PHNOM PENH AT FIVE, AND THE ABSENCE OF SHATNER

Pop quiz:

I mention Baghdad -- what images pop into your head?

Or how about Moscow?

Hanoi?

Philadelphia?

Phnom Penh?

We all have mental images imprinted into our psyche from who-knows-where 0f places that we've never been to, cities that we've never stepped foot in, oceans that we've never crossed. A lifetime of t.v. and movies and even books have allowed us to create our own, personal storehouse of locations within our mind that probably bear little, if any, comparison to the actual locales that exist independent of our own perceptions of them.

Take Phnom Penh.

More specifically, Phnom Penh at five a.m. on a typical Monday morning. (Then again, is any morning really typical?)

If you had asked me two, three years ago to close my eyes and slow down my breathing and get all contemplative and stuff and imagine Phnom Penh at sunrise, I would have imagined, well, not much at all. Dark streets, probably. Mounds of garbage lining the roads, definitely. Run-down, decrepit buildings having their grimy exteriors illuminated even more by the gradually fading moonlight.

Certainly the streets would have been empty in my vision. Who would possibly be out at five a.m. in a city as a dangerous and notorious as Phnom Penh?

Ah, but I have learned certain lessons in the past few years, and most of them have to do with preconceptions. They have do with judging before experiencing. And if you have not experienced Phnom Penh at five a.m., especially down by the river, then you have missed something fascinating.

What's Phnom Penh like on the banks of the river at five a.m. on a Monday morning?

Crowded, is what it's like. Dozens, hundreds of people doing their exercises, walking in place, walking around, running around, dancing in groups to music pumping from ghetto blasters. You will see couples and families and damged people with twisted legs holding out scales for you to step on, calling out the price, five hundred riel only sir, sir, a good price, mister, a cheap price, just for you my, my friend. You will see the darkness give way to an orange and gentle sun that will soon, very soon, become merciless.

At five a.m., though, it is gentle, this sun, and the air is cool, and the streets, which are emptied out after midnight, which no one in their right mind would wander around after twelve a.m., are full. The streets have been reclaimed from the night and given over to the day. No more fear. No more locked doors. No more sideways glances to the motodopes over your shoulders.

At this time, you see, these streets pulse.

That's Phnom Penh, by the river, at five a.m.

Moscow at five a.m.?

Don't know.

Never been there.

************************************************************************************

There was a recent program by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (or the CBC, kind of like Japan's NHK or America's PBS, only without those annoying pledge breaks every twenty minutes) that sought to establish once and for all (or at least for this year) who the 'greatest Canadian' was. I thought it was kind of a silly idea, and still think it's kind of a silly idea, but the results are interesting. Scary, but interesting.

The winner was Tommy Douglas, the creater of universal health care in Canada. Which shows you how important this issue is for Canada. (He is also, incidentally, Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather, Kiefer being the daughter of actress Shirley Douglas, but I don't think that's why Tommy was voted number one. I mean, Canadians like Kiefer Sutherland, don't get me wrong, very cool in Young Guns II and Flatliners, especially, but we don't like him enough to vote his grandfather the greatest Canadian ever.) Given that David Suzuki, the environmentalist writer/t.v. host was also on the list, it's a telling sign of how much weight we give social, humanitarian issues, us Canadians. We do have standards, you know.

At least, I think we do.

But check out the rest of the list.

Because Don Cherry also placed in the top ten. Cherry is a hockey commentator who is always putting his foot in his mouth and insulting Quebeckers or Europeans and he is highly entertain-ing and watchable. A lot of people don't like him. I do. Apparently, a lot of other Canadians do, too.

Is he one of the greatest Canadians ever?

Hmmm...

Even more disturbing, he placed ahead of Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, John A.Macdonald, our first prime minister, and Alexander Graham Bell, who only invented the, oh, what do you call it, um, oh yeah, the freakin' telephone.

I mean, come ooooonnnnnnn...

It's kind of like Rush Limbaugh placing ahead of Michael Jordan, George Washington and, I dunno, Benjamin Franklin. (Didn't he invent electricity? Or discover it or something?)

A hockey commentator placing ahead of a hockey player? Gretzky is god in Canada. And John A.Macdonald is on our money. (Then again, so are kids playing hockey, true, but they're playing it, at least -- not commenting on it. And they're not wearing outlandish ties. And this is on the back of the five dollar bill, the blue one, and I saw Mike Myers when Late Night with Conan O'Brien came to Toronto, and he called it a 'Spock five', and I didn't know what he meant, but then he took out a magic marker and drew some black hair and pointed ears on a giant blow-up version of John A.Macdonald on the five dollar bill, and, lo and behold, he was right -- he does look like Star Trek's Mr.Spock. But I digress...) And did I mention that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? (Although Joe Mantegna as Joey Zaza in The Godfather III says that the Italian, Marconi, invented it before Bell -- but what do mafioso know anyways, right?)

I know I know; it's a silly poll to begin with. But I'm still surprised that Pierre Trudeau or Gretzky didn't win.

And I think Canadians need to raise their standards a bit.

After all, where the heck is Montreal and McGill University's own William Shatner?

Don't we know anything?

TO FAIL IS DIVINE...

...failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.

-- Ian Buruma,
Wages of Guilt


Long live failure!

Right now, critics around the world are trouncing Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER, a film I'm dying to see, with their linguistic weapons of war. (Well, not all critics -- Harry Knowles of www.aintitcoolnews.com and Armond White of www.nypress.com have championed the film, but they're in the minority.) Overlong, garish, ludicrous, filled with bad acting and an implausible tale -- in other words, a typical Oliver Stone flick.

That's what they say. I've long been an Oliver Stone fanatic; that particular obsession will have to wait for another, epic-length blog. Let's just say that the rampant, galactic-wide dismissal of the film saddens me.

Not because of the film itself. Hell, maybe it is a mess. Who knows? I'll decide when I see it, whether it's on DVD here or in a theatre somewhere else in the world. The moment you start allowing critics to dictate your entertainment options is the moment you have, officially, given up all vestige of independent thinking. Epic or epic-yawn, I'll watch the flick.

Why?

Ah, because to fail in a noble quest is better than succeeding at a mediocre one. There is great, worthy respect due to someone who has bitten off more than they can chew. And what a sight to behold, to pay homage to! How ennobling to see effort spent -- misplaced, perhaps, misguided, to be sure, but spent, nonetheless. Exerted and unleashed effort, regardless of the outcome, is always inspiring.

George Lucas once said that he spent two years thinking about a movie while a critic spent twenty minutes writing and thinking about it. (And all of you jesters out there up in the balcony who are thinking that twenty minutes is too long to spend thinking about a George Lucas flick can exit now. Watch your step on the way out.)

Think about it. Think about what it takes to write a script about Alexander the Great. Think about what it would take to cast it, shoot it, edit it. You know what it takes? Passion and balls.

What does it take to write a review? A piece of paper and a pen. A computer and a keyboard. (Or an, um, blog...) This does not mean that a review cannot also be a noble piece of work. But too many critics take a perverse glee in cutting others down to size. To use your art for those principal aims is small, petty, demeaning.

We are here on this planet to do grand things or fail miserably trying. That's what I believe.

Clive Barker, the horror writer, was asked how he would like to be remembered. "As a failure," he said. Why? Because that means that he had not reached his ultimate goal. Because that means he sought to do something beyond his grasp and did not quite attain it. Because that meant he was striving.

Ah, to strive. To strive, friends and neighbours, Romans and countrymen.

You don't learn from success. You learn from striving, failing, falling short. In the last few years I've failed quite a bit. I trained for a marathon in Japan, only to blow out my knee in the week before the race. Couldn't run it. I took Level Three of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Didn't pass it.

But as every true warrior knows, even the losses are battles. To fail while attempting something above and beyond yourself is proof of your appetite for life. If every attempt is to be met by ridicule from the weak, the cowardly, the meek, than what does say of us, the human race? What does it say to the young? It says that we make ourselves bigger by putting down and ridiculing those who try and achieve something, that's what it says, and that doesn't say much about us at all, in the end.

So let's make a toast to Oliver Stone, shall we? Maybe the film is riveting, or maybe the film will make you want to eat rivets, but let's salute the foolish, the mad, the bold quest of a man who dared to bring Alexander's impossible life to the silver screen. Let's raise a glass to the last-place runner of the race, the goalie pulled after five goals in ten minutes, the employee sacked after a week on the job.

And I can say, with all honesty, that, should success elude you, I wish you a long life full of failure. I wish you scorn from critics, be they family or friends or, well, critics. I wish you a horse to fall off of in battle. And another to hop back on.

THE SOROS DOCTRINE

George Soros is the billionaire Hunagrian-Jewish-American who spent millions of dollars in trying to defeat Bush, but he's also quite a remarkable philanthropist, a man who didn't start giving away his money into he was well into his sixties. For many years he had been interested in philosphy, even writing his own books on the subject, but after a certain point in time he came to realize that the real self, his true self, was, indeed, a philosophical, contemplative one -- but it wasn't enough. All of that thinking and pondering had created a vacuum, he said, and by doing he escaped from the vacuum and into the realm of the actual. (Or something along those lines.)

Right now there's a boom, an explosion of universities in Phnom Penh, and all of the schools are trying to figure out, hmm, what exactly do we, um, teach, so that these kids can move beyond the thinking realm and into the actual realm? And so there's lots of business classes and computer classes and English classes because this is what the kids will need, goes the common currency of thought. And they're right. But these are the future leaders of Cambodia, these people, and this is a new age in this country, and so we have to be careful, even cautious, about what is taught to them and how it is presented. How it is framed.


