Chapter 1
I don’t exactly know when I stopped believing in anything – and I don’t quite remember what it was that I believed in – but I do know when I started wanting to get up in the morning again: during the pandemic. Funny that.
It was a time when many people stopped believing in the world and began either opening their eyes to more fantastical lies or discovering that certain things were just never true in the first place. I wasn’t having much of a ‘big awakening’, aside from something was about to change my life; that was respect for my fellow humans.
The pandemic – for those of us who made the decision to stay in the socialist republic of Vietnam – was a glorious time. A glorious time! That’s crazy. Mad Frankie Fraser said something similar in his autobiography. He described The Second World War as a glorious time, but for villainy. Just seemed like a funny thing to say, but, anyway, it was kind of the same way for me. Some unlucky and dumb schlubs decided to stay put, wherever they were, and not take a leap of faith.
I was in Thailand. A land where I thought I’d be spending the majority of my days for the rest of my life, however when I realised that the land of Vietnam was not going to maintain strict lockdowns and was still open, I knew there was only a very short window to escape the ever-increasing shit-show of Thai lockdowns. I took the risk. It paid off. Happy days. I found myself holed up in the city of Da Nang; the only thing I knew about Da Nang was it was the place in Full Metal Jacket where the ‘me so horny’ lady was. A bit of ‘love you long time’ wouldn’t be so bad? It doesn’t really matter what Da Nang was like when I first got there – it’s what it turned into that actually matters; a place and time where my eyes were opened and my life changed (for the better?). Nothing happened which made me happier or more enlightened, nothing like that, but I did eventually witness things I couldn’t quite comprehend.
During the pandemic, Da Nang remained quite free for quite a long time (until it wasn’t). The big draconian lockdown didn’t come into play for well over a year. Almost a full year of entertaining bliss. The expat community in Da Nang was fairly small – and rapidly grew smaller as the as the pandemic progressed – and made up of ragtag, all-sorts. Ones who might be labelled with popular terms like ‘hippies’, ‘woke’, ‘far-right’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘populists’, ‘socialists’, ‘yoga chicks’, ‘digital nomads’, ‘tech bros’, ‘backpackers’ (who’d forgotten to keep backpacking), oh, and quite a few fucking drug addicts. One uniting trait about the expat community of Da Nang was this: not a single person had a brain that hadn’t been, or wouldn’t be, fried by the consumption of too much online content.
There were only a few choice spots to hang out in the expat area of Da Nang. It was at those choice spots you would find the usual people, doing the usual shit, every single day. Sometimes there’d be new faces, probably because you hadn’t seen them before, or, sometimes, new faces would be able to come into town (but that slowly dried out), and sometimes there were faces that would disappear, and sometimes there were faces that changed faces. All faces. All I could see were faces, that’s what became important to me. New faces meant new ways to make money.
I tried making ethical money for years. Before that, I’d been making unethical money, and once I got into the ethical money game, soon I worked out there was nothing ethical about making money. If you wanted to make money quick and easy, first thing you needed to understand: all the great products and ideas have been done to death. The only thing left was to create new problems for people and extract money from them. It was pointless providing solutions to problems that made sense; that was a losing game. Because, in the end, nobody really wanted to believe in anything that actually made sense. Logic was just impossible to force upon people. This was my biggest revelation in life. Most people wanted to believe whatever the hell they liked, regardless of whether it was bonkers or not. People like their lives to simple like that. There were people out there making incredible amounts of money from selling people ideas that were preposterous, and I figured I’d do the same fucking thing. This wasn’t an overnight revelation. I’d been noticing things for a couple of years, but once I’d arrived in Da Nang, and my other online business had slowly started to deteriorate, it clicked hard for me and I decided, “fuck it, this was the life for me!”
