After a week anywhere, Johnathan would get an itch to move on, he told me. I like to linger at least a month. With such restlessness, he’s visited a hundred countries at age 42.
After one week in Vung Tau, he’s now in Dalat, then back to Penang, where his wife waits. After the quickest rest, they’ll fly to Nepal, Perugia and Rome. All this time, his wife is working as an architect.
“Soon enough, no one will be able to do this,” I remarked.
“No one but them,” corrected Jonathan. “They’ll fly as much as they want.”
“Of course.”
“Our passports, they can just cancel, to meet their net zero emission goal!”
“That’s why I’m glad to be in Vung Tau. I’m just exhausted, man. I never thought I’d say this, but I don’t want to go anywhere, not even inside Vietnam.”
After returning to Germany, another friend had remarked that whenever there was a pause in our conversation, I would close my eyes. Words stanched, I sank.
Across a narrow alley from us was a house with two altars, one to worship Mary, Jesus and Joseph, and one for three ancestors. Perched on a wooden couch, two girls stared at cellphones, but a retarded one standing near was happy to be screen free.
“Just before you came,” I said, “she suddenly started to dance. Vietnamese kids don’t do that, dance spontaneously, but she did. Just look at her, she’s the happiest one over there, and the smartest one, too!” Up and down the alley, there were all these adults and children also fixated on cellphones.
“You’re right. After all these people have destroyed their brains, she’ll be the only one left to run Vietnam’s space program!”
With current film wizardry, it will be even easier for Vietnam to stage landings on Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and, hell, why not, the sun at exactly noon (when it’s hottest).
At that sidewalk cafe, three coffees cost less than a buck. Thinking they had miscalculated, I pointed out we actually had three, but no, everything was kosher. Next, we went to a much more elegant place, with even mash and bangers on the menu. Here, each coffee or Tiger Beer set us back a buck.
“Look at this, man, we were just at some dumpy sidewalk cafe, and here we are, in this cool place. Look at this building! The ambience is similar, though. Entire families relaxing over drinks, people talking and laughing, and they’ll sit here for another hour or two. That’s Vietnam!”
“That’s right,” Jonathan replied, “and that’s why I love this place.”
“You don’t find this in the US, not three generations relaxing at a restaurant table! Even in Europe, this has become very rare.”
“You still see it in Italy.”
“You’re right, they’ll spend three hours eating dinner.”
My memories of Italy, though, had become outdated. Jonathan informed me the train stations in Florence and Siena are now swarmed with idle North Africans. Itinerant Black Africans still sell leather goods made by Chinese in Prato, however, so you can still snatch a $1,300 “made in Italy” “Dolce and Gabbana” bag for, I don’t know, $50? If the label falls off on the flight home, just sew it back on.
As for Brussels, Jonathan said the area around Brussel-Zuid is filled with crumbling Art Nouveau buildings with their windows boarded up. Trash strewn Moroccan tea shops lend colors and aromas to sidewalks. Such decayed grandeur made his wife sob.
Boozing with Jonathan for a week took me days to recover. Though still groggy, I then took a boat to Saigon at the insistence of the painter and poet Trịnh Cung. After a decade in California, the 84-year-old has moved back into his Saigon condo, now transformed into a personal gallery. He’ll sleep surrounded by his framed canvases. Perhaps he can place a glass coffin in the middle, with one for me, too, in the laundry alcove.
In Trịnh Cung’s upscale neighborhood, many cafes and restaurants were decorated in that deracinated way common to all ultra-cool enclaves. Soon, it will be curtain for this mode of living, so no more Czech beers, Thuringian sausages, seafood paellas and eccentric burritos within five minutes of your door. With peak oil, gas, travel and cosmopolitanism over, it’s all downhill now, with jolting bumps.
Spotting so many Caucasians zooming by on motorbikes, I joked, “You’re probably surrounded by more whites here than in California!”
Removed from the city and country that nourished him, Trịnh Cung shriveled. He had marveled at the American landscape, visited its museums, but the elation of encountering the fabled West fizzled out. Nearing the end, he can’t afford to not be reasonably happy.
