In the Shade

I wrote this five days ago -- the night before I discovered this would be my last week at my school. The next morning, I learned that this surprise COVID wave, first sprouting up in Da Nang four days earlier had become too concerning, and classes were to cease the next day.  Since then we’ve not gone into total lockdown in Hanoi as yet, though social distancing and mask-wearing policies have been put in place. Today I learned that shops in the old quarter are to close.

 

In the Shade

The glow of the city light and the night sky bounce off the lake and deliver specks of color for me deep in the shady lane. Here I walk home to my place. I said goodbye to Giang, and puppies Noodle and Sausage. It’s a time for the self, and mine is along Ho Tay, in Hanoi, Vietnam.

There he is now. A once again single man of 37. Not rich, no great fame, uncertain prospects, disappointments and grumblings plaguing the soul. Most of those beasties are familiar creatures.  

I can walk with those grumbly grimlies. They sleep deep in the tree shadow in the quiet night. But there’s something of a livelier dance. It’s strange and I just start to fathom. I realize this scene will stick with me. It’ll be in my dreams sometime. Sometime it will come back to me just where I am now. There’s something large then.

 I am dismissive of my accomplishments as a blind person, cause any accomplishment as a blind person will be jacked up with steroids and jet fuel in the mind of the ignorant by-stander, who’s never met a blind person with decent education and exposure. But what of my accomplishment’s solitary? I’m still blind, and a person. No one’s watching, but here I am, a year now across the ocean in Vietnam, where I’ve done so much shit I never did before and didn’t anticipate. I came into this knowing I would have to do things I never did before and didn’t anticipate, and didn’t I? I didn’t know it’d be a year away from all I left behind. I guess I made it have to be a year’s out of sight and out of mind with my decisions. I made a change in my world, even though I didn’t start the little fire that sprouted in my wake.

Somethings you force yourself to do. Sometimes, though you can’t quite believe it—it is so unfamiliar – they work, ever so slightly. Sometimes you can feel this alone in the dark as you adjust.

See of Eyes

Its June – my second ever in Vietnam. July lies ahead, which is as yet the only month I’ve never seen Vietnam dressed in.

(Quick note from the present – Vietnam’s relatively earnest and responsible efforts during the current COVID season mean we are pretty well back to pre-virus business on the domestic front. No domestic transmissions since mid-April, and no COVID19-linked deaths at all. Schools, including my primary place of employment have been back in business for over six weeks. No six foot/1.86-meter thing, no bread starter kits, nothing. It would be nice if I could consider paying the old country at least a visit, but then it would be quite a while before I was let back in where I am now. Unlike in the U.S. this time last year, I have employment enough where I can afford to live. Hopefully I got some other things going on an artistic front to buff my ego. Anyway, all this can be yours America, et al, if you’d only consider a wee bit collective intention – I’ll say no more. Back to the more timeless topic from a few weeks ago.)

 

 

I’m pondering how to disclose something that really shouldn’t feel like disclosure. The trouble is, it contradicts something people assume by default. People seem rather surprised when I do muster the energy to disclose it, which like so many things my side, is all about the bummer of having to account for myself, and thus miss opportunities to talk about anything else in the world. The best friendships involve ‘The Talk’ somewhere at the beginning. But even relatively pleasant iterations may miss some details one might find rather imp. Yes, the talk. You know… how you went blind; how you get to work, use Facebook, eat, get around, scratch yourself … the whole floodgate of unimagined concepts, a consequence of a world that isn’t bursting with blind or disabled people --  particularly ones that aren’t on a leash,, and aren’t exactly like that one unfortunate and inspiring blind person you interacted with previously. It is part of the minority’s burden no doubt. There are those that don’t care, and are sated by their assumptions, and there is the insatiable flood of curiosity. It is good and healthy to give one’s attention, but the overwhelmingness that is your singularity causes you to get drowned in all those eyes that stare on you.    

All this is to say…. hehem... and by the way, if you are someone who’s had the talk with me, and are afraid to ask more questions -- don’t be afraid, you asshole! Also know that there are other resources out there besides your friendly neighborhood disabled person encase you are correctly assuming said person may wish to talk about other stuff sometimes (See a couple quick links below).

All this is to circumlocute saying… hem hem… I have vision. Yes, it’s true. Shameful isn’t it? Most blind people are doing this too. Not disclosing to the wider world that they actually have some eyesight. If you enjoy a little more argot in your life, we sometimes sport terms like low vision or legally blind, even though, legally blind includes those with no vision. I don’t really know about the legality of any of this, but I will often refer to myself as blind, with low-vision or legally as a qualifier, if there is insistence that I qualify myself in light of the aforementioned disclosure. Yeah, we don’t tend to think of blindness as an explanation for why someone is looking at something closely, right? An extremely common circumstance is for someone carrying a white cane to be called out as not really blind for such anomalous behavior as looking at things. Sorry officer. Amidst some people, doing anything requires breaking rules of ignorance. You don’t need any vision to discern the anguish you cause the sighted world you swim in just by doing things unassisted. It is palpable. Man oh man… this reveal is right up there with admission of my less than stellar hearing, which I’ve not even done yet.   

When I was five or six years old, someone told me I was visually impaired, which was the explanation I got for being taken out of classes in order to smoosh my face against some paper and familiarize myself with some enlarged shapes and characters. While it doesn’t really jerk my chain like it once did, ‘visually impaired’, or VI doesn’t appeal to me nowadays. It reeks of what someone like Carlin might have called language softening. Might euphemistical sterilization due? That is to say, it seems to want to soften the blow of a concept through apparently technical sounding language – the more syllables, the more abstract. Why not one syllable to rule them all? The other reason I don’t quite have the hots for visually impaired any more is I’ve embraced the idea put forth by the National Federation of the Blind in the U.S. and other organizations, that folks with different levels of vision deficit (blindness) share a common reality, and that dividing into categories based on residual vision creates a hurtful, ableist hierarchy. Certainly, there are differences, and hierarchies form regardless of ideals, although outside of the maybe 15% of blind folks with no vision, you’d be hard pressed to find people with the exact same amount of sight. Yet impacts of blindness, total or otherwise, are more social fabrications than natural facts – a bit on that here.

