HOW I LOST IT, AND WHY; HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I kind of lost it yesterday.

You know the scene in the movie where the guy being yelled at says "Let's talk about this tomorrow," and the other guy, the pissed-off guy, says "No, we're going to talk about this now"? That was me, last night. The pissed-off guy. The one that people are telling to calm down, relax, let's talk this out. Using the words you hear in movies.

Two days ago I was bit by a dog while beginning my run. To go for a run I have to go up a short incline that borders an elementary school on the right, and a house on the left that features two dogs that are always growling and barking, and often roaming around free. The other day was one of those 'roaming-around-free' days, and one of the dogs decided to nick me in the leg. Not a Cujo bite, no, but a bite is a bite, and after fourteen years of running, this is the first time I've been bitten.

I complained to the owners. Or tried to, anyways. The owners were away, in the provinces. Fine. The kid in charge, the one who answered my call at the gate, a teenaged kid, was named Blue. Whatever. I've heard stranger names. He was nice enough, apologizing, telling me that it wouldn't happen again.

The next morning, while trudging up the hill to go to work, the dogs were loose again.

Not fine.

Last night I went to the house again, just as the owners were getting home. I explained who I was. They tried to brush me off. Come back tomorrow, they said. We're tired, they said. This is the Philippines, and things are different here, and you can't blame a dog, yada-yada-yada. I told them I wasn't blaming the dog, I was blaming them. Then I asked if the dog had had any shots. When they said no, I kinda sorta pretty much lost it.

"My girlfriend is dying of cancer," I yelled, the dark mountain night around me doing little to absorb my raised voice. "If she gets bitten, she will get sick, and she will die. Do you understand that?"

It went on and on, as arguments do. A fragile peace was enacted. I left angry, almost enraged. I flashed back to the time in Japan when I was whacked in the stomach with a two-by-four by a homeless nut, while nobody around me helped me.

I've never really lashed out at anybody before like that. I'm not proud of it, but I'm a LITTLE bit proud that they may be worried. Because just this morning I heard from a local fellow that his wife was bitten by that same dog last year. It's not dogs running around loose around here that worries me, because a lot of dogs run around loose; it's the crazy and vicious ones running around that get my blood boiling. It's not me getting bitten that worries me; it's a cancer patient getting bitten, or one of the kids from the school not five metres from their house.

There's a lot of things I don't understand about living in Japan, in Cambodia, and now in the Philippines. But some things are universal. It's not right to yell at somebody, no, but it is right to stand your ground. When you're ticked off, remembering that distinction can be quite different. For the New Year I will ask myself to keep a cooler, more level head. I will try to have access to the better angels of my nature at the necessary time. And I will hope that the stuff I keep deep down inside of me, the passion and feelings and rage and compassion will come out in a better, more humane manner.


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On a lighter note, now that that's all out of my system, Happy New Year!!! Many thanks to the handful of people who read this blog, and all the best for a safe and fulfilling 2006. The best is yet to come.

DOES THE UNIVERSE, IN FACT, HAVE A WHOOPEE CUSHION AT THE READY? OR IS IT JUST YOU AND ME AFTER ALL...

Whenever one of my students complains about a particular assignment or quiz or test being too 'difficult', I always respond the same way, saying: "Life is difficult."

Not a particulary original comeback, somewhat smug and flippant, truth be told, and it's exactly the kind of comment I would have absolutely despised a teacher of mine saying back when I was a student. (If it's true that we all eventually become our parents, perhaps it's inevitable that we become our teachers, too.) I've even been called on it -- when one of my students asked a particular annoying question (meaning, a question I didn't have the answer to, but should have), I muttered "that's difficult," to which he cheerfully responded, sensing his opening: "Life is difficult!"

And yet, it is, isn't it? Life. Difficult. I think when we say (or when I say) that 'life is difficult', we mean 'life isn't fair'.

And yet, what is 'fair'? Does fair mean that we're all born looking like movie-stars, blessed with the intellect of Einstein, granted a lifespan that leads us from year to year with the grace of an angel and the luck of the luckiest penny? If we break our leg, or crash our car, or come down with cancer, does this mean that the universe has it in for us?

I tend to think that way, in my most stupid and selfish moments. As if the universe gives a shit what I'm doing. As if the universe plots and pleads against us or with us, hastening our noble moments to fruition while simultaneously getting ready to put the whoopee cushion under our asses when we least expect it. Since the possibility of a supernatural deity guiding and gliding our lives remains somewhat distant and opaque, I tend to view the cosmos as an entity unto itself, its own God, perhaps, or Gods, rather, made up of an infinite number of divine parts, some naughty, some nice, some both at one and the same time. Like a Santa Claus who constantly confuses his two lists of our virtues and vice.

The only way to combat such an indifferent and plotting universe is to rely on our own humanity to combat the unfairness of the battlefield of life. Instead of relying on the Lord, we rely on each other. Instead of looking for clues in the weather, we look for clues within ourselves, and adjust accordingly.

Who knows? There may, in fact, be a God, or there may, in the end, merely be a self-sustaining universe that whips us around according to its own celestial rules. Either way, when life gets difficult, I think it's better, more humane, more comprehensible, to simply step outside and feel the air and take a quick look around to see who is out there that we can help. Or who may be able to help us.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

I've never lived in a place before where clouds touch the sky and the ground at one and the same time, but that's what happens here, in the mountains, in Baguio. Houses are nestled along a winding slope of mountain edge; the clouds, so close you can touch them, smell them, roll around and dwell in them, drift in and out and between the forest green of the tress and shrubs, dirt and rock. There was a moment, my first or second day here, driving down the highway, staring at the dwindling day through the passenger-side window, when I thought spotted fire. There was smoke everywhere, billowing and bragging its wares in drifting streams of off-shade white. Then I realized: Those are clouds, not smoke. The clouds mingle then merge with the land and the roads. They almost share the same space as us. We're neighbours with the infinite. We can live amongst the clouds and pretend that the real world cannot touch us here, that the clouds' mystical vapors can shield us and protect us from our own fragile selves.

