Verse

It’s hard to maintain a blog about just one thing, especially such a pathetic thing. Getting the daily sniveling emails helps, I suppose. He’s been attempting poetry:

Temple drums

sacred tree flower’s scent

Peace found and lost

and

Mountain sky

Joy betrayed

Peace no more

and

Joy dispursed in lies

Hope eroded by

assumption;

Why live.

— all from June 1. Grammatical and spelling errors all his, of course.

 

I’m not sure how to make it all hang together. I’m only doing this in hopes that if someone like me–someone in Cambodia or Myanmar, maybe–meets Greg and starts to be swept away, that he or she will find this and think twice.

Perhaps you’ve met this guy and he’s telling you about his military record. I’ve never found it. Or his PhD or his multiple degrees. Look them up. They don’t exist. Perhaps he’s confiding in you that he’s working for the Australian embassy in whatever country he’s in. By all means, call them. He isn’t.

It’s easy to let yourself believe, however. Records don’t exist because of his super-secret missions. Same with the embassy–he’s operating in the grey area where everything happens, doncha know, but where nothing is discussed. He’s not a Western man, baby–that’s why his conversations are so self-aggrandizing; that’s why he enumerates his degrees every chance he gets, brags about his fighting skills (though never actually demonstrates them), whines about his sad family life, his brittle persona, his devastating empathy. But of course, it’s not that he’s your special diamond in the rough. He just wants to look at himself in your eyes as he talks about himself. It’s a sick little masturbation, and you’ve become part of it.

If you have a year of your life to throw away, or money to invest in a sham company like Teknomadic, the one he half built and abandoned in Luang Prabang, Laos, by all means, listen. If you don’t, just take a bit of a closer look. He’s selling you a world built on his word, and his word is worthless.