In truth, I am a quite visual person. While I’ve found that I tend to range near the low end of visual capacity among those with color and shape perception, I enjoy and use what I have. I like to stop and look at the roses, essentially putting my nose in them, and I even do some drawing. The blue sky and orange sunset make me happy and inspired. I imagine and dream visually and colorfully. I have sexual and personal aesthetic preferences based on appearance. My lack of apologies to those who assumed I was innocent of such sins.

Perhaps part of the difficulty is I was never told what my acuity is. I’m usually pretty patient, hence my service to you in this essay; but one q that sometimes gets my goat is “how much vision do you have?” I suspect if I had a number, like 20/990, this would not be very meaningful, and would require no fewer chunks of time fruitlessly trying to depict what I can see and when, “yes, I can see your hand moving”, and so forth. It’s just one of those things that aren’t disagreeable per se, but certainly can be du jour, especially when it would be much more interesting and helpful to disclose how and why you carry an assault rifle with googly eye decals. In the meantime, I just have to assume that is just what you are doing, plus one or more preferred explanations, each about as awkward as approaching someone, and introducing yourself by asking them how much they can see.

This isn’t to say that vision talk isn’t interesting either. Sometimes context is everything. Think of how much time I took pondering and writing this little bit, born out of my insecurities about how to disclose my anomalous circumstance, and wash myself of the scrutinizing eyes I got to wade through every day. That experience isn’t something I prefer welcoming daily, but there it is. Anyway, it was good talking about me to you.

Here’s a pretty good piece on blindness myths – check out #7 in particular.      

Speaking of Whistles

I had to let this piece o’ work incubate for a couple weeks, as a good word bird does. And speaking of whistles…

I’ve been reading bird-sound expert Donald Kroodsma’s book, “The Singing Life of Birds”. In it he politely critiques the idea, posed recently by some scientists, that tonality in birdsong suggests a human musical sensibility. Many continue to claim that bird songs contain elements common to western music, including notes from diatonic scales (doh ray me…), major, minor, and diminished triad chords, and major, minor and perfect intervals (frequency differences between two notes), etc.  He doesn’t really provide a clear example to pick apart, so it is hard to say whether he’s right or wrong; but his principal argument is that the claimers are engaging in confirmation bias, i.e. cherry-picking. It appears if you look at a sonogram, or graph charting the different frequencies in a bird’s song, matches with traditional music notes and scales are, in my words, co-inkeedinkal. What we might cite as a minor third in a bird song is likely slightly out of tune, or a major exception to most bird note intervals. I am kinda putting words in Dr. Kroodsma’s mouth. He does point out that scientists fail to back up their claims with evidence from sonograms, and instead designate fragments of particular bird songs (like that of the Hermit Thrush) as musical scale intervals, stating “that’s a fun exercise, but it remains important to realize that one could do this with any series of notes and conclude that the intervals are also found in our music.”

The apparent problem is that the fragments used in scaling these bird songs are not simple stable notes, instead modulating or shifting pitch, like someone trying for the first time to play a slide melody on a ukulele with a full coffee cup.

This has been my general sense of things as well, although it seems that if there is some kind of innate foundation for appreciation of musical intervals in people, as would appear reasonable, it isn’t a stretch to suspect birds have this too.

          Kroodsma points out that there are plenty other similarities between bird and human songs we can hang our hat on, even if advanced tonal theory isn’t one. As with the ukulele example, people modulate their tones all the time, trembling and skipping their way from the notes on a written score, and if me, you can be perfectly happy playing out of tune for a couple hours, missing that middle C note by some prime number of vibrations per second. Unlike many people, birds can hold fast to a tempo and rhythm for extended time.   

Similarities Dr. Kroodsma specifically gives include musical themes or motifs, accelerandos, ritardandos, crescendos and diminuendos. Countless examples of musical themes are crucial in allowing us to distinguish one species-specific sound from another. Themes are constancies that help make a song a song, like repeated notes or phrases, peculiar voicings (like the lilt of an Eastern Wood-pewee, the metallic nasal-ness of a Blue Jay, and the insect-like trill or tremolo of a Chipping Sparrow), preludes and flourishes (like those of a Wood Thrush), or distinct admixtures of these signatures. Think of leitmotifs, or different characters represented by particular instruments, moods, or melodies in a classical symphony, like in Peter and the Wolf. The thrushes (Wood Thrush, Hermit Thrush, American Robbin, Bluebirds, Common Blackbird, etc.) are a family of birds that share an affinity for ethereal melody and a flute-like quality. They demonstrate what a songbird can do, using their two voice-boxes (syrinxes) in self-harmony and rapid alternation. A Black-capped Chickadee is an example of one who can transpose his simple but distinct “Marco! Polo!” song, much like a musician picking a different key for a favorite tune to suit a show.

Accelerandos and ritardandos are the gradual speeding and decelerating of a musical pattern respectively. The example of an accelerando Kroodsma provides is the song of a Field Sparrow, which, like most of the examples I’ve given, is a bird native to the Eastern U.S. Yes, perhaps I harken too often to the land of hydrogenated peanut butter. An accelerando is like a loose bouncing ball set to music. The Canyon Wren of the Southwestern States, on the other hand, does just the opposite, like the musical celebration of fading drips from a faucet. It is almost as though the orchestra Field Sparrow symphony conductor decided to send his coloratura soprano into reverse, which rarely happens in human orchestras. Northern Cardinals, (mostly Eastern North America and some islands) can do both ways or neither, depending on the exact song he or she chooses (birds rarely heed their conductors).