I thought of this recently while reading this book THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND that caused an academic sensation (if that's not an oxymoron) in the mid-eightites, mostly because it took to task the rather dismal state of education in the elite universities in the States -- your Harvards, Yales and Stanfords, all of which had begun to slowly drop of all the old-dead-white-guy stuff and replace it with it multicultural, possibly revisionist approaches to learning and education.

I'm not going to get into that that here. That's been argued to death a thousand, million, trillion times, by people much smarter and much dumber than me. (There's a lot of the former, a few of the latter.)

But what a university is for is a good question, an obvious question, and one that isn't necessarily asked a lot anymore. Higher education simply is; universities simply are. Next?

And yet...

At the risk of sounding like someone who doesn't have any original ideas of his own (which is pretty much close to the truth), I read a book a few years back (or most of the book; it was pretty tough going, it being a 1950's-British-Marxis-feminist tract and all, so cut me some slack, okay?) called THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, by Doris Lessing. There was an introduction at the start of the book, a long one, a good one, actually a great one, in which Lessing basically ripped into the state of modern university systems the world over. She is one of the world's most erudite, respected novelists -- and she never went to university. High school dropout, like Einstein and Quentin Tarantino and Robert DeNiro and Peter Jennings. No-name schmucks.

A few points she made that I remember.

1) Universities, especially liberal arts programs, are set up in a very either/or, competitive fashion. Meaning, if you like author X, then you shouldn't respond to author Y. If you like both, something's wrong with you. At a very young age, students learn that there is the Canon (cue the sound of thunder and ominous music), and these are the books contained therewithin, and this is the kind of literature that should be read about and written about.

Got a problem with that? I did, and I still do.

What's lacking is any kind of personal, authentic response to the books in question; the self is left out of the equation. Meaning, we are taught, to a certain extent, to think of books as having this almost mystical 'validity', or 'value', or even 'worth', that exists above and beyond are own perceptions of the text itself.

Hogwash, Lessing says, and I agree. There are books and your responses to them. Period. You may hate a book at age eighteen and love it at twenty-eight and find it decidedly mediocre at thirty-eight. The book has changed nada. You have changed much. The book and you have crossed paths a few times, and you have emerged, altered. The book just sits there, waiting for your response. (I read John Irving's THE CIDER-HOUSE RULES every few years and am always amazed at how different it is.( Waiting for your emotions.

But what's happened? We have a world now where books, and certainly films, are judged as if they are part of a sporting competition. People write movie reviews, especially, that rarely have any authentic representation of the author's feelings.

No, no, no, you say, the author has to be objective. This ain't Oprah. This is literature. He has to view the work for what it is. Personal feelings have nothing to do with true, authentic criticism.

And I say no, no, no, that's b.s. Because if you are a boxer, then you are going to have a different view of ROCKY than if you are an accountant. If your parents divorced at age eight and you remember every little bit of it, then you will respond differently to KRAMER VS.KRAMER than I will. If you were a high school basketball player, not great, no, not giving Jordan a run for his money, uh-uh, but not bad with the ball, then you will respond differently to the Gene Hackman classic HOOSIERS than a non-sports fan will. If you have a particularly keen interest in history and ancient civilizations, then you will view ALEXANDER one way, and the McDonald's manager working the late shift, the one with the receding hairline and whacked stubble dotting his cheeks, will view it another way. (Not that those two people couldn't be the same guy, come to think of it.)

This is not to say that there are not books and films that are better produced, more diligently stitched together than others. Of course. That's what quality and craftsmanship are about.

But art is not produced in an aesthetic vacuum, or emotionless vacuum. It is created by strange, loner-like people with weird, wild impulses that are hungering to express the sentiments inside themselves. And hey -- guess what, kids? To deny that you are a similar person with identical longings when judging such work robs art of its true purpose. It makes you a liar and a cheat, too.

2) The other point Lessing makes, and this is a good one, has to do with people who leave. People who exit. The teachers who stop teaching after a year. The cop who gives up the beat six months in. The student who stops attending classes after a year and a half.

We do not pay enough attention in society, she argues, to people who stop. These are the people who cannot fit into the system. These are the people who do not respond to the system. And these are the people who usually have the most constructive, instinctive things to say.

Instead, what happens is we have thousands and thousands of people who are trained in a particular way of thinking and reacting -- and so is it any wonder that most book reviews and film reviews sound so similar, as if they were all written by the same computer programme? Of course not. This is how the system trains people. This is how the system operates. The people who couldn't fit into the system, who for some reason or another couldn't adapt, have moved on. The world has lost their voice. The neighbourhood has lost that cop. The classroom that needs that kind of teacher has been replaced by the formulaic, institutionalized one.

Point is, as Soros points out, there is great wonder and satisfaction in contemplation -- ess -
entially, that's what university does for you. It gives you four, five, eight years to sit around and think about stuff and write about stuff.

And then at a certain point you have to get out into the world and do stuff, and so what we think about during those years, and how we think about it, does not remain in a vacuum. It is released, to intoxicate or poision the masses. How we think, and how we train others to think, needs to be addressed.

So next time you're teaching a Cambodian, the slow, shy one at the back of the class in the ripped, dirty slacks, or talking to the late-shift manager at Mcdonald's, the heavy guy with the raggedy stubble who doesn't look that bright, truth be told, ask them about what they're reading. Find out if they've seen any good movies lately. Ask for their opinion. Listen for their emotions. The tremor and excitement in their voices.

These are the ones that don't fit into the system, see.

These are the ones to ask.

These are the ones you listen to, carefully.

Before they go.

*************************************************************************************


I am pleased to bring to your attention the writing of Brian Gibson, a fellow survivor of the York University Creative Writing program and fellow cross-country teammate of mine on the York Yeomen team that placed third at the Ontario championships in '96. (Brian was the strong, lean, fast guy who placed in the top ten, if I recall; I was the, um, weak, not-so-lean slow guy who placed, uh, nowhere-near-the-top-ten.)

You should go to www.bleedingdaylight.ca and check out the latest novel from one of Canada's brightest young writers, a murder-mystery set at our old alma mater, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

(Oh, and last time I saw him he looked a little different from the author's photo -- but I'm betting he still wears Darth Vader t-shirts.)

WHY I LIKE COMMAS

There's this one scene in the Richard Price novel FREEDOMLAND where there's a mob or a protest or something in an apartment somewhere in Jersey, and the person in charge is either trying to control the crowd or scare the crowd, cupping his hands in front of his mouth to amplify the sound, and he starts saying something like: "The police, are on, the way. You have, to stay, calm." And that replicated so perfectly the way that people talk in those situations when you have a lot of loud people saying a lot of things and you want to be heard, have to be heard: the staggered, staccato monotone, the jagged breakdown of a sentence into easily heard and identifable parts, and I'd never seen it put in print like that, and I thought cool, which is why I've remembered the style, if not the exact wording, of it even five years after reading the book (which you should read, by the way.)

THE COSBY DOCTRINE

I read a transcript of LARRY KING LIVE the other day (because, uh, that's what guys like me do in their spare time, when they can never figure out when the suspender- guy's show is on over here), the one where he was interviewing the author of the second most bestselling non-fiction book in NEW YORK TIMES history, a self-help book called THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE. (And if you don't know what that book is, then you don't exist in the same universe as all of those folks that voted for Bush do.) He's a pastor named Rick Warren, I think, and he said some things that reminded me of a Buddhist expression I heard somewhere:

Your life is not yours. It can be taken from you at any time.

This particular Christian author made a similar point: Look, this is not a self-help book, because self-help books all say: It's all about you, and I'm saying, right from the start, this isn't about you at all. Your life is not yours and yours alone.

That's the gist. (Cool word, gist. Not used often enough.)

We think of our lives as ours, to have and to hold 'till death to us part -- wedding vows of one. We make the rules, baby. We decide the course of our fate. We captain the ship.

I look at it this way. A few years back a homeless lunatic whacked me with the equivalent of a hockey stick across the gut in Tokyo, leaving a nasty bruise that was a gift, if only because had the man thwapped me in the face, I could be missing an eye right now. My life would have been altered in ways I really don't care to think about. He's already taken something from me -- my naive sense of security that only a Canadian can have. (Or maybe a Nebraskan.) He could have taken my pupils, my jugular, you name it.

Whether you look at it in Buddhist terms or Christian terms or no terms at all, your life is hanging by a fragile thread, baby. All of your dreams, aspirations, fears and fragilities are one whisker away from being sliced and diced, late-night style. (I'm not sure what that last part means, either, but I'll go with it.) We all have our personal space and our personal rights and our own personal integrity, yes, true, acknowledged, but there is a truck, see, just down the street, travelling quickly, and you are listening to your walkman, head bobbing, lips mouthing, thinking about that latch on your fridge that just, won't, shut, and you are slowing down, wading to the rhythm of beat and the pulse, while that truck, the one you don't know even exists, is getting ready to mow you down, no questions asked, skid-marks on pavement with brains, blood and skull-bits being mandatory, not optional.

