In The World, The World, Norman Lewis describes being taken by a Burmese into his parents' rural home, where all six inhabitants slept on one bed. Lewis was given his own camp bed in a separate room, however, but "it was a solution the dear old mother completely failed to understand and she complained at length at the family's affront to good manners, and the decadence of the times." The father also got Lewis some moonshine. "The drinking of alcohol came close to a deadly sin in such an environment, but the old man trudged down to the nearest stall-owner's house and came back with a pint of country spirits. 'For your friend, who has now become my son,' he said to Tin Maung, handing it over."
The main aim of modernism was to wrench you from your context, as in family, village and nation, and with those mostly accomplished, postmodernism's purpose is to divorce you from yourself even, so as you wake up with another boner staring up wistfully at your stubble, you can forlornly squeak in your freshly minted genderfluid voice, "I wish I could be a side of beef in a white bandage dress, just like Caitlyn Jenner."
The centuries-long war against reality began as a campaign against the lower body, where nature is most frank, gaping and unruly, but as the browbeaten masses are gang pressed into an increasingly antiseptic, hypocritical and unreal universe, perverts lowjack the farting, fornicating and cuddly lower body. This colonization must be reversed.
If a saner world is to be recovered, it will be built on the foundation of places like Certaldo and Ea Kly. Here, men haven't gotten the latest global bulletin about the obsolescence of race, borders, nation or gender assignment at birth. "What the crippled c-word are you talking about?" they would snap, these deplorable, salt of the earth hicks.
It is, again, dawn, and I'm at the corner cafe, hunched over, bouncing my legs and rubbing my arms, like the rest of them, with only my hand warm, palming a cup of tea. Jovial as usual, the owner shouts at an arriving regular, "We're out of coffee!"
When an old man shows up on a bike that belongs in a First World junk yard, she laughingly yells, "You can park that here, and if you lose it, you won't have to ride it again!"
Several of my table mates have been here since about three to offer rides to bus passengers, coming home for Tet. As a thin one with short hair disembarks, a man asks the rest of us, "Is that a boy or a girl?" He doesn't know how to address hir to make his pitch.
"Boy!"
"Girl!"
"You can't always tell these days," I conclude without judgement, as the stick figure trudges down the dusty road, pulling, with much effort, hirs luggage.
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