Crescendos and diminuendos are gradual increases and decreases, respectively, in volume over a musical movement. Both are quite common among birds that can hold a song for a second or more. Not invoked by Kroodsma here are musical articulations like glissandos and de-glissandos, referring to glides up and down in frequency, much like a slide whistle or slide ukulele. Glissando can also refer to interconnecting ascending or descending notes, like when you drag a finger over piano keys. This relates to modulation mentioned above, though simple gradual glides from one note to another can really jump out, like in the slurred pees and wees of the aforementioned Eastern Wood-pewee. I think one could call the unsteady glide of birds like the Canyon Wren ‘legato’ or ‘portamento’. One of the reasons I’m even writing about this business is I’ve discovered a bird of Hanoi that exemplifies a very pleasant aggregation of simple music qualities named the Plaintive Cuckoo. The male’s song bares no direct reference to his name, unlike the clock-ready Common Cuckoo Species, now prepping to populate the northern reaches for the toasty months. Nor does he register as plaintive in my mind, though perhaps ever on the verge of cuckoo. His song is an example of accelerando, as well as staccato, with brief glissando. He follows a gradually descending scale with intervals smaller than typical Western musical tones.

Why all these birds speak Italian I don’t know. On the other hand, duets are also quite common. In the U.S., Carolina Wren males and females duet, as do Northern Cardinals sometimes. This is more common among tropical songbirds though, where females are more likely to sing and defend a territory. Singing between males and females among these species is thought to strengthen bonds and help birds track one another in dense tropical foliage. The ability for a bird to duet with his or her mate may keep him or her from being attacked as an intruder.

A most striking example of a song for two however is the North American Barred owl’s courtship duet. Here the male and female trade and weave all sorts of sounds in a most haunting cacophony: hoots, caterwauls, cackling from the male, and hums and distinct vibrato from the female.

I remember arriving with friends at a campsite late in the night in the deep forest of the Washington Cascades a few years ago. Not much human life had been stirring in the area for quite a while, as the bolt on the gate that guarded the path was encrusted beyond budging, and after this obstacle was a large fallen tree. As we took turns taking a handsaw to this snag in the road, some of us carried camp supplies from the car up to the site. It was pitch black as we set up tents, when we heard a banshee duet above our head. It sounded like five of them.

“Now I know you suckers think that’s the ghosts of grandparents come back to terrorize you like they did in life” I said, “but those are actually two owls doing their courtship duet.”

Such is the wonderous world of bird music. There’s something special about getting the chance to hear such phenomena in auditory solitude from the motoring multitudes. Not that I’m against urbania or human sounds – I make plenty myself.  

“Man’s desecration of his environment by noise is the most pervasive and gratuitous of his many outrages against nature.” E. A. Armstrong. 1969.

See also here.

Hello From the Hanoi Motel Six

Xin chao, y feliz Pascua tarde.

[Note that I meant to post this last week -- I've sure you'll forgive me for the halting of time.]

It has been about three months since I taught at the school here. And what little twisty nucleic acids can we thank for that?

I’ve managed to do some private tutoring, lots of pacing around, some musical sleight of hand, and some other remote giggish work for my old job at Portland Community College. The private lessons started in person and migrated online as we proceeded to lock our doors, run around in circles, and stomp on whatever virus spore shimmied its way through the bidets.

It is a simple life. Unfortunately, my little ground level studio with no windows to the outside isn’t the most pleasant place for a living time-capsule. I think of the spring coming to the northern forest and ponder nicer places, as I’ve done too often in my life: phoebes and Louisiana waterthrush arriving in northeastern North America, wrens and song thrushes waking up in northern Eurasia, orange-crowned and black-throated gray warblers in the Pacific Northwest coming to a screeching halt with their legs in midair, like in cartoons, panting for breath after a short migration--I’m the expert here, and I’ll tell you how birds work.

Like many an expat in Vietnam, I’ve tried to convert my teaching into online work. There are many services, especially out of China (Cambley, VIPKid, etc.) that facilitate paid teaching via web browsers or their own apps. I realized early on that the voluminous digital gig economy with its random hours, zero benefits, and low pay is whistle-beckoning me.

My-oh-my how I tire of inaccessible apps and websites. In fact, I’ve been tired of them for decades, which goes to show how much progress has gone down on this front, and may ironically explain my insomnia. It certainly demonstrates why heavy-handedness is often called for. When accessibility is considered a matter of charitability--special needs--a nice thing to do, but sometimes not practical, then consequences need to apply. We must make ignoring us impractical for those who will make barriers--the appointed shapers of the conduits of our existence. The access that disabled people do have wasn’t born without a fight.

               Anyway, so far, after spending hour upon hour with these platforms for teaching English to speakers of other languages, like VIPKid, Cambley, and DaDa, I feel as though I am digging myself a bottomless hole in space. I think to myself, there’s a good chance any complaints I have will mean as much as a mosquito to them, and that they deal with zero accountability for application and website accessibility. This may be especially true if they are based outside North America or the EU, where at least some hard-fought legal precedence is established, however tenuous. If I was but an insect in the U.S. job market, I’m one in outer space now. That’s my sense of the global online circuit.

March rolled around with no prospects of schools opening. Some new cases began to grind business to a further halt, evaporating a few silent, cautiously hopeful weeks. Many fellow expats could be seen drinking their day away, assisted by a $1.30 beer platform. Others told me that they were plenty busy on the ball, and told me what English teaching service they were using. “You should totally sign up!”

A really pleasant American fellow expat told me about his successful swap to VIPKid for English teaching. He expounded on their ample virtues and pay, and told me they are looking for Americans like us to teach English online. This was perfect for him, especially as he was to relocate fancy free to Chiangmai. It is nice to be as free as a bird. To think you can get a job all the time, live on a shoestring and live the itinerant, interstellar hip existence. I wish I was like others. I try to remind myself that I am rightfully an adult, with all the liberties and induction of ego inflammation entailed by age and androgenesis. As I walk down the street or try to start a conversation, I would like the people I encounter to use a vocal tone that says, “You are a human being just like we are.”

