Random thoughts on a Sunday morning...
The thing I don't understand about ghosts is, if there ARE ghosts, why don't they ever show themselves at nine o'clock on a Saturday night in the middle of Times Square? Why don't they reveal themselves in broad daylight during the seventh inning stretch of a Yankees game?
Maybe there are certain rules that ghosts follow. They might have their own system set up, and we -- the living -- are just unaware of what it's all about. They may have their own union or something, mandating when and how they can reveal themselves, and to whom.
That might explain why you never hear of the ghost of Japanese geisha showing up in Sarnia, Ontario. Just doesn't happen. You never see the lonely, desperate spirits of the poor people slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge wandering around a mall in Toronto. Why is that? It makes me think, should ghosts exist, which I'm on the fence about, that there ARE regulations. There IS a code. Maybe they have everything planned out. You can't just cross over between continents. You can't jump back and forth in time.
If they do, in fact, exist, they always decided to roam around abandoned buildings at two a.m., revealing themselves for only a moment or two to a selected few, which leads me to suspect that they have a plan. They have a plot. There's a system at work.
I have the same questions about U.F.O.'s. Why doesn't one just land in the heart of Tokyo? I'm tired of this we-saw-it-late-at-night-hovering-above-a-cornfield-in-Nebraska stuff. Just show up on the White House lawn, for once.
For God's sakes, simpy REVEAL yourselves!
Once and for all.
Is that too much to ask?
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It's the beginning of the month, a December month, 2004, and the sun is shining, the air is hot, the streets are dusty, the sky is blue. Somewhere in the world the Christmas season is taking hold, I'm sure of it, I REMEMBER it, but here, in Phnom Penh, aside from the odd Christmas tree put up in stores to humor and entice the foreigners to unleash their American and Cambodian cash, there's little reminder of Kris Kringle and his merry men. Somewhere, I'm sure of it, Kris and his elves are working feverishly in their workshop, working their asses off to meet that deadline that is only a few weeks away. I'm not knocking Santa, he works hard, does is best, and Christmas Eve is only one night and all, but I think he left Cambodia off his flight path. I think Santa should think about adding Southeast Asia to his list next year. The kids could use him.
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You know how you can never find your OTHER sock, the one that makes a pair? I'm convinced that there is some kind of a rip, maybe even a portal in the space-time continuum that has been programmed or designed simply to allow those socks to leave this particular dimension and enter another one parallel to our own.
Think about it. Everybody always loses the 'other' sock. Where do they go? They're rarely found. Maybe it has something to do with the idea of a 'pair' itself, and socks, no matter what material they're made of, represent something in the universe that is not meant to be PART of a pair. Yes, yes, we have two feet, requiring two socks, but maybe the universe is sending a kind of signal, via the missing socks, that two feet are one foot two many. That we're wasting one of those feet. That that extra foot is, in fact, a form of gross excess. So the universe, perhaps of its own free will, perhaps through the deliberate machinations of a higher being, allowed a portal to be created that was specifically intented to go after those socks. To nab them before we could find them. Maybe they're tossed into some elaborate junk drawer that exists on the border between this dimension and the next. All those socks, millions of them, waiting. A symbol of our waste. Marooned in the purple, starless vortex of the space-time continuum. Wondering what they did wrong (if socks have consciousness, of course.)
Sometimes the universe does send messages, you see, and the 'missing' socks may be one of them: Don't waste things. Use what you have. On one foot you can do a lot, is what these missing socks may be saying.
(I'm not crazy. I swear...)
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This is a Chris Rock line, and it's so funny in its simplicity and logic that if it doesn't make you laugh, then that implies that my written delivery is not nearly as funny as Rock's spoken delivery, which will offend me. Greatly.
"You know when a plane crashes, and the only thing that ever remains intact is the 'black box'? Why don't they just make THE WHOLE PLANE out of that box?"
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I was talking to an old Swiss gentleman at a restaurant the other day, a retired chap who had spent thirty years playing music in and around Asia, and he was on a visa run from Thailand, first time to Cambodia, only staying in Phnom for a few days, in fact, and he was asking me about the city, where to go, what to see, how much to pay the motodope drivers, and I was answering him as best as I could, not even thinking about my answers too much, and it only struck me later that I had once been a kid from St.Catharines who, only twelve, thirteen years ago, played hockey every Saturday or Sunday morning at Bill Burgoyne arena for seven, eight years (usually there, yes, but also at the Haig Bowl, the arena down by the General Motors plant, but not too often at that one) and now I was most definitely not a kid and I was nonchalantly throwing off my knowledge about Cambodia to a slightly grizzled and weathered but kindly foreign gent and, while my information was not necessarily INSIGHTFUL, no, it was, more or less, ACCURATE, and it made me think about how far we can go in life, literally and figuratively, how much we can learn, how confident we can become, how vast and how small our own little worlds really are.
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