Isaac Simpson - Philosophy and Fucking in Vietnam

Philosophy and
Fucking in Vietnam

A Travel Memoir

Isaac Simpson

Outlaw Publishing

Los Angeles

Authors Disclaimer: I am not an expert in history, economics, sociopolitical theory or international law. The following observations are the immediate impressions and speculations of a common man as he travels through a strange new world.

Words 2015 Isaac Simpson

Cover design 2015 Bjorn Johansson

Interior design 2015 Beverly Butterfield

Imprint:

Outlaw Publishing

726 S Santa Fe, Apt 107

Los Angeles, CA 90021

ISBN-13: 978-0692501030

ISBN-10: 0692501037

The following is exactly 93% true.

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

[contents]

Vision quests are an ancient Native American rite of passage. Boys nine to sixteen years old travel alone to the wilderness and stay without food for one to seven days. Visions occur, sometimes induced by hallucinogenic drugs.

The visions reveal to the boy his purpose in the world. Upon returning to society, he is considered a man.

One of the only surviving accounts of a vision quest was written by a famous Lakota Sioux medicine man named Black Elk. He described the moment when he went over the edge, into his vision.

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

Black Elk

[PROLOGUE]

The End and the Beginning

Fall 2010

New Orleans

A sickle of Asian coast. Heat and dust and people squatting on the ground, eating fetuses out of head-sized eggs like the guts of a melon. A sweaty hulk in a bus station smothering a pre-teen girl, the bows in her hair are buried under his fat and dark with his sweat. Zombies creep into an orphanage and pull the chubby orphans out of their beds and pop them open with their teeth like bloody soup dumplings. The boat-sized stone head of a blonde patrician, unflinching as jungle vines thick as sewer pipes weave through his eye sockets. The white chocolate faces of the presidents of the United States melting under fluorescent lights and a red flag rigid above, frozen in the air conditioning. The perfect ass of a woman with the skin of an apple and the flat face of a crab. An all-glass skyscraper protecting a heap of shimmering human skulls piled like cinder-blocks all the way to the top. And an old woman standing in the dark, watching me sleep.

I awoke to the bleep of a heart monitor, curled up in a lump on a skinny cot. The room was cordoned off with a curtain the color of doctors scrubs. When I remembered where I was, a vice of depression clamped my gut. It was the second time in a month I had taken myself to the emergency room to be sedated.

The shuffles and beeps of the ER triage at Touro Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, filled my ears. There was a crusty glaze on my lips and my eyes felt sticky. The freezing air-conditioning found the gaps in my paper gown.

I unfolded myself and rolled off the cot. The heart monitor clip was attached to my finger and I pulled it off and threw it on the bed. My clothes sat in a pile on the floor and I put them on and slipped my feet into my sandals. I peeked out of the curtains and saw a few orderlies waddling around. I moved through the curtains and past the orderlies. The double doors of the main entrance slid open. I walked out of the fluorescent hospital into soft purple dawn.

The air was damp and cold, the sort of chilly humidity you only find in the bayou states. I walked through the parking lot in search of my truck and the blood returned to my limbs. I found it where I had left it and climbed in and turned the key. The thin neon numbers on the digital clock flickered awake. 5:00 a.m.

I was a second year at One Road University Law School, where, with substantial effort, I had carved out a typical law students worlda clean, quiet apartment, a daily schedule of reading and exercising, and a set of friends in various stages of high-functioning alcoholism. I had spent my 1L summer working as an intern at a law firm in Saigon, Vietnam. I had returned to New Orleans from Asia two months ago.

By the end of the summer, I had tumbled into a pit of depravity so deep I wasnt sure I could climb out. I had hoped that returning to my boring American life would allow me to convalesce, that the daily routine of it would work as a sort of decompression chamber. But somewhere along the way Asia had flipped a switch in me that I couldnt turn back off. Readjusting was more difficult than I could have possibly imagined.

Its hard to explain what clinical anxiety feels like to someone who hasnt experienced it, but a good analogue is an endless paranoid higha bad trip that will not go away. Every moment I felt like something was profoundly wrong. I could not relax. Nothing was enjoyable. I couldnt have a drink or watch a movie or eat a meal in peace. People with depression say everything looks grey. For me, everything looked red.

The worst symptom of my anxiety was insomnia. It had started on the long plane ride across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to LAX. My drug of choice for flying is Xanax. Usually two .25mg pills put me in a slobbery coma for up to twelve hours. That day I was feeling off so I took one-and-a-half and slept in my cramped seat for maybe three hours then jolted awake in claustrophobic fear. I spent the rest of the flight in the throws of a full-on panic attack, getting up from my seat to stretch, sitting back down, ordering water then coke then coffee then beer. Nothing helped. I was in the clutches of something out of my control.

After several days of travel, I made it back to my apartment in New Orleans, where I lived alone. I had interviews for lawyer jobs scheduled the very next morning. That night I couldnt sleep, but I passed it off as jet lag. I went to the interviews red-eyed and full of coffee and was so tired and unprepared that I made a fool of myself. A baldheaded lawyer with big shoulders from the law firm Skadden Arps asked me what kind of law I wanted to practice.

Definitely not transactional.

Im transactional.

Oh... I laughed. He didnt. Im sorry. Youll have to excuse me. I just returned from Vietnam and Im super jet-lagged. Its not that I dont want to do transactional... I guess its just that I... I dont know what I want to do.

He didnt ask me why Id been in Vietnam or any other questions at all. We spent the next three minutes in awkward silence then he said pleasure to meet you and pointed to the door. The other interviews went just as well.

Two more nights passed with nothing more than a few minutes of half-sleep. I would roll around in bed, alternately reading, watching TV on my laptop, and trying very, very hard to force myself to sleep. Like all insomniacs, the harder I tried, the more awake I felt.

On the third day I managed to doze off for a few hours, but then something even stranger happened. I woke up with the same excruciating feeling of panic I had experienced on the plane, but I was disoriented and could not remember where I was. The objects in the room, some of which I had owned for years, seemed strange and foreign. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that there was an intruder in my space. At the foot of the bed stood a dark figure. When I saw it, my heart jolted like in the first moments of a freefall.