This collection is merely a spasm, a drop of creation and ideas into the infinite swirl of the digital universe.
It is a work of art. It is for and by art.
Thank you, sincerely, for reading.
-KC, 4/18/2023
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STORIES FROM THE EAST
SANTA’S GIFT FOR DR. PETER DASZAK
“Dark, grotesque figures, in a soundless rage, attacking with the fury of a Florida man...
“Dark actors, leading Mickey Mouse to a prison shanking in the shower.
“Yessir, it was all angles and no curves. The blood hunter’s ghost marriage proposal, that anagram in The Lancet… All this while the doctor radiated heat, felched by a broken mirror. The doctor’s stethoscope and sphygmomanometer taking shape in the steam. ”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The city’s neon panorama was shrinking in the rearview. The river of animation scattered into faint, winking pinpricks of light.
Curving along an empty highway, the Cadillac clattered further into gathering tendrils of mist. The car’s engine grinding, like the gnashing of teeth.
Santa Claus was at the Caddy’s wheel, wheezing and sniffling. Then Santa squinted, hit the high beams. The air outside was becoming increasingly befogged with a chalky dust, the fog glowing in an almost iridescent whiteness…
“It’s wrong on more levels than a broken elevator. I tell you what... The higher up Huang Yanling climbed, the more she showed her ass.
“She just had the worst case ever of the butterfingers. Up and fumbled that Frankenstein dish. Then she pressed her eyes shut, as if in prayer, and hung her round face low… a setting moon... Yessir, you can bet a kidney that a whole long list of exonerating lies went tumbling through her head.
“But little did she realize how many horrible things had already flown out: hatred, hunger, pain, poverty, disease and death. All of life's miseries, let out into the world.
“Just one, just one… one wrong move altered the course of human history. The CCTV footage of that fumble, oh brother! It’s up there in the panopticon, somewhere, for sure. Too bad we don’t have a Lizzy Salander to dig up that database…. Talk about pictures worth a trillion words.”
Santa’s nose trickled blood. His jowls hung low, boiling in layers of anger. He had hot, dark rings of pain beneath his blue eyes, and a tangly mess of white hair curled down to his neckline. A silky menace colored his tone as he spoke.
“The Supreme Leader, Brother Snake God, when he got the word, he had the sad face of a chained monkey. Gotta wonder how many messengers he snuffed out, before he sniffed the opportunity, before he fed the demons.
“Brother Snake God did in his dentures, soccer kicked over a row of tombstones, knocking them down like dominos, and then Brother Snake God commanded his
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer comrades to open the zoo gates, concoct a cauldron of rumors... Yessir, Brother Snake God only chooses people he can control.
“Yessir, Brother Snake God ordered an invasion of cleaners and scrambling dragons. The cleaners shining in the last light of day. The scrambling dragons speaking only in solecisms. Yessir, the scrambling dragons’ truest truths are rarer than diamonds. Their truest truths come fringed in sunbursts of gold.”
Santa’s flushed face creased into a smile. He flashbacked to street art, Banksy-esque graffiti paintings of little people held upside down, by their ankles, small holes bored into their brains. The little people’s skulls dripping egg-yellowy oils into petri-dishes…
“The little people can lap through the water. They can cast misty shadows. The little people run, scratch, and bite, but, in the end, they’re always tripping up like a startled duck,” Santa growled, staring daggers, and a snarl of revulsion broke across his lips. Then Santa stepped on the gas, throttled the engine, revving it like a chainsaw.
“But the world was swaddled, sickly, and it took that honey, wandered in circles.
The world carving paperboard cutouts of people... Then Tedros did the duckwalk...
The Snakes’ puppets operating with the precision of hornets building a nest.
“Yessir, then there was Charles M. Blow, and Chris Cuomo, Stephen Colbert, all their ilk: the Goat Fucks.
“The Goat Fucks were living through screens, pissing and throwing pennies from atop skyscrapers. The Goat Fucks on opposite sides of smiles, treating scientists’
diplomacy as if the scientists were sending lit sticks of dynamite...
“Goat Fucks pointing guns, leading the blind into caves, mocking the blind’s prostrations… The Goat Fucks expatiating, with Brother Snake God and the Snake-charmers, in bone-white slants, moonlighting and pantomiming emotions.”
Santa paused, momentarily, and as he emptied his heaving chest, his voice strained, “But the blind kept crawling. On their bare bellies. They swarmed, chins wet, under milk-white stalactites sharper than vampire fangs. With a mouthful of batshit, the blind went hiding in corners, shivering as they hugged their knees.
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The blind ignorant, unaware of words glistening with moisture. The blind’s cries simple as guide dogs. The blind’s footsteps followed by speeding trucks.”
The wintery sky hung low, hazy, and bleak. A darkening smudge was spreading.
Banks of inky clouds swept along by fierce and frigid gusts of wind. The heavens above committing a kind of frotteurism.
“Comb your hair, put on your shades, and dig your bunkers. It was the Year of the Rat, after all… It was endless stretches of greenery, soaring walls in the Kingdom’s Garden… Yessir, all the cadres at that banquet had a reclining seat…
“Comrades, cadres at the Gala, smiling and dancing in bursts of illumination.
Everything painted red and gold, with bestiaries decorated in grinning rats.
Everyone at the Gala, collared in cangues, blissfully unaware of the pedo lurking by the playground.”
Santa felt a tremendous force, a searing pain ripping through his chest, and he unloosed a series of dry, hacking coughs. His eyes stretched wide when he remembered that coughing, once, was worse than saying the n-word.
“Throw your head up to the sky and imagine God Himself, hanging upside down, like a bat, dangling and doing sit-ups from the leg of a flying helicopter. God Himself, the real Patient Zero. God Himself, smoking on a mary-joo-wanna cigarette.”