BILL MURRAY IS A GOD -- AND SO ARE YOU

Groundhog Day is one of those films that I catch a few minutes of on cable every five or six years, never from the beginning, always in bits and pieces, and I'm reminded, each and every time, what an insightful movie it is. I saw it for the first time when I was in high school, and laughed at it, and enjoyed it, and forgot about it. Over the years it's gained a kind of cult popularity within spiritual and religious circles. It's not a movie that looks like a masterpiece; it looks, in fact, like what it is -- a Harold Ramis movie, directed in that competent comedy style by the guy who brought you Vacation and Club Paradise and Analyze This and Analyze That and Multiplicity and, lest we forget, Caddyshack. It's a mainstream comedy movie, shot as such, with nothing arty or pretentious about it. Given all that, I can also say that it's something close to brilliant.

You probably know the plot. Bill Murray (in a role not unlike the one he portrayed in the underrated Scrooged) plays a grumpy weatherman assigned to wait for the annual coming-of-the-groundhog one cold February morning in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania. Only problem is, he can't escape the town; he can't leave; he wakes up each and every day and it's the same day, the day he got there, with everybody doing the same things and saying the same things and living out the same actions. He's stuck with them. He's stuck with himself.

Simple. A neat little fantasy twist that would make Richard Matheson or Rod Sterling or Stephen King proud. But it's not the hook that makes the movie; it's the metaphor. Here is a man who is not happy with his life or the people around him. His life is routine, boring, uneventful. The same shit happens, repeatedly. He can't escape it. He tries to escape it. No luck.

So what does he do? Tries to leave. When he can't do that, he tries to use his newfound knowledge about the rhythms of this one particular day to his own advantage; he learns about people's habits and moods and emotions, hoping that by knowing these, by using these, he can get people to love him. Doesn't work. So what happens? Frustrated, he tries to kill himself.

Even that doesn't work. And what's interesting is that the film clearly shows, after one suicide attempt, a few of the other characters commenting on his horrific truck crash. What does this mean? It means that the world does go on, without him; it means that other people can leave, grow, move on. It's himself that he's stuck with, and his own life. We are all the main actors in our own movie. I'm not entirely sure that Ramis had this existential offshoot in mind when filming that particular scene, so sly and subtle it is, but it works.

Even death can't claim him. He wakes, up again, in the same day, repeatedly.

Eventually, possibly out of sheer boredom and hopelessness, he begins to use his knowledge of the town and others to benefit the town and others. He starts doing everything for others instead of everything for himself. Instead of trying to impress the girl he loves, having given up on her ever coming around to his romantic point of view, he simply does good shit for those around him. Stuck in the same day, the same routine, he makes the best of it for those around him. After all, they, too, are entrapped in the same monotony; even so, he can make their lives better. Such selflessness thus causes the woman he loves to fall in love with him. Which causes him to magically, the next day, wake up, in a new day. Life has moved on, and he with it.

A simple story, really. The story of our lives, actually. Doing the same stuff day after day, trapped in routine, going nowhere. Trying to sideswipe such boredom by chasing after our own selfish desires will do nothing to alleviate such pain; only by inserting ourselves into others' lives and others' existences will we be to reach beyond ourselves. That's what the film is saying, in a comedic, Bill Murray-like way. It's utter unpretentiousness, its humor, its understated warmth and generosity-- that's what makes the film work as a better-than-average comedy, and it's also why so many Christians and Buddhists and Muslims have seen the film as embodying and embracing their own particular religious philosophy.

It's one of those movies that may, in fact, upon reflection, simplify and clarify and embody the process of living itself more clearly and succintly and empathetically than any other film I can think of.

"I'm a God," Bill Murray says in the film, "not the God. I don't think."

There it is, the crystalization of the whole film, of human existence, right there.

If there's a more concise philosophy of life and living and how to approach our own roles in an uncertain universe than that, I haven't heard it.

THE SKY ABOVE AND THE GROUND BELOW

Cancer is a lonely word, especially for an agnostic. Sitting in the oncology ward of the Baguio City Medical Centre, chatting with a friend of Helen's, a cancer survivor, a Christian, a believer, I feel shame at my own uncertainty. She is telling me that God saved her, that God healed her, that she was spared despite the doctor's certainty surrounding her supposedly terminal condition, and that Helen can be spared, too -- and who am I to argue with that? She is here. She prayed; she survived. Shit, if that happened to me, I'd be a believer too.

But truth be told, I've never understood prayer. I understand the need for it, yes, the reaching out, the longing to be heard, the hope for redemption and absolution and change. But I've never got it. If God has a plan, then what good is prayer? And if His plan is to give a thirty-five year old mother ovarian cancer, then what kind of a plan is that? That's the best His power can do? There are times when I want to take God outside and confront him in the back alley behind the garbage cans and ask Him just who the hell he thinks he is, fucking around with us mere mortals like this. I can accept free will; fine. Let us humans fend amongst ourselves and screw up our own little lives. But I can't accept cancer, or tornadoes, or malaria. The older I get, the more I realize that the questions kids ask, the dumb questions, the why-is-the-sky-blue questions, the where-do-we-go-when-we-die questions, are really the only questions out there. Everything else is scenery.

And yet these very same basic, maddening inquiries are the ones that linger and fester, that make me feel like Allie Fox in Paul Theroux's brilliant book The Mosquito Coast, which was made into an equally compelling movie (featuring what is probably Harrison Ford's finest performance). Fox ranted and raved about religion and society and the stupidity of man; if I don't catch myself, watch myself, I could end up like that.

