Sound counsel has no expiry date

No, this ain't a shameless recycle, I got a point here.

Yeah, so for a while back 11 or so years ago, I had like a monthly column on this site that was run by these foreigner freelance journos and stringers and shit, sort of an Inkernetsk clearing house where all these cats who wrote in Taiwan for everyone else could throw up their own shit.
Needless to say, their standards were, to put it mildly, relaxed, as evidenced by the part I just wrote about me having a monthly column on there.
These dudes are still around and are actually sort of semi-public figures, in addition to being really excellent fellas, so we'll maintain our standard No Outs policy. If you know them, then you'll know of whom I speak.

Anyways, the events of the last few days here kind of made me think about how, you know, you might think you got the whole thing sorted, as I was mentioning to the Wee Irish yesterday. And then, you know, out of nowhere, well.

So I wrote this in like 2000 or 2001 or some fucking thing, but it kind of expresses a lot of my thoughts over the last few days.

Except that now, unlike then, I'm not so consumed (apparently) with what a clever sumbitch I appear to be.
Jeez, save yourself a whole buttload of embarrassment and burn everything you wrote more than 6 months ago, for jumping out loud.
Anyways, it goes like this, pretty much as it appeared at the time.

And yeah, it was about 5 nicknames ago or so.
And keep your thoughts about the picture to yourself, trust me, I've heard them before.

The Boomzilla Mojo
by Snake

You Feel Lucky, Punk?

I'm sitting at the light, rainy morning rush hour, right? And I start to get that creepy feeling, you know, where you just know that the cat on the next bike is giving you the old once-over. Being in a fairly confrontational frame of mind on the given day, I elect to not ignore it, so I turn and look. Sure enough, it's an old coot on a paint-spattered Sanny 125. Dude's got on the standard propane driver's navy blue-with-white-reflector-strip two piece rainsuit, rubber flipflops, and yellow hardhat with the red/white/blue stripe, you know, the one no foreigners except the old burnouts in Tainan ever wear. Buddy's doing the long slow tilt down, then up, just eyeballing the fuck right out of me. Bad enough already, but of course, he's passed the mandatory 35-year-old point where he gets queered out enough by eye contact to cut it the fuck out. Not our pal, fuck no, the old bastard has the corn to keep up the action even after going pupilo a pupilo. So, like I usually do in these situations, I give as good as I'm getting. Jimmy looks down, I look up. Jimmy looks up, I look down. Now, so far, me and Staring Lin are shaping up for a right fucking Mexican standoff here, and God only knows to whence this whole ugly mess could escalate. Fortunately for both of us and the free world, the light starts to change. And just as the other yellow is getting old, Gramps looks me square in the Oakleys and says:

"Gutta lackeyt ooyoo..."

Light changes, I boot out, and I'm like two or three blocks on before I figure out what the fuck he's on about. Of course, by that time, he's way off behind, disappeared like maybe he was never really there in the first place. Like some angel or messenger from The Other Side or some fucking thing. Way too late for me to say thanks.

And so I'm thinking, like, now what the fuck was that? And what the fuck was he talking about, anyways? Some kind of fucked up goodwill missive from the Tourist Bureau, or his best shot at Have a Nice Day?

Or maybe he knew something I didn't?

For the guys back in Vietnam, troops, hangers on, and correspondents alike, for them the standard departure wasn't marked by a Goodbye or a Seeya or even a take Care, when those poor sons of bitches took their leave, the only thing the smart ones ever said was Good Luck.

Good luck.

Goddamn right, pal, and thanks for thinking of me.

Because, as I was telling Spunkmeyer just the other night, we forget, you know. It's gotten too gentle here, things are all legal and shit now, everyone's all visa-ed up, and it's easy to get sucked into thinking you're at home or something stupid. Just when you get your sick white ass all settled in and your shit is sorted and all, why that's when something comes down the Boomzilla Mojo about some sorry fuck who got his fucking hash settled, but good.

And you always ask, or I do anyway, is this bad luck? Was our bud really just Walking Down The Street Minding His Own Business?

Or did some little teeny weeny, seemingly meaningless fuckup or poor judgment call fly out and circulate in the Karmic fucking ether, taking its own sweet time before circling around, days or even months later, to scream back to earth in a Satanically steep descent, picking up speed and evil ions along the way while speeding at Terminal Velocity, straight back at the unsuspecting ruboid who got lulled into thinking he or she was back in fucking Pencil Thin, Iowa?

The Bad News is, don't believe the CETRA press releases, kids. It's still the Third World. Most of the time, anyway. Usually when it stands the best chance of fucking you up royally.

Occasionally we used to find a new clear route that cut minutes off our driving time, one of those semi-industrial strips that run along the tracks or something, with no traffic at all most times of the day and almost no inroads, where you can just fucking open up and tool your bad ass along without worrying about stunted fuckboys with Henna hair and bad teeth or dopey fucking secretaries who never really got the hang of that scooter driving thing. Upon describing the newly discovered route, descriptions would invariably end with something like "...and you can do like a hun, and all you have to worry about is a fucking cartoon anvil falling out of the sky and squishing you..."

The problem here is, it's sometimes easy to forget that we live in a place where the incidence of actual cartoon anvils falling out of the sky and squishing you is only slightly lower than the chance of rain.

As the old collection agency Final Warning letters used to say, "Conduct Yourself Accordingly...".

Good Lucky To You, indeed.

NEVER get off the boat.

God Damn Right.

Unless you're going all the way...

Raj