 No, I don’t need them to count the three stairs to the mall entrance. No, I’m not afraid of your silent dog--I didn’t know he was there until you apologized. Unfortunately, as I dig a bottomless hole in space, I realize I might not be able to fake being the steel monkey I’m supposed to be. I can’t fill out forms on these Pho-king websites because buttons are not properly labeled and edit boxes are not sufficiently marked up to allow one to navigate without a mouse or touchpad via a text-to-speech screen reader device (like Apple’s proprietary Voiceover, or JAWS for Windows). No, I need help--just not with stepping off a curb. Help from a friend is enough to get me through the steps of a simple online job application, but when the web platform or standalone app to communicate with students has the same problems, it’s no job for me no matter how many master’s degrees of separation I hold. Crikey.

I contacted VIPKid about their futile app, website, and instruction materials, offering to help them improve. “I’m sure they will find some work for you” my Chiangmai-bound friend said.

“Your teaching career is impressive and moving to us. Unfortunately, after discussion, investigating the limitations of our online teaching portal and curriculum, we cannot accept your application at this time. We are a young company that is growing and has the mission to prepare every child for the future world, and we hope to in the future be able to meet the needs of EVERY student. But unfortunately, at this time we are not able to accommodate teachers and students in these situations.”

Anyone say, ‘special needs?’ We are not yet considered a part of the future.

Heartbreak is the name of the mouthless moth that emerges from a chrysalis of wasted time. BS is the wasted time.                   

Uncle Mike

(Wrote this a short while after some bad news in January. Kinda wanted to keep it private, and I’m still not certain if this is a lil too much show and tell. Some thoughts and items of info you handle with extra care, ya know? Maybe people that knew Mike Baldyga could still use the information. Either way, ‘ouch!’ I say!)

Everyone should have an Uncle Mike. Not just a nominal Uncle Mike, but a proverbial Uncle Mike. Not just a proverbial Uncle Mike, but my Uncle Mike. Then people would understand well who he was to me.

If there’s one person I can readily point to and say this man indubitably inspired me and shaped my whole being, I suppose it’d be him. Maybe my brother, dad, mom, helped too. It seems so obvious with my Uncle Mike though. What he did was teach me from the youngest age possible that it was cool to be smart, to know about things, to grow with youthful exuberance and mature complexity in tandem, to love science and nature, and to travel. His explanations of weather and thermal dynamics were music to my ears long before it was any other decipherable language. So were his stories of local gangsters and traveling the world to chase solar eclipses. So were gunshots at a rock to get the right “p-taw!” sound, and various other highly necessary science experiments and clown-tricks.

Actually my Dad’s best friend from childhood, and later a co-worker with my mother at a company that specialized in collectable classic book re-pressings and memorabilia, Mike lived, through most of my childhood, in his own childhood home (known as the yellow house regardless of whatever color it took on) with his brother and father, no more than a couple miles from me. Mike never married or had children. He was that uncle. Not the foil-wrapped chocolate one you’re Grandmother gives you when you go to her house to light the Chanukkiah; but that fella who maid the Ernest decision to check out on some of the prescriptives of adult life in order to be free and pass the seed of this type of freedom on through the generations where the ground receives it. A kind of Tom Robbinsian enlightened rogue/guru hedonist character comes to mind, a la Woodpecker or Larry Diamond, but cocooned in layers of caution, vice, and reluctant retiring-ness. Consider a small-time gestor that makes one feel regal to be around sometimes. One can see oneself pleasurably in the mishmash of visible qualities, including when he put on your little clown nose.

               Mike often joined my family on the greatest adventures we could afford as a child: like road-trips to relatives, or skiing. Obviously he was old and experienced enough to be my father, but he was bizarre, entertaining, and child-like enough to be like a second older brother, especially when things weren’t so tender between me and my actual older male sibling; although I was jealous at how my brother could win over Mike’s attention the way one does upon the cool kids with tools like experience and charisma. While with no known desire to have children of his own, he took his value to the Attenberg boys with enough serious dedication to warrant his frequent sharing in dinner at my family’s table and crashing on our couch. “Most exotic meal I ever had” was his refrain after dining with us. I’m not sure if it referred to anything specific, like the Chinese take-out from down the street, or my mom’s potatoes au gratin.

So often in my memory I can recall Mike on the couch with me and my brother, discussing MacGyver, racecars, and other such things that might unexpectedly string an intelligent man with two fawning children; meanwhile my parents and any other adult were about their business in another room. My early years were, upon close inspection, rather tumultuous, with tons of medical issues, nascent family troubles, and the upheaval of trying to integrate in a mainstream school with a facial deformity and poor vision, but memories like those painted by uncle Mike are why my brain, as brain’s do, kind of cursorily scrolls past that ugly stuff in reflection.

               It probably shouldn’t be much surprise that Mike was as into bird-watching, and plant and animal identification as I would become. Before there was the internet and my eventual expertise, there was Mike, who we would always share specimens with. In return, he would present us with something cool, like a snake-skin, feather, or book with audio recordings. If you add the time of magic and whit together with these objects, the value is hard to reckon. There’s really not enough time or patience inside me to plot out and justify his own significance. It is all a rush of feelings and time spent in incubation under the mass of his soul in the endless honeycomb of mirrors in my mind. Ephemera like snake skin or a feather will have to do then. The way they are cooked up and shed without any person’s artifice, like so much magic, is part of the stunning charm we can always take awe in.

               As I say, Mike had no children, and was never married. Perhaps it was out of a mix of fear of dedication and an idealist’s dedication to an ever insipient ruck-sack revolution. One thing I can say is he did retire from too much responsibility. Perhaps it was out of direct experiences I’m no expert in, or out of seeing turmoil produced in attachments like my parent’s marriage and family that told him such things weren’t for him. Instead of a clear path of gentle embraces and detaching with the wind like so many feathers and clouds, He had long-term vices, and stifling hang-ups that could break one’s heart. Adventures that could have been were set aside in drunken stupor alone on his couch with Bevis and Butthead; long overdue rendezvous were likewise flaked on; and whatever marriage might be was in principal out of the question in spite of a tight long-term, live-in relationship.