Still, cancer attacking someone you care about does that to you. Makes you ask the big questions, and then pisses you off when the answers don't come. And then you realize that cancer's everywhere. I reread the Afterword to Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and am reminded that its original title was Cancer, until his wife wisely told him that that was a bad idea, an invitation to doom. I read an article about the making of Rebel Without A Cause in Vanity Fair and learn that the director's mother died of ovarian cancer. I sit and wait in the oncology ward and watch the sad but patient faces of people with the disease, hoping against hope. Praying.

It is what it is. I will keep asking the questions and waiting for the answers. The consolation comes with the realization that, afterlife or not, master-plan or not, prayers or not, there is still today. Today is real and present. I can feel it, however fleeting. There is still the here and the now, the people around me and the times we share, the essential solidity of the sky above and the ground below, which may, in the end, by its sheer emotional, tactile, resonance, render any kind of heaven null and void.

WHEREUPON A TINY PORTION OF A DICTIONARY FINDS THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NECESSARY TO VALIDATE A LONG AND PATIENT LIFE

Entering a new country, living in a new country, I'm always struck by one simple, somewhat stupid observation: This has been here all along! All of this! The people and the cars and the mountains and the malls! While I was over there, all of this was over here! Going on! Ongoing!

We tend to think that where we are is where it's at. And it is. But there's all this other shit going on that exists on a simultaneous plane of existence, next door, close, but accessed rarely, if at all.

The same goes for words.

There's a lot of words I don't know. English words, that is. I'm not talking about Icelandic or Ukranian or Welsh or Finnish -- I don't know any of those words. It's one of my pet theories, the one about everybody being almost completely illiterate, because most people only know one, two, languages, but there's hundreds and hundreds of languages, so almost everybody is illiterate in most of them.

But let's focus on English. It's what you and I know best. But every now and then I come across a word that I've never heard before. Just the other day I ran into 'chiliastic'. This professor was using this word to compliment a book explaining why Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and all I could think was: You blowhard twit.

I mean, 'chiliastic'. Come on. I consider myself fairly well-read; I went to school. But I've never, ever come across the word 'chiliastic' in any kind of book, and it's one of those words that academics use to prove that they're smart and erudite. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Or 'pulchritude'. This one I found in Jane Smiley's novel Horse Heaven. She's a graceful, elegant storyteller who, every and now then, throws in a word like this. I'm reading along, thinking I'm smart, thinking I'm sophisticated, and then I come across 'pulchritude', and I'm reminded once again that I'm a hick from St.Catharines.

Ah, but here's the thing. Here's the thing, goddamnit.

They're real, those words. They exist. I found them, whole and complete. They were there, in an old dictionary on the shelf where I'm living, the beat-up kind, the kind your grandfather keeps on the shelf in his den, way up top, above the stack of National Geographics. I flipped through the pages, and sure enough, there they were: 'chiliastic' and 'pulchritude.'

How long had they been waiting there, those words? Decades, I'm thinking. I would bet that nobody in the house I'm staying at had opened those books to find those words. Somebody, years ago, had proofread those words, and they had been inserted into the dictionary, and that dictionary had been typset, had been bound, had been released for sale, and there they sat. Those words. For years and years, nobody had looked for them. Nobody had asked how they were, or sent them cookies. They just sat there, in black and white. Waiting. Patient.

Until the day I liberated them. I flipped through those pages, and suddenly there they were, and their function in life, their purpose in life, had been validated. They were not meant to be forgotten in a dusty book on a rackety shelf. They flew up from the page and into my mind. They acquired a new life.

I felt proud of those words. They had attained the kind of glory they must have been seeking all along. They could now die a dignified death. They had been used.

I put the dictionary back on the shelf and looked at it for awhile. So many other words, waiting to be read. A parallel world that had existed next to my own for so long, invisible only because of my ignorance. Those words, all of them, page after page, weren't asking for much, really -- just a bit of time and attention. And yet, how could I validate them all?

I can't; there's not enough time. I had to turn away from that shelf and go back to my life.

There the book sat, and I could feel those words staring at my back as I walked away. We all just want to be acknowledged.

SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS...

Two different signs at two different points in the road:

Sign #1:

Welcome to Bagiuo City! The Cleanest City In The Philippines...

Sign #2:

Welcome to Baguio City! Smoke Belchers Will Be Prosecuted...


Now, this is what I'm thinking.

Is Baguio City the cleanest city in the Philippines simply because all the smoke belchers have been prosecuted? Are all these smoke belchers, felons that they are, crowded together in some dingy, needless to say smoky cell at the bottom of the police station somewhere?

Because goddamnit, if there's one thing I could never, ever stand, it was smoke-belchers. Don't know about you.

RECENTLY READ BOOKS; A RANDOM OBSERVATION

Some stuff I've read recently, if you're interested:

FAT OLLIE'S BOOK by Ed McBain -- McBaind (aka Evan Hunter, who passed away earlier this year) is the master of the police procedural, and this is one of his last few books. Great dialogue, familiar characters, a murder to solve -- what's not to love?

I'LL TAKE YOU THERE by Joyce Carol Oates -- Oates is one of the few 'literary' writers who is also a first-rate storyteller. Most of the so-called stylists, in my opinion, score an 'a' on theme and character and prose and metaphor but flunk out completely on narrative momentum. This book tells a young woman's coming-of-age in the mid-fifties with that philosophical grace and storytelling trajectory that Oates seems to have patented. And it has a final sentence that explains the title and confuses me even more, but because it's Oates, I'll forgive her.

