In 1968 many bad things were happening in the world. Many more than today, by volume and weight. In March of that year some frustrated, tired, bloodied US soldiers came across a town in Vietnam called My Lai.

Those soldiers were looking for VietCong soldiers. The ones who had been killing their friends and mining the roads and fields to maim those who didn’t die. There were no VC in the village. Those US soldiers killed everyone there anyway. Systematically, in some cases with rape, and in most cases without haste. They murdered 300-500 civilians. Old men, women, babies. Just like the SS or the MKVD.

Of course not all US soldiers were like this in Vietnam. My Lai was nearly successfully covered up, however, so it’s a certainty that at least a few more US soldiers were just like this but never caught.

When a bunch of Saudis and their Bible-group friends destroyed the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon and a plane full of brave individuals in a Pennsylvania field there were TV cameras around the world. The cameras largely showed what amazing friends the US has in Canada, England, and many other nations. The cameras also captured Egyptian cabbies in Cairo applauding the act, waves of Palestinians partying in the streets, Pakistanis gloating while applying for student visas to study in the US. Muslim citizens of every predominantly Islamic country loudly crying out in joy.

Not all Muslims. It only looked that way b/c it was almost impossible to find an Egyptian who would say he found the act deplorable or a Saudi not in the royal family who didn’t heartily endorse the day.

When Americans found out our people had been raping and slaughtering Vietnamese civilians, we spit on them. We jeered them. We made them unwelcome, unemployable. We disowned them, even the honorable innocent who’d risked everything for the love of their home, merely by association with the isolated horrible acts that had come to light.

I’ve lived with lots of people. There’s only one I never got into a fight with. I’ve even avoided gun play with better than 93% of them. That’s an A-. Just like my blood type. Symmetry is a fantastic thing in life. Ties it all up. Who cares if it’s completely unrelated.

The one person I’ve lived with and never even got in an argument with was Shawn Kelly. I put his name b/c he welched on a deal so I’m a little steamed after all and I’d like him to look me up so I can complain.

Shawn and I lived together in I’Chon, ROK when we were both teaching at Kuk Je. I saved him from drowning in a rice field once, more or less. I full on saved him from sleeping in his sewage soaked clothes by making his drunk ass strip after I dragged him out of the stinking water and walked him home. Man we drank a lot of OB Lager together till he got thrown out of Korea.

He had a crush on a wonderful young lady who went by Sunny. Close enough to her real name to work well. Her brother had the best little dive in I’Chon but that’s another story.

Shawn wanted to give her some flowers. I supported the venture b/c she seemed so damn terrific. He was too timid though so wanted me to go with him. Ho! Sure, I said. But I put a condition on it. If they ever got married, he had to ask me to be his best man. I’m a child of vision you see. I’m also a child of Loki. When we got to her I pushed him and his roses at her and I ran.

He exchanged pleasantries and more or less asked her out. Then he ran after me intending to kick my ass or at least throw one shot. But God love him, he may be Canadian but he’s no Ben Johnson. He never even got close.

They got married but I never got an invite, let alone a best man request. Always a bride’s maid. I was in the states by then, though, so it saved me at least $1,000 US. All told, he was the best roommate I ever had. I’m not even really steamed about the wedding. I just wanted an excuse to have him find himself here via Google and write me one of these days.

But back to the Singaporean girl. After Shawn got kicked out of Korea he went to Singapore. I visited and we even went to Thailand together. Swanky old city-state the Lion City. Koh Samet ain’t half bad neither.

Shawn taught English in Singapore too. He had an 8 year old student curious about his occidentiality (to coin a term) ask him one day, “Are you a Christian or a free-thinker?”

Upon entering the world of corporate America there is only a single piece of advice I feel every initiate should be given and take as a grail.

Get yourself a micro-cassette recorder and tape record every conversation you have with your manager.

It is simply amazing how fast memories and communications improve when confronted with proof of the veiled threats, badgering sighs, insinuated chauvinism, and menacing tones that look so very innocuous on the written page of a legal document.