The darkening smudge in the sky started spreading quicker, spilling across the horizon, like an ink stain, racing rapidly in every direction.
“There can be no murder in paradise. I’m telling you. It’s incomprehensible.
Inconceivable… Brother Snake God got that smoldering intensity bright in the whites of his eyes, yeah? And he corrected the wrong ideas, right?
“Metastasis? No sir, not in paradise! In paradise there’s only virgins, green grass and positivity…”
Santa had been licking his wounds, was pulling on a Snoop-sized blunt. The fat man had his meaty hand gripped over the width of the steering wheel, and his knuckles were scraped and bleeding.
As Santa was sitting back in the bucket seat, he steered the Caddy with one hand, and a faint clanking could be heard from the trunk, sounded similar to metal hitting a human skull.
Santa coughed out a plume of smoke, clicked his tongue, then went on, “A maze of limestone caves. Sure paid off like a winning slot machine. We had Ron Varra running around with his hair on fire. But he wasn’t credible. He was a crank. A
‘conspiracy theorist.’ Then God Himself, in the gold chair by the fireplace, told us the dead were coming back to haunt the hospitals.”
“Yessir. Now everyone understands that a day is long, and a year is quick.”
Here and there Santa reached over to stroke the pangolin resting in the passenger seat. The pangolin was purring like a cat.
“I’m telling you. This is killing.” Santa continued, his Texas twang breaking. His enunciation clipped. His voice upping an octave. “I’m telling you. It’s never been like this.
“The Snake-charmers used their cunning, inveigled us. They threw ants in the sugar... Ants in our pants… Fed us nothing but bones. They exploited our Restless Anal Syndrome and used imprimaturs to cast spells. Didn’t Marx say something about the peasants being like sacks of potatoes? It’s no wonder the peasants believe in opioids and influencers, Maatje Bensassi and phantoms.”
A hologram above the dashboard flickered on, displayed grainy video of Marilyn Manson pouring milk and cereal into a groupie’s yawning vagina. Then the ghoul dove down, devoured the Lucky Charms like a starving dog.
A moue played across Santa’s face, and his lilt became aggressive, “Yessir, it’s onion heads on the prowl. Onion heads tapping on trumpets. The onion head’s call to arms is telepathy turned telekinesis...
“And we’re slaves, slaves to a type of torpid stillness. Slaves, goin’ batshit crazy in algorithms… Incunabulum, tintinnabulation… Fucking robots building robots.
“Yessir, we all got hoodwinked… It’s the greatest coverup, the greatest crime of our time…
“But few even care. We’re walking crash test dummies. Post-human. We’re Sam Harris, naked and covered in peanut butter, chasing imaginary llamas.
“Yessir, last time I went to California, a homeless lady, who looked like Michael Rapaport, squatted in the middle of traffic, defecated, then threw a handful of her shit at me, screamed something about Gavin Newsom...”
Santa snorted, felt chunks of dried blood trickle down his throat, and sneered with a satirical curl of his upper lip.
“Yessir, the ghosts sure are coming back to haunt the hospitals. The ghosts fighting for air and light. The ghosts pressing their noses against one-way mirrors like trapped rats.”
The pangolin lifted its pointy snout. Its eyes flashed purple. The pangolin had started shaking like a chicken with its throat slit. But now the pangolin was stoic as the dead. The pangolin statuesquely still, the pangolin reflection of a reflection, a picture of a picture. The pangolin daring anyone to pity or patronize it.
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“A popcorn bomb plot. A lady in a gorilla mask punching a politician in the face. A ballerina blasting Coca-Cola firehoses at fat children in Kansas. Bill Gates talking like a pirate and terrorizing call centers in the Philippines. A Karen in a death van.
A Chinese warship in the Taiwan Straits… A bat cave in Cambodia…. You know Joe Rogan killed the animal’s mother. But we were all pouring gasoline on the delusion, living in a spitfire derecho. We all saw the sad results and no desultory plan. There’s a tracking chip in every electronic device. That’s the true magnet link.”
The Caddy picked up speed, roared past the fresh corpse of an elf. The elf in a snow angel of blood. The elf splattered cold in front of a Waffle House, the eighth ring of Hell. The dead elf’s right arm bent to a sharp curve, twisted like a serpent.
The elf’s torso distorted from the impact.
Coroners in space suits were ringing around, in a conga line, dancing in pendulum-like movements, stopping every ten steps to stomp and kick at the elf’s corpse.
One of the coroners dropped to his haunches, punched his gloved hand up the elf’s little ass, checked for coronavirus via an anal swab test.
“It’s the Ring of Fire, right? Tin foil hats, bulletproof business suits, and threats of catastrophe. Senators in drag. Damn right the Senators fooled us all, tricked everyone on Twitter, ejected tongues of flame. But, mister, some might say there
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer are more elves, and the elves are up high, living in the clouds, humming 2 Chainz,
‘Beez in the Trap.’
“The elves with a list of grievances long as a man’s forearm. The elves sharpening knives in struggling structures. The elves with awareness in their eyes, confidence in their bearing. The elves fixing to fake the Mars landing, play grab-ass with Elon Musk.”
The churning mass of black clouds in the flat sky thickened, and there was only a faint glimmer of light toward the north. Santa sure knew a peccadillo when he saw a peccadillo.
“One laboratory, it’s all it took. Yessir, Huang Yanling, the 21st century’s Gavrilo Princip.
“One lab. One wrong move. One fumble… One spill… Brought the world to its knees. Crippled economies… Took time, trillions of smiles… One lab, gaming functions, slipping Mother Nature the Bill Cosby pills…
“And Dr. Daszak and Shi Zhengli, oh, they’re singing karaoke. They’re off sipping champagne and stuffing toilet paper into Al Capone’s vault.