LOST BOY, LOST GIRL by Peter Straub -- Straub could be called 'the thinking man's horror writer', and this book, supernatural in tone (or is it?) only further solidifies that claim. It's spooky and creepy and moving and strange. Straub is also a very, very clever and sly, subtle writer; there are two, count 'em two sentences in here, carefully spaced out within the text, that make me reevaluate the entire book as a whole. The book is told through an omniscient third-person narrator, and also through the journals of its protagonist, novelist Timothy Underhill. And yet at one point, in the third-person section, Timothy Underhill pops up to make a personal comment. Which leads me to suspect that the book we're reading is actually the manuscript of Timothy Underhill as he uses his fictional prowess to understand and dissect, for himself and his own sanity, the disappearance of his nephew. The greatness of the book is that it can be read and enjoyed whether you buy my premise or not. (But I think my speculation is spot-on, because in another book, Mr.X, Straub slyly drops hints that his first-person narrator is actually African-American. I mean, really slyly. I missed the clues completely, only to feel like a numbskull after reading an interview with Straub where he fessed up as to his narrative trickiness.)

THE SWEET FOREVER by George Pelecanos -- A gritty crime book set in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1980's. I've read three other books by Pelecanos, all featuring African-American P.I. Derek Strange; this isn't a Strange book (although secondary characters from the later series pop up here), but it shows that Pelecanos' fascination with the urban underworld of his hometown, and how good people try to survive in a fucked-up environment, has been on his mind for quite some time. Read this book to see how to stretch out three days of narrative action to three hundred pages.

THE ALL TRUE ADVENTURES OF LIDIE NEWTON by Jane Smiley -- A fictional first-person memoir of a young woman roaming her way across American in the nineteenth century. Like so many books I've read by American writers recently, both 'popular' and 'literary' (god, I hate those terms), this one centres upon race, and the timebomb that slavery set off for whites and blacks alike. Smiley is a hell of a writer, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction. She nails the dialect and tone and emotions of her central character perfectly. (I'm assuming, not having been around in the nineteenth century.)

PALE HORSE COMING by Stephen Hunter -- Hunter is the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic of The Washington Post who just happens to write crime novels on the side, many them of featuring Arkansas sherriff Earl Swagger. This book, too, centres around issues of race and respect, albeit in the fictionalized Arkansas of the 1950's. Gritty and grim with lots of guns. But a moral core at its centre, I think, that the best crime fiction always seems to possess. Thoughts on morality and conscience are often more palatable when squeezed between the gunshots and mysteries of a good thriller, in my opinion.

GENERALISSIMO: CHIANG KAI-SHEK AND THE CHINA HE LOST by Jonathan Fenby -- An account of the battle between the Communists led by Mao and the other side, the ones fighting against communism, led by Chiang Kai-Shek. Like most biographies of famous wartime people, it focuses less on the personality and more on the events in which that personality was formed. Fair enough. I learned a lot about the internal conflict of the time within China, the war with Japan, the divided nature of the Chinese state -- but there's a lot of 'this happened, and then this happened, and, oh, then this happened, too...'

DOUBLE PLAY
STONE COLD by Robert Parker -- One of the things that ticked me off about my
WIDOW'S WALK Creative Writing classes was that they never allowed any 'genre' stories to be written for submission to the class -- no mystery, horror, sci-fi, romance, thrillers, comedies, etc. The dirty little secret of English departments is that few of the teachers have ever read outside of their own narrow clique of classics. The shame is that they miss out on fantastic, clean, concise examples of the kind of writing they're trying to teach -- writing exemplified by Parker, who has a minimalism that makes Hemingway look verbose, and a sense of pace and theme and tone that is haunting and wise and always, always fresh. And the story remains boss.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SPORTING LIFE by Mordecai Richler -- Richler was Canada's best-known novelist when he died a few years back, but, truth be told, I think he's a far, far better essayist and critic. (We all read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz back in high school, and it's a great book, but after that? I don't think his stuff is all that great.) Funny, savvy, sardonic, sarcastic writing here, but a sense of humanity runs throughout as he writes about hockey and baseball and fishing and African safaris.

On the shelf, waiting to be read:

RUN by Douglas E. Winter
SPEAKS THE NIGHTBIRD by Robert McCammon
HORSE HEAVEN by Jane Smiley
FIDDLERS by Ed McBain
THE PORTABLE FAULKNER by William Faulkner
HARD REVELATION by George Pelecanos

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I read something in Esquire recently that stuck with me. Something about experience. About diving into life. And it mentioned the fact that you if you choose to go out and experience, well, experiences, then you can't complain about the kind that you find, or the kind that find you. Everybody always says things like 'Oh, that'll be such an experience!', usually accompanied by a wide grin. And yet the assumption is that this 'experience' will be magical and wonderful and akin to eating a yummy chocolate muffin. But once you exit the shallow end and enter the deep end, anything can happen, and probably will happen, and will most definitely fall under the bold-type heading of 'experience'. We have to accept that which happens, even the experiences that leave us shell-shocked and weary. Not because it's God's plan, or even our plan, but because it happened, period -- to think otherwise is to invite only further grief and confusion.

That's what I'm trying to convince myself of, anyway. Not sure if it's working. I prefer the 'yummy chocolate muffin' type of experience, myself...

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THE PASSION OF THE SHATNER

I've been thinking a lot lately about Captain Kirk and Mr.Spock. Specifically, about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trekk III: The Search For Spock. Other people, more cultured and sophisticated and holy, may turn to the scriptures or the lord for their advice; I turn to the holy shrines of Shatner and Nimoy. We are who we are.

In Star Trek II we learn about the Kobayashi Maru, a simulation program at the StarFleet Academy wherein the young cadets were presented with a no-win scenario, a possibility that every captain and crew might very well encounter. Admiral Kirk (his position having been elevated in this film from that of a mere captain) lectures the young Vulcan Saavik (played by the young and impossibly slender Kirstie Alley) about the necessity of such a role-playing scenario. The only snag, of course, is that Kirk is a hypocrite; he was the only student in the history of the academy to actually beat the Kobayashi Maru situation, by secretly sneaking into the computer system and reprogramming the scenario so that there would be, in fact, a way to win. A way to live. Why did he do such a thing? As Kirk states later in the film: "I don't believe in a no-win situation."

