I could do a lot of things if I had the money.

I can hear ciadas buzzing in the warm dusk. The water pump whirs every 10 seconds. The random horn blurts in the oncoming darkness. Hanoi trundels by in a typical steadfast, stubborn pace, anything but precise but vital and alive. It makes me think about what Hanoi sounded like 20 years ago: the utter absense of horns, of machine sound– just the whir of bicycle wheels, the hawking of hawkers, the night murmers, the arguments won and lost. But the Vietnamese I have found are not a quiet people. They yell and scream, laugh and shout with the best of them, and at all the right times. Why walk over to someone when you can scream at them across the road? Why do something quietly when life demands your presence if not in body than in sound? Whether it be pounding something out in a bizarre, arcane fashion at 6 am in an attempt at fixing your own electrical wiring; or cranking your television to a sound-distorting level so you can hear it’s shadow down the street while you are drinking green tea and gossiping with friends. I don’t know. Maybe the noise is something more… an assuagement, a familiar, familial part of life here– you make noise so people know you’re there, so you’re not alone.

These nostalgias for times past, as though the past has a validity not found in our present age. It’s neither more or less real ultimately. I think people, including myself at times, assume more pastoral, less developed societies are invariably more authentic or real than the cellphone-ridden, mtv watching, American Idol obssessed, facebook-blogging, gas guzzling SUV driving cultures we come from, and when we find out that places like India, Vietnam, Kenya want all that too, it becomes a disappointment, as though the squalor, the human misery, the filth and disease are a product of authenticity. Isn’t what so many of these post-modern philosophers (stemming all the way back from Kant) are so interested in, this search for authenticity? This search for the real that is lacking from our lives to a point that we have become pathalogical, cut off from each other and ourselves. And of course this REAL cannot be found where there is such a bold and fundamental lack of authenticity in our western culture, right? How can one find oneself in the thick morass of this media over-driven, commodity-based society where we’re all screaming for SOME HONEST TO GOD REAL AND TRUE HUMAN CONNECTION! We’re all gasping for a little fresh breath of the REAL… So what if that fresh breath comes with the biting cack and cough of petrol exhaust, and the stink of human feces mixing in the river that runs languidly outside our traveler’s hostel (festooned with satelite dishes, awash in hash and Bob Marley)? Because you’ve found a real society, finally. A place you can be you. And you can only be yourself somewhere else, a somewhere else which can only be found where the people can’t get penicilin or condoms or antiseptic and indoor plumbing is a Xanadu-like fantasy, a place where people wear funny hats and think quaint things that are SO DIFFERENT than our stodgy one dimenisonal dogmas and faiths. In fact, you can dress up like a native for a while on your vacation from yourself. You can adopt a few of their customs even, but not the nasty ones where you might have kill an animal or beat your wife into submission, but the cute ones, the dot on the forehead or the sarong while you bathe. Yeah, those! It’s funny, you can actually feel more and live more boldly here, shucking the previous stodgy YOU like a moldy corn husk! Behold the world is yours, and you could just get to it if these fucking kids would just stop asking for your money. And wait, did I just see a monk with a cellphone? And do they have the internet here? They do?! JESUS! And is that a western style hospital over there? God, it’s gotten so touristy lately. I can’t even find a homestay without an internet connection! Why can’t I just be free to be me?! Where has the real gotten to?

The fans buzz beside me. I hear some karaoke in the background, a warble, the atonal pinch of Vietnamese folk song. I’m alive. I’m real. I’m here. I’m digging my ipod in the haze of motorbike exhaust. But I’m not alone. Hanoi still flows on before me. Outward and above, alive as the cicadas that burst in their shells, as though in constant renewal. Rebirth.