Spending heaps of time burning a bootable OSX Cd so I can repair permissions on my boot volume, “New Brain”, which will allow me to continue editing Susan Hero in trouble free fashion.

Next scene to cut: Morell in his lair.

For all the advances the UNIX kernel offers on the platform, it’s still a pain in the ass to debug and tweak things, especially here where 1) the humidity is higher and can degrade equipment including HARD DRIVES and 2) we pay for the Internet here by the Megabyte.

Thus, I surf the web with images turned OFF, and I create lists of things to down load, ala apps and utilities, which I’ll download at an Internet cafe.

Anyway, want to continue the tale where I left off, where were we, ah yes, on our way to the hospital.

So we whipped aroung the traffic circle by the grotesque Lions — due to the French influence here in INDOCHINA, there are traffic circles everywhere, even in Rattanakiri dirt roads which lead to remote hilltribe villages you might find a grubby, overgrown traffic circle with rain and sun bleached stautes of children dancing in a circle, cherubs examining their stubby, sausage like penises, etc.

I continued to do CPR and respiration, but I couldn’t really get the right leverage, me leaning over the back seat to encounter, time and time again, the strange, blank, blue face of the stranger on the back seat.

Believe it or not, one of my impulses, besides revulsion and an instinctive fear/dread, probably due to my own early childhood encounters with death, via my Dad’s death when I was just a kid (and of course these thoughts are lacing themselves through my mind as I too am a stranger in this land, trying now to help another dying stranger), was an impulse to LAUGH. To CRACK UP laughing!

After all, it was a riducluous sight in a way, and if circumstances had been different I would have laughed: a blue faced person in the back seat staring at me, lying on his back with his mouth hanging open.

Eyes open, like a fish on ice in Chinatown, just staring at you, it is such a strange sight that part of you will want to LAUGH.

And note too, that that guy was still loose and supple, hadn’t hardened into a corpse, a stiff. Thus, he couldn’t have been lying there long before his wife found him, and maybe he was still aware, although he wasn’t breathinig…

…but maybe he was truly dead. Maybe he was in the Bard’s undiscovered country already, and I was here, through some twist of fate and choice, trying in vain to breathe life back into him.

And where was his dear wife who had found him so horribly?

And his nephews and Cambodian nieces?

I pinched his nose and breathed again:

“Whhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhggggghhh”

The air rasberried vacantly out of him, past the loose tounge and flabby cheeks, into the shared air of the Toyota.

The other guy who had helped put him in the car just sort of hung there, in a dazed curious suspension whatching me, what I was doing.

And what WAS I doing?

One and Two and Three and Four and —

Breathe–

“Whhhhhaaggggagggahhhhhhhh…”

Finally we made it to the hospital, and in a blur we hopped out of the car. Someone called a doctor, and an old grey haired guy slowly wheeled a gurney over to us so we could place the blue man on it.

“Here get his arm. His head, watch his head.”

His head was still hanging loosely, I reached, making a diving catch as if I were still a freshman in high school on the football team. I caught his head and kept it from snapping back in the transfer from car to gurney.

The old doddering, kindly looking doctor (he certainly looked well meaning, if not excalty qualified) started to roll the gurney haphazardly towards the intake corridor of the hospital.

“His head, his head–“

The blue man’s head was lolling off the edge of the gurney. I motioned to the doctor to pull on his legs, to slide him down squarely onto the gurney.

After a few more gestures, he understood. We pushed and pulled, positioned the ever-blueing guy onto the cart and we rushed him towards the intake corridor.

Already a crowd has gathered. I know not from where they came, it’s as if they were already idling there anyway, prepositioned from the nearby forest.

A nurse was counting crumpled bills on a stretcher–

Various naked torsoed men, sun baked and smoking cigarettes, materialized slowly from the dusk, attracted by the body on the cart. They ruefully observed as we brought him in.

And the old doctor disappeared, leaving me to continue alone!

The crowd circled round to watch. The blue man was nearly purple now; I could discern a differnt shade of blue where he’d perviously worn a T shirt.

He was not a redneck–he was a BLUENECK.

His eyes and mouth were still agape, and everyone was waiting…