Ah, but the genius of the film is that it presents Kirk with his very own 'no-win situation' later on in the film: the death of Spock, who sacrifices himself for the crew, who saves the lives of everyone on board the Enterprise but gives up his own life in the process.

Star Trek II may very well be placed on the same shelf as the Koran and the Bible in future times, if only because it is a metaphor for life itself. We are all stuck in a 'no-win situation'; none of us are getting out of alive. How we deal with that scenario, how we are forced to deal with it, in the lives of ourselves and others, is the crux of this film. And the crux of life. Hence, Star Trek II's celestial genius.

Not that I'm shortchanging its inevitable sequel, Star Trek III. Of course, in some ways Star Trek III is a colossal, monumental cheat; it subverts the wonderful sentiment of the previous film by essentially saying: "Actually, you know what? Vulcans can beat death! They can come back alive! They can rise from the dead!" Say what? That's not what we learned from the previous film -- that life was long, that aging was painful, that death was final, that hope can be relearned only at a great and painful price.

Granted, the filmmakers were clever enough and canny enough to hint at a possible salvation for Spock in Star Trek II, but still -- one can't help but feel a little bit sideswiped by the fairy-tale nature of Spock's resurrection in Star Trek III.

And yet.

The film redeems itself. It does so by highlighting the courage and compassion and essential goodness of Kirk and his crew in their quest to bring Spock back to life. They need to bring the remains of Spock back to Vulcan; they need the Enterprise to accomplish such a goal. Kirk goes to Starfleet command to ask permission; Starfleet, naturally, says go bleep yourself.

"The answer was no," Kirk tells his crew. "We are therefore going anyway."

Without a moment's hesitation. Without a pause. Kirk (and his crew, lest we forget) knows that by essentially stealing the Enterprise he is forfeiting not only his salary and his career but his entire reputation. He is violating dozens of laws, risking death himself, throwing to the wind everything he has ever worked for and dreamed of, and all of this for the mere shred of a chance that Spock could, in fact, come back to life due to his and his crew's efforts.

What would you do for a friend? What would you give up? What do you consider honorable? What do you consider noble?

These are the questions that Star Trek III asks, and answers. It is not as good a film as its immediate predecessor, no, but the questions it raises and the themes it explores have a weight and a density that I only dreamed of as a child. Thinking back, I realize that the values it espouses are good and worthy for children, and they are ideas I picked up on without realizing it. Watching Kirk and his crew casually throw aside their careers and reputations for the sake of (possibly) saving their friend, I was taught that your job is not what's important, that honor and dignity mean nothing if they are not put to some sort of real-life test, that it is worth sacrificing all that you hold dear for the needs of the one, rather than the needs of the many.

I've never watched The Next Generation. Or Deep Space Nine. Or Voyager. Or Enterprise. As a child, when I saw the bald captain of the new crew, I pledged allegiance to Kirk and his bridge. The kind of pledge a child makes, as if betraying a fictional character would actually have weight in the real world. Funny, the shit we think about, and the shit we ultimately turn to for solace.

For some people, all they really needed to know they learned in kindergarten. For me, I'm starting to suspect that I could just watch Star Trek II and III over and over again, and call it a day.

Oh Canada

Canada continues to creep up on me in the oddest of places. While recently wandering through the Bangkok airport, killing time in that sluggish, aimless way that only airports allow, I checked out one of the myriad mini-bookshops that that seem to sprout, whole and complete, every forty feet, in between the Internet cafes and just beside the Duty Free shops, bursting with chocolate. One of the books on display was a collection of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler's essays on sports. Having not been in a Canadian bookstore in well over a year, it had been, logically, a great little while since I'd seen any book about anything remotely Canadian gracing the shelves anywhere in Asia. I bought the book (paid in baht), and spent the better part of the hour flight between Bangkok and Phnom Penh reading about Edmonton hockey and Montreal baseball, written in that droll, sardonic style that was Richler's grumpy trademark.

Oh, but there's more Canadiana drifting through the air than one would at first think. Here, in the Philippines, in Baguio City, at the mall. (Of all places.) While waiting for the afternoon matinee of the latest Harry Potter flick with a ten-year old boy and a twelve-year old girl in tow I noticed the familiar voices of SCTV's Bob and Doug Mackenzie (aka Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, the latter having been born in my hometown) floating from the loudspeakers, their classic, if irreverent, version of 'The 12 Days of Christmas' lighting up the drizzly, mallish afternoon. (Malls are malls, everywhere.)

So what am I to make of these disconnected examples of Canadian culture intruding themselves into my present-day, Asian experience? (And hey you, yeah, you in the back, Canada does, too, have a 'culture'. Are you trying to tell me that Alan Thicke just, like, emerged from nowhere? Hell, no.)

Probably not too much to make of it, I suppose. Canada is a G-8 country, after all; it's people are literate, and talented, and, periodically, worldly. Word gets around. Why shouldn't I find Canadian books in Thai airports, or comedy parodies in Filipino malls?

Ah, but there is no inferiority complex quite like the Canadian kind, growing up with our neighbour to the south ignoring us and unaware of its own, endless shadow; there is no experience quite like that of being Superman's slightly spastic kid brother.

And there is also the personal part, the comfortable part, Living abroad, the alien abstract inevitably becomes the routine necessity. Even from my present vantage point of the Philippines, itself not exactly the most prosperous of countries, I am able to gaze at Cambodia anew, and think: "Shit, that place is poor", as if it is only now, aay, taht I can truly understand what 'Cambodia' means.

Away, we lose touch with what we know, and we are sometimes -- if we're lucky, if we're listening hard enough, close enough -- reminded in the most mundane and unexpected ways of our roots and our depths.

WE ARE ALL HOWARD THE DUCK

Shoes.

After intense concentration and concerted reflection, I can sincerely state that my previous, sum-and-total knowledge and perception of the Philippines' social, historical, cultural, spirtual and metaphysical existence pretty much boiled down to:

Shoes.