Remember Heathcliff Huxtable talking to Theo on THE COSBY SHOW? "I am your father," he said. "I brought you in this world, and I can take you out." There's the Powell doctrine; this is the Cosby doctrine. Now, I don't know if there's a Father up there bringing us in and taking us out. (If there is, I think he just might look like Cosby -- stern but goofy.) But I know now, more than I did before, that we can all be taken out, whether anybody's in charge up there or not.

This can all be taken from you, this life, and it's helpful to remember that we are taking away other's lives, all the time, constantly. Everyday we take something away from someone else by a warm wave of the hand, a snide comment, or a friendly nod of the head, whether we realize it or not. Not their life, of course, we don't take that, we give them that, we allow them that, but there's a myriad of insignificant acts that shape our interactions that don't conceive or disintegrate our lives, no, but they add to them. They subtract.

There's more to life than life itself.

(Unless you're a serial killer or a soldier or a sniper. Then you do take lives, literally. I met a dude my first week in Japan at a bar: Me: What do you do? Dude: I'm a sniper with the marines: Me: Oh. Thinking -- You kill people; I, um, teach ESL...)

We give and we take. And given that Cosby was always handing out morals like candy to little Rudy, here's one of my own: Try not to take too much of other's lives, and be on guard for those that are taking yours, little by little. (And be forgiving, too. They may not know it.)

WEATHER, CARDS, ALEXANDER...

Hot. Dusty. Blue sky -- all day, every day. Rain, not a chance. Wind, if you're lucky. Cool on your cheek, a reprieve, however brief, from the sun.
Cambodia in November. Late November.
Back home, an Ontario fall, close to winter.
Seasons here don't change. They shift. One moment it's raining each and every day in the late afternoon for forty minutes on end, hard rain, driving rain, and then, click, the channel's changed, the rain's gone, the sun is back, minus the wet, and the long lazy day can begin once more.

**********************************************************************************

Reading fiction from home takes on a different weight in a foreign land. One minute you're immersed in a Canadian short story, a familiar story, a domestic story, complete with frigid weather and frigid people, and then you hear a sound, a laugh, up you look, and there you see: casually pedalling cyclos and slowly shuffling women with food balanced on their head and groups of motodops sitting on the side of the road, enveloped in a game of cards, the only game in town, kneeling beside their bikes, all of them leaning against one another, leaning forward, the men and the bikes, and down go the cards! SWAP! When Cambodians play cards, they play, each hand thrust down as if they are sure that this is the one, and then you tilt your head down, to the page, and you're back, back home.

************************************************************************************

An ode to courage, daring, ambition, stealth: Alexander the Great, quoted:

My friend, if by deserting from the war before us
You and I would be destined to live for ever, knowing no old age,
We would do it; I would not fight among the first,
I would not send you to the battle which brings glory to men.
But now as things are, when the ministers of death stand by us
In their thousands, which no man born to die can escape or even evade,
Let us go.


Which I take to mean: Unfortunate, yes, but Death is here, there, above, beyond us, around us. So live, now. Fight. Revel in glory. Commence.

THIS IS A LONG TIME AGO

I've always loved this quote from comedian Gilbert Gottfried: Did people in ancient Greece walk around saying: 'Gee, this is a long time ago...'

It cracked me up at fourteen. It cracks me up now. (Which says something about how much I've matured, but...)

I can't even figure out why it makes me laugh so much, but I remembered it recently when I was reading one author's take on Alexander the Great, and his explanation of how we can't judge yesterday's standards by today's morals.

I was reading a biography of Alexander and his conquest of most of the freakin' world, and I wondered: Why did most of these people, these conquered people, give themselves so freely to this young punk after their land was invaded, their fields razed, their citizens slaughtered?

The explanation was, well, in those times, that was what people did. Plain and simple. If your land was invaded, and your side lost, sorry, pal, but you gave up any authority you had to the rightful victor, like it or not.

Similarly, those who judge Alexander's seemingly endless desire for more and more lands to dominate as essentially barbaric may have a point, but they're also missing the point, because he lived in a 'pre' time --pre-Ally McBeal, pre-Freud, pre-Victorian, pre-Christian, pre-everything. The way we've been conditioned to view the world cannot possibly mesh with how he saw the world. Was it right? Was it wrong? Irrelevant. It was, period. You can't project backwards. You don't have to agree with the way things were. But you have to acknowledge the way things were, acknowledge the framework through which people saw the world. Alexander believed himself to be a descendant of Zeus. Oracles were consulted regularly for advice (oracles being the primitive version of Dr.Phil.) War and conquest were the standard by which success was measured. Aristotle was a soldier and a scholar, and saw no contradiction between the two. The world was an unknown entity, there to be fought over, divided, and contemplated upon, preferably in white loincloths, I'm guessing.

Think of it this way. Three thousand years from now, scholars, future Aristotles, may look back at our time, at 2004, and marvel at a world so divided by culture and religion, by linguistic differences and theological clashes that led to the deaths of thousands of innocents. Three thousand years from now, there could be one race of yellowish/brownish/blackish/whiteish type people, and the teenagers of that future era will read their history texts (or have them implanted in their heads, I guess) and laugh at how primitive, unsophisticated and basic we were.

From our horizons, Alexander and his ilk were basic, yes, ignorant of human psychology, sure, and overly dependent on oracles and sophistry, uh-huh, but their legends endured. Their exploits inspired. Alexander was so well known he was written about in the Bible and the Koran. Not bad. Which of today's leaders (or conquerers) are mythic enough to make the cut three thousand years from now in some as-yet-to-be-written gospel?

Just think: As you butter your bagel and watch Katie Couric on the Today show and settle into your comfortable cubicle at work and bop around town looking for a Dairy Queen so you can nab a Blizzard for lunch, diet be damned, you are also living and breathing right here and right now in that land known as 'a long time ago.' People thousands of years from now (assuming the world will still be around, and I think it will), college kids whizzing around the skies in vehicles too abstract and surreal to contemplate, are studying your life and your values, your diet and your weapons, your judgements and choices, and they're snickering, these kids are. Sighing. Wondering how you could be so ignorant. Wondering how you could be so skeptical. So naive. They're relieved, these futuristic sophomores, that humanity has somehow managed to advance past that barbaric and primitive Dark Age known as the 21st century.

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO NOW?

Should I stay or should I go?

To Myanmar, that is.

Not that I'm planning to travel to Myanmar in the next few weeks (or Burma, or whatever the country's calling itself these days), but it's a question you have to ask.

Why? Myanmar has an utterly corrupt military dictatorship that rules the country with an iron fist, as the saying goes. How corrupt? They had free elections about a decade ago, and the democratic party, the party that actually, like, advocated, you know, DEMOCRACY, won, and the government said, basically: "We don't care."

Their spiritual leader, Auu San Kyuu (the spelling of her name is horribly wrong, but forgive me) has been under house arrest for a few years now, maintaining her solidar-
ity with the people. (She's the daughter of the last honest leader of the country, and she's given much of her life to forwarding the pursuit of democracy in

So, the dilemma is:

If you visit Myanmar, and meet its people, and witness its beauty, you're feeding the regime. You're planting money in the pockets of the military. You are, essentially, advocating and enabling a dictatorship to continue, and even thrive.

The counterargument is:

Myanmar is poor. Myanmar is needy. The PEOPLE are needy. If you go there, you will be buying their food, staying in their hotels, purchasing their products. You will be giving money to people who need it. You will be helping honest people improve their lives.

Difficult choice.

I don't know what the right answer here. On a massively lesser scale, in Cambodia you can buy cheap DVDs of the current Hollywood releases for three bucks a pop. Is it illegal? You bet. Are you helping the government continue their piracy? Uh-huh. Are you also allowing small-time business owners to STAY in business so that they can continue to feed their family. Yes. So what to do?

Don't know.

The good thing about living in a poor country is that it makes you THINK about these issues. In Canada (or Japan, or Norway), you can buy a DVD, and travel abroad, and not worry too much about where your money is going, and who it is profiting.

Here, in this hot, wretched land, the most basic, fundamental human elements -- travel and barter -- become moral dilemmas. It's a lesson, if you look at it that way. It's a continual reminder that the elemental functions of humanity reveal other, more complex shadings the further away you are from home.

GIVEN TIME

The other day Clinton unveiled his new presidential library amidst rain, wind, and three former presidents. (Gerald Ford was sick.) Speeches were made, photos were taken, false political smiles were plastered on one and all -- and a monument to one person's life was opened for all the world to see. Apparently, you can walk around and click buttons on various computer consoles arrayed around the whole library and you can pretty much see what Clinton was doing on every day of his freakin' life.

Which got me thinking (which I try to do as rarely as possible, by the way) that it would be cool if we could all of have our own, expansive library dedicated solely and squarely to the centre of our universe: ourselves.

Wouldn't it be cool? I know, I know, a lot of you are young, meaning under forty; now that I'm almost thirty, I'm redefining the boundaries of what is YOUNG and what is FREAKIN' ANCIENT. But still -- think about it.

Rooms and halls devoted to you. To what you did each and ever day, week, month, year. Clinton was the very definition of an overachiever. (I'm reminded by an old teammate describ-
ing Michael Jordan: "The difference with Michael was, he had more natural talent than anyone else on the planet, and yet he was also an overachiever. He worked harder than anyone else. You rarely get those two things together in the same person." I think the quote applies equally to Slick Willie.) Clinton was the kind of guy who was campaigning coming out of the womb, I'm sure, complimenting the doctor's slap-to-the-buttocks and reassuring him that it didn't hurt, no, not at all, in fact he kind of enjoyed it, truth be told.