               A truly difficult time in my life was in bloom as my parent’s relationship fell apart at the seams. This wasn’t so much the divorce that would come – divorce in a sense is the tiny, pragmatic legal imprint concerning a more robust dystopia. Family friends stopped coming around. Tension filled the lonely air, free of all those little things you got used to. Escapist video game music struggles to fill the gaps in contest with shouts and door slams.

               I was 18, and about my uncle Mike’s Hight when I saw and quickly took him in my arms at my Dad’s wedding to my step mom at the end of 2001, perhaps four years after I last saw him. He still had the chocolate lab, Major, from the last time – the failed guide dog in training. Was Uncle Mike a failed guide dog in training? Why not – I was never so happy to see anyone. I never quite lost track of Mike since that time.  He came to graduation parties of mine, and attended my step sister’s wedding in Ohio, and my step mom’s funeral. I spent a gloomy autumn afternoon at his home, enthusiastically discussing hydrology and adiabatic systems a couple days after being released from the psych ward at a hospital near my University.

               I got Mike to visit me once after moving out to Portland, OR like a good Connecticut kid. We had a blast hiking around the waterfalls in the gorge, driving to the coast, dining out where the Vietnamese restaurant proprietors could call him Uncle mike… He was gushing with love and enthusiasm for the trip. While he came to Oregon for the solar eclipse in 2018, I didn’t manage to get him out a second time, although that seemed to be genuinely something he wanted. Getting a hold of him was notoriously difficult, though my communication with him was more sporadic than what he got with a couple others including my dad. If this wasn’t the case, I suppose I’d have a better understanding for the trouble he was in.

               I could see why one could have been mightily sated with the life he had when I dropped in his latest bachelor pad in exurban CT. It was a small two-level apartment, kept tidy with shelves of gold-lined, hard-covered books, a white cat with a single black spot named Spot (succeeding such feline friends as Orangy and Black Kitty), spring-fed forest pools and the wooded Aspetuk River -- although the landlord recently cleared much of the property’s woods – it was still quite lovely, quiet, and yet not far from the bustling New York metropolitan hustle. If one could live in peaceful, Zen-like isolation, this would be a practical place to do it. White-throated and Fox Sparrows were all over his feeders in the darkest of winter days. I was happy to pay a few visits there over the past couple of years to see him and the bird life when I was around my old Connecticut beat; although my visits came after last minute, drunken cancelations of plans to dine out, or cook out at my mom’s place. There were undercurrents of sadness and long-term loneliness plaguing the brilliant guy that seemed to want little more than lounging around with a bottle and NASCAR on the TV. They began to register as others hinted at them, although I saw them in part as the ironic mishmash of an enigmatic guy that never wanted much more than some personal concoction of freedom.

About a year ago, I spoke to Uncle Mike on the phone after several broken promises to meet while I was in the Northeast for the holidays. His voice was tremulous and weak as I’d never heard it before—sickly--elderly. A visit to his home revealed him to be gaunt and tremulous. He admitted to be in withdrawal. He’d binged and claimed he had given up the heavy stuff. He made the latter claim before departing for a liquor store after meeting at a Thai restaurant the next night. He also announced that he gave up his job of several decades just days prior without any fanfare. It was time for him to cash in and move on to a new chapter. I told him to come out to Portland with me. “I might just do that” said he, not for the first time.

He said he was feeling remarkably well and was off the heavy stuff as I spoke to him  on the phone the night before my departure for a stint on the other side of the world in august; though this came after several days of not getting a hold of him during a farewell visit to Connecticut. His voice was slow and tremulous, and he showed no interest in meeting me in the city for a farewell meal before my flight.

               Just days later, my dad informed me that Uncle Mike was taken to the hospital by his siblings for detox and rehab. I didn’t know that he was near death, with his liver and heart on the brink, and his legs barely able to support him.  

  I didn’t contact him directly over the course of the five months in Vietnam. His long-term sweetheart told me she shared with him my article in Chao Hanoi. I woke up on Saturday morning Jan 11 2020 my time to a message from my dad that Uncle Mike was found dead on the floor of his apartment. The shedding of a beautiful something, that while alive helped me fly and kept me warm, and in death has fallen to the deepest parts of me. He lies with the most beautiful dreamscapes of my memories.  

I guess it’s “done seeya bye!” It’d be nice if you told me you weren’t able to be here, but typical. I have missed you Uncle Mike. I will miss you more that I’ll never see you again, as is so with the most beautiful ephemeral springs.

Mike’s Obit.

P.S.

In spite of the funeral, Mike was decidedly unreligious. Probably a good idea to assume you are mortal, and leave instructions at some point, eh? He did leave me on the other side of the world with two Master’s Degrees pertaining to Environmental Science, and with a vast assortment of other steadfast conditions I’m happy to credit to him in his wake. When you are reminded of how the most immortal, larger than life elements inside you are attached to the most mortal in the course of life – ouch.

 Love,

Uncle Trev

6 Months -- On the Right Soundtrack

I

Six months in Vietnam as of last Thursday. And What have I done? Not very fluent in the language, and with apprehension for the future. It is good that I maintain a foothold with a routine of scribing observations, eh? First of all, I should give some recognition to the musical backdrop in the Saint Honore bakery/café place near my home. I’ll get to that in a bit.

First for something more pressing. Have any of you hirsute, masculine types ever examined your face during the day, only to discover that you neglected to shave about half of it? It’s more of a drag when your peach fuzz grows at about an inch per hour. That’s about 109 million cm per nanosecond in metric terms. I can thank 6 months of the metric system for that last ounce of wisdom, which a half beard by no means belies.

