Liquid Radio Carbonics: Hydro-Mechanical Reactivity and the Science of Betrayal

Mind control, as a modern technique, began quite accidentally with the discovery that stereo-transfer waves could create irregularities rendered for utilization in high frequency, with the circuitry of liquids serving as both the conduit and the pitch. Louis Pasteur was the first to work it out successfully using ordinary milk. Then they started with the children’s juice boxes. Equipped with today’s precision satellites and moisture-recognition software, they can now beam the signals directly and inexpensively onto the wet fillings in people's teeth, and from there the isotopes electrolyze their way into the bloodstream, eventually moving on into the neural pathways. Make no mistake about it...they are smart, they are determined, and they are out to make slaves of us all. It starts off with the "organic effervescence" and the "free ranges", and it ends up with everybody caged or in cubicles. It’s not just chicken broth, per se, and it’s not the pharmaceutical companies either. They put it in the juice! It’s been in the juice all along, for decades, and it’s not communists or jihadis or the military. It’s not the Chinese. Masonically trained technocrats, with their chemists and engineers in pocket, have long pervaded our universities, and now they’ve infiltrated entire beverage industries as well – quietly, methodically, irresistibly peddling their elixirs of controlled death. They concoct these so-called refreshments in the same laboratories and employing the same formulae as have been designed to further the global war on terrorism, a circumstance of supreme irony and ultimate treachery, bottling our basest fears and using our noblest instincts as a marketing tool. Poison-mongers, all of them, ruthless, they foist on us their fortified slurpees and their energy-burst smoothies, enforcing their vile mandate with Rosicrucian muscle (so as not to get their “hands dirty”). They’re in the orchards, they’re in the carbonization plants, they’re everywhere; the streams of commerce have been infected, and our sodas have never been less safe. And if they should make it into the local water supplies, well then the show’s pretty much over because people, given adequate levels of dehydration, will invariably behave like sheep bound for slaughter. The enemy is an army of technicians and vending machine resupplymen, shrouded in secrecy and driven by hubris, the cowardice of its tactics matched only by the ambition of its strategy. Their weapon is our unquenched thirst, their battle cry proclaims a sly toast to our health. Drink up and be merry, we are told, for tomorrow we may die. But the witches’ hour, black midnight, advances swiftly, as does their darkest brew, and the morrow has all but arrived.

What Haiku Done For Me Lately?

This haiku I write,
It's my most recent poem.
It's not very good.

Old Vietnamese People

In Vietnam and in Vietnamese communities elsewhere, except in very formal or official contexts, when speaking of age one states a person’s age as the number of years since her birth plus one. The Vietnamese apparently consider a person’s gestation period as a part of that person’s life. (I cannot help but assume that such a perspective impacts Vietnamese opinions when it comes to the debate surrounding abortion.) Of course, the Vietnamese are aware that the typical pregnancy lasts only nine months, and so I presume that it is for the sake of convenience alone that when calculating age they add a full year to account for time spent in the womb. The logic of this way of speaking, even if born of a desire for arithmetic simplicity, makes it entirely possible for an individual to exist well before her parents have ever even met each other. This is especially true in the case of preemies. The potential for such a scenario, it seems to me, greatly undermines the significance of ancestors.

“Deathdays” are, perhaps, Vietnamese culture’s way of counterbalancing Vietnamese parents’ lack of importance. Vietnamese people have traditionally treated birthdays with little or no fanfare and have, instead, celebrated deathdays – that is, the anniversaries of the day when a beloved ancestor passed away. Family, friends, and neighbors all gather at the household where the dead honoree used to live, and they have a big party. Unlike a birthday party, however, no gifts are given. A place for the dead person is set at the table, though, and a bowl of food is served for the dead person’s ghost. Someone, usually the household’s matriarch, is assigned the job of emptying the dead person’s bowl of food when no one is looking. Then everyone pretends that the ghost came and ate dinner.