." -Warren Zevon

It's 3am again, a familiar place. No rest in sight. I have a 7 o'clock alarm set and I think I will still be awake. I've been thinking a lot about depression.








(Cue violins)

Everyone has felt depressed, but not everyone is depressed. Within clinical depression, the walls close in, you can't catch your breath. You cease to find pleasure where once it flowed freely. Nothing can quench it, nothing can dull it. It's there when you wake up, like a sullen child - especially it is there at night, when you try to find sleep.

Night is a time of dark contemplation and an utter loss of agency. The things that concern you bubble up in a great swell, overwhelming you. There, pressed into your bed, there's not a thing to be done about any of it. I'm not diagnosed, but I suffer all the symptoms.

This is what keeps me up at night.

Insidious insomnia. Not as much lately, but starting in middle school I learned to operate on between two and five hours of sleep a night. Insomnia centered around a problem falling asleep - rarely a problem staying asleep. And as I mentioned, I'm not a napper. Certainly my schoolwork suffered. Certainly my sociability suffered. Most crucially, I suffered. Insomnia is a dear cousin of depression. The two swirl together like shit down the drain. Imagine Heller's man in white. One bag feeding, the other collecting waste. Once a day a nurse switches the bags. But hey, I can't complain.

Depression is a complex and misunderstood problem, testament to our overall ignorance of the human brain. We have medications that can scratch the surface, but we know so little about them, and the wrong drugs make it worse. As does mixing meds with alcohol and narcotics, both of which become sultry to sufferers of chronic depression. One thing we know for sure is that something about the neurological reaction that causes this brooding sadness can also cause habituation, even chemical addiction. Addiction to sadness. Happiness begins to feel like an ill-fitting shoe, strange and alien. Dickinson was right, it might actually be lonelier without the loneliness.

I simply wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

I feel like I'm coming out of a long tunnel. My eyes unaccustomed to the light. It's a cruel and harsh light at times, the kind of beating rays that soak your shirt with sweat. But how much can be accomplished in the dark?

I'm unused to emotional extremes - apart from rage - ecstatic happiness and true sadness had both, over the years, dulled to a thin line where everything felt much the same. It grants you a sort of imperviousness, if only because you suspect things will go wrong at any moment, but it's no way to live. The Sopranos (wise and all knowing) taught me that depression is rage turned inwards. When you learn that the evil in the world is unreceptive to your frothing anger, you begin to blame yourself. At first, perhaps, you hate yourself for not being able to stop it. Ultimately, you can develop the delusion that you might be the cause of it in the first place.

I've never tried medication - neither for sleep nor sadness. I tried talk therapy. I cried and danced the brutal-honesty dance with a few different strangers. All it taught me was that it was something I would have to come to on my own. It is a constant battle. I fight alongside a petrifying number of sufferers. Travel can feel like a cure, but it's distraction at best.

I wish moments of serene peace upon you all, moments of uproarious laughter and of shattering sadness. All of it reminds us that we are alive. That we are, after all, merely animals that have learned calculus. On a long enough timeline, we are not of importance - a genetic hiccup that appears to be self-correcting.

We are droplets in a wave. Infinitesimally small. Utterly inconsequential. To time and space we are ultimately of only passing interest. For me, this is a comfort. Because, despite our insignificance, here we are. We might as well try to get some shit done.

I think Emily was wrong at the end of her poem. When she said,

It might be easier
To fail—with Land in Sight—
Than gain—My Blue Peninsula—
To perish—of Delight—

That sounds like bullshit to me now, although I loved it when I first came across it. Maybe it's easier, Emily. You may be right. But don't miss the Blue Peninsula because it's too hard. I hear it's lovely in the summertime. It would be a damn shame to skip it.

I shot mannequin portraits today. These are my favorites.

Location:Hanoi, Vietnam