Retirement Part 1

When asked about his retirement plans on his 70th birthday, the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, demurred, pointing out plans to complete seventy new schools that year.

It may or may not be obvious that these circulars are sent weekly on Sundays to a mailing list consisting of, well, anyone who has ever emailed me. Last week I got a bounceback. A little research revealed that the recipient had retired and I had been using his now-canceled business email address. An indexed FB post revealed that he had retired. When an email address disappears, the person it’s connected to is gone…

At least the USPS forwards mail.

When it comes to retirement, I prefer to take the Rebbe’s advice.

Hadrian VII

If you told me in the 1970’s that in the future the pope would be American and there would be no newspapers, I would have laughed. Today the pope is American and newspapers are just barely hanging on.¹ Already a person reading a newspaper looks anachronistic. Newsstands are gone. Coin boxes have been abandoned, splattered with graffiti and stickers; unrepurposed sidewalk eyesores that no one has bothered to pick up.

Charlie Don’t Surf

Charlie surfs.

I am a Ghost

For some reason, history weighs on me here. It’s hard to ignore the fact of the Vietnam War, a war they call here the American War. I was too young for the war, but by months, not years. I still remember the Canadian immigration rules as they stood in 1973. You needed 30 points to become a landed immigrant with legal status in Canada:

• one point for each year of education
• five points if you could speak English
• five points if you could speak French
• ten points if you had a job
• ten discretionary points

The language points were on a scale so that a native speaker of English would score a full five points and a person who only had high school French might score only two or three.

Having achieved the academic status of high school graduate, I would have twelve points. Five more for English. That’s seventeen. Three more for French, maybe four if I could take the French exam while intoxicated. Quebec would be more forgiving, Ontario didn’t really care. So let’s say 20. The missing ten points seemed an unscalable obstacle. With 2-S (student) deferments limited, the draft was a real possibility.

A Vietnamese army vehicle stopped at my hotel’s parking lot the other day. It was…ominous. Hanoi hadn’t sent a patrol to pick me up. The real attraction was the two popular seafood restaurants next door.

At university, I was taught by Ricardo Gullón, who suffered a leg wound while fighting for the doomed Spanish Republic. A few years later, while in Chengdu, I walked through a park where Chinese fighter planes were exhibited on elevated stalks as if they were in flight. I had the same ominous feeling of displacement, of being where I was not supposed to be.

In Panama’s Tocumen (then Torrijos) airport, I once watched a three-engined 727 land. There was something off about this airplane, something different. The landing gear consisted of too many tires: sure enough, it wasn’t a 727 at all but a Cubana de Aviación Tupolev-154. My parents once sent me a postcard from Berlin. Berlin DDR, that is. Seemed odd at the time. I feel that somehow these events are connected in some mysterious way.

Expats in the beach town of Da Nang prefer t-shirts, short pants and flip-flops. But the clothes that have come to me to wear here—an olive green 5.11 police shirt (I need all the pockets I can get) and similarly colored trousers—I swear that when when I tried them on I didn’t realize they were cargo pants—together make up the look not of someone who is headed to the waves but of someone who was in the military or still is, waiting for a mission.

Wars always spawn ghosts. My white hair is yet another problem—in Vietnamese mythology, ghosts have white hair. Some say that a tall (comparatively) Western ghost in a nondescript military uniform has returned to haunt the streets of Da Nang. That the ghost is responsible for finding and disarming unexploded ordnance. Or worse, the ghost seeks to detonate a bomb, to take one last kill. The police have not yet been called in to investigate.

Let’s just say that children aren’t giving me any trouble on the street.

Do ghosts haunt your town?

Retirement Part 2

I had an interview with a recruiter the other day. The Saudi market is not as rosy as it once was. Nevertheless, BigLaw firms are rushing to the desert. American firms, for the most part, haven’t figured out how to exploit the Saudi market. They worry about bar admissions and the like, matters that mean little where traditionally, a male Muslim with a power of attorney had a nearly absolute right to act on behalf of another.

I once asked an attorney from Lebanon if he had ever appeared in the local shari’a courts, tribunals that were supposedly reserved for Saudi lawyers only. “I am a Muslim with a power of attorney,” he replied. “No judge would dare deny me the right to speak.” Things are different in the Kingdom. Really they are.