With its tent cities, flash mob robberies, street takeovers with cars going donuts, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, biblical droughts, blacks targeting Orientals, poisonous education and absurd rent prices, millions have already fled the wokest state for Texas, Idaho and Mexico, so of course, it’s only sane to return to Vietnam, though I’d choose Vung Tau or Dalat over congested Saigon.
My first “Postcard from the End of America” was a published in April of 2013, with a book of Postcards released in January of 2017. James Howard Kunstler, Morris Berman and Dmitry Orlov had long mapped out America’s demise, so it was easy for me to see the end. Even without Covid and its jewjabs, the country was being murdered, or boiled, if you will, with 330 frogs being hypnotized by Kim Kardashian’s ass, AOC’s teeth or Trump’s hair.
On my last night in the USA, 8/4/18, I sat at Shamrock and Nickel’s in South Philly, plus Jay’s Elbow Room in Maple Shade, NJ, so goodbye, dives! They don’t have such in Vietnam. Each tradition is enriched and refined over centuries, if not millennia. Its destruction, though, may take but a decree.
Away from Philly, I still get news of it from my old buddy, Felix Giordano. On 3/20/22, he wrote, “Went to the Pennsport titty bar, a cheap can of beer $5 and the bimbos are old and fat… new owners… but at least they show their dried up cooze to us… Ain't like it was. Last time I passed Billy Boy’s [in the Pine Barrens], there were 20 bikers hanging out with no stupid masks on. Jersey has too many wokester Nazis as is, but some guys you don't fuck with.”
Sometimes, I browse videos of Philly on YouTube. A subgenre on Kensington has emerged. Though that hood of bent double zombies was ghastly enough in 2018, it’s sunk to an even deeper subbasement of hell, with its last preserver of local history, Jack’s Famous Bar, dead.
Though it’s tempting to tag Philly’s Kensington, LA’s Skid Row, SF’s Tenderloin, Baltimore, Gary, Oakland, Camden, Jackson, New Orleans and Saint Louis, etc., as previews of an America to come, that’s not correct. They’re snapshots of the USA right now, for similar sights can readily be found in Las Vegas, Sacramento, Phoenix, Orlando, Denver and Austin, etc. Across the country, Americans live in destitution and squalor, and it’s all by design.
They’re being jabbed, starved, driven mad and boiled. The smuggest, too, can enjoy a fantastic broth flavored by their own stewed flesh. A bit more salt wouldn’t hurt, though. With hardly any meat left on their bones, they’ll happily line up to vote. Jewish puppets have never failed to make them weep. If only the rest of the world doesn’t have to pay for their abysmal idiocy.
With 1.6 million people, Philadelphia had 562 homicides in 2021. With 98 million residents, Vietnam has less than 1,400 murders a year. There’s a 6/23/22 video of a half naked white woman lying bunched up on a Kensington pavement. She had just been beaten up and set on fire. Since she didn’t die, she won’t be included among this year’s casualties, so for the record, nothing happened.
On 8/24/22, a reader left this comment at my blog, “One thing all these homeless, murder videos have in common is weather. 70 and sunny attracts riffraff like shit attracts flies. Why doesn't this happen in Wyoming or N Dakota? Because -65F wind chill and homeless do not mix. If houses are too expensive why not relocate to Okla where a job at a Kwikie Mart will get you a nice apartment and a used car?”
To this contention that the homeless don’t exist in freezing states, “Biff” responded, “Maybe because those states have some of the highest suicide rates in the country, so there’s hardly any people left—you should go there and check it out.”
Having visited North Dakota and spent +5 months in Montana, I concur there is plenty of despair up that way, with off the charts alcoholism. To illustrate this most vividly, here’s an account from “Martin”:
Speaking of the cold and homelessness, while living over 20 years in Alaska I remember two guys freezing to death on the concrete entry way outside the front door of my Union Hall in Anchorage. They must have been passed-out drunk, if I was freezing to death I'd have broken the glass door to get inside the heated building.
I know of a guy in Anchorage whose pass-out luck ran out when he passed out drunk just outside his own front door. When he finally came to his feet were frozen so he dragged himself into the kitchen, turned on the oven, put his feet in, then passed out again. He came to the second time from the pain of his feet cooking. Both feet had to be amputated. Now he sits in his trailer until the first of the month, waiting to get his monthly welfare deposit so he can go on his once-a-month, week-long, alcohol bender. He then starves it out, broke, until the first of the following month when he does it all over again. That's his life.
