Im writing my martian autobio, as i said. Here are a few samples:

(im poor & have just enough money for food and a roof, i hope this book will be a (relative) success)

NDE

Take it for what it’s worth, but our family dentist is Vietnamese (quite remarkable, really: she spends one month every year in Vietnam volunteering dental care for addicts in their “rehab centers”), and she knew my father well. He ended up in a coma before dying last year.

She told me she had also been in a coma herself, for six days, but hers was punctuated by an NDE (near-death experience). She rose into a sublime, luminous place where all suffering had ceased.

There were other kind people there (sometimes almost a little too welcoming), though she didn’t know any of them.

They were communicating through something other than words.

She wanted to stay, but her survival instinct took over.

Coming back was extremely painful.

Afterwards she told me: these are only words, and I’m doing my best, but it’s like asking a fish to describe life on land.

I asked her whether she had remained Buddhist afterwards, and she said yes!

#nde #vietnam

And

Preface

I am going to tell my story here, piece by piece, category by category: my autobiography.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, as the preface to his own:

I am undertaking an enterprise without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow mortals with a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. Myself alone. I know my own heart and understand mankind. I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I dare believe I am unlike anyone in existence.

I am not Rousseau, and I have no desire to be Rousseau. Quite the opposite. When I meet someone for the first time, I see them as an entirely different being. It is through conversation that bridges get built and common ground slowly reveals itself. That is what I find delightful. My hope is that, by reading me, you will feel as though you are having a conversation with me, and perhaps even find yourself reflected in me.

And

Vietnam in a Single Image

I lived in Vietnam (that is the right word: this country is far more alive than France) for a year. Impossible to describe, so I often end up describing the house I was living in as a way of describing the country itself.

In Saigon, I was living at ldb’s place. At ldb’s place, there was ldb, his Vietnamese girlfriend, a Vietnamese friend of his Vietnamese girlfriend, L: a Vietnamese scammer, G: the only white homeless man in Saigon, A: an Erithrean banned from Saigon, a dog (which got stolen from us), two cats, and a monkey (which was strangled to death by ldb’s next girlfriend).

#ldb #vietnam