A region I’ve delved into, at least for the sake of articulation is something I’m sure a lot of blind, disabled, and other minority folks can relate to. We often use words like infantilization, patronization, or condescension to describe a persistent condition. These hover around the mark, although as words are wont, their package mightn’t make it completely.

               I suppose I have an internal dialogue, although often it uses voices other than my own. Maybe it is the voice of a less dour and condescending BBC reporter, or even the sound of a text-to-speech screen reader like JAWS. Maybe it is Stacy Keach, describing paranormal matters through the refinement of a mustache and reconstructed cleft palate. Anywho, when I hear my own voice down on Earth, too often there is this aggravating diminutive quality to it. It is a cerebral state more than anything. I become the pimple-faced teenager on the Simpson’s; the cute puppy that talks; the adorable kid that does adult things sometimes – “here, let me tie your shoe for you…”

One is not allowed the privilege of adulthood. I’ve never quite felt accepted into that the club of full-time, adult human beings. Privileges, encase you’ve heard otherwise, can be quite nice things indeed, often worthy of rights. But there is this small hiccup of a demon that tells me through my own voice, or that of others, that I, no matter what I do, will always be a child. It is stultifying and embarrassing. I’ve long had this sense of reality. An ironic thing is that many minority folk were never fully allowed into the fold as children. Childhood is a hierarchical, pseudo-meritocracy also, and thus thrives within a class of outsiders. Ostracization is one side of the coin, but so is childhood poverty and incrimination. I never really fell into the latter part. I was quite the good boy most of the time, as now, so the projection has it. I might’ve been jealous of those who commanded fear through a rap sheet or stories of classic woe. Even when you are not particularly short, your neck can grow soar from looking up at people all the time. Maybe this is why I don’t care for inspirational/motivational speakers much. I am tired of looking up and not seeing the moon. Maybe I’m using the term adult to refer to that enviable circumstance one finds oneself in, where you’re not constantly offered help or physically manhandled during human interaction, or where you are allowed to participate in common activities, like conversations, games, arts, exercise, etc. with no strings attached – speaking of which, I’m going to tie your shoes.

 Now, I shall describe in only the most interesting detail, this place that I’ve sometimes gone lately to get some work or relaxation done. You ever get the sense you don’t quite get the full story on anything from people? I call it “don’t tell Trev syndrome’. You can get by with snippets you can run with.

It’s a nice place – this place, although there’s often a guy that is out in front waiting for me to take too much time in finding the door, where upon he comes and grabs my wrist or arm like it’s a snake, and guides me in. I’ve tried some Vietnamese with progressively higher volume to try to extract myself beforehand. His response is invariably, “ok ok” with no change in the snake grip.

There’s something for you youngons to learn from such experiences. As I noted in a recent FB post, speaking for others in your shoes is not easy, and regularly not advisable. I do have a sense of justice though, and I will stick to it in spite of contradictions from others that share my cramped blind shoes. Indeed, there are many blind people that express great gratitude when someone comes and offers, not just assistance, but bodily manipulation without asking. I’m almost invariably not one of these. In Vietnam, I’m much more tolerant of this. I realize, as I’ve stated, that I may find myself in danger and need, while simultaneously not having the linguistic capacity to express or receive information on said danger/need. I’ve, somewhat reluctantly, shown gratitude to those that have come to physically guide me across busy streets. In fact, unlike in the U.S. or anywhere else I’ve been extensively, in VN, I have frequently asked for help in crossing some of the more maniacal streets. Here’s the deal though. I don’t think that my strategy here negates my general critique of unwarranted assistance. The difficulty in understanding where the line is drawn lies in the phenomenon of strangeness. It is hard for the general public to deal with something that is strange. People also want to be heroes. A need to shimmer and shine in our cast system of heroes is intertwined with a dread of the unknown. It is the sense we cannot allow for these free-radical beings, these folks plotting around with mobility devices – these blind people that move circuitously towards a destination, trailing walls, feeling about for things, rather than taking the strait, bold trajectories we all know and love. Surely if they could speak in your language, they would cry out for help, and it might as well be you, kid, they call upon. Here’s the deal, I say let them. Let them feel around, let them thrash, flail, spin around, get lost even. They have voices, and if they are deserving of adulthood, they can ask for help when they are ready for it. In fact, they might be getting lost, because they are panicking, sensing that someone is watching them, about to jump out and grab them, or at least judge them on their lack of grace at any time. There’s a quite good chance of it. Can adults be strange? I say if you don’t think so, that’s your problem. Everybody’s got problems, and I’ll try to understand yours… now get your hands out of the way – I’m going to tie your shoe – get!    

II

Now for that place I told you I’d give a fleeting glance at. Saint Honore has other locations, and I don’t know if what I hear here is representative. There’s a mix of Chicago blues, including Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf, and cuts from the 1994 Jimmy Rogers’s ‘Blues Blues Blues’ all-star session album, featuring Mic Jagger, Eric Clapton, Taj Mahal and others. The latter is a quite nice album, though the nominal album Artist, Mr. J. Rogers, on shared voice and guitar, is a wee overshadowed by the rockers and younger bluesman in his midst. We get some more old-timy stuff, like Robert Johnson and Bessy Smith as well. There’s also ‘Poor Man’s Moody Blues’ from Barclay James Harvest, a symphonic pop rock tune from 1977, in which the band (BJH) poke fun at their critical comparisons to the Moody Blues. The song stylistically alludes to the Moody’s hit ‘Nights in White Satin’ of ten years prior. Neither the BJH tune, nor the Moody Blues’ one bare much trace of blues. One might suspect the juxtaposition with genuine blues numbers to be a result of goofs in a streaming service; but then we get genuine classical symphony music from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (thanks to my iPhone for telling me that, I knew it wasn’t a BJH Mellotron.), plus New Agy stuff like Enya’s Oronoco Flow and Karl Jenkins’s ‘Adiemus’ (Jenkins used to play oboe and keys for Soft Machine). Michael Jackson’s Earth Song appears to slide into the latter genre. This makes for an uncanny patchwork, but it is a generally pleasant, sophisticated fare. Most inexplicable are the few blatant Christmas tunes I heard today, including Perry Como’s ‘There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays’. Perhaps this is with reference to the recent school cancelations prompted by the Corona Virus? The Urban Gentry jazz bar was also spotted playing Christmas music in recent days.