“Yessir, it was gongs and clouds of smoke and pained voices shouting in chorus when Dr. Daszak tore off all his clothes, set fire to his tennis shoes. The doctor’s head swinging from side to side, like the casing of a bell, as he tore off running, his hairy legs pumping. The doctor with the shocking speed of an Olympic sprinter.
“The doctor’s feet aflame, two bright balls of fire, twin meteors in the night, as he tore through the streets of Wuhan.
“Dr. Daszak, with a certainty, a concentrated savagery in his sprint… The doctor stopping only to dance in graveyards, with his arms outstretched. The doctor barking at a mid-autumn moon, foaming at the mouth, rabid and hairy as a werewolf…”
The inky, dark scuds of cloud coalesced to form a dense steel-gray mass. The glimmer swallowed whole. The sky gray as a wolf.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Santa rolled the windows down a skosh, let the Caddy breathe. A line of cold air whirred in with a sucking sound, like surf slicking over a slope of sand. The air with a strange smell, something between mildew and medicine.
“Yessir, Dr. Daszak bled the bats, red-handed, with the ceremonious air of a pedophile priest. His was a practice, his was a language of receding gumlines. His was a mouth like a gloryhole…
“Yessir, Dr. Daszak was the Snakes’ fixer. He bought Brother Snake God all the necessary time and excuses, let the broken elevator fall free.
“The Snakeheads… yup, they yanked the seat out before the blind could sit. Then they lost a lung from laughing so hard. The Snakeheads, and their kidney thieves, the world knows they have reeducation camps. But the world didn’t know that the Snakes had their prisoners standing and clapping, cheering the British and American death tolls.
“Yessir, but that Dr. Daszak, he kept an eye out, like Fetty Wap. The doctor elected himself the mayor of a ghost city and was accompanied by thundering drums and exploding fireworks, everywhere he washed up. Just look at the cut of his jaw as he speaks…
“It’s true that we learned more from losing than winning, I tell you what. But our smiles died on our lips.”
The skunk, strong sativa slammed Santa with the force of a flash flood. His eyes reddening, he eased back further in the bucket seat, blew a series of beer bottle-sized smoke rings.
“The Snakeheads knew from November, and they were watching water like a housecat... Yessir, no mock outrage at their booky-wooky coverup. But just as you can’t hide the sun or the moon forever, the truth will find its way.”
The pangolin tilted its head, smiled lasciviously. Santa was feeling especially loquacious.
“The Senators’ thoughts heading into flares, leading into an apotheosis- and it centered on prison labor, rare earths, quiescence, and resting failures… The Senators speaking snuff poetry… The Senators’ teeth shiny as waxed wood...
“The Senators sharpened their box-cutters, said the unions were too greedy. Then the Senators bought stocks and brought in the elves. There were Snakeheads in bulletproof business suits at every step, and yup, they burned hell money, hopped the elves up on melanin and grinch hormones. Ho-ho-ho!
“But the elves saw the light. The elves, these days, have been jumping to a death better than life. The elves bitter as black coffee, the elves review-bombing, lying flat, living in collapsing buildings rather than doing swan dives. The elves sick of bungee-jumping without ropes. The elves having preemptive panic attacks. The elves wielding baseball bats, bashing in the skulls of perfect strangers.
“Yessir, the elves’ hands were bent, burnt, and calloused; the elves’ hands festering, a calligraphy to their scars. But none of that will stop the elves’ surge…
No sir… because you can’t really kill an elf. Its energy won’t be destroyed.
Nowadays the elves’ ghosts live in almost every machine, and the elves’ ghosts are tiny, too, mere molecules.”
The pangolin peered silently at the mugshot of Dr. Daszak. Santa had glued it to the Caddy’s dashboard. Dr. Daszak’s bald head glistening, a film of sweat over his forehead. The doctor’s face with a look of horror stamped on it.
“I believe in Sharri Markson… Sometimes history needs a push. And really, where are the three workers? Where are the body bags? And just who’s been wearing surgical masks like a holster? It’s game theory, crowns… upskirt camera binoculars…
“The Snake-charmers, they’re spitting in our faces, spitting in the wind. And we’re Theo Von, mullet-headed, weeping while we masturbate. Or so the Snake-charmers think. But it’s not that simple.”
Vapors, columns of illumination and sheets of mist shrouded the distance. Santa tugged his lips into a spastic grimace, and his temples bulged with craggy bones.
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“It’s the elves. The elves are unmasking the Snakes’ composition. It’s a code, the patterns of branches, the maps and trees designed for lungs, hieroglyphics written in spike proteins. It’s the electrification of the entire world, the breath of God, the megadeath event... Believe me… the elves will be heard.”
Santa and the pangolin, just earlier that dreary day, had escaped a ziggurat lockup.
Crawled up and out a chimney. Caught a hitch in the back of a garbage truck.
Then Santa stole a golf club from a Walmart and stalked around the Walmart’s parking lot. Santa with the pangolin perched on his shoulder, like a parrot. Then Santa sang “Silent Night” as he bludgeoned and carjacked a street pimp from Arkansas.
Santa’s irritability was understandable. After all, for two straight weeks, Santa and the pangolin were locked in a small, windowless, low-ceilinged room.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In lockdown, they never slept. The two spending every waking moment forging official documents, using a Ouija board app. The two receiving detailed instructions from a spirit claiming to be the REAL Carlos the Jackal.
Another metallic clank and a whomp whomp. Muffled cries echoed from the back of the vehicle. Santa then crinkled his nose in revulsion and stabbed a finger at the dashboard, clicked on Clay Travis and Buck Sexton’s radio show.