Martin lives in Portugal, with a decade in Belgium before that. Like Morris Berman, Fred Reed is in Mexico, as is Australian Max Igan. Canadian James Cobbert lives in Japan. I’m composed and well fed in Vung Tau.
In 2020, Yankees pitcher Masahiro Tanaka returned to Japan over safety concerns for his wife and kids. Why stay in some deadly shithole? During seven years in New York, Tanaka won 78 games, lost 46 and was twice an all-star.
During my quick visit to Saigon, I spotted an acquaintance in an alley, so sat next to him for half an hour, each man with his own cheap coffee and tea. Though I had met him 22 years ago, we had talked about absolutely nothing, so it was the same this time.
Having spent nearly his entire life within a mile radius, he’s done almost nothing and been nowhere. Barely supported by family, his main pleasure each day is to slouch at this exact cafe to sip a slow dripped coffee with just a touch of condensed milk, as motorbikes, bicycles and pushcarts roll by.
Together, we watched a scrawny black dog in a threadbare basketball top run back and forth, looking for edible scraps, instant love, lasting friendship or perhaps traces of the divine? Only he knew. His bobtail highlighted his nasty looking asshole and impressive balls.
On a grimy wall opposite, a young gecko paused, himself lost in thoughts. For him, this wondeful life hadn’t changed.
2 comments:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1207-34th-St-SW-Watertown-SD-57201/114543206_zpid/
Not glamourous, not Malibu, not Soho, but warm and dry.
Hi Linh,
Excellent writing as always. I'll add in my personal anecdote to these two sentences you wrote:
"As for Brussels, Jonathan said the area around Brussel-Zuid is filled with crumbling Art Nouveau buildings with their windows boarded up. Trash strewn Moroccan tea shops lend colors and aromas to sidewalks. Such decayed grandeur made his wife sob."
I arrived in Brussels on New Year's Day 2011, in the morning, after taking a one-way overnight flight from Cancun, Mexico; after months in sunny Mexico I was greeted to overcast skies and snow on the ground. From the airport, I took the train to the Brussels-Zuid (South) station and from their I took a metro line to my girlfriends empty apartment (she was in Portugal visiting her family for the holidays). I knew, by just seeing the decay, trash, graffiti, and shifty Moroccans between the airport and my girlfriends apartment, that Brussels was a third-worldish minority-packed city that I was going to hate. I ended up living in Brussels for over a decade because of my girlfriend (later my wife) who had to live there because of her EU work. Fortunately, we are able to travel a lot.
During my time in Brussels, I remember walking around the city pointing out that "decayed grandeur" (the stuff that made you friend's wife cry) to a Colombian friend when we used to walk around the city talking photographs. I'd say, "Imagine what the man who had this home built for his family two or three-hundred years ago would think if he could see his home now." The beautiful home he had built was, on the bottom floor, a scummy Moroccan tea-shop full or old North Africans speaking Arabic, while the upstairs has been partitioned into several hovel-like apartments where these old mens ISIS-loving grandsons lived (no exaggeration, 300 Muslim locals joined ISIS and tens of thousands in Brussels supported ISIS).
The whole city of Brussels (EU headquarters) is a living proof of how massive third-world Muslim immigration destroys the beauty, wealth, safety, and tranquility of any place it settles. To think that these Brussels technocrats, who work in Brussels and can see with their own eyes the damage Muslim immigration has done, wanted to FORCE millions of new "refugee" Muslims upon Hungary, Poland, and every other EU country shows us how foolishly incompetent they are. These EU eurocrats couldn't run a McDonalds well, yet they direct the destiny of Europe - hence the actions against Russia and the energy problems the EU has now.
I pissed off many expats (EU workers) who were living in Brussels when, ten years ago, I told them that we'd have, sooner or later, a Muslim terrorist attack: either a metro bombing or a machine-gun massacre in the Grand Place. When it happened a few years later, when our local, homegrown, Muslims murdered 33 people, I refrained from telling them "I told you so."
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