One more astronaut in
Black skin of universe
One more traveling man with
Heavy tired eyes, feeling cold
Feeling cold

Thinking around the clock of
Drinking on the job
Of the powdered food and piss bags
Never having sex, growing old
Growing old

CHORUS:
Headspace, alive and painless
Weightless and almost sane, I
Close my eyes, I
Become the sky, yeah
Headspace, alone and shameless
Can’t wait to find the faces
Left behind
In a troubled time back home
Back home, back home, back home

It gets so lonely you know
Weeks and months alone
Chasing sleep and space junk
And the dying stars I’ve known and loved
Known and loved
Through true decline of the
5 billion minds or so
Through mud slides and earthquakes
Blue one hold and rolls along
Rolls along, rolls along

[CHORUS]

One more astronaut in endless old universe with
One more second chance and
Wondering why he’s here at all

[CHORUS]

Bold are the ones who
Come over the line to fall over
The horizon
Never ones to fade away

And then it hit me
This cosmic pull and energy
It kind of makes me wonder
If I’ll ever make it
Back home

—I Mother Earth, Scenery and Fish, “One More Astronaut”

If one thing is wrong, this does not make its apparent opposite right. There are no linear scales in the physical world past mean old Daddy Time. They are convenient for us to draw graphs but they don’t happen in nature. Circles do. When you apply a supposed linear scale to a circle the opposites are the same point. Now, strictly speaking this is not the logic I want to use but I think you get the picture.

If someone puts a cup of piss and a cup of vomit before you and says:

The vomit tastes awful but it’s fairly nutritious after all. The piss is easier to swallow, and it’s cleaner from the ammonia in it anyway. Which would you like to drink?

And you say:

“Yuck! no way.”

And the reply comes:

“You have to pick one, that’s all there is.”

Well, don’t miss the point this time. Just because one is wrong doesn’t make another right. Just because there’s no obvious alternative does not mean there are no alternatives.

I cannot possibly imagine a more uninteresting subject. I simply must stop letting the hired help put suggestions in the topic jar.

Cocksucker is an insult that was terribly popular when I was very young. I remember how much I hated to hear the kids in the older grades say it and words like it. It was years before I would willingly use expletives. I hated to hear them so much, I think, because they are potent and have the undeniable gutter poetry that makes them difficult to shake off. They have fallen out of favor in recent years. I would like to help one of them make a come back.

I am going to attempt this end with an open letter.

To every foreign national who is screaming “racism” b/c you are now required to be photographed and fingerprinted to stay in the US:

You have never heard me bitch once about getting photographed and fingerprinted in Seoul b/c I was a foreign national living in Korea. I watched them let all the Canadians go through without having the same treatment but fair is fair. I know that Americans are more likely to do something bad in Korea than a Canadian is, so I never will bitch about it even though I didn’t like it. It’s time for you cocksucker Pakistanis, Arabians, North Koreans, and Moroccans to quit acting like little girls and admit the same thing.

Someone in North Korea recently made a poster that wasn’t very nice. It showed missiles destroying the Capitol. We were talking about being nice the other day and how maybe it’s important after all. I think this could be another one of those cases.

Here’s another Korean lesson for you. PDRK stands for People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. ROK is for the plain old Republic of Korea. Americans just call them North and South because that is a pair of adjectives we have been obsessed with since the 1860s.

Something that I think many foreigners are surprised by is that the freedom in this country means Americans are free to be profane. Or perhaps that’s why “they” “hate” “us.” We don’t beat around the bush, so to speak. We go straight for the mother joke.

It’s a shame they are such psychopaths in the PDRK. They have one of the nicest flags in the world. It’s simple, clean, and sharp looking. They felt the need to copy the US in the color scheme but what the hey! I believe we stole that from France after all.

If you don’t believe me about North Korea being psychopathic, you’ll have to buy a history book. If you don’t believe me about their flag, well, take a look:

This is a flag that I am putting on display for them instead:

If you speak any Korean you might recognize this second flag is both subtle and profane. A combination the French invented but the Americans took away by force some years ago. Just like their flag colors… say, no wonder the French don’t like us. The Brits also had the talent at one time but they became so subtle that the profanity went inoffensive. It’s another sad thing. That there’s a point where subtlety snaps to insipidity.

If you do not want to go the clever route, here’s another flag. It’s the same joke but just plain profane.