“They like to think God Himself went and offed us, like He was stomping on a cockroach. But, no sir, He wasn’t hanging upside down from Kobe’s helicopter.”
Santa swallowed the end of the blunt, belched, and set the Caddy on cruise control. His bloated face blanched. Then he reached in the open glove compartment, plucked out another from the pile of pre-rolled blunts.
“God Himself, like Mike Tyson, stomping on your children’s testicles,” Santa muttered, and effortlessly Santa clipped the blunt in between his thin red lips, bit into the blunt like a hot dog, and then touched his finger, ala ET, and flicked the blunt’s tip ablaze, and a string of grayish smoke curled to the sunroof.
“There never was an answer. There were more questions. Joe Rogan killed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ate the red-nosed fucker alive, raw, like a zombie, as the animal was twitching and coughing blood bubbles… Fucking socialists, Rand Paul’s neighbor, they had no problem carjacking me for my flying wheelchair, no sir…
“Yessir, a constellation of factors took place, blew in like a burst of wind against a flagpole. Late 2019, early 2020. The Year of the Rat… The Year of RaTG13…”
“One factor involved Doctor Li, the Wuhan doctor. That man was a patriot. A martyr. A saint. He tried to jump on the dragon, choke out the dragon, put out the fire, before it spread. Before it reclined its seat directly at the world’s knees…
“But it was all tithing, totalitarianism, bureaucracy, glass hearts, apathy and antipathy, empathy distress. There were tongues licking blood off the blade. The
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer lab’s disinfection took place in October 2019. But the dragon had flown the cave.
Later, Brother Snake God found his clothes, slipped on his singlet, and proclaimed another ban, bellowed out: ‘No more towel-snapping hijinks!’ But it was too late.
“Brother Snake God, in a wrestler’s singlet, forced the doctor into a full nelson, forced the doctor to drink the dirtiest dragon dick blood.
“Yessir, it’s one of the fundamental principles of a Leninist system. Whenever the Communist Party is skating on thin ice, it can afford to switch to repression. The greater the difficulty, the greater the potential growth. Any crack could be a big one… Meaning that one could expect episodic jumps in volatility… Meaning that one could expect the Snakes to be highly sensitive and nervous and, ultimately, inactive…
“Yessir, in the before times, in the good ole’ days, pre-plague, the Snakeheads just made payday loans and fed America poisoned pet food. Then fentanyl. The latter was revenge for the Opium War. Yessir...
“Then Brother Snake God got ants in his high pants, and he upped the stakes, fed the American children spiritual candy contaminated with razor blades. Then Huang Yanling’s epic fumble-rooski… The lady worse than Ryan Leaf, I tell you what…
“Brother Snake God, we know he once lived in a cave and that he ate bat soup.
But he was no Ozzy Osbourne.
“Brother Snake God eventually sent the bootlickers and window-lickers to take over the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But it was too late.
“Brother Snake God, oh, he agonized, dug himself a new cave, and hid his puffy, steam-bun of a face for weeks. But then he came to, photoshopped alertness into his eyes. Then he strapped on his high pants, went to work. Brother Snake God’s high pants perfectly creased, perfect as folded paper, his pants dark as motor oil.
Brother Snake God’s high pants just as his eyes and his hair: a most pure, funereal black.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Santa put the pedal to the metal. The speedometer reaching 106 MPH. And, silently, he remembered when he used to impersonate Jesus, back when he had a series of slapfights with African cabdrivers. Then Santa recalled his stint as a fortune teller in a bus station bathroom, over in Hoboken. Santa’s always believed in tarot and circumstance.
The pangolin cast a puzzled, sideways glance at Santa as the Caddy passed by a blank highway sign. The blank sign bent, slanting like the spine of an old man. A flickering streetlight silhouetted and lit up Santa’s fat face like a strobe light.
Santa stuck a forefinger to his chin, nodded, and unloosed something between a laugh and a growl.
“The death of one... The death of one…”
Santa again swallowed what was left of the blunt and reached into his red coat’s front pocket. Pulled out a baseball-sized snowball of cocaine. Licking his lips, he raised his eyebrows like he’d solved a riddle, and proceeded to smack the white ball to his face and snort as much as he could. Then he slurped up the rest and screamed loud as an opera singer.
“I told you a thousand times. It was a popcorn bomb plot. A hijacking of public trust. A switchblade to Mother Nature’s throat. But the research went astray.
Fauci ignored the fireball in Tianjin. And worse yet, he played with the fire.
“Yessir, the Snake-charmers wore their underwear outside their pants. They pulled out their yogurt-slingers and played Russian Roulette. And after they finished, elf brains were blasted, oozing trails of yellow and red sludge, the elf brains splattered, like modern art. Fucking Jackson Pollack performance pieces over the white walls of that lab. It wasn’t as if the French could have built it any better. It took almost two decades for a reason.
“Then we discovered the truth about Nicki Minaj having swollen testicles, an impotent penis, and a sex offender husband. But it was too late.
“I too fear, loathe, love, and ultimately believe in the power of the internet.”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The pangolin chewed on a tablet of children’s strength LSD. Then Santa ducked down, dug under the driver’s seat, and broke out a blood-stained bottle of Laotian rice whiskey. Brushing his long white beard to the side, Santa twisted open the bottle cap with his teeth, spit out the cap, then flipped the whiskey bottle upside down, cradled and chugged it, all whilst steering the Caddy, carefully, with his bare left foot. His chubby, prehensile toes curling over the steering wheel.
With his right foot, Santa was pushing the Caddy hard, ragging on it, throttling the gears, like a racecar driver.
