LAZY IN DA NANG
LAZY IN DA NANG
9:33 AM
Sunday, January 12, 2020
— I wrote this date about five months ago. And now it’s June and very hot and the depression is sinking into the toes and the sparkly tinderbox is on fucking fire, and you can’t say what you really think, because you gotta be positive, man. You gotta be a self-help book at work. Do you even have work anymore? What is work? What is a job? What is REALITY?
I was asking myself that question today as I was getting showered and dressed, feeling hungover — but free. I’d been up for hours last night in a work chat discussing something disgusting that happened to a woman and her daughter from an anonymous flasher. And the conversation devolved into everybody lashing out at me because I had an opinion they didn’t like. Whoa, dude. You can’t say that in here… We’re all bullshitting ourselves to get through this.
Then I had people self-righteously telling me I had problems, or wondering why I was so negative or why I talked the way I did on the internet … “Bryan has problems,” somebody said. My problem was them!!!!
I sat there on the couch with a whiskey buzz. I’d been out on the beach and I had the guitar in my lap ready to start working on a new song, I’ve been writing many this week and then it all feels pointless … so why continue?
I stopped writing, pretty much, last week — no, it was last month. Before that, back in April when everything here was in Lockdown Mode … I was disciplined each morning with push-ups and walks along the beach when nobody else was around … and I started wondering and thinking about what it would be like to live on a planet, and in this city, when there was nobody else. Just me.
I felt like I missed seeing people, it helps a writer obviously to have something to observe. I get lost in my own introspection and that’s what happened as the month progressed … I wrote an entire novel called The Basement, I wrote four one-act plays, dozens of poems, submitting them all, writing a synopsis for a previous novella I wrote years ago … and being a writer is probably one of the only jobs where you could write, and write, and write, and work, for an entire month — at your very best — and it is still meaningless.
Nobody wants to hear that their life is meaningless, that their job is fucked, that the world is heading for a colossal failure, that companies don’t want to pay anybody, that people are greedy, secretive, sadistic, cops are crooked, politicians are full of shit, death is knocking on the door … and the good people rise to the occasion of looking good on YouTube, Zoom, and pontificating like that, I mean, what happens next? Nobody wants to read the ravings and rantings of a lunatic!
Good. I’m lazy in Da Nang. I wrote a book of poems last year with that title when I was living here with my Chinese girlfriend. She hates me now! I used her name in other writings that I’ve forgotten and I’ve had girls on the internet asking me about it.
“What happened? It’s kind of a sensitive issue, as a woman.”
An important lesson as a writer (and as a human being): most people aren’t going to like you. And when you are too nice to certain people they will walk all over you. So, something’s gotta give here.
I got some gel into my stupid fucking hair and my hand was my comb and I walked out onto the street to a corner coffee place and I ordered a black coffee with ice in it and no sugar and I sat down on a little chair on the corner watching all the people going by and I stuck a cigarette into my mouth. I realized, Vietnamese people will respect you much more if there’s a cigarette dangling from your mouth. Okay, fine.
The girl brought the coffee over to me, I paid for it (15,000 Dong = about fifty cents) and I walked down the road toward the beach, the sun was bright, bright. And deadly. I was shaky, felt that way. A little on edge. Laughing at myself, seeing the beauty of the beach. Finally. White sand. Crystal blue-green water splashing, soft sounds. Wind through the palms. Girls tanning themselves into blisters. I lit my cigarette, smoked it.
And drank my coffee. Alone.
I knew I was a writer. I knew I was a writer. I knew I was a writer.
But, so what?