Visa Issues

Americans normally get 90 day visas for Vietnam if they simply ask for them on the country’s eVisa platform. For some reason I only got 30 and by my counting, January 18 to February 11 is not 30 days. I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to be put in the position of overstaying my visa. I can’t imagine that the punishment interview would go over too well.

Falling

One of the facts of aging is that you become unsteady on your feet. I have never been that athletic to begin with, so I’m probably starting from zero. I went to a Thai restaurant the other evening—familiarity with cuisine is indeed helpful—and on the way back to my hotel, I fell.

A friendly Australian picked me up off the ground. A group of Vietnamese surrounded me. “Are you alright?” they asked. “No, I’m not,” I relied.

So often I am reduced to celebrating an event that could have been worse. In 2008 when I lost my house to the Crash I couldn’t have been more excited since the mortgage was taken off my hands for a home that pre-Crash was assessed at $750k but was now worth only $100k.

All those poor seniors you saw working as greeters at Wal-Mart? Thank God I had no money invested with Bernie Madoff. So when I fell onto the sidewalk I thought, at least I can walk, nothing seems to be broken. Hooray! And all this coming from a person who is rarely an optimist.

A buckled sidewalk was the likely culprit. On the way back to the hotel I stopped at a pharmacy. I told the pharmacist that I would like some painkillers. I was offered paracetamol, that is, Tylenol. Why are we so afraid of painkillers? It’s not likely I’ll become addicted to Vicodan or Percadoos if I just take a few after an accident.

The pharmacist told me that the paracetamol was strong, 650 milligrams worth. In response, I rolled up my pants leg to reveal a bloodied knee. He went in the back of his store and brought out the codeine. I only took one.

The next evening, on leaving yet another restaurant I tripped, but this time on the way down I was able to grab a light pole, swing myself around, turning that falling momentum into an acrobatic-like twist.

I’m surprised that none of the innocent bystanders applauded the acrobatic antics of the white ghost in a strange military uniform.

The Dalai Lama, Passports and other Heads of State

The Dalai Lama visited the notorious Epstein Island more than once. I trust that Jeffrey toned down the parties while His Holiness was visiting.

Since passports, visas and paraphernalia are on my mind, what travel document did His Holiness² use to enter the USA? I doubt that he has a Chinese passport. Did India give him a travel document? Or are there still post-war UN travel documents still available?

Pope Leo has at least three passports: American, Peruvian and Vatican. Only his Vatican passport carries diplomatic status, a status the United States will not recognize. Whenever Leo enters the US, he has to use his American passport.

Milwaukee-born Golda Meir gave up her American citizenship and passport (I think), held a British Palestinian passport during the mandate and an Israeli passport after 1948.

The previous king of Thailand, Rama IX, was born in Boston in 1928, but never took American nationality. A prime minister of Guyana was previously American. Did any other American, technical or not, ever lead a foreign nation? Besides Eamon de Valera, of course.

William Walker proclaimed a republic in Baja California with himself as president, but it didn’t last. Texas was a republic created by Americans out of Mexico which lasted for ten years, but if you include Sam Houston you’d have to include Jeff Davis too.

Game at 50 Advertising

Andalus Publishing puts out a pithy text entitled Game at 50 (and Beyond): Secret Seduction Tips for the Older Man.

Rupert Murdoch is rumored to have been a reader:

“By August 2023, barely five months after calling off his engagement, the ninety-two-year-old mogul had a new girlfriend.”

-from Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman.

Before the events described above and while still in his 80’s, Murdoch dumped his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, who previously had been married to Mick Jagger.

We can thank the Murdochs for Fox News. The conservative architect of that channel, Roger Ailes, was #metooed in a sexual harassment lawsuit. Predictably, Ailes denied all the charges before other victims came forward with similar claims.³ A month after his departure, he fell at his mansion at Palm Beach, hit his head and died.⁴ The Murdoch organization settled the remaining lawsuits.

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Khe Sanh

With time remaining on my visa running out, I made a border run to the Bao crossing with the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. In Vietnam I am mute and illiterate, but the Lao, Isaan and Thai languages are all close cousins. After crossing the border into Laos I could once again speak, albeit badly.

After returning from Laos, Vietnam border guards wouldn’t let me in because my passport expires in less than six months, even though I will be leaving Vietnam before then. Word to the wise: subtract six months from your passport’s official expiration date to get the real world validity period.