The Clay and Buck Show faded, and Warrant’s “Down Boys” came on the bass heavy stereo, the car filling with rock guitars and heavy sounds. Santa bobbed his scruffy face, slapped at the dashboard as if he had a winning hand of Blackjack.
Then he rolled down all the car’s windows.
Santa shifted his gaze, saw there were zoo animals, lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas and kangaroos, along with the comedian Jim Breuer, the comedian running on all fours, groaning and making goat sounds... The escaped animals in the breakdown lane. The animals pushing forward at varying speeds…
Further on the horizon, another runaway elf had doubled over, was writhing and convulsing in the breakdown lane. A centaur soon parachuted in, sputtering and wheezing, and it pounced, commenced to grind its hooves at the elf’s green, puckered face.
“Certain things you do really make me mad…” Santa sang along and then flung the empty whiskey bottle out an open window. The Caddy’s four windows sucking in wide columns of cold air. The air taking on a metallic, sulfuric tinge.
The pangolin glanced at the open car windows as if they were the empty eye sockets of human remains.
“Jani Lane was underrated. The man was a genius. The Tarzan of butt rock.”
“Whoa, can we rewind to where we been…”
The pangolin squeaked on the leather as it rolled on its side and pawed at the air, like a playful kitten.
“Yessir, there’s nothing wrong with a sissy.”
Milky air, in a patina, thickened around the shape of the vehicle. The lions, kangaroos, and Jim Breuer disappearing, drowning in swirls; the animals becoming stuffed animals, toys for fat kids in Kansas. The animals becoming lost faces in heavy cream, the animals amassing with the miasma.
Santa smashed his left elbow, like a cage-fighter, jabbing at the car’s driver side control panel. The Caddy’s windows creaked upwards, pathetically warbling. The pangolin rested back on its haunches, had the defeated look of a whipped child.
“We’re fixing to find Patient Zero. We’re fixing to find God. We’re fixing to find the culture dish, the mice, the missing millions, the urns, and the grant network.
I’m making my list…
“It’ll be the New Normal at the New Nuremberg Trials… It’s Daszak first, then the Bat Lady, the doyenne, then the Wuhan body snatchers. Then the Snakeheads and organ thieves and graverobbing bureaucrats. It’ll be those whose actions spoke louder than words…”
Santa spoke softly through his clenched white teeth. Santa spoke without moving his lips. Santa will always be a ventriloquist.
“And there will be justice for the elves… No more just saying ‘Candyman’ into a mirror…”
The air curdled and tossed droplets, bits of icy spray. The Caddy was getting moist.
Its windows misty and slick. The air’s viscous composition further greasing.
But the Caddy was undeterred, kept cutting forward. The Caddy barreling, nose first, veering off the highway, roaring onto a bamboo path.
Santa brushed his hands over his bloodshot eyes, struggled to summon a smile.
“Crazy Train” then came on the Caddy’s speakers, and Santa cranked the stereo up louder than a jackhammer… Randy Rhoads’ guitar riffs rattling the car…
Breaking through a flimsy cardboard barrier, the Caddy swerved into the mouth of a white-water lake. Santa squinted, tried to recognize a ridge in the surf, where dark, curving humps were rising to the water’s surface.
The Caddy’s engine screamed. The vehicle pushing further, digging deeper into the ivory depths.
Stony atolls appeared, rising like dragon’s teeth. Off in the distance chalky sediment had formed a delta, a wedge-shaped landform. An island of an island.
Further afar, the misty outline of a wave kept creeping closer, and closer…
The car nosed forward, slicing through the white waters like a knife through a birthday cake. The Caddy a spoon plunging into a bowl of yogurt. The car soon flooding in loose wet clumps, rippling burbles.
But the Caddy kept its centrifugal force, kept careening onwards.
Cream-white swamp-waters splashing, flooding the vehicle’s interior, foaming above Santa’s waist. Slick, ice-cold eels slithering in, encircling Santa’s marbled legs...
But Santa was undeterred. And Santa stoically manned the wheel, like the captain of the Titanic. Santa focused as a shaman. Santa’s intentions set in stone. Santa driving forward. Santa up to his buttery neck in the water’s chill, its hardening churn.
The pangolin then floated to the surface, sleeping like a shark. The pangolin a dramatic character for the cereal.
Santa grinned, crookedly, and cried out, “God Himself, an agnostic. God Himself, the biggest misanthrope of all… There’s no murders in paradise… No murders in paradise…”
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As the cream rose, it numbed the passengers, like the purest cocaine. The bathtub waters increasingly argent and rising over Santa’s bloodied nose. Santa’s bushy white beard then gathering, folding like a funeral shawl over his round, bruised apple of a face.
Santa then juddered and swam, stomped even harder on the gas pedal. Santa splashing at the milkshake waters. Santa flailing, until he was blinded by a crushing sheet of ice.
The pangolin, ride or die, resorted to doing the breaststroke. Then the pangolin capsized, its black belly protruding upward.
And now Santa knew, exactly, his plan for everything... Be it contemptuous amnesty, merciful oblivion, a towering wave, or just a shadowy blur...
“And the last thing was hope,” gargled Santa, underwater, his limbs spreading, stretching like a starfish, as the music suddenly stopped.
LEAVING HUE
Red flags were plastered and hung everywhere around the train station…
I’d come as a flashpacker, heading out on the Reunification Express line, train
#SE4, from Da Nang to Hue.
The train ride was sold as beautiful, and it was, aesthetically; known as one of the world’s most scenic, jaw-dropping train routes, it lived up to its reputation.
Train tracks snaked through lush jungle, and gazing out the window, I peered out at the tropical, verdant mountains, rugged streams, and sinuous valleys of the Hai Van Pass.