Unlike cases of Christmas music, last I’ve checked, there have been no new cases of the virus in the past week, and only some 16 total in the country -- no deaths. The flu and other diseases are likely having a more deleterious impact as we speak, although native folks are quite cautious. Expats are out and about more than ever it seems, like me, out of work until schools start back up.

               Back to the Saint Honor music scene, the volume is kept at an unobtrusive level, and is generally nice. The cozy, familiar, and peaceful atmosphere have enticed me to walk a little further and pay just a bit more money in order to frequent the place over the past week. Contrast this with the also chain Highlands Coffee, with its 10 or 15 V-Pop and American top 40 numbers on constant repeat, little changed in the past 6 months. My brain swings from acceptance to disgust when I pay Highland’s a visit. There’s something that reeks of a bland dog eat dog commercialism in the saccharin Highlands music, as well as in the smokey, loud hustle and bustle I pass through on the street to get there.

Sometimes I get trapped, if you will, in hints of the familiar: familiar music, people speaking English, fellow expats, familiar coffee shops and bars. One is wont to this in my condition I reckon, although attachment to the familiar can stifle adaptation to the unfamiliar, as might the lack of natural light in my studio apartment. What’s more, I suspect I’ll feel less infantile once I can actually learn to talk in the ears of natives.

Bonus observation – South Africans also regularly end sentences with ‘eh’ – a habit usually credited in the U.S., with shock and respect, just to Canadians.

Lots of frog sounds coming from behind the buildings, and to a limited extent, the edge of Ho Tay/West Lake. I believe they are brown tree frogs (Polypedates megacephalus). The common English name refers to other species, and there are other terms used, including Spot-legged Tree Frog and Hong Kong Whipping Frog. Their sound is a cross between a bark and a quack, a bit like the wood frog of the Eastern U.S.

Got a visa renewal for another 6, which, as I hear tell, may not be so easy to do come July – South Africans are to be thanked, eh?

Gas Gas Gas II – of Observations and Wags

               Another observation is that an article I wrote for the Anglophone Chao Hanoi online magazine got published. Apparently, many people read it, though an additional many come to me now saying they saw an article about me. Indeed, I wrote this article about me. Chao editor and chief Carlos may have written the exact same piece, but that would be pure coincidence.

               The piece was drastically shorn from a sprawling beast I struggled to rend and boil down. I guess the main idea I landed upon was to address the novelty of my presence, and its relationship to the actual difficulties I face, which is distinct from whatever inherent difficulties there are in being blind. I didn’t mention this in the piece, but by itself, blindness isn’t particularly bad, or even, dare I say, of much consequence. But blindness is no noble gas. Nor is Jumping Jack Flash. It is rarely to be found by itself. As Carlos told me, if I wasn’t an enigma before, I certainly will be now that thousands have gotten a whiff of my article—I wrote it by the way.

  A notable blind poet, memoirist, and professor Steve Kuusisto published an interesting piece recently. Here he boldly admits to feeling regret over a perceived burden he places on fellow faculty members and university staff in his pursuit of accessibility and inclusion, all be it with resolution to persist. How real this is. How constant is the feeling that one is a burden -- that even if one can say they are accomplished, they are differentiated by the burden their disability inflicts on others in the upward struggle. One is slapped into feeling that way -- that one should be ever obliged or contrite in their demands. Someone else may suppose that academia should be a paragon of inclusive, equitable thinking. If this was so, I’d still be in academia.

This reminded me of some ponderings I had o’recent regarding the topic of help. Thank you to a conversant Finish lady at the Jazz bar on New Year’s Eve, and perhaps to the irate neighbor who sprayed us with a hose (I initially thought it was Champaign) for awakening some concise thoughts on the matter.

Help is not a passive act. It is an assumption of power. When you help someone, even with supposition of supreme altruism, you are assuming the role of power barer in a relationship. Political? Yes. Say you offer to cook someone food, and that person, hungry, and far from home accepts with no strings attached -- perhaps you are the one driving that person home after moreover. That person is obliged to accept whatever it is that you cook as good fare, not to mention your dawdling, smoking, groping, probing, forgetting that the person is allergic to raw box jellies and may prefer listening to Lana Del Rey’s sinus congestion over your political podcasts. The helped is usually considered one who has made their big decision already, and that decision was to receive help. The precision of that help, the inappropriate behavior of the helper, and available alternatives to flee to are inferior concerns in the shadow of the big deal – the charitable deal. Constantly a blind person as myself must fish deep into their cerebral pockets for the best decision to make – to ask or not to ask – to accept or turn-down assistance. Asking someone for something simple as directions or accompaniment to a location might bounce back in un-wanted grabbing, endless delays as the in fact ignorant provider (counter to initial presentation) checks their phone and asks other passers-by, and ultimately quite likely an unwanted final destination as it has been discovered upon parting. Sometimes refusing help, even in the kindliest way possible is seen as an act of aggression. The imperfect helped is the taboo of the picky beggar, the biter of feeding hands, the out-of-turn ignoble one. The helper is the chevalier, the master, the gigging saint, the political tactician. Lowe, what a temptation it is to jump in the box car of charity. Mighty no-no to surrender such an opportunity, especially when it is in motion.