Now, we're not all overachievers. We're not all replicas of The Man From Hope.

Still. It's interesting to think about.

As people wandered around the rooms dedicated to your life, what would they see? What pictures would be on the wall? What achievements of yours would be listed in thick, leather-bound books? What would make people stop, and read, and consider.

What will your legacy be, is what I'm getting at.

(Michael Jordan once said: "I don't have a legacy. I have a life." Meaning, I can't worry about what people will say about me after I'm dead, because I'm alive right now and I have some living to do. Words I agree with completely. But it helps, sometimes, to consider our actions today in the context of how they will be perceived tomorrow.

If it's all over now, God forbid, and you have shuffled off this mortal coil, and next week, at a windy, rainy ceremony (attended by no former presidents, no past prime ministers, only by your close friends and families), the doors to your new library are opened -- what's inside?

As the people you've loved weep and remember and examine all that you've left behind, all that you've accomplished, what do you think they will see? What will make them stop and dab their eyes and marvel in pride?

And what will make them pause and look around in wonder at the marble halls, not because it is so grandly extravagant, no, but because it is so small compared to the person you were and the person you might have become, given time...

LOST IN TRANSLATION

When you are living in Asia, and you're Canadian, unless you were actually, like, a student in your university days, and actually, like, studied and stuff, you probably don't speak the language of the country you're living in. You are, in essence, a child.

Why? Because a child can't read. When a child is lost, he or she can't look at a sign and figure out which highway sign leads to Lindsay and which leads to Pembroke. (Not that a child should be looking at highway signs. I'm not advocating children driving. And if you don't know where Lindsay is, you're not from Ontario. Or, if you do know where it is and you're still not from Ontario, that scares me. People shouldn't know where Lindsay is. Some places should remain unknown.)

So, in Asia, at least for the first little while, we're infants. (Actually, I guess I was an infant back home, too, but that's for another post.)

I've been in Cambodia for seventeen (?!?) months, and I can't speak barely a lick of Khmer. It's not that I don't want to; if my life was measured in centuries, rather than years, I wouldl earn Khmer, and woodworking, and the rules of American football, not to mention Canadian football, and I would try my had at pottery, as well. But I'm getting up there, you see. Time ain't forever, Tupac Shakur's mother said in POETIC JUSTICE, and she was right. (And if you're wondering why I'm quoting old Janet Jackson/John Singleton movies as if they were scripture, well, I'm the kind of guy that quotes those kinds of things, is all. And I didn't go to church, no, but I went to the Fairview Mall cinema every Friday, so there you go.) I'm not sure how useful Khmer would be back in St.Catharines, or Ottawa, or Canada, or, um, the rest of the world.

Of course, that didn't stop me from trying my hand at Japanese, which sure as hell ain't the language of choice in Oshawa or thereabouts.

Why did I study it (albeit briefly)? Because I'd been in Japan for two years and I couldn't speak it, for one, and I wanted to see what studying a language did to my head, for two.

I wanted to know what it meant to study a language. I don't remember how I learned English. I'm not quite sure what's happening when I try to write English. The words come, and I transcribe them, and occasionally they're in the right order, and often they're not, and, well, so be it.

Learning a foreign language makes you a kid again, and it forces you to think about, well, thoughts in a way that you've never had to before. It's really, really hard, and really, really gratifying, and, the cool thing is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, or how many degrees you have, or how man other languages you speak -- when you learn a new one, welcome to infancy, babe. Nap time is at three.

Of course, knowing other languages does help you to learn a new one. I took lessons at the Association for Japanese Language Teaching in Tokyo (and if you think that sounds strange coming from this St.Catharines kid, imagine being this St.Catharines kid, sitting in a Tokyo classroom at eight a.m. on a cold winter's morning in that land of the rising sun, an expression that most Japanese have never heard of, come to think of it), and in my class there was a French couple and an American Chinese and a Brit and an eccentric German professor, mid-thirties, married to a Japanese, Japanese kids, but he didn't speak the language, and he wanted to learn. Considering he spoke German, French, English, Thai and Malay, I thought he wouldn't have a problem.

But he was just like me. He came to class early in the morning, and he wore glasses, and his hair was never combed. (Like I said, just like me.) Difference was, he was smart. He under -
stood languages. Both of us were inept at Japanese, but he understood that was this was necessary, and essential, and unavoidable.

At a certain point, about four months into our lessons, he turned to me, excited, and said: "Scott, I zink ve hav reached a turning point. Ziss is vere we go forward."

Or words to that effect. (With apologies for my German transcription.) There does come a point where things click, and words fall into place, and you do things by reflect that you used to have to by, well, thinking.

Simplest example: When a waitress brings you your food, do you consciously think about saying "thank-you." No. It comes out. (And if you are one of those people who don't thank waitresses, I hope you burn in hell, eternally.)

The thing is, when you learn a new language, you do think about it. And think again. Until, after five or ten or twenty times, presto-changeo, out they come, the words, and you didn't think about it, and you've made a leap. First it's a word, and then it's a sentence, and then, when you learn the vocabulary, it's a conversation. (Or a monlogue.)

Ah, but there's the rub -- vocabulary. How do you learn enough words to be fluent?

You have to read, and listen, and speak, and it's repetitive and boring and endless, but I'm starting to believe that if you don't speak another language, you're not in touch with some -
thing fundamentally human. If you only speak one language, you're living life in black and white.

Learning another language brings out the shades and subtleties, the yin and the yang of how we communicate and how we identify ourselves. Thoughts are words, nothing more, and words are thoughts. They're our currency. You speak another language, bam, you're rolling in dough. And you get to wheel and deal with people and concepts outside of your normal frames of reference. You get to continually access and wield something ancient, lasting and open-hearted.

A PERPETUAL PRESENT

Here's the deal:

You want to go to university. You want to study English. You are young, and bright, and you are tired of dropping off both Khmers and foreigners at the front gates of schools that you have never dreamed of stepping foot inside, let alone attending.

But now you are dreaming, you see, and your dreams are big. Problem is, so are your children. And so is your wife, come to think of it, who is eight months pregnant.

Do you stop your job? Do you go to school full-time to ensure the prosperity of your future, thereby neglecting the realities of the present?

This is what a lot of Cambodians face. There are dozens of universities popping up all over, promising degrees, which they will undoubtedly deliver, with one small warning: DOES NOT GUARANTEE A JOB UPON GRADUATION. (Actually, the schools won't carry this warning, and everybody knows that anyways -- there are thousands of students, and hundreds of jobs, and those jobs that do exist will go to those with money and connections, period. You bet people are worried.)

So this is the thing -- it's easier to ride a motobike around and pick up people and drop them off than it is to go to school. Know what? It's more profitable, too. Once you graduate, and you get a government job, and you're on the path to respectability and progress and achievement, you are congratulated with a salary of about twenty U.S. dollars a month.

Know what a moto-taki driver (motodop) can make, if they're lucky?

More than twenty bucks. Not a lot more, no, but more. And when you have a pregnant wife, and crying, hungry kids, more is more, no matter what the amount.

I don't know what's going to happen to Cambodia. Nobody does. Women are getting a university education for the first time in who-knows-how-long, and the people, the young people, are certainly smarter than their elders; after all, all the really smart ones were decimated during the Khmer Rouge era.) There is still cheating and corruption amongst the young whippersnappers, of course, but that's par for the course. They are bright, and they motivated, and they have mouths to feed and families to make proud.

And yet...

There aren't a heck of a lot of jobs out here. And women are still second-class citizens. And Cambodia is still, first and foremost, an agricultural nation. None of the university educated young 'uns want to go back and work on the farm, however, because there's no money in that, no esteem in that, and besides, the government jobs have air conditioning. And who can blame them? But what that means is that nobody is really studying how to properly farm and irrigate and innovate this country, in rural terms; nobody, as far as I know, is interested in creating a structure that will allow the majority of Cambodians, those living in small villages and communes, to thrive and prosper and heck, maybe even feed their families. And, on top of that, the education system, pre-university, is abysmal. Everybody bribes their teachers. The teachers themselves are not educated. Nobody wants to teach in the rural areas because the money's no good. And the teachers themselves make only twenty, thirty bucks a month, which means that they have to get two, even three jobs, which means...

You get the point.

Cambodia's future is wide open. It's better than before, of course, unquestionably, but then again -- how can it not be better than genocide, or a foreign, Communist power ruling over your homeland? There are lots of signs of improvement here. You have to look closely, true, but they're there, nevertheless.

But there is still that moto-taxi driver, you see. He wants an education. He wants to learn about the world, and English, and the world beyond Cambodia. But he has a wife, and family, and while nobody likes to drive around Phnom Penh at midnight, tracking down backpackers, hoping to give them a lift, the present will always win out over the future, every time, and that's what worries me about this country the most -- it's in a perpetual present, until that unknown point in time when the future catches up with everyone, and by then, you see, it's too late.

THE HERE AND THE NOW

You slip and fall on the ice and bang your head and for the rest of your life you have a tiny scar stretching across your brow, looking like a little corn on the cob, as your aunt used to say. Or you hold the hand of someone you love as they die, feeling disgusted by the clammy grip of their fingers and horrified at your own reaction -- distaste mixed with love. Or you strap yourself into the plane that you told yourself you would never get on and suddenly you are up, and AWAY, and there is no place else to go but down, far below, and that is a somewhere-kind-of-place that you don't want to be a part of, twenty thousand feet below, not yet, not after this moment of elevated bliss.