Straddling the pass were the lapping waves of the South China Sea, their undulating, yale blue waters bubbling and foaming into squiggly shores of eroding rock and bronze sand.
Aside from spotting a gun tower, it was generally hard to fathom that a place as picturesque and serene was once a conflict zone, a place of unspeakable barbarity, carnage.
Communism…
The train itself was more what I would have expected. It was run-down, utilitarian.
My train seat was hard, though it was sold as the soft option. Sitting in it numbed my lower back, legs and ass.
A tiny cockroach scurried by my feet. I wondered, that if sentient, would the cockroach be communist or anti-communist... I couldn’t see it being apathetic or apolitical. Not after 300 million spins around the sun…
Cigarette smoke wafted its way through the carriage. A middle-aged Viet in high-riding blue jeans, a white “same same” t-shirt and shiny leather shoes poked his head into the space between the cars, coffin nail dangling from his lips.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Disinterested rail employees in blue uniforms sold snacks and water, and without any hint of irony, a hammer and sickle were embroidered on their carts’
moneybags.
One train employee sat in the seat next to me for a time, watching a historical drama set in Nguyen Dynasty, on his phone, without earphones…
The scenic surroundings gave way to urban sprawl as the train arrived in Hue city.
Seeing the red star flags, hammer and sickles, portraits of “Uncle Ho” everywhere had me thinking communism, thinking in confabulations, perhaps due to my indoctrination as a child in the US school system of the 1980s.
But, in fact, in 2020, I’d discovered through observation, conversations with locals and browsing online that Vietnam is probably the most capitalist place in the world…
Everything is to be sold. Anything can be bought.
Human organs. Human beings included, if you have the right connections.
Regulations, laws take a backseat to cash.
There are little to no environmental regulations, at least that are enforced.
Garbage, leaves, plastics are burned on sidewalks, in front and backyards of houses, apartments…
The traffic, roads are Darwinian, more of a jungle than anything in the Mekong.
There’s little to no social safety net. It’s every man, woman and child for themselves.
Government cash flow flows into a super small, select few. The rest of the masses are left to fight for scraps.
If not for the strict censorship, monitoring of media and draconian anti-drug, anti-porn, and anti-vice laws, Vietnam would be a libertarian utopia.
This Vietnam, the Vietnam of today, is communist in name, power structure, and superstructure only...
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I’d come to this communist turned capitalist utopia as a solo traveler, trekking through the center of Vietnam, to Hoi An, Da Nang, and, finally, Hue.
Unlike us Americans, the Vietnam War, or, as the Vietnamese refer to it, “The American War” isn’t much on the minds of the local people.
Unlike America, where we still discuss, pain over it, refer to unwinnable conflicts, quagmires, warzones, and general dumbfuck foreign policy as “this or that Vietnam.”
Unlike America, the Vietnamese don’t think much of it, aside from learning about their victory over the Americans in schools.
Aside from that, they don’t spare a second (or first) thought when walking or riding their motorbikes by a decommissioned M-46 towed field gun, or a captured US warplane or chinook helicopter with its belly, its ballast cemented into the pavement out in front of a government building or museum…
I’d grown up in the 1980s, in the long shadow of the war, when Vietnam, the war there, remained etched into America’s recent memory.
It was a stigma, a trauma.
A festering, open wound.
As a nation, we had collective PTSD.
There were those I knew, personally, who’d returned from the front lines, and I’d heard their stories...
Like an uncle of mine who’d served, taken a bullet in the ankle, was honorably discharged.
Every single night since the war, for years afterwards, he’d been plagued by night terrors. Vivid dreams.
Him back in the green, trudging through the caws, echoes and marshes of boobytrapped jungle, his friend, Derrick, in tripwire; the whoosh of a bamboo whip; the young marine writhing and twisting on the spikes, his eyebrows upcurved, dark blood curdled in his mouth.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer My uncle, in his dreams, would hear those wretched gurgling murmurs Derrick uttered, as mortars clapped and colored the sky.
Every night he’d see Derrick’s face in a deathmask.
Every day, my uncle’s limp, tottering gait served as a reminder.
He’d taken to smoking reefer to calm his nerves. He and my dad, staying up late into the night, watching baseball, puffing joints and laughing.
It was the only time he was happy, my uncle, when he was stoned enough to forget…
And there were those I saw but didn’t know, who’d returned from the war.
The homeless vets.
My neighborhood was dotted w/several homeless veterans, sleeping rough, shellshocked, unable to function in society.
I’d see them on the street, faces blanched, cracked eyes and 1000-yard stares.
Cardboard signs asking for money and food.
Jingling Styrofoam coffee cups full of loose change.
American flags hanging from their shopping carts…
There was a constant stream of movies I’d seen on cable, late at night.
Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Rambo.
Assorted B-movies featuring yellow people, commies, being shot or blown to commie bits by someone w/a mullet or Chuck Norris or someone resembling Chuck Norris or someone resembling someone resembling Chuck Norris.
And I’d watched documentaries, news footage in grainy color, bloody bodies hurried away on stretchers, that little Vietnamese girl napalm victim, her ghastly gesticulations and nudity, and helicopter crashes, John McCain, prisoners of war in tiger cages, carpet-bombing planes and ejaculating flamethrowers, buildings aflame, charred thatched roof villages, bullet-riddled, burning and burned bodies, amputees.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer That was my idea of Vietnam. A warzone, a panoply of destruction, a hot rainy jungle hell of death.
Not my superlative vacation destination…
And that was my idea of communists, communism.
Warfare, alongside starvation, bread lines, death. Siberia. Nukes. Steely grimacing vodka people in furry hats.
Boat people. Boat people in Miami. Bay of Pigs. Schoolchildren ducking under desks. Gorby and that big birthmark on his head. The Berlin Wall. Crises.
