Flood

Greetings,

My dear friend Sir Thomas, knighted by William Butler Yeats in Sligo, asked about floods here. Am I drowning?

I sang, row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, life is but a dream. When I say I am floating I don't mean in a boat, at least not yet. We've had some rain, often heavy. Cleans the air.

This is the rainy season and you know how the media likes to present disasters, epic dramas of humans battling the natural elements, battling themselves and so on.

I am floating in the clear sense of sitting, writing, reconfiguring this web site, aligning stars and exploding galaxies, nebulas and infinite diversity. I've been here two weeks tomorrow. A delightful respite from civilization and the abyss.

After working in the morning I wander through narrow twisted alleys to a side street clogged with motorcycles, women hawking fruit, veggies, meat, tofu, used clothing and babbling in their incomprehensible tongues. I covered a lot of Ha Noi ground the first two weeks so it feels good to sit down and organic stuff.

For example, I cleaned all the useless shit off my hard drive to free up space. Here's to free space, outer space and inner space!

I sit down off the curbing street on a red kinder garden chair at one of my usual eateries. The woman serves delicious freshly grilled spring rolls filled with veggies, cold white noodles and a plastic container of greens along with the bowl of chilies and sauce. Using your clean chopsticks you dip the noodles and spring rolls in the sauce. You smell, chew and swallow. It's cheap and filling. Great taste. It runs less than a buck. Some people stare at you. Others have seen you here before so they accept you. To them you are just a little stranger than yesterday.

She is busy - only doing lunch. She's gone before dusk when a woman selling fruit uses the stone space. 

I wander up the choked street dodging speeding motorcycles, women lugging baskets balanced on bamboo staves past merchants selling merchandise out of their ground floor flats. Mechanics hammer metal fixing bikes and broken appliances, salon girls cut, wash and dry, old women sit and gossip about how the younger generation is wild and crazy, young boys haul bricks on a deranged pulley system up to a flat undergoing renewal, older men in their pajamas play GO slapping scarred wooden pieces on the board while drinking beer or tea with their friends, children scamper through the maze.

No one bothers you because they know you live nearby and no foreigners are crazy enough or lost enough to find this narrow area filled with families and life daily.

I sit down with a delicious thick iced coffee in a cafe where the owner smiles and watches family dramas about love, hope, deception and scheming hollow scripts on the box. Everyone has a box here. It's the BIG diversion, all entertainment. Loud and louder.

I return to my little cave and go up on the balcony with a chair, blue plastic table and two plants - one a flowering bougainvillea. I enjoy green tea, watch the clouds fly past, savor quick rain storms sharing whistle songs with birds, some free, others on distant balconies in sad cages.

Riding the rails south to Hue soon. Playing my blues harp.

Metta.