Imdelda Marcos's shoes, that is. The wife of the leader. Infamous to me only because, during my late-childhood, early adolescence, he was known to my politically naive self only as one o those far-away in space and time world leaders sufficiently notorious to bear mention on Dan Rather's nightly newscasts, and probably because he was brought down to puppet-size life on that British comedy show Spitting Image, which also served as my first introduction to the Ayatollah and Qadafi. (If memory serves. And not that Marcos was all that bad; of that, I'm not sure. And while we're all gathered here, shooting the shit so casually about world leaders big and tall, why is it that so many newscasters still refer to Sadaam Hussein as 'Sadaam'. Isn't 'Saadam' his first name? Isn't that the equivalent of calling Carter 'Jimmy', Martin 'Paul', Seuss 'Dr.'?) I knew, too, probably from the occasional Johnny Carson joke, that Marcos's wife Imelda had a lot of shoes. Loved a lot of shoes. Probably had a fetish, all things considered.
(Not that I knew what that word even meant, but it was one of those pieces of vocabulary whose vortex contained within it all things adult and grown-up, from Johnny Carson's jokes to being able to drive to knowing exactly what to tell the barbershop to do when you sat in the chair and the scissors came out.)

Growing up, unless you're an army brat (or exceptionally curious), your knowledge of the world is understandably limited. Now I find myself, kind of grown up, for the third time (after Japan, after Cambodia) trying to make snese of a strange and foreign land. The process gets easier, to some extent (especially the third time around) the similarities inevitably slaughter the differences. And I always reach for whatever book I can find to help bridge the ever-present caps in knowledge and understanding. I've stumbled upon one here in Baguio called America's Boy: Marcos and the Philippines, written by an American who has lived, off and on, for over twenty years in a small Filipino villiage.

Things I've learned so far:

1) The Philippines are named after King Philip of Spain, who conquered this mass of seven thousand islands, largely in the name of Christ, which accounts for the fact that this country is now 95 % Catholic, an anomaly in Asia.

2) The Americans basically took over the country at the end of the Spain(Mexico)-America war, and until the Japanese seized control in WWII the Yanks weren't really sure what the heck to do with it. Was the United States conquerers or colonialists or what? Even they weren't sure.

3) The Philippines has been ruled by the Spaniards, the Americans and the Japanese; like most Asian nations (with notable exceptions, like Thailand), it's had other people telling them what to do and how to do it for extended periods of time, which usually, if not always, results in a pissed-off populace and years, if not decades, of convoluted politics and attempts, often armed, at achieving their own sense of solidarity and pride -- which is nothing more than dignity, elevated to the national scale.

These facts are just that, facts, and give little, if any, flavor. For that, you have to walk, listen, observe and see what your own confusions and uncertainties tell you about the land and, more importantly, about yourself.

Living in a foreign land you are, indeed, trapped in a world you never made, to steal the tagline from Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck. (The George Lucas-produced film version of which, by the way, I freakin' loved -- I must have been the only kid, if not person, to have seen the movie, read the comic adaptation, read the novelization, even, and actually bought the soundtrack to boot.)

Even as a kid, though, I never really understood that moto: 'Trapped in a world he never made!' Howard was, of course, an exile on earth from his home planet of DuckWorld, but who among us is not trapped in a world that we did not make? We don't choose where we're born, or to whom; we pop out into existence without a training manual or instructional video, and are thus expected to figure it all out as we go along.

In that sense, whether or not you live in a foreign country or the bedroom of your childhood home, you, too, are trapped in a world you never made. You have to look around and piece it all together. For me, with the Philippines, I start with Imdelda's shoes and work from there. For you, well, I'm not sure; that's your journey, in your world. It's just a matter of remaking that world again and again and again, day by day, until either you or it (or both) start to feel the gentle tug that indicates a coming together of the individual and society, however unlikely or jagged the fit may prove to be.

IN BAGUIO

They frisk you at the malls in Manila. In Baguio City, too. There is a slot for MEN and WOMEN, just like the (imaginary) doors we walked through in elementary school. You walk through, and you're padded down, and if you're absent of any hand grenades or switchblades or submachine guns, you're free to check out the Mickey Dees and cinema screens. I'd never been frisked before, let alone before going into a mall, but now, even after a few days, it's become a familiar experience. (And I didn't say I enjoyed it; don't go there, people...)

Landing in a new land, a strange land, you latch onto the familiar, noticing what's the same, what's different, what's odd, what's mundane. Usually it's a mishmash of all of the above. Here in the Philippines, given that most of the people are reasonably poor, people take jeepneys around town -- a kind of taxi-type bus that is reasonably cheap. Each of the jeepneys is decorated with their owners own particular colour and fetish, but most of them display red and white stickers that ask: "How's my driving?". Followed by a phone number, of course.

Here in Baguio, a mountain city, a northern city, it's full of what mountains are full of -- hills. Long and winding ones. Up and down ones. All of these hills reminding me of similar altitudes from my stay in Japan, down to the myriad checkerbox houses that dot the high and mighty landscape. Given that I'm 'up', it's cool, quite cool, late-October-in-Canada-cool. I like it. After the heat of Cambodia, endless and dense, it's nice to be cold again. Nice to need a blanket at night.

In a strange land, a foreign land, you embrace the unknown and reach for the familiar. I've already dived into a paperback copy of Lost Boy, Lost Girl, one of Peter Straub's latest fantastical, slightly horrific offerings. Straub being one of my adolescent idols, running right behind Stephen King, it's good, for a time, for a moment, to lose myself in harmless yet insightful entertainment. Good to see how literature can use the tangible weight of metaphors to make sense of the senseless. Good to be distracted from what even the fresh mountain air and sloping crescents can't deny.