 I think of the time I asked a roommate in Worcester MA to drive me to the train station (of course there’s no decent public transit to the transit station from Main Street -- cabs in the city are, and perhaps still are, excruciating, all be it likely in the form of ride-sharing. He immediately regretted his decision to help. His mind was in agony. His decision was one of proscription rather than thoughtfulness. The time was rush hour. The 20 minutes or so of the ride featured frequent profanity on the top of my driver’s lungs, accompanied by slams of his fists on the dash. “You should’ve asked me an hour ago champ” he said through clenched teeth several times along the way. I genuinely offered to get out and call for a cab, and pushed gas money into his mitts, but he refused. ‘And woe to him who has exchanged one’s charitable power over a blind man’ thought he. Does a proverbial fisherman dare share his trade with a lowly blind man, risking closure of equally proverbial houses of oms, and opening the sea to plagues of well-fed blind folk, and some fewer fish? Often, we blind people are given special seemingly benign favors we are not told are just for us. For instance, a visit to a large café where we are told to sit down and be served. We may debate over when and where to play the disabled card and accept freebees; but if we are not even told it is a freebee, let alone something we shouldn’t expect at a future visit, how are we to comfortably plan our actions? We may sit down for a half hour before realizing the error of our assumption we’d be served, perhaps not even knowing where we should order. The point is the power differential too often disarms the assisted of that capacity: the power to plan, to expect what others expect, and to react with resilience to change. I believe in the goodness of altruism and necessity of equity; but the power dynamic tied up in charity, reliance, condescension, ego-itis of physically normative differentiation – all that is to be feared.   

 

     Speaking of poetry (See Steve K above), and to know a tree -- poetry is a troublesome subject for me. Sometimes it seems like license for people with no discernable analytical skills or articulateness to be artists and get applause. Sometimes it is quite lovely!

   Anyway, here’s a brief contribution to bad verse, for the golden retriever at the local jazz bar…

 

Those wags, yes and that wagamuffin.

Those beats, this brush, the wind, and that drum.

My lady. What is it? That’s right.

 

Itches are words by the boatload bin.

Through the gag-…inducing… smoke I’ve come,

for the old… furry you… this night.

 

P.S.   

A nice fella chatted with me at the corner coffee shop next to Tay Ho (the lake). He hadn’t read my article it sounded like, though he had seen me around quite a bit – surprise surprise Mr. Sight-ala. Anyways, we talked about naturalizing beavers in Ho Tay? No sir. We talked about my blindness, which I’ve been talking about on this blog most of the time, so it is apparently circumstantially fine. We talked about him a bit to bring some balance after all. Apparently, he met a blind person 😊. One thing he stated that stuck with me was “you really take us out of our comfort zone.”

Should’ve gotten some clarification, but I get the sense he was talking about all the folks like himself that simply encounter me on the street with barely an exchange. Little that I said to him was particularly heavy-hitting or said un-good-naturedly.

I told him “well, I try hard to make people comfortable all the time.” That’s the truth. Kind of the job of many a minority to make those of the normative substratum nice and comfy.

“You do man” he said simply.

Not sure why he said what he did then other than the honest fact that the sight of me, perhaps interacting with me makes him a wee uncomfortable, and he was facing down his discomforts by getting to know me a bit. Fine I suppose, but why should it be my burden to cause discomfort? It doesn’t strike me as my innate responsibility to assuage people of their hang-ups like that. Well, that is…have I taken too many fish from the lake? I am told it is recommended not to fish there.   

 

 

Christmas Chanukkiah is a Gas Gas Gas

 Hello there.

Don’t mind me, just updating the blog.

One thing that has slipped into my general awareness recently, like so many nano-plastics, has been the decidedly poor quality of air in Hanoi. The massive traffic, unbridled construction, burning of waist, and certainly other factors have been knocking at my door. When it couldn’t get in, it extended its claws and scratched relentlessly for a while. I wonder, when I hear a someone with a weak or scratchy voice in VN, how much of it is this pollution. After a small fever like thingy (WHO terminology) in late November that didn’t weaken me enough to keep me from work, the gristle and soreness persisted in my throat. Very gradually has this cleared up. Still there are latent sore spots, but besides that, I’ve been fine, assuming my brain is not turning to swiss cheese. Getting better is one thing, but I wonder about just what I can’t help, like the air.

               Of additional downers is the fact poor air is not confined to the gaseous streets. The bars and concert venues here, which host some of the music and finest people I’ve met, are also chalk-full of cigarette exhaust – enough to make me want to wear the mask I now carry around for street fumes. These are ex-patric locations, many of whom hale from places where the smoking bar is as endangered as lake turtles in Ha Noi. Is this all wholesale, repressed nicotine anarchy? The export market in second hand smoke is certainly a hot one for the American and Brit. One doesn’t want to be an asshole to those who have traveled thousands of miles and thousands*1.6 of kms to smoke to their masochistic heart’s content. Although, was it GB Shaw who said a sadist is merely a masochist who follows the golden rule? A golden rule for a heart of golden swiss cheese. Oy. Some things one deals with through absorption-- for a little while.       

               Macro-solid sightings of late include a Shabbat Center for Jewish communitarians, mostly travelers and some expats. Yours Jew-ly(1/2) went there for dinner on Christmas/fourth day of Hanukkah. Many Israeli backpackers among the patrons. Some folks were cooking and serving latkes, which was nice of them. The assistant rabbi running the show was a New Haven CT man. Globalism is not quite dead, and indeed smells like olive oil. Probably that’s what Christmas is all about. It seemed like I should be doing something to celebrate that evening. Not bad, although grab (the ride-share service I’ve been relying upon for long-distance intra-city travel) dropped me off some 300 meters away.

               Since the school I teach at enjoys teaching about multiple religious traditions, I’ve shared some basic stuff about Hanukkah – thanks be to Wikipedia for backing me up this time. Perhaps the kids will think of me when they are reading the same article through digital reverse osmosis 10 years from now. Then they will wonder why I only taught them about the dreidel, and didn’t actually bring in latkes like the next English teacher at the school. They love the dreidel though. In exchange for being allowed to play through a couple class sessions, the children in my small class of 10 and 11-year-olds had to sing a line from the ‘Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel’ song before each spin. I say be disappointed if you come to Hanoi and don’t see some native kids singing the song or shouting “gimel gimel!” while sitting around in their yarmulkes in the park.