Too many times I’d be sat talking to people who just regurgitate the latest thing they probably read online – as if it was some idea that definitely came from their own mind. What they would say with absolute assurance and confidence were bonkers and made little sense: the pandemic was actually just a distraction from the Epstein list (at the time, quite a wild conspiracy theory); a Pot Noodle (a very popular instant noodle product in the UK) which contained bacon flavouring was white supremacy; the idea that someone could be a heterosexual man (who identifies as a woman) and in love with another man is a heterosexual; the idea that we must protect all women’s rights because women are in danger yet if a man who is six-foot-tall – and as hench as you fucking like – wanted to identify as a woman and then punch another woman in the face, that was fine (it was fair); the Jews had convinced everyone on earth that it was round when, in actuality, it was flat; you should inject peptides into your penis and that will save you from cancer; you didn’t even need to use sunscreen, you could just eat 400 grams of cacao nibs a day and that would keep everything okay with your skin; the aliens didn’t build the pyramids, it was mutant clones that built the pyramids under the instructions of aliens; there were strange bright-white-skinned men who lived beneath the arctic; there were shape-shifting lizards that operated international banks; there were pathogen mites injected in your skin with experimental vaccines; there were minute robots that have been put into your bloodstream that would be activated by 5g towers (if you sneeze too many times that was a definite sign of 5g poisoning); if you coughed and said excuse me that was a definite sign of being a Nazi; the first monkey in space wasn’t really a monkey (it was a midget dressed as a monkey); the Vietnam wars started because the Jews were bored, and the giant apes that American G.I.’s saw in the hills of Monkey Mountain were definitely real apes (and not Viet Cong’s in costume – that was a Mossad psyop). This daily tirade of insanity was my awakening. These clowns have money and believe in nothing. Their money was better off in my pocket (I forget who said that first, but I’m claiming it).
A lesser man would go insane from having to listen to this drivel on a daily basis. No-one could have a normal conversation about anything during this time – or since for that matter. You couldn’t simply discuss the weather. You couldn’t simply discuss if a certain coffee was okay. You couldn’t simply discuss going to a country and having a great time without someone telling you that deep, dark overlords were in charge of that country. It didn’t matter if they were left-wing, right-wing, somewhere-between-wings, somewhere upside-down – everyone was fucking bonkers. I created a mantra in mind that kept me sane and very happy, people were money-extraction machines.
For the longest time I’d wander Thai streets full of girly bars and have every woman shouting at me, “sexy man, where you go?.” I knew very well that they didn’t see a sexy human-being; all they saw was this sort of plodding ATM-humanoid machine that could spit out money into their small hands. Whether the amount of money that I had to spend was accurate in their minds didn’t matter; I soon reverse engineered that idea and applied it to everybody I ever spoke to in Da Nang. All people were a simple, skin-coated machine that prints money, and the only way to get hold of the pin code is to mirror the bullshit coming out of their mouths. Life is beautiful, but life is also depressing. I’d loved to have cured cancer or invented a time-machine; alas I am yet another man that raped humanity.
During this time in Vietnam I did miss Thailand, mostly because of the filthy sex. Don’t get me wrong, there was filthy sex to be had in Da Nang, unfortunately that filthy sex was to be had with filthy westerners. Dirty, smelly people. People who didn’t even shave their armpits. Flabby pasty-faced women (despite them living in a in a part of the world which often hit 35 degrees on a daily basis). People who dressed like it was laundry day every single fucking day of the week. People who would unironically say Get Out was a good movie. They were easy to fuck because, like most westerners, all you had to was dangle drugs in their face to make them susceptible to sexy-time. I was never one to partake in banging cocaine-whores when I was a kid, or even in my prime drug dealing days; I found them to be fucking disgusting, plus what’s the use in a cocaine-whore? They never want to spend money. All they do is siphon cocaine from you with, sometimes, the option of sucking your penis. That wasn’t for me.
Cocaine-whores are the lifeblood of many a man’s sex life. Cocaine whores will give you anything you need – except the cocaine-whores that won’t put out, but, you know, it’s a woman’s prerogative just to siphon cocaine and not put out. Cocaine-whores have been around for millennia, there were just different drugs involved before I suppose. There were probably some weird roots or psychedelic berries or some of that balmy powder that they blow into each other’s noses in the amazon rainforest so they could fly around and talk to wood nymphs. Many different narcotics to siphon sex out of people. But I wasn’t interested in people like that. If sex was going to be transactional I don’t want to be dangling drugs in their face, I want to give them money; there’s nothing worse than having sex with someone who’s off their face on drugs. Sweaty jaws crunching, eyes bulging, yapping shit, and, as we know, people tend to yap too much shit as it is, so giving them drugs that make them yap even more shit 10 times faster is a fucking terrible idea.
The rank pussy was everywhere. There was some good pussy though: yoga pussy. But they didn’t really come out as much, only on occasions. I would happily give my soul – not because I wanted to fall in love and get married – to have a regular good fuck from a yoga girl until the day I die. I knew most of them probably believed in absolute bullshit but what did it matter? I was never going to have a logical conversation with any person ever again. The last person I could have a logical conversation with was dead so what was the point?
I didn’t want to make more friends, I wanted to make more connections to make more money. I didn’t want to have a soul mate, I wanted to have someone who didn’t talk that much and liked it doggie style with a few nasty extras. One such person most likely existed and I was going to find them. After all, what else was pleasurable in life?
