-^-for posterity-^-

one canadian in my class is named ben. he is an interesting fellow and i think i described him earlier. well, he asked me if i wanted to play basketball with him this afternoon and i happily said yes. of course i would like to play.

i went to the courts which were located in the middle of a water park. they were small and had a volleyball game going on them. the water park was made up of large slides held together by ghastly concrete. it all looked like it was designed by lenin.

our team was quite a rag tag bunch. there were three canadians who were all teaching at schools around the city. they were all in their mid 20’s and spoke perfect canadian. eh? they weren’t very aggressive and smiled a lot. there was also one viet kieu. (pronounced viet q) his family left vietnam after ’75 and he was raised in california. he speaks both vietnamese and english and plays basketball ferociously. then there was me and i haven’t played basketball for months.

we played games against teams of younger vietnamese. they knew what they were doing. their movements were graceful and they played to win. they had beaten all of us foreigners almost thirty odd years ago and they weren’t about to loose now.

i was told to guard a young man with long hair and a head band. he was missing a few teeth and the ones that remained were oddly colored. he was very thin and i towered above him. the court was cleared by our viet kieu friend. he yelled something at the people that were playing at the other end. we said that it was ok, they could stay and we could play down here. he retorted, “oh, they don’t mind.” absurd.

the game began and the canadians and i lumbered around the court and scored on many awkward layups. the vietnamese would deftly move around us. we would barrel through the lane and they would toss up floating jump shots from all angles. we got every rebound and they got every foul.

i was very interested with how much western culture there was in the crowd that had gathered to watch the north americans play. there were many nfl jerseys. many nba jerseys. many fubu hats. they all knew english curse words and they all knew american basketball players. i always grew up in a culture that decided what cool was. i never had to go to another culture to find out what was cool. for better or worse, these young boys all were products of asian mtv and loved it.

well, the north american’s lost the game as they did almost 30 years ago. the determination and the deftness of our competition brought about our demise. nothing too interesting, only fitting.

oh, on another note: i was watching a french news program and they were covering an amreican anti-war protest in washington dc. they interviewed a lady in a counter protest and she said this, “you can’t have dialogue with killers. you just have to kill them.” now, no matter what you think about the pending war, you must concede that a statement like that should cause something to short-circuit in the brain. seriously. do you think that people simply forget to carry out statements to their logical conclusions? do you mean to tell me that the lady that said this didn’t actually realize that if you would kill a killer, you become a killer? even if can justify the killing in your own head, you still are a killer.