An old diary piece by Koon Woon

 

January 28, 2010

I believe this Journal idea is a sane idea and will help keep me in this class, school, and in life itself.

6:10AM in Seattle now and it is still dark; the streetlamps are visible through the slits of my blinds as I look up to the computer screen. Some people have already finished fornicating, showering, and breakfast and are commuting to work. The stretch of the freeway between Everett and Seattle and for that matter, all the way down to Tacoma bumper to bumper like electrons in a tube of copper wire in the making of this terrain a mega city in a decade or two. I have not driven a car in almost 40 years.

My mythic journey? In my imagination and delusional states, I have been many things – including that of the Director of the National Security Agency. My job was so secretive that the location of my office was top secret, so secretive that even I didn’t know where my office was. I belonged to an organization simply known as Insiders. We operated the government itself while pretending to be janitors at top government offices and multinational corporate headquarters. There are various ways we communicated that were rather slow and primitive, including the use of hiding messages in books in the public libraries. Why were we able to control the world even though our methods were so primitive at communicating with each other? Planning! And Intelligence! We must anticipate events and conspiracies and military, social, and cultural movements way ahead of time. In this regard, we were almost as good as the Triad of the Chinese Intelligence as it was revealed in the British M1’s The Jackdal Files. We shared intelligence with the Mossad, or the Israeli intelligence. They have the best technical apparatus, but we have the best political analysis.

I have been at my outpost for the last 30 years now – Seattle Chinatown. Hey, folks, I will let you in on a secret --- Seattle is the first place in the world that will be most likely be hit by a nuclear bomb from China or a Chinese sub. The brain of the US government is no longer in Washington D.C. but in Seattle. I have nuclear codes. It is based on Deontic Logic. For example, I might be on the phone with someone (where that person is don’t make any difference, if the conversation is picked up by the Chinese Second Artillery Force, which controls nuclear missiles. For example, a person and I may be discussing the price of Lychee tea in Seattle Chinatown at the Uwajimaya Asian Market and Emporium. When I appear to be not making sense to the party I am speaking to, the Second Artillery Force will realize that I have been poisoned or stressed to the point that I have decompensated to the point that I cannot not relied on to do my job. At that point, they will fire nuclear missiles at Seattle. This is all the details I can divulge unfortunately. I am sure you want to know more. Such is this kind of life.

We only show you that there is a puzzle. But once you think you have solved the puzzle, you will see that there is another puzzle within this one, and so on either ad infinitum or terminated at some point. Then, The Truth in Rented Rooms.

I am aware that there is a paranoia delusion with elements of grandeur in my morning illness. It is all right. It kept me alive all these 40 years of my illness. I never wanted to kill myself no matter how bad things deteriorate to, because in the morning, I always feel grandiose and happy.

Memories by Koon Woon

 

There is something insoluble in my tea that you poured

 

I don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…

 

The tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country, where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland Shakespeare…

 

But more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in, and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…

 

But long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath. Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9 tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…

 

But later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the land of tea…

 

All in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…

 

Koon Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle