The TV screams with bombs and sirens. We all watch telenovelas everywhere. I remember one with a romantic clone, I saw it in Brazil, the actors were beautiful and soothing. War is common and I expect it in my dream. On a dirt road somewhere, clutching a big green bottle stuffed with a cobra, trailing cobwebs like a ghost dress. All the important stuff happens on dirt roads.

I generally don’t remember my dreams even though I try to hang onto those little boogers as best I can. Sometimes I write them down. But the descriptions fail to jog much on the rewind and it usually slips before I can scribble fast or clear enough, leaving me with scraps of half nothing-sure and fragmented love letters of my subconscious to me in bad poetic. Then I lose the scraps. There’s a file somewhere, the file of lost bits of dreams hard trying to keep hold of but nonsense. And I’ve lost that file.

So maybe this is the new file. Or at least for today it is.

The first time I heard of snake wine was when my good buddy, Trags, got back from a trip to Vietnam. He’d been on a semester at sea and decided to take a little ramble around after he’d finished. He told me that after the first few sips you start shaking. Then you keep drinking to stop the shake. And then you see God. How far down in the bottle do you see God? Depends on how big you are.

The ever-informative Wikipedia gives us a nice take on this lovely little tonic:

There are two varieties of snake wine. A large venomous snake can be placed into a glass jar of rice wine (sake), often with many smaller snakes, turtles, insects, or birds, and left to ferment for many months. Snake blood wine is prepared by slicing a snake along its belly and draining its blood into a mixing vat with rice wine or grain alcohol. The gall bladder can be emptied into glasses with wine and the snake meat, liver, and skin can be prepared to accompany the drink.

I’ve wanted to go to Vietnam for ten or so years now. It has nothing to do with snake wine, I assure you. I guess it has to do with lessons not learned and trying to see things through the eyes of my Father, ghosts, heroes dead-lost on the decisions of angry old men, then trying to understand why our leaders are failing us, why we are buying into it this time and allowing freedom to die. experience exposure enrich grow – Hot blood bending in a vat of wine and guts. And often times, a causality, a system of creation that we cannot see in the event of history happening – evolution or undoing and who cares?

Problems have arisen due to the popularity of the drink with the Vietnamese. As the main culler of rats, snakes are now highly regarded. Hanoi has seen an endemic rise in the number of rats roaming the streets without their main predator there to bother them. As a result the government stopped the sale of snakes and cats to China and put a trade ban on many restaurants that serve the wine. (more)

I’d like to assemble a mass trip to Vietnam. We could trade them crates of Budweiser for bottles of snake wine. It would be a healing campaign. There’s a real future in healing campaigns. A franchise of good merit, charm, rebuilding, revising and expansion not unlike the Peace Corps. Paving streets of gold. We’ll be doing it all over the place for the rest of our lives.

I want to go and heal and sip some snake wine. But my current line of duty might preclude me from a Vietnam getaway.

Tomorrow, I’m going to go find some snake wine on the streets of New York. They say you can find anything here. There’s truth in snake venom. Want a taste?