We all have moments that have shaped us. Affected us. Even molded us, almost against our will. These are the moments that made us realize that we were alive, there, at that moment. We can't imagine ourselves without them. We may be watching t.v. or crossing the street or watching the rain splash against the windshield when those moments come back, vivid and raw, real and alive.

But how often will we really think about them again? I read this awhile back, and it made me think, and it's true -- even our most precious, hidden memories, the ones that drift in and out of our minds as we dive into and out of sleep, are finite.

No, no, no, you say. That's not true. I think about them all the time.

Fine. I'm sure you do. But add it up. Do the math. In the course of a life, how many times will we think about that particular point in time? Ten? Fifteen? Let's thirty.

Thirty seems like a lot. Thirty is a number you can grasp.

Oh, but that's the point, isn't it, that grasping, that wielding, that holding-on, and the scary thing, the finite thing, is that you can count it, you can conceive of it, you can get a grip on a number like that. Your memories have a limit.

I think we take for granted those little pieces of time, wonderful and wretched, that have chipped away at our psyche. When we're wounded or bruised, we reach for similar points in the past that have bludgeoned us -- we compare, contrast, decide which is more painful.

Same goes for the good stuff, too. Was this experience as good as that experience? Our mind flashes back, remembering the brightness and the glee and the sheer, glossy goodness that only memories can provide. And then we store the new experience away. To be retrieved at a later point in time.

Or let's look at it this way:

Something happens to you that instantly reminds you of a previous event or incident or escapade that occurred at some point in the past. You hadn't thought about that memory in years and years, ages really, but boom, here its, back for more. And the thing that reminded you of the old event suddenly takes a new meaning, a heavier resonance, because now it forms a weird, transitory bridge from the self you were to the self you are.

Case in point. When I was in Tokyo a few years back, I was in an Internet cafe, minding my own business, browsing the net, when suddenly I heard the song "I love a rainy night."

And I was instantly reminded of a tape my brother and I had made when we were eight and six years old, respectively, a tape that was recorded at a winter cottage we used to go to every February for a week, and on the tape there is a wild and wacky Scotty Spencer singing 'I love a rainy night', and I had not thought about that moment in years, decades, or that tape in years, and yet here it was, back for more, and maybe that first incident -- me as a kid, singing -- had occurred so that this latest incident -- me as a twentysomething in Tokyo -- would have an added resonance that would cause me to reflect on who I was and where I'd been and how strange and mystical the process of life itself can be, if you think about it.

Maybe somebody up above was orchestrating the whole thing, I think at times, usually before sleep. Maybe the events that don't make sense to us, that cause us pain and joy, are not meant to be understood now -- they can only be comprehended in context, and that context can only arise after years of experience. After living, in other words.

Whatever.

Point is, when you travel, you're aware, you notice, and you reflect. I've seen a lot in Cambodia, stuff that I'll remember for the rest of my life -- but how many times will I think of these things? Five more times? Fifteen?

To be honest, I don't know. (Which is as it should be.) But when the memories do come back, don't neglect them; don't treat them as commonplace. Don't shove them aside, assuming they'll be back. Let them linger. Dwell on them. Think about what they mean, and why, and make the colours in the picture a little sharper.

They may be back again at some point in the future, yes, but they are also here, now, and the here and the now is perhaps the most fleeting state of all.

BLONDE JOKE OF THE DAY

(With apologies to all blondes out there. Natural or otherwise.)


So it's Friday night, and this blonde decides to go and see this new ventriloquist act that comes to town. The papers have been saying great things about it, MARVELLOUS things, in fact, and she needs a little sunshine in her life right now, this blonde does.

She arrives early, gets a nice seat, smack dab in the middle, sucks some gobstoppers and settles in to enjoy the show.

Out comes the ventriloquist, an old, balding, gentle-as-can-be looking chap wearing an old cardigan vest and bright green tie. Gripped in his right hand is his grinning wooden friend, smiling that idiot-smile found all on all dummies, wooden or not. He sits on a small green stool, centre stage, rests the dummy on his right knee, nods a little nod to the crowd, and gets to work.

Out come the jokes. One after the other. And guess what, folks? They're all bonde jokes. ALL of them.

Not surprisingly, the blonde is shocked. Stunned. Disgusted and dismayed. She looks around and sees that everyone ELSE seems to be enjoying the show, thank-you very much. Some people are giggling. Others are roaring. Still others are laughing so hard that tears are drizzling down their cheeks, leaving, literally, small pools of water on the floor.

After twenty minutes, the blonde's had enough. QUITE enough. She's listened to these kinds of jokes all her life, and enDURED them all her life, but no more. Tonight's the night when she makes a stand. When she demands the respect that all blondes deserve.

She stands up, takes a deep breath (to gather her courage), and then, shaking, screams:

"Enough! ENOUGH! I've been here for twenty minutes, and I've heard nothing, NOTHING but blonde jokes! And YOU may think it's funny and THEY may think it's funny, but let me tell you -- I sure as heck don't think it's funny, mister!"

The old man's eyes pop wide. His mouth opens and closes. He looks around the hall, at the suddenly silent crowd.

"Oh my," he says. "My oh my oh MY. I'm truly sorry, ma'am, if you were offended. I, well, I was only telling JOKES, you see, and I never imagined that --"

"You be quiet!" the blonde yells, waving her finger at the ventriloquist. "This is between me and the little man sitting on your knee!"

ATLANTIS -- STAY LOST, PLEASE

Given that they may have actually, really, honestly, sincerely found the fabled lost city of Atlantis, according to a story on cnn.com, it made me re-evaluate my idea of the perfect afterlife.

Not that I'm sure that there IS an afterlife, of course, but there may be one waiting for me, and I know what I want to see.

Forget the angels. Put down those harps. Lock the pearly gates. (And what does that mean, anyways? 'Pearly' gates? Are they draped in jewelry or something?)

When I kick the bucket, what I want to see is a clean, well-lit display room. The kind you might see in a used-car dealership, for example, or better yet, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. High ceilings. Bright lights. Perhaps a uniformed guard standing in the corner, looking bored.

And what is exactly in this room?

Nothing much. Just pictures on the wall, that's all. Beneath the pictures will be a one or two paragraph caption. Clean, bold type. Easy to read.

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- but the content, right? What's it all about, Alfie?

Again, nothing much. Just the mysteries of the universe finally, unquestionably explained.

After all, I'd be dead, right? If you can't find out the answers when you're dead, then what's the point of it all?

So, this is what I'd like to see:

A picture of Dealey Plaza, Dallas Texas, November 22, 1963. The death of J.F.K., if you haven't guessed it already. And then beneath the picture would be an explanation of what really happened. Oswald did it. Oswald didn't do it. Oswald did it, but others did too. Whatever. I just want the truth. And, contrary to what Jack Nicholson may believe, I think I could handle it, being dead and all. Let me have it.

Then I move on, wandering through this lovely room, listening to the soothing, pleasantly bland muzak that drifts along with me.

I come to a picture of stars. Not 'stars' as in Pauly Shore and Don Knotts, but 'stars' as in 'celestial wonders of light'. Beneath the stars, two words, in bold: 'Big bang'. Followed by an explanation I can understand.

You getting the drift? It's simple, really. Show me the pyramids -- then explain how they were built. The Loch Ness monster? Why not; I've always wondered about that mythical (?) beast. How about ghosts? Are they real or not? I just want to know, is all.

Others may want to spend eternity in God's loving embrace. Good for them. Myself, I think that could get stifling after awhile. He's got a hell of a grip, God does. (Maybe He could be waiting in the room after the display room?) I just want to know what it's all about. I want all the mysteries of life solved, explained, put to bed.

At least, that's what I thought.

But then I saw that article about the finding of Atlantis, and something just felt...wrong.

Atlantis is not supposed to be found.

Charlie Brown is not supposed to kick the football.

The Red Sox are not supposed to win the World Series.

If Atlantis is found, and the Loch Ness Monster is found, then they're real, and if they're real, then they're not mythical anymore.

And when you take away the mythical, then you take away that wonderful, golden layer of life that elevates us.

(Then again, I'll be dead when I'm finding all of this stuff out, right? So maybe it won't matter much. Maybe, being dead, I'll want all the answers I can get. Because eternity sounds really, really long to me, and I'll need something to think about.)

But I ain't dead yet.

So maybe Oswald did it, and maybe he didn't (and I have a theory, of course, but that's for another, later, epic-length entry), and maybe the Bermuda triangle really is out there, and ghosts do actually exist, but if you happen to find out any of these answers, do me a favor, okay?

Don't let me know.

BEER AND CONFUSION

The other day I went to Kirirom national park, a beautiful, cool, scenic kinda place about two and a half hours north of Phnom Penh. This was for a 'team-building' exercise with my co-workers. Play games, bond, share experiences -- with the hopes of a better working relationship for all. A nice trip, a nice day, with the required breaking-down-of-the-van-on-the-way-back which is typical of Cambodia and might even be mandatory. But there were gorgeous moutains and wide, endless green fields that stretched in circles around us, and kids in white shirts bicyling back from school, staring and smiling at the unfortunate foreigners, far from home, so it was a moment to remember, despite the breakdown.

On the way out of the city, we passed a billboard advertising a local Cambodian beer -- 'Your country! Your beer!' -- the ad shouted, with a group of twenty-somethings clutching cans of beer and smiling and looking for all intents and purposes as if they had just won the lottery, if the grand prize happened to be a couple of bottles of suds.

