Dispatches
from the mental health center...
(Fragments from
Koon Woon’s existence):
The first time
“You are
nothing!”
Keeping souls
in a ledger
Conard
Genius at the
Triple L
You can always
TRY
Helping nephew
play chess
The Car Man
Clean Start
Juneau House
Under the
weather in Aberdeen
Morrison Tales
Times with E,
S, and V
MDR, minimum
daily requirements
Director of the
NSA
Napa revisited
THE FIRST
TIME
Sewers spieled
steam in our most gentle city of San Francisco. Sometimes I had a bed to sleep
on, like at the Chinatown YMCA, and sometimes I slept without a bed or
companion. Fog and rain assailed me, but I am as thick as the NY City
Directory. Family correctly diagnosed me as incorrigible and left me at the foot
of the dumpster.
It is here at
the Stockton Hotel at the intersection of Stockton and Vallejo that I breathed
the vehicle exhaust from my third-floor window propped open by a can of pork
and beans. My furniture adhered to the minimalist cot, zinc bucket and wash
basin. The shower room had no windows and was lit by a weak incandescent lamp. You
need to bring your own toilet paper to the shared latrine.
Then you wrote,
“They confiscated his deck of cards, jailed him and disallowed all
communications with his pregnant wife.” They also said to him, “Women and
children are building socialism, and you are so idle you have time to gamble? Just
as you have no empathy with the poker loser, we have no leniency with you.”
The
Port Master of New Amsterdam embezzled a million dollars from the port but was
not imprisoned for the crime.
But democracy
has triumphed. Black ops keep it lively – a debate between Margaret Atwood and
Billy the hillbilly.
YOU ARE
NOTHING!
It was a
building in San Franciso speaking to me. The building was all white and it was
a hospital on Pine Street, a mile south of downtown. I shouted back that it was
nothing. Some nothingness is stronger than other nothingness, and in this case,
the building was stronger than me; it was a fortress, an invincible
construction where it housed labs, blood, needles, and people. Some people go
in in some condition, and they come out in another condition, about that this
is all we can say.
The Tao says
that health cannot be bought, it must be earned.
I was the tai
chi master of the supermarket and not only that, but I was also the reader of
souls, and Jimmy Carter was president. I said that I would read his book
someday. Some time later, after all of this, I received a card from Jimmy and
Rosalind that was simply signed. They could write their own signatures. But I
don’t know about that buffoon in the White House today. It is like monsoon
rain, a lot of inconvenience and we need it to soften the hardened mud, but
despite its heavy volume, it ends rather quickly when it ends, and things go
back to a tolerably drear.
Things are
really like that – come thingness and go nothingness. In Chinese sensibility,
whiteness is death, the funerial color. Even so, I was so out of it, I was not
afraid, because I was even more afraid of life.
KEEPING SOULS IN A LEDGER
In
the colorful blur of St. Mary’s Square, a message on the clock said, “Know son
the evil and flee thence!” I had been sleepless in SF entering Grant Avenue the
entrance to Chinatown. I lugged my suitcase through the crowded street like an
assassin on a mission. Inside my suitcase is a leather-bound ledger, where I
make the infinitesimal notation of entering a soul. I made a mark “+” if the
soul merits recycling and a mark of “-,” if it should be returned to the fires
of Hell.
Mother,
my eyes are pierced by the sunrise between two corporate buildings, and my legs
grow weak.
Mother,
if I transmigrate, how would you know me if I came as to your door as a puppy?
In
the matter of mothers, schizophrenia is allowed. And in the matter of souls
kept in a ledger with their merits and demerits the world keeps a record of harm
done. I am sworn as a notary, and my commission expires when the seas consume
the land. When all is said and done, I was a good clerk in the ethereal realm.