Please do not show it to your friends in the ROK. While their northern kin are maniacal baby-eating fascists, South Koreans are really quite nice, if you’re not black or dating one of their daughters anyway.

I’m going to say something a lot of you may have thought but wouldn’t admit it or didn’t know what the feeling really was. I really enjoyed September 12^th, 2001 through the end of that year. People were SO nice to each other. I can’t remember a time when more people held the door for me or said, “excuse me,” and, “thank you,” when it mattered. It was the only time I was full-on proud to be American since I was a kid.

Last night in the QFC I was buying a lot of things. What I was buying was none-o-yer-beeswax. There are a few places you can still read about how to turn a supermarket into a weapons factory (I feel so sorry for the poor CIA and FBI flunkies assigned to catch me crossing the actionable line — today’s not the day, boys). You won’t learn about the proper ratio of ____________ to ________ here, though. Damn Google for bringing you here!

In the market, I thought I told ya’, oh, Jenny, you silly millionaire. Anyway! Back in the market, I had a cart full of ____________. I already had ________ at home.

An average looking young man with a goatée walked up right behind me to the only open checkout in the market. He had exactly two items while I had approximately two score, if you will. His items were some irises and a bottle of wine. How could I possibly stand in the way of a poet getting laid!

I did the right thing. I waved him ahead. I don’t think my upbringing taught me to do it. I just think I learned it can pay to be nice. I had proof immediately. He smiled and said thank you.

It turns out the lady behind me was also short on items, one this time, and it was her birthday. I gave her cuts. She said thank you and we had a nice talk as you must have guessed or else how could I have known it was her birthday. I’m only psychic about your insecurities, and the future of the European Union. Not much else.

It turns out the next guy behind me was only there to buy enough beer to make it to Wednesday and talk about the band name he has been saving: “Flaming Star.”

I didn’t tell him it was a stupid name. I was nice! I gave him cuts and we talked about his Black Sabbath shirt and the lady’s birthday and the Kidney Thieves instead. It was great. We were all friends for 6 minutes and the checkout lady liked me for being nice.

It was not hard to do the right thing and give them cuts. Why does it seem to be so difficult for people to do the right thing when it’s so easy?

See, two nights ago I was late to get home and my car battery was dead. These two good looking young white men walked up to get in a Honda Accord near my car just as I got out my jumper cables to look for help. I asked them if they weren’t in a hurry to get somewhere would they please help me out. They said no to this 3 minute favor. I eventually got help but it took an hour of running around and cost money and made me even later to get home and take care of some important things.

The reason I really wish people would be nice is I wrote down those white boys’ license. I tried to stop myself so I could just let it go. Now I’m going to have to look them up and do the right thing. And this time I think it’s going to take longer than 6 minutes.

I’m not doing it for some purple dinosaur in the sky or some bearded peacenik Nazarene.

I’m doing it because it makes life better. More valuable.

This is something we have needed to straighten out for a long time and I think New Year is the perfect time.

You’re not a bad person if you’re not as pretty as the people on television. If you don’t drive a Lexus or even understand why someone would buy anything but a house if they had 60 thousand dollars, you’re not a bad person. You’re not even a bad person because you like things the Pastor or Priest said you shouldn’t like or that you want more than you have.

You are a bad person because you cheated on an exam. You are a bad person because you said you’d taken care of something when you hadn’t. You are a despicable piece of trash because you took credit for something someone else did. The world is worse. The entire world is worse for your lies or your slight. Maybe you weren’t lucky enough to make it to Kenneth Lay or George W heights, maybe you were. You made the world worse if you’re a telemarketer. You made the world worse if you’re a Senator.

And you smirk because you think, “No,” or, “So what?”

But you know it. Nothing can take it away because it doesn’t matter how many people you can cheat or lie to or fool. You’ll always know, whether they ever do or not. You know even if you’re only that out of work writer or that movie star. You know that you only got that far out of luck because you don’t know a damn thing about the world whirling past you. It’s where that little tickle in your gut comes from. It’s where the lack of satisfaction lies even when you’ve acquired something you long thought you’d wanted.

You know it. And maybe you can escape admitting it today. Give it some time. It’s not going anywhere.