I thought of most Canadian beer ads, and how they, too, tie in nationalism and patriotism and whatever ism you want to call it with getting blitzed, hammered, shredded. (Heck, even the names are patriotic -- Molson Canadian, comes to mind. As do 'I am Canadian!' ads so popular a few years back.)


Everybody loves their country. Everybody loves their beer.


Which got me thinking: Everything always seems to come back to, or revolve around, the name of the country on our passports. Why is that? Why are we obsessed with our nationalities?


I guess it's natural, and inevitable, and necessary -- we need to feel like we belong, and we need a sense of place. It's natural to be proud of where you are and what you do. Nobody wants to feel like their family is composed of a bunch of schmucks, and nobody wants to believe that the country they live in is on the wrong side of morality, truth, honor.


But I think there is a thin line between pride and arrogance.

The good thing about living abroad is that you are forced to look at your country anew. You start to realize that the stereotypes people have about your own native land are completely false and, more often than not, truer than you ever knew.

The other day I realized that I had not spoken to another Canadian in Phnom Penh for a good two, three months. Wow. But on a daily basis I speak to Americans and Finns and Dutch and Japanese and Singaporeans and even Burmese.

And don't think twice about it.

That's worth raising a glass too, isn't it?

************************************************************************************

Last night I watched CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and THE INCREDIBLE HULK on t.v., both of which I really enjoyed, and both of which came out, like, a year and a half ago. (Okay. I'm a little late.)


After the movies I was flipping around the channels and I came across that old SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 'Weekend Update' host Dennis Miller, who I was surprised to see hosting a talk show because a) who knew he had his own talk show still? and b) this is Cambodia, so it's always shocking to see anybody western, in some sense, let alone someone you used to imitate while in junior high school. (I was also flabbergasted to see that John Macenroe has his own bloody talk show -- and it's available, via cable, in Cambodia. As a host, he's not half-bad. When he tries to make jokes, well, let's just say he was my favorite tennis player as a kid, and leave it at that.)


Dennis Miller still throws out these arcane, obscure references that may qualify as jokes if you have the time to search the Net to locate their sources as you're listening to his routine.
But truth and insight comes from the strangest places, and as his first guest he had that familiar character actor Hector Elizondo, who some of you may know and others may not, and he was talking about this play he was performing in at some Burbank theatre, and it was about an older man dying, and a young nurse who soothes him, yada-yada-yada, and he quoted some of the lines of the play that are actually quite, well, provoking.



"Cultivate confusion," the old man tells the young woman. "Confusion leads to questioning. It leads to searching. Certainty leads only to dogma."


Fantastic, insightful stuff.


I remember getting a tour of my new junior high school when I was still in Grade Six, and the place seemed mammoth, monstrous, because there were, like, two floors, not one like at Pine Grove Public School, which had been the land of my learning for the past seven years, and Kenny Savoie, a likeable, scruffy character who I have not seen since the age of thirteen (and does that make me feel old, well, I guess it does) was just as bewildered as I was: "Scott, don't lose me now!" Half-joking, half-not. He grabbed my arm as we wandered from room to room.

Then, much later, came Japan, and Cambodia, and if you ever live abroad, or even travel abroad, you will be confused, and you will question, and you will wander, and you will grow.


So, I wish you all a little bit of confusion. You may even find yourself in an endless series of perpetual, perplexing cycles of confusion and uncertainty, leading you to constantly seek out the answers to questions that others neglect to even ask. You may contain within yourself those seeds of restlessness that sprout ambition and courage. You may be forever wondering if you are now the person you were meant to be.


You may always be confused, if you're lucky.

BREADTH AND DEPTH

Two stories, one true, the other a fable:

First --

Pierre Trudeau -- Canada's greatest, truest prime minister, a man I accidentally met along with Greg Gaspari and Eric Daigle while waiting for movie stars outside of the Sutton Hotel in Toronto back in the fall of '95, a man who signed my paperback copy of Paul Auster's screenplays for SMOKE andBLUE IN THE FACE before he slowly strolled up Bay Street, a small old man who no one gave a second look to -- used to go scuba diving in the Arctic. In his fifties.

(See why he was the greatest?)

After he died, one of Trudeau's companions on those nautical adventures, a long-time doctor friend of his, recalled the glee and the determination the prime minister brought to his dives. He used to sit on the edge of the boat, and smile at the doctor, and look at the wide Arctic sky looming over them, and ask: "How deep do you think we can go?"

Second --

Two guys, one young and one old, are sitting on the top deck of a luxury cruise liner as it slowly bobs it way through the Atlantic ocean. It's a beautiful evening -- cool air, red sun slowly sinking into the water, bikini-clad babes milling around the pool. Lit cigars. Lavender lounge chairs. Red wine. Soft music. The whole deal.

The young guy, taking a puff on his stogie, slowly lets the smoke escape from his lips.

"My first time on a boat," the guy says. "Can you believe that. First time. Just look at that water, man. Look at it!"

"Yeah," the old guy says, smiling, watching a college girl in a two-piece do her laps in the pool in a series of lazy, I-ain't-gotta-be-nowhere strokes. "And you know what?"

"What?" the young guy says, taking another puff.

"That's just the top," the old guy says, turning his gaze to the sea. "That's just the top, kid."

I'll come back to these points in a moment. Honest. Don't go anywhere.

See, the thing is, I've stepped foot in seven countries.

For the record: Canada (the true north strong and free), the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia.

Three of them don't count. (Okay, okay -- they count as countries, yes, but they don't count for me. Why? Because I spent only two days in Hong Kong, one night in Malaysia, and
Thailand -- well, Bangkok has a heck of an airport. Got a KFC and everything.

I've spent a total of a month and a half, tops, in the States, and that's including over-the-border runs to Buffalo, New York, and vacations in Myrtle Beach and Orlando.

Japan? For four years the Japanese were my homeboys (and homegirls.)

Kampuchea? Seventeen months, and counting...

And what have I learned?

For me, it comes down to breadth and depth.

A former Canadian co-worker of mine here in Phnom Penh (who used to teach high school math at East York Collegiate in Toronto) has been to a hundred countries. A HUNDRED. That's a lot of stamps in a lot of passports.

I've been to seven.

But I lived in Canada for twenty-three years, and will again. (I'm assuming. Although Ice -
land is looking tempting. And El Salvador, well, it has its moments...)

Japan was my base for four years, and I feel a strong, almost electric pull to it.

And Cambodia is definitely surreal and intricate, but it's raw and real and compelling.

The thing is, I've spent time in these places. I've ate the food. I've listened to the music. I've watched their politicians talk and bargain, slowly realizing that they all the do the same
shuck-and-jive, no matter what the country; it's the beat that changes, is all.

Living in Canada, and Japan, and Cambodia, has given me depth. It hasn't made ME a deep person, no, but it's forced me to dip and then dive into the deep end of life. You have time to breathe and live and grow and think when you live a foreign country.

Passing through a country for a week or a month, you get breadth. You see a lot. You marvel a lot. But I don't think you get the chance to learn a lot. It's the difference between seeing five flashy movies and reading one good book, slowly, in sips, not gulps.

Not that you have to go to a foreign country to get depth. I think you can stay in the town that you grew up in for thirty, forty years, and, if you look around, and observe, and listen, and feel for the pulse and listen for the hum, you will get a depth deeper than you could ever have imagined.

I don't think one way's better than the other, breadth or depth, either-or, Freddy versus Jason, Alien versus Predator. Different strokes for different folks, as I like to say.

The import thing is, no matter where you are, or for how long you are there, to go deeper.

To dive in.

How deep do you think you can go?

TURN THE PAGE...

I like books. Love books. LIVE for books.

The test of a reader is: Have you read a book while walking down the street at any point in the last, oh, year.

If the answer is yes, then you're a reader.

I was walking out of the train station near my apartment in Japan, reading the first volume of Robert Caro's great, unending biography of Lyndon Johnson when a crazy Japanese homeless guy whacked me in the stomach with a two-by-four. (Howard Cosell's famous call of the Ali/Frazier fight echoes in my mind: "Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!") I was down for the count in Sagami-Ono, Japan.

I could sit in a room by myself and read and be reasonably happy for the rest of my life.

But is reading enough?

There's the world inside the books, and the world outside of the room where you're reading the books. And, at a certain point, those two worlds have to, should, collide.

You can't get everything from books. You can get a lot -- perspective, compassion, empathy, plain old knowledge -- but as a way of learning about the world, understanding the world, you gotta get out.

You gotta walk around.

You gotta travel, listen, observe.

I was given a book by a friend of the family called LOST JAPAN by Alex Kerr before I went to Japan. It was all about how the Japan of today doesn't compare to the Japan of yesterday, about how the modern Japan is trashing the traditional Japan, about how customs die and are buried on a daily basis, and now nobody in Japan seems to be noticing, let alone caring.

I read half of it. Put it down. I couldn't get it. Couldn't process it. Couldn't imagine it.

Why?

Because it was all about stuff that I had no first-hand contact with. Culture, economy, history and society -- I knew about that stuff in Canada. (Kind of. Well, a little.)

But in the rest of the world? Japan? Didn't affect me. My borders were square, and I was inside them, and I hadn't been out.

Cut to two years later, and I've lived in Japan, and taught the people, and ate the food, and watched the news, and learned the language (a little.)