When I was an intelligence officer⁵ I never would have made a rookie mistake like this one, showing up at a land border with a passport that was about to expire. Oh wait, I never was an intelligence officer. Maybe I just looked like one that day.

On the way to the Bao border crossing the bus passed through the town of Khe Sanh. The famous battle of that name took place in 1968. The town overlooks a great valley; both sides determined that it had strategic value and it was only 20 kilometers from the Lao border, a jurisdiction the Americans could not enter while weaponry from North Vietnam roared in.

Today the region is known for its coffee which tells you something about the futility of war.

The immigration officer wore the uniform of the victors; there was no point in complaining. Running through my head were hypothetical scenarios that could occur if I were not freed: the fate of my belongings back in Da Nang; where I would stay in Laos; how I could find assistance, how long it would take to get a new passport.

Shortly the matter was settled and I was permitted to enter the country. Those who are on active duty today are too young for the war. Coming up through the ranks was difficult because the spoils were given to veterans, veterans who once patrolled combat zones but now are aged. In dealing with American passport holders it would be naive to believe that all of the wounds have healed completely.

The Depths

Today I published The Depths to my mailing list, a re-telling of a conversation I once had. The conversation did not take place while on the run from gangsters.

In those waning days of the Canal Zone, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana sitting in New Orleans had jurisdiction over vessel accidents that occurred within the locks of the Panama Canal. Working on those cases, I was introduced to New Orleans and eventually took and passed the bar there.

I was introduced to the story of Abelard and Heloise while an undergraduate. Looking back, I’m not convinced that a story of a passionate, limerent and ultimately destructive love affair was appropriate for undergraduates. Then again, many of these same undergraduates played real-life Dungeons and Dragons in the university’s steam tunnels. Love affairs then and there were deemed DMR’s, for “deep meaningful relationships.”

Just like that of those two long-ago French lovers.

ps I hope to have an “unsubscribe” page up and running soon. (Note: there’s now a link.)

Tet

Whenever I hear this word, I expect it to be followed by the word “offensive.” Today the word is much more likely to be followed by the word “holiday.” It’s Chinese New Year in Vietnam, a nine-day festival where people return to their villages, businesses close and fireworks displays are mandatory.

The Year of the Horse is upon us. During the holidays businesses close without warning as I found out today when I found the popular Nomad Kitchen had closed for the holiday.

I expected Da Nang to be full of French cafés where I could while away the day over coffee, or Ca Phé as it is called here. If there are such places in Da Nang, I haven’t found them yet. I don’t remember finding them in Saigon when I visited a few years ago while on a visa run to Cambodia.

Cambodia

Speaking of Cambodia, Christiane Amanapour hasn’t showed up in Thailand, peace broke out, so my fantasy of sending dispatches from the front remains delusional and unfulfilled. A group of Australians of a certain age announced loudly at lunch that they were canceling their trip to Cambodia “because of the war.”

There is no war, and the casinos on the Vietnam-Cambodia border are open. To find a war, I would suggest Gaza or Kiev.

Da Nang wants to be Vietnam’s “crypto” city. I’m not sure if Vietnam has global crypto aspirations. So far no one has been able to make it work.

Phi Tai Hong

As bad as my Thai is, I can at least get around. Here in Da Nang I’m reduced to pointing. Even though the American influence and presence ended a half century ago, enough people speak English well enough so that I’m not entirely lost.

I take a lot of motorcycle taxis here. When they can’t find me they call me and…we bark at each other. I simply have no idea what they’re saying.

Echoes of Vietnam in the 1970’s: I cannot disassociate Vietnam from my own 1960’s and 70’s.⁶ A college classmate walking through the corridors of now torn-down Lower Flint wearing a lampshade on his head, asking “where are the rice paddies?” People indeed wear such pointed circular bamboo headwear here. Still.

Next to my room, then 3222⁷, I posted a National Geographic map of Southeast Asia on the wall. One of the residents of Woodward, I don’t remember who, celebrated the triumph of the Khmer Rouge.

After a few years of Khmer Rouge governance, even the Communist Party of Vietnam had enough, invaded and threw Pol Pot out for giving communism a bad name. The government Vietnam installed is still going strong, strong enough to squabble with Thailand.