Yellow people in jungles, jumping from trees, armed with long knives, stabbing and slashing Americans. Female snipers shooting at Matthew Modine, Animal Mother and Cowboy.
A world of shit…
Communism was the Evil Empire, everything that was evil.
As a child, growing up in the last decade of the Cold War, I’d learned to hate everything communist.
(Being called a “commie” in school was even worse than being called a “faggot.”) The fucking commies wanted to fucking nuke us, and wanted to do other horrible things to me, everyone I knew. What those horrible things exactly were, I didn’t clearly know. But I did know they were horrible...
However, eventually, communism, its fiscal methodology, lost. Capitalism won.
Colonel Sanders turning out to be America’s finest commander.
America’s bankers and corporations finishing off the mission in Vietnam, decades later…
The Cold War was won. The Iron Block fell. The USSR collapsed. China became mercantilist. Laos, while still authoritarian, opened to business. Cuba is slowly opening.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Only North Korea remains true red communist, Stalinist, and even it’s got its own thriving underground commerce, markets, and may one day follow the PRC into mercantilism…
Although I’d been in Asia awhile, traveled extensively throughout the continent, because of the mental image I had of Vietnam, because of the war, communism, I’d always had an aversion to visiting.
Even though a few friends, coworkers had loved traveling in Vietnam, praised and recommended it highly, I still couldn’t bring myself to go.
I felt guilty, shitty. About us inflicting so much death. I especially felt ashamed after learning about “Agent Orange,” and how that affected, and continues to affect, veterans and locals alike.
Then on a trip to Australia, I had an unavoidable connecting flight that was delayed, making it necessary for me to spend 48 hours in Saigon, or, as it’s now known: “Ho Chi Min City.”
Contrary to my expectations, preconceived notions, learned wariness, I loved it!
The buildings. The cavalcades, waves of motorbikes. The electric, buzzing and chaotic streets. The freshest fruits, vegetables; the banh mi, pho noodles and yummiest milk coffee concoctions I’d ever tasted.
(Ever had an egg coffee? Salty coffee? Or coconut coffee? Well, dear reader, you should!)
I was taken aback by how friendly, talkative, and welcoming the people were.
How wired the city was. Every little café, corner restaurant, mom and pop noodle spot having a WIFI router, the password posted on the wall or table. The net speedy too.
I’d even met and had sex with a tour guide. A Vietnamese girl. Never could I imagine that I would have, technically, had sex with a communist, had sex with a member of the communist party. But I did.
(And it was glorious!)
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Vietnam certainly was, still is, as of this writing, a developing country, with nagging issues like wealth inequality, traffic safety, pollution, corruption.
But, to me, an outsider, a casual observer, a dilettante, Vietnam, with its large young population, looks to be on the verge of- something.
What, I don’t profess to know, exactly. But it is something…
I’d later happily visit Hanoi and Phu Quoc, finding friendly faces, culture everywhere, like the fabulously well-preserved temples and fascinating traditions, such as the elaborate rituals, celebrations, colorful robes, dances of ancestor worshipping ceremonies and holidays.
And I’d had fun strolling the night markets, which were bathed in sweet aromas of fruits, seafood, coconut pancakes, local snacks, and the super fragrant, ubiquitous sandalwood incense burned nightly in hopes of conjuring good luck.
(Fortunately for Vietnam, unlike Cambodia or China, there wasn’t anything akin to the Khmer Rouge or Cultural Revolution, and many time-honored cultural traditions remain intact…)
As for the “American War,” while there, it wasn’t on my mind a lot.
Sure, in museums I’d seen relics, fragments of bombs, landmines, torn bloodstained clothing, radios, walkie-talkies, journals, ledgers used by the communists, to coordinate the war effort and guns and knives used by Viet Cong to kill determinate and indeterminate numbers of French, Americans, Koreans, assorted enemies, “soldiers of the puppet government,” but these displays about the
“American War” mostly made me sigh, shake my head in dismay.
(It had been educational, enlightening, though, to see the war from their eyes, their perspective.)
((To them, as was stated in a video display, a “martyr’s epilogue,” spoken by a Vietnamese commander, a battle-hardened, gravelly voiced communist, with twin tufts of scraggly coal black hair and a fierce face, who, forehead furrowed in deep folds, emphatically proclaimed the war as “their American Revolution.”)
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer (((It was a narrative I’d not heard before, their side; it was a story that, perhaps, should be told in American schools, not because it was right or wrong, but because they had their reasons for fighting, and as Americans, as participants in that war, we should, from an epistemological perspective, be aware of it…))) However informative, nothing I saw affected me, that much, on a personal, emotional level.
Until Hue.
Hue had one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
During the “Tet” offensive, in the small hours of the night, a fierce ambush was launched by the North Vietnamese communists and their affiliates.
The communists captured the city, but after a protracted battle, featuring urban warfare, house to house combat, heavy street gun battles and sniper fire, the Americans won back control of Hue, their victory declared in an emotional flag raising ceremony, hoisting Old Glory in front of the Citadel…
It dawned on me that visiting Hue, for someone a generation or two ahead of me, would be sort of like visiting Fallujah, for anyone in my generation…
As for the city, the Hue of today, it’s amazing, aside from trivial developing world annoyances like a handful of obnoxious touts, the worst being motorcycle taxi drivers constantly passing by and barking “marijuana, marijuana, lady, lady, boom boom.”
(A common Hue scam where an unwitting foreigner will try to buy weed or a hooker and find himself arrested, having to bribe his way out of jail. The motorcycle taxi driver and corrupt police working in tandem.) And, of course, the traffic safety issues, literally taking your life into your feet anytime you crossed the road, attempting to dodge the mobs of motorbikes streaming by like missiles, or navigating the sidewalks full of street vendors, construction rubble, large piles of dirt, debris fires, and garbage.