I tried to read LOST JAPAN again. I found myself nodding. Understanding. Agreeing and disagreeing with his points. The book had a shape and a texture and a relevance that was suddenly, well, relevant to me. Because I'd been in that world for awhile, if not of it.

Books and reality are sometimes two different worlds for me.

The intersection of the two is when life really starts getting interesting. It's when 'life' with a capital 'L' meets and greets the thinking, pondering individual who turns the pages.

The intersection is when the boldness and vividness of life come into full play.

YOU SAY MACRO, I SAY MICRO

How do you save Cambodia?

How do you save Sudan?

How do you save Bangladesh?

And what does that mean, anyway -- how do you 'save' a country? Are some countries doomed, simply because of their location and their leaders?

No, according to Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's foremost macroeconomics gurus who is trying to figure out a way to stop poor countries from being poor.

His answer, as detailed in a New York Times story that ran last weekend, is simple: Money.

Lots and lots of money.

Simple.

Simplistic?

I kinda think so.

Now, I'm no economist. I took no poli-sci, economics, or development classes in university. (You're looking at a guy who dropped out of Grade 11 Accounting after a month, and whose idea of a good history lesson at the time was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.)

But I'm living in Cambodia, and work for an NGO, so I'll put in my two cents worth.

You can inject all the money you want into these poor, desperate countries in South-east Asia and Africa, and Sachs is probably right -- more money IS what is needed.

The problem, however, is...

1) Where will the money go? Most likely, right into the pockets of the charming, benevolent governments that lead most third-world countries. They don't care about the poor. They care about lining their own pockets with all the goodies that they can.

(Oh, sure, they care, yes, but in the same way that everybody cares about poor people. Nobody likes to see it. Nobody likes to think about it. And it all comes down to the individual and the individual's own life -- if he can improve it, he will. If he can use the money to get him out his own dire circumstances, he will. Why wouldn't he? He's been through hell and back, most likely. He's seen his family starve, die, beg. The biggest governments and wealthiest nations are still just groupings and gloppings of individuals who are looking after their own self-interest first, period. Any good that arises is a trickle-down side effect.)

2) Assuming that the money gets where it's supposed to go, will it be used efficiently? Probably not, because the people in charge of the governments of most of the poor countries in the world don't really know what the hell they're doing. They either siphon the money into their own bank accounts, or, should the money actually be used how it is intended to be, it will probably be used in a wasteful, inefficient manner.

Why? Well, they don't have the skills. They don't have the know-how. They don't have the time or the energy to implement the skills or the know-how, either, because life is short and projects are long and it's difficult to create something out of nothing. Difficult to build castles in the sand. Easier to watch them wash away as you kick back in your villa with a pina colada in one hand and the remote in the other.

This is not to say that there is no hope, because I think there is, but it lies in the next gen -
eration, and the generation after that, and the generation after that. And so international experts -- carrying lots and lots of cash, as Sachs suggests -- have to dig in deep and prepare for the long haul and do the best they can, with what they have, to help train and implement, by hook or by crook, government and community programs that are relatively easy to run. You have to train the young and hope that they can somehow break the endless cycle of dependen-
cy and corruption that so many third-world countries revolve around.

So, I think Sachs is right, to some extent -- it takes cash. But cash alone ain't enough, and I think he approaches everything from a macro-economic perspective.

All well and good, for the big issues.

But life is lived on the ground level, on a micro-scale.

Life is lived in inches.

ACID ATTACKS AND LOGIC BUBBLES

The Phnom Penh Post is a bi-weekly paper that prints somewhat extensive coverage of news stories that are making waves in Cambodia. They have one section in particular that is a must-read, if you are inclined to stories of a slightly morbid nature. It's basically a police blotter, detailing all the nefarious acts of violence that occurred through Cambodia in the previous two weeks.
Aside from the usual tales of robbery and incest, there are -- for a westerner -- crimes that seem uniquely, well, odd. (Not that robbery and incest aren't, you know, odd, but I'm talking about odd odd, uniquely Cambodian odd.)

Cases in point:

1) Acid attacks. If a woman finds out that her husband is cheating on her, it is rather disturb-ingly common for the wife to get a jar of acid, confront the guilty mistress, and douse her from head to toe (or as much flesh as she can possibly reach.) This does a nice job of scarring and disgfiguring the guilty tramp for life.

2) Anything involving an axe. There are gun crimes here, of course, and they usually involve AK-47s. But more common are axes. Oh, and knives. Can't forget about the knives. I think it's easier to shoot someone, personally -- not that I've ever done it, although I wouldn't mind trying. (A joke. A joke.) But an axe. Man. That takes proximity. That takes in-your-faceness. That takes metal striking flash. And blood, as Anthony Perkins moaned in Psycho. Blood...


Not that I'm an expert, but it seems here that crime is often triggered by something petty, and small, and sometimes slightly ridiculous -- like a cow that wanders over into the wrong field, or a pig-castrater being attacked by an unruly mob. (Then again -- is there any other kind of mob but an unruly one? I guess not.) And yes, there are such jobs as pig castrators, and it's not as easy as it looks.

The thing is, Cambodian society is, for the most part, very relaxed, laid-back, congenial. People have warm smiles and friendly eyes. But there's a lot of anger and frustration being reigned in. A lot is being witheld. And when tensions rise, and the temperature soars, and the stomach is empty -- stuff happens.

People are good, people are kind, and the world really could fit, quite comfortably, into an episode of FULL HOUSE -- I do believe all of that, to a certain extent. The majority of people do not want to strike out and bash someone. The majority of people are not interested in dousing acid in people's faces.

And yet --

Poverty tends to erode the moral values that we grow up with. Relentless, unending poverty does more than erode those values; it can, over time, obliberate them in a single, red-tinged blast. When you have no job and you have nothing to eat and you've never drinken clean water in your life and you have six kids to feed and it looks like the rain won't come for awhile so you can kiss those rice crops good-bye for another few weeks, thank-you very much --

When that's the case, and your angry neighbor comes on over to yell at you about your cow, and that axe is hanging just over there, on the wall, well.
Blood happens, sometimes.

Which doesn't justify it. Which doesn't condone it. But you gotta be able to piece together why bad things happen to good people, as the book says.

************************************************************************************


Speaking of piecing things together, here's one more thought about the reaction to Bush's re -
election, and it has to do with empathy. It has to do with imagination. It has to do with pro -
jection.

The great lateral thinking guru Edward Debono (www.edwdebono.com) talks about universes and logic. More specifically, 'logic bubbles'.

Everybody is in their own little universe. Doesn't matter whether you're black, white, Canadian or Cambodian, you're in your own little world. As Frasier asked Cliff Clavin on Cheers:
"What colour is the sky in your world, Cliff?"

Well, we're all Cliff Clavin's. We all see the sky a little bit differently. And, based on how we were raised, and by who we were raised, we all think and act differently. We all react according to our own logic.

So all those millions of Americans and Canadians and Europeans and Japanese and everyone else in the world who are flabbergasted, absolutely gobsmacked by Bush's reelection, and just can't believe how an idiot like that could be elected again, well, all of those people are approaching the issue in the wrong way, I think.

Meaning, they're judging book according to their logic bubble. According to their logic and the way that they see the world, view the world, understand the world, there's no reasonable manner in which anyone, well, reasonable could possibly vote for Bush. It doesn't add up.

Well, yes, but...

Look.

Look closer.

Step out of your logic bubble. Let it burst -- but just for a moment. You can go back to it. I promise.

Look at it this way.

You are a born-again Christian, as a heck of a lot Americans are. You got two kids. Church on Sunday. A mortgage you'll be paying for a good twenty more years. A nation under attack.

And the man leading your country is also a born-again Christian. He talks in a way that you can understand. He says he's gonna protect your country, and he's done that for the past three years. He believes what you believe. And the French and the Italians may not like it, but, well, heck, you weren't planning on going over there anyways anytime soon. Gotta look after your own soil first, right?

If you try and think about things according to not your own logic bubble, but somebody else's, well, I think it's easy to see how Bush was re-elected. I think it makes sense if you look at it that way.

I'm not saying it's good that Bush won. I'm not saying I would have voted for him. (And I'm Canadian, and I can't vote, but you get the drift.)

I'm saying this lack of understanding reflects a lack of curiosity, and a lack of imagination -- an imagination that requires to step outside of our own beliefs and values and try to under -
stand somebody else's -- not agree with those values, or even respect them -- just understand.

And if I'm a hard-core Christian, what' s the most important thing in my life?

My relationship to God and Christ.

And if there's a leader who shares those identical concerns, and is a tough, plain-speaking son of a gun to boot, well, he's got my vote.

Simple.

Never underestimate the power of religion in American society.

And remember that your logic bubble is extremely, completely irrational to millions of other people.

In Ontario, if a fifteen year old decided to shave his head and don the robes of a Buddhist monk for a few years, he would probably be taken to a counsellor.

In Cambodia, he would gain the respect of his family and the reverance of the whole society.

It's all about perspective.

Last thing: You can't reason somebody out of something that they weren't reasoned into believing.

Are people reasoned into their particular religious beliefs? No. It comes from childhood, or it comes from emotional crises, or it comes via revelation.

You can reason all you want, via facts and figures and news articles, about how much of a twit Bush is.

But if he's a Christian, and I'm a Christian, well, he ain't usin' reason to get my vote.

He's speaking to my beliefs.