LEAVIN' ON A JET PLANE

Somewhere in the endless suburbs of Tokyo there lies one particular train station named Sagami-Ono, on the Odakyu Line, and a stone's throw away from that particular station is a squat grey apartment building, four floors, that I lived in for four years. Room 417, if I recall correctly. I lived there and slept there and read there and learned there. Four years.

Whenever I hear about Japan or read about Japan or even look at a map of Japan, I always think: Something's missing. That 'something' is me, and my presence in that specific place, at that specific time. My sojurn there was not worthy of entry in an online encylopedia, of course, nor does it bear mentioning at the end of the latest economic and political news emanating from Nippon, but there is something special, almost sacred, about the fact that I was there, in that land, that I had a space of my own, if only briefly. It was mine.

I believe I will feel the same way about Cambodia when I leave, which is tomorrow. (I may be back, but who knows.) Of course, Cambodia is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the international news, but perhaps that will only accentuate the oddness and sacredness of the part it played in my life. There will always be me in Cambodia and Cambodia in me. Noone else need know; noone else need care. But the benefit of travel like this, of living in foreign lands, is that you become connected to the world.

Novelist James Michener's autobiography is entitled The World Is My Home, and famed Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, while resolutely maintaining that his films were made for the Japanese audience, acknowledged in his own autobiography that he, too, felt at home anywhere in the world. I don't know if I would go that far, not yet; I'm not sure how at home I would feel in Iraq, or Iceland, or Burkina Faso, where life expectancy hovers around thirty, tops.

Yet it really is one world; that most banal of truths is solidified again and again the more I travel, the more I see.

I was going to use this post to jot down a laundry list of memories of Cambodia, so that the future me (or the future you?) would be able to taste and touch and feel and sense what it was like. So that I would not forget.

But I will forget, some of it, and will remember, probably most of it. And the specifics I could list would only cloud my true intentions, which are to show that the differences are actually not so different after all. What would I list, anyway? People's smiles, people's actions, the specific contours of buildings and textures. To do so would be to highlight what's different, however, and I would rather leave this place and this time with the simple realization that perhaps such differences do not bear repeating. We're too much alike.

Off, tomorrow. Off to the Philippines. I never thought I'd end up in Japan, let alone Cambodia, let alone the Philippines, but so it goes. I guess I'm taking this 'canuckinasia' thing a bit too far; perhaps, eventually, I should return to 'canuckincanada', right?

Not that it would matter much, really.

In the end, it's all the same.

ESPECIALLY TIME

Time attains a different degree in a hospital. It moves at a stranger rate. Even if you are in a darkened room, light from the hallway outside, the world outside, blends in and reminds you that life moves on, regardless. Nurses bop in and out of rooms. There is no sense of night. An artificial glare bathes everything in its own indifferent glow. Racks of ragged paperback books sitting tight on a rack in the lobby beckon to be read, if only to substitute a story for the plodding passage of minute after minute. Who am I to refuse the pleas of such lonely books? While lounging around the Bangkok Hospital last week I took another gander at John Irving's A Widow For One Year, a book I'd read twice before years before, and, like Twain marvelling at how much his father had changed in seven years, I, too, was astounded at how much this particular book had mellowed and improved since 1998. (Not that I'm comparing myself to Twain, of course.)

As an unreserved John Irving junkie, I've always loved his work, but it's only been recently, in the past few years, that I've begun to truly understand what he has always claimed is the most important component of his novels -- or, indeed, any novel, namely: the passage of time. How time affects us. How it changes us. How it allows characters to grow and shift in unexpected ways, and how narrative, too, achieves its own special flavor and slant depending on what happened to who, and when. Especially when.

I'd always taken that remark for granted -- but the more I think about it, the more I agree with it, and learn from it. Time is nothing if not space stretched out, and a novel is full of space. Irving's novels in particular tend to trace the entire arc of characters' lives, and can often take reckless leaps in narrative time that, in retrospect, seem not only bold, but absolutely essential. (One chapter towards the end of The Cider House Rules jumps ahead twenty years -- a surprising, disconcerting decision that is that much more poignant because of its ambition. The film version had to abandon such recklessness.)

It is only through time that we achieve any perspective, or meaning, or resonance, in our own lives and the lives of others, and the best works of art recognize that. Novels can do that so easily; turn the page, and presto-changeo, it's a decade hence. They rarely do so, of course, because that requires patience, and plotting, and the signs of a well-thought out story; in today's contract-driven, book-a-year world, who has time for plot? Who has time for craftmanship?

Film, too, is at a disadvantage, because the experience itself unfolds in linear time. And yet, upon reflection, some of my favorite films from my favorite filmmakers are obviously, even relentlessly obsessed with what time does to us. What time demands of us. The Oliver Stone films I particularly love -- Born On The Fourth of July, The Doors, J.F.K., Heaven and Earth, Nixon, Alexander --span months, years, even decades in the lives of its protagonists, a technique that lends some to argue that much is truncated, much is condensed, much is slighted in the race to cram as much life as possible into the shortest time possible. Fair enough; a valid criticism. But I would argue that it is precisely such 'cramming of life', so to speak, that inevitably creates the boldest, most emotional effects. Only time can tell us about ourselves, and only time can teach us, scold us, spurn us and reveal to us. Only time.

The days are long in a hospital room. I sat in a chair and looked out the window and read my battered copy of A Widow For One year. Took only a couple of days, it did, but within those days and beneath those pages I saw children grow old, spouses die, decades pass and minutes stretch out. Will my life follow a similar pattern? I think of my grandfather, who was my age in 1949. Will I endure a similar span? Who were we, and who are we? Where are we, and where are we going? How do we move on, and how do we retain the best of who we were? These are the questions I asked myself while reading the book, as the nurses made their nightly rounds, and the hallway lights, as always, stayed on.

ON A DOCK

While eating breakfast a few days ago in the restaurant of the A-One Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, the lazy seventies rock of Steve Miller drifted through the gaps in the morning buffet, taking me back.