As to Thailand, I can’t go back at the moment–for several reasons. No, none of these have to do with being on the run from gangsters, thankfully. You can only stay so long each year, and it’s not a calendar year, but a rolling year. So my year doesn’t reset until some time in March, 2026.

Vietnam doesn’t seem to be a mail country, unlike Thailand, where I’ve had a PO box for a decade. In Saudi Arabia, mail was traditionally dumped in a pile in Riyadh’s town square (today’s place of execution) and if you saw an envelope addressed to someone you knew you took it and delivered it yourself.⁸ I do have some connections (clout, Chicago; wasta, Saudi Arabia) and I can get back into Thailand by paying $300, but…if I can get the passport in Vietnam, I’d rather save the money.

I hate to penny-pinch, but such is the lot of the unemployed. I thought I’d have a new Saudi contract by now, but that is not the case. I could teach English here–I suppose–or even in Bali. They’re recruiting, or so I’m told.

Part of the problem is that I lack the skills or knowledge to achieve my goals, goals which therefore, by definition, are delusional. For example, I heard a national security podcast where the guest, owner of a recruiting company, was complaining how candidates never list whether they have a clearance, are clearance eligible or even have a passport.

Listening to the podcast, I assumed that he would hire me if I remedied these two minor resumé deficiencies. I sent in my resumé, altering it to include information about my clearance eligibility ⁹and my soon-to-expire passport. He wrote back! Not to offer me the much-wanted position whose offer was but a formality but to answer a question I asked about the Maginot Line.

At some point I need to return to the United States to throw away the contents of my storage locker. I need to do this to make sure its contents don’t end up on Storage Wars.¹⁰

Since no U-Hauls are ever towed by a hearse, it’s best to dispose of your personal effects, not to mention the odd barrel, while you still can.

I have the feeling that if I’m going to go it will be either an accidental death—death by misadventure—or as a victim of crime. Anything else would be…boring.¹¹

There is a special word in the Thai language for a ghost left behind by the spirit of a person who died by a violent crime: phii tai hong. In Vietnam, the ghost population is few, both less specific and less colorful.

Somalia and Me

The ICE surge in Minnesota against the Somalians has affected me. The Democrats, disagreeing with the surge, have left the government without funding, so one government office after another is shutting down or going into shoestring mode. This would include, presumably, State and the Passport Office. My passport renewal application is likely to sit on someone’s desk for now.

A government shutdown, once thought an anomaly, has become a feature of American life, like impeachment. Once upon a time, children learned that only one American president had to endure an impeachment, a century old anomaly, nothing likely ever to happen again.

Now we’ve added Trump (twice) and Clinton: the ball is just starting to roll. Any political squabble can result with a government shutdown. This is to be expected given that the country is broke and politically evenly split.

It’s easy to look at Minnesota and reach the conclusion that the Somalis are out of control and had learned to effectively game the welfare system in their new country. Nothing to do with me—I’m not Somali. I don’t live in Minnesota.

Until a circumstance that has nothing to do with me all of a sudden has very much to do with me.

A Loan Request

I’m sitting on the patio of my hotel eating a banh mi chicken sandwich, minding my own business. I have noticed that as you get older, there is a tendency to unnecessarily insert yourself into the affairs of others. But this time, I was merely watching a Tik-Tok video that warned of “Dark Prophecies” for March 7, 2026, without s;ecifying what they were. Please follow and subscribe and hopefully I’ll get a heads-up before the terrible day.

A white haired Australian who was slurring his words sat down next to me on the bench and started a rant. The first words out of his mouth were that he had run up a bar bill, three million Vietnamese duong, ($120 USD) a substantial sum in these parts. If I would agree to pay, he would pay me back. One of my talents is getting people off script. I asked how he proposed to pay me back. “By telephone,” he said, “but unfortunately I lost my phone.” “So that won’t work,” I said. Turns out, his wallet had gone walkabout as well, so no ATM card.

Then two Vietnamese individuals joined in. One said that he was the bar owner where my new friend had run up a bill. The other was a Vietnamese police officer. I noticed that the policeman’s gun was hanging, ready and clipped to his belt.

It had just started drizzling and the policeman was wearing a new raincoat; his uniform was pressed and he wore a military-style dress cap. He could easily have passed a parade review.

You rarely see policemen in Da Nang. My guess is that this is due to the fact that Vietnam is a communist country with low tolerance for misbehavior.