Developing world stuff, basically.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Other than that, the city was highly enjoyable, gorgeous, the riverside area, specifically, when lit neon at night.
All along the Perfume River were roistering young people from the colleges nearby, and many buildings built in art deco architecture, painted pastel.
My personal favorite landmark had to be the Saigon Morin Hotel, with its elegant French colonial architecture, rectangular face of quintuple rows of French doors and small glass pane grids, wooden-framed windows, and wrought iron balcony railings.
True architectural eye candy.
And one must traverse the visually dazzling remains of the Imperial City, see its pavilions, gates, eaves, frescoes, gardens, and stone bridges, as well as the nearby emperors’ elaborate tombs, the various towering pagodas, and one must ride or drive around the surrounding countryside, gander at the sprawling green jungle hills in the distance, which were magnificently photogenic…
But I couldn’t get past the battle there.
Thinking of those soldiers, young bucks, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, thrown into that situation, them running in the muck, gunning “commie” motherfuckers down and themselves falling bloody to the earth in hailstorms of bullets, exploding in improvised bombs and wanton mortar fire, being picked off by snipers in the same very streets I walked as a tourist.
So many people, just so many fucking people, had died there.
There were over 1000 Americans dead or wounded.
Not to mention the ARVN, its over 2000 dead or wounded, and the occupying NVA, VC massacres of civilians, commies chasing down runaway Catholics, those hiding in churches, those friendly with the Americans and ARVN.
The communist death squads swarming into villages, executing every boy/man over the age of 15, bodies chucked and stacked in shallow mass graves.
The communists had their mass casualties, too, in the end, numbering thousands.
Death tolls, to this day, that are disputed…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I couldn’t shake the images. What it must have been like. The heat, horrors, stenches of death.
It was in the starkest contrast imaginable to the present city, its youthful energy, cafes and colleges. Hard to truly envision that sort of calamity happening in this effervescent, wondrous place…
When it came time to depart, I had my guesthouse arrange a ride to the Hue airport, and after checking out, I was met by the driver, a man about 60 years old.
He was approximately 5’4, thin, and sprite. Had charcoal black hair, small eyes, and a round face, reddish cheeks, thin lips and a slight smile in the right corner of his mouth.
Though his accent was strong, his English was overall pretty good, and, setting off in the car, we struck up a conversation.
“Where do you come from?” He asked, honking his horn musically at the other motorists and motorbikes that weaved and crisscrossed, buzzed like mosquitoes around our vehicle.
“America,” I said, not thinking much of it.
But he was more excited than most I’d met there to encounter an American.
“Oh, America very good! Very good!” He exclaimed, his heightened voice having a raspy cigarette cadence, and he gave me an enthusiastic thumb’s up with his free hand.
He proceeded to tell me how as a child he lived near the MACV compound.
American soldiers, aid workers had taught him English. His family and friends of his family were soldiers in the war, fighting on the side of the South, The Republic of Vietnam, alongside the Americans…
He said that when the Americans were in Hue, it was “very happy, a very happy time.”
We drove along and he pointed out landmarks- where the MACV compound was, soldiers’, locals’ late-night hangout spots, and bunkers, flashpoints in the battle…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I was curious as to what happened after the war ended, what happened to those in the city, in league with the Americans.
He told me they, including his family, were forced into the countryside. The communists repopulated the city.
It was nearly a decade until they were able to live inside the city again.
He’d also lost track of his father. Through a network of those in similar straits, he’d been promised that his father was alive, but could never locate him...
The driver had been one of the “boat people,” attempting to flee Vietnam, in various boats, rafts, makeshift floating contraptions. He attempted to reach Hong Kong, several times, but on every attempt his boat was fired on by Vietnamese soldiers or otherwise intercepted, forced back…
When our ride began, he’d told me that “before, many people were against the communists, but now they are good.”
But as we approached the airport, he showed me something he’d written on his phone and didn’t want to say aloud.
“Communists tell lies.”
Then he wrote:
“Killing many Catholics. No freedoms.”
His withered face, the lines in his forehead like couplets of the pain he endured, made me cognizant of this forgotten bunch, the Vietnamese on the same side as the Americans, fighting with us, believing in our ideals, wanting freedom.
I’d always seen the Vietnamese War as being an interventionist adventure. I’d seen the angry hippies at peace rallies, the burning draft cards. I’d seen the movies.
I’d seen it as binary. Us against them.
But it wasn’t so simple.
I’d heard the American narrative of it, growing up, and having spent time in Vietnamese museums, I’d seen the Viet Cong, communists’ narrative.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer To hear this side of the story, this firsthand account, from this man, who’d lost his father in the conflict, been banished from his home, had tried to sail a boat to Hong Kong, and was nearly killed in the waters by the communists, the Vietnamese territorial guards, it was gripping.
This man’s story moved me, affected me far more than any movie or museum exhibit...
And, standing in the immigration line to have my passport stamped, I wondered, what the future would hold for this country…
Would The Party be able to maintain power into the new decade, into the 2030s and beyond, with all their children growing up, online, in a globalized world?
Before my visit, they’d begun imprisoning bloggers, like Mother Mushroom, and other dissidents at an accelerated rate, and during my visit, the BBC was banned in Da Nang, Hoi An, and Hue, unable to be accessed without a VPN.
Was this a snit? A blip? Or might The Party attempt to copy the China model, reverting to totalitarian ways to assert total political control, using technology to police its population, becoming a tech-based police state…
I don’t profess to know.
Because I’m not a communist.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
LIJIAN: PORTRAIT OF A WUMAO