And beliefs will trump reason every single time.

You gotta project.

Break out of your logic bubble every now and then.

Consider life from that strange, distinctly other way of life, and you may be surprised what you find.

FOREIGN AND TRUE

A few weeks ago I was on the back of a moto coming back from work, and I noticed a young tourist bopping around with the typical tourist attire -- white t-shirt, black shades, copy of LONELY PLANET CAMBODIA gripped tightly in his fist, walking in that slow, slightly hesitant gait that all travellers from time immemorial have somehow patented and passed on.

The only difference?

The dude had only one arm.

A few minutes later I saw a Cambodian walking across the street, and he only had one arm, but it took me a few seconds for that to register.

The thing is, in Cambodia, there's a lot of amputees -- I mean, a lot. Arms, legs, hands, feet -- you name it, a lot of them, tragically, are missing it, due to the millions of unexploded mines left by the Khmer Rouge, not to mention unexploded bombs that Nixon and Kissinger dropped oh so many moons ago. (Thanks, guys.)

So why didn't I notice the Cambodian guy? Because I'm used to it. Because I see it everyday. Because the more you see something, the more it becomes routine, every-day, unextraordin-
ary. A white guy walking around missing his right arm? I don't see that every day. It's novel. It's patently unique.

Living abroad forces you to notice. At home, where you're from, you're lulled into a safe slumber of innocence. This is the way the world works, and this is the way that traffic lights work, and this the way that they count their change for you at the convenience store when you buy your six pack of MOUNTAIN DEW. It's all so routine that you don't even realize it's routine. You're in a bubble, a universe of your own, without even knowing it.

And then I went to Japan, and my universe exploded, and I realized that no, no, things are done differently here. You can spend years examining, exploring and trying to figure out those differences. (I know. I did.)

The thing is, after a few years in a foreign land, the very things that first freaked you out or amazed you or simply caused you to shake your head in stupefied bewilderment gradually become as ordinary as the linoleum on the kitchen floor in the house that you grew up in. (Do you remember what that looked like? Maybe. But you may have to think about it for a second or two. It being so ordinary and all...)

Even Cambodia -- fascinating, godforsaken country that it is -- can become routine.

The trick is, you have to look for the things that will transport you out of yourself and into that wonderful state of being which is so transcendent but so elusive, too, that realm known simply and irrevocably as: curiosity. Curiosity as a state of mind. Curiosity as a philosophy. Curiosity as a means of satisfying some unknown intrigue inside of you that is desperate to find out more, more, more about the people and places around you. Too many people are only curious about what is next on t.v. tonight. The limit of their curiosity is the edge of the remote control.

So, my unasked for advice: Be curious. Look around. Look twice at things you look once at every day. Examine them closer. See what makes them tick. Take nothing for granted.

You may find something you didn't expect. You may be elevated out of the routine and end up someplace foreign and true.

Dubya

A couple of uninformed Canadian thoughts (via Cambodia) on Bush's re-election:

1) The fact that Bush received millions of more votes than Kerry, and that everyone in the media was really, really surprised by this, proves that the media is a lot more liberal than I realized. For the past year there's been so much hatred spewn out at Bush on the news and on the Net that you could get the impression that Bush was clearly unloved in his own land, at the bottom of the list ahead of Jeffrey Dahmner and just below Ben Affleck.
Uh-uh. Not the case.

The media doesn't focus on the millions and millions of evangelical Christians in the U.S., especially the ones who didn't vote.

Bush's campaign team did. And has been doing so for the last four years.

Praise Jesus. 'Cause they sure as heck are. And maybe they're onto something...

2) Someone made a good point: Clinton and Carter were two liberals who grew up in the conservative south. They spent their lives learning how to talk about their own political views (which were those of the minority in Arkansas and Georgia) in a way that was clear, friendly, respectful and persuasive. Kerry grew up in the north, surrounded by the wealthy liberal elite, and so he never had the opportunity, or needed the opportunity, to hone and refine the sweet-talkin' sensibility needed to woo somebody of a different political persuasion over to your side.

When necessary, Clinton and Carter can both sound like two country-bumpkins. A lot of words come to mind when talking about Kerry -- but 'bumpkin' ain't one of them.

3) Another good point someone much smarter than me made a few years back: How different is your life when a new leader takes office? I'm not talking about the changes in foreign policy, of domestic issues, or the economy -- I'm talkin' about your daily, everyday, go-to-work-and-come-on-home life. How different is it? Granted, some people are affected by presidential or prime ministerial switcheroos -- especially those in the military. But for most people, well, their lives stay pretty much the same. They go to work, and their taxes may increase a little bit, and they may get irritated or angry over the direction of the overall country -- but is their family much different? Is their social life or working life radically altered?

I dunno.


4) Another point somebody much smarter than me made: Bush is probably the best politician of the last forty years. Not the smartest leader. Not the most competent, or even likeable, head of state. But the best politican. Even better than Clinton. Why? Well, everyone agrees that Bush ain't too swift, is alienating the world, and has had everything given to him on a silver platter.

But he's been elected president.

Twice.

With more of the popular vote than anyone in twenty years, I think.

A young government official once asked former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien what the definition of a good politician is:

"The guy who wins," Chretien said.

Malcolm X, Scott Baio, Yao Ming...

My old dormitory friend, a bright young Albertan I'll call "Jacoba" (because that's, um, her name) who is currently articling her brains out in a law firm somewhere, made an interesting point to me in an e-mail. She's smart, this kid is (or she was when I knew her, way back when, before the crack and the speed finally took hold -- which is a joke, Klinger, a joke), and she said that she thinks that we are witnessing the end of the American empire, with the dawn of a new one yet to be determined.

Seems a strange thing to say, what with the Yanks kicking major Rambo butt around the world, but perhaps the Americans have reached as far as they can go. When you reach the top, the pinnacle, there's nowhere else to go but down, right?

And so the next great empire is...

If you ever read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, you'll notice that at the end of the book, (which was the end of his life, too) Malcolm talked about how he wished he had time learn Chinese and Arabic, because those were the two major languages that would come into play in the coming years.

Can you say "right on the money?"

It certainly seems like China is poisted, in the next thirty years, to change the global course of the economy, and the military, and possibly even every major sports, except for hockey. (Yao Ming, anyone?)

And there's no question that the Arab world will be at the heart of international relations for the next generation or two.

But wait...

Maybe we're all too dualistic in nature. Maybe we've bred by the Cold War to think of everything in terms of dualities -- of good and evil, left and right, the West and the East, Joanie versus Chachi.

Maybe, instead, there will be the U.S. in this corner. And over there, wearing the red trunks with yellow stars, weighing in at a whopping one billion people, there will be China. And somewhere in the middle, and off to the side, and look, over in that corner there, will be a series of multiple contenders for the belt. Smaller states, lessened in military and economic power, yes, but potent in geography and geo-social-political-bubblicious strategic position.

Maybe, instead, we will stop thinking of the world in clean-cut, divisible entities. There is a merging and a blending going on -- of people, ideologies, political philosophies.

Everyone's got a place at the table now.

And whether "Jacoba's" right, and this really is the end of the American empire, well, who knows? It will be a hell of a show to watch, I know that much.

Get me ringside seats to that one.

PARTIES AND DISTANCE

The twenty-ninth of October was a Friday, which also happened to be the coronation day of the new king, son of the old king, and it also happened to be my birthday, conicidentally enough. There was lots of fireworks, and singing, and speeches transmitted over loudspeakers, not a word of which I could understand, mostly because the sound quality was poor, and it was in Khmer, and I was very, very high up, on top of a building, waiting for dinner.

On top of INTERED, this would be, which is a language school here in Phnom Penh; there is a lovely outdoor restaurant just down the hall from the classrooms. If the students don't want to learn English, they can eat. And drink Coke. And be merry.

As was I, that night. It was a good night, with American and Indian and Khmer and Filipino friends. A mix of the world, drinking and laughing and eating together. Talking about nothing much at all. Forcing me to do my imitation of university staff members. Eating too many french fries and drinking too many Cokes (my diet mercifully suspended, if only for a day.)

Somewhere, just down the road, behind the palace gates, there was a new king being crowned. I'm no king, and no crown was placed on my head, but it was a royal night, I must say, a royal night.

************************************************************************************

If you mention that Cambodia is halfway around the world from Canada, requiring almost twenty hours of flight time, that sounds like a long way. As was Japan -- a minimum of twelve hours, Tokyo to Toronto. A fair hike.

But is it really all that far? Isn't it relative?

Less than a day, is all. From Cambodia to Canada, from cultures so extremely different that they appear to exist not in the same universe, let alone on the same planet. And you can go from here to there in a day and a bit. A lot of waiting in airports, yes, and you will have passed through five airports and four countries, too, but still. Not that long, in the grand scheme of things.

Where I grew up, in St.Catharines, Ontario, the big shopping mall was (and still is, I'm presuming) the Pen Centre, and that was a good fifteen, twenty minute drive from down where I lived. Twenty whole minutes. You take the bus, you're talking a solid half hour. At age twelve, that was far. That was far. I think you even had to transfer at the downtown terminal. In high school I met some people who actually lived down that way, which seemed incredible to me. And Fort Erie, where we would often drive to on weekends to visit friends, was, like, forty-five minutes away.

So, in the space of about ten or twelve years, I've gone from considering my house to the Pen Centre to be far, to believing that Cambodia to Canada isn't all that far.

Progress?