In fairness, it seems to me that the police here are somewhat lenient. In Thailand my new friend would already be in jail. The Thai police have little patience for misbehaving foreigners. Thai police know not to go on wild goose chases accompanying foreigners in search of funds. By the time a reluctant payor had sobered up, the Thai police would have had the bank transfer forms filled out and if he did not complete them, he could stay in jail until he did. An ad hoc fine would be added to the bill.

The Australian then disappeared into the hotel lobby, where he asked the receptionist to pay his bill and offered to pay her an extra two million duong. Unfortunately, he did not have a plan to obtain the funds.

In the old days, travel writers such as Richard Halliburton (and arguably, L. Ron Hubbard) would journey into the great unknown and bring back jungle tales of man-eating tigers, ferocious cannibals and exotic rituals. But these days, tourist adventures often come down to the consequences attendant to an unpaid bar bill.

I wish I could offer tales of unconnected tribes or breath-robbing cities hidden amidst mountains filled with people who did not know the white man and assumed I was a returned deity. But no.

The Aussie approached me again and said that he owned a bar, he had cash in the bar, and that if I would pay he would take me to his bar where he had the funds. “I’ve got a better idea,” I told him, “take this Vietnamese man to your bar and pay him. You need not involve me in this.” The Vietnamese policeman nodded. One less name to add to his report.

“That’s the thing,” he said, “I don’t want him to know where my bar is.”

“And why is that?”

“It’s a long story,” the Australian said.

Too many long stories for me.

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1. This week Amazon’s Washington Post laid off all of its photographers, closed a bureau in Kiev and made 1/3rd of its reporters redundant. ↩︎

2. Here I am not referring to the American pope in Rome. Leo XIV has both American and Peruvian passports and probably has a Vatican passport as well. Leo never visited Jeffrey’s island, either. ↩︎

3. That is called 404(b) evidence under the Federal Rules of Evidence, for those who are wondering. ↩︎

4. I didn’t know this when I fell the other day. ↩︎

5. I just made this up. However, see Mathews, My Life in the CIA. ↩︎

6. There were at least two South Vietnamese students in the red, new student directory the year I was a first year student. While in Chicago, their country disappeared. Mark Zuckerberg digitized the student directory and made a billion dollars. ↩︎

7. Before the room was “mine” it belonged to an Israeli woman named Tal Tammari. One evening, my roommate tried out his Hebrew with Ms. Tal. He said something which I heard as lasteen hamad. This sent Ms. Tal into fits of laughter. Face full of tears, bent over at the waist laughter. She refused to tell my roommate what was so funny. I had dinner with him in January, 2024 and we discussed this incident. He investigated the phrase and couldn’t figure it out. Maybe someone knows? ↩︎

8. I was a civilian US Navy mail officer in Iraq. In Panama I created a trystero that provided US mail services for 1700 or so people. I initiated a worldwide APO mail survey in 1982, for which I was scolded by the Department of Defense. Mail is a subject dear to my heart. ↩︎

9. My classmate Steve Thompson claimed that his brother had converted to Islam, had joined the Jordanian armed forces and had been assigned to a position in Montreal. He insisted that his brother held the rank of luft. Fast forward, and your correspondent was conversing with a Sudanese intelligence officer about such matters. “The Jordanians have no such rank,” he told me. “Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong,” I said. “No,” he said, and he ran down the names of the ranks of the Jordanian army, in English and in Arabic. Nothing was remotely close. In Steve’s defense, I don’t believe that he simply invented this story. There must have been more to it. So what if he got a few details wrong? ↩︎

10. True story: several years ago in Boynton Beach, a man in his 70’s entered the garage of a house under construction and blew his brains out. That morning he had received a call from two New York cold case squad detectives. A 55 gallon drum had been found by a new homeowner of his recently purchased home in Brooklyn. He opened it to find human remains. A forensic examination revealed that the body had been placed in the drum in the 1950’s. Property records linked the man to the house. The house had been bought, sold and lived in by three different families who never took notice of the drum in the attic. The story was filmed as an episode of one of the NCIS shows. The suicide was reported in the Boynton Beach newspaper. ↩︎

11. Author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton was electrocuted in a Bangkok hotel; David Carradine was found hanging from a pole in his closet at another Thai hostelry. ↩︎