Back fifteen, sixteen years, to a lake, and a dock, and a cottage. Near Halliburton, Ontario (where Bill Murray and his comedic gang filmed the first, best Meatballs, back when the world was young), this cottage was (and is). Steve Miller was the music of choice that summer (and the summer before that, and the summer after that), along with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, the Traveling Wilburys and the Beautiful South. Us kids would put on the tunes and listen to the beats of our adolescene fade out of tune, one note at a time.

And yet, sometimes there was stillness; sometimes the music was gone. I remember, vividly, sitting on the dock one morning with my friend Mike, the two of us reading our paperback books as the waves leisurely lapped the sides of the dock, begging to be noticed. The dads were probably out fishing; the moms where most likely inside, cleaning up after breakfast. I read my copy of H.P.Lovecraft's strange and horrifying tales of depravity (purchased because there was a recommendation by Stephen King on the cover -- if King blurbed it, I bought it, period). Mike read the novelization of Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers. (In those days, the reality of the world, the harshness of the world, was still a source of innocent, escapist fun, and we revelled in that make-believe terror.)

Out on the water, the first boats of the day, towing anxious skiers ready for the fun to begin, occasionally sliced the silent morning in two, but that was fine; that was what summer was for, after all. A light wind pushed at the water and pulled at the pages of our books. Later that day would come our own bout of waterskiing and fishhooks, campfire and music. Later that summer would come school supplies and autumn shoes, velcro binders and coloured pencils. That was fine, too. Everything had its season, we were learning. You couldn't always stay on a dock. You could learn to appreciate the stillness, though, and we did. We learned.

We sat on the dock, under the blue, feeling the wind, listening to the distant roar of a distant boat, as the waves did what waves do: advance and retreat, rise and fall, collapse and ascend -- almost effortlessly, almost gracefully -- in their own, incremental manner.

CARPE DIEM

Helen, the thirty-seven year old Filipino woman I've been seeing for the past sixteen months, mother of a ten-year old son back home, has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had her uterus and ovaries removed a few days ago here at Bangkok Hospital. Chemo to follow, probably in the Philippines.

I'm stunned and sad, angry and confused. I have no idea what I'll write about in the days and weeks and months ahead, but this is a very personal, profound journey, and it's not my place to chronicle it here. I thought I was a pretty philosophical guy before. But now.

Let me just say: If you are a woman, or if you know any women, please dot not ignore any inexplicable weight loss or pain in the lower regions. Ovarian cancer is hard to detect, and when it is, it's usually late in the game.

As for the title of the post, it may be cliche, but it's not meant to be ironic. Live for the moments, and the people you share them with, because life can be one cruel bastard at times.

OFF TO THAILAND

Life takes us to unexpected places at unexpected times, proof of which is the fact that I'll be flying into Bangkok, Thailand tomorrow morning for a week to ten days, depending on how long my rather-ill friend's surgery goes. (Let's just say that hospitals in Cambodia, even the good foreign clinics that do exist, are not equipped to handle major surgery.)

I've never been to Thailand (other than the airport), despite its proximity to Cambodia, and these are not exactly the conditions under which I wanted to visit it, but so it goes. The writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., always quotes his brother's philosophy of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." And this is one of those times.

Expect sporadic updates for the next week, but I'll try to write from Bangkok with a taste or two of urban Thai life.

___________ ONLY HAPPENS IN ___________

There's a series of commercials that have been airing on CNN International here in Cambodia that feature a number of tourists sampling the sights and sounds that are unique to Madrid, Spain. The food, the people, the vibe, the jibe -- all of it is captured quite well in thirty second clumps of tourist propoganda, and each commercial ends with the vistor enraptured by the city, mourning their exit, wistfully exclaiming: "Madrid only happens in Madrid."

I like that catchphrase. It makes sense. It has heart. It makes me want to quit my job and pack my bags and hightail it on out to Spain to find out what the hell is so unique about Madrid. And it got me thinking: does every city have its own, individual essence that cannot be replicated anyplace else? Fuck that -- does every person have his or her own unique domain?

We're all taught that as kids, right? No two snowflakes are alike, there's nobody else like us in the world, torturing small animals is perfectly reasonable behavior, as long as fire isn't involved. (What, you weren't taught that last part? I can't be the only one.) The thing of it is, som much of life is redunant. The asshole who cuts in front of me is not the same asshole who cut in front of you, no, but they are distant cousins, metaphorically speaking. If you've seen one small town in Ontario, I guess you haven't seen them all -- but after driving through dozens of them, it sure as shit seems that way. Identical modes of being and living are just that -- identical. The details may change, but I'm not sure that every person and every place has a secret heart and sympathetic soul; carbon copies exist. As you grow, you learn that. Sad, but true.

And yet.

'Phnom Penh only happens in Phnom Penh'. The legless female dwarf in the wheelchair. The smell of dust and dirt and shit and exhaust. The morning sun, arrogant and blazing. The row of motodops sleeping in their carts, cloaked by the night. The fast-driving Mercedes, with their fast-driving owners. The smiles of naked children picking through trash. The anger and fear lying just below the surface of the most gentle faces.

Yes. I suppose 'Phnom Penh' only happens in Phnom Penh'. And if this is true, which I believe, than who am I to say such is not the case for all places, every place, all people, every people? The maddening aftereffects of aging, I suppose. We live through the years, and the years live through us. I have been there and I have seen that, we think. Not realizing that a tiny piece of ourselves is being chipped away. Not understanding, even remotely, that we are cutting ourselves off from a kindred soul that could emerge from a flower in the pavement or the hand of a stranger. We look into others' eyes thinking that we've seen them before. What a fallacy! How routine us humans can sometimes be! To think what that particular person has seen and done! And a new town. To imagine what secrets and hearbreaks it contains! Were we to have such concealments exposed in all their human sordidness, surely our hearts and our minds would crumble with the weight of such emotion.

It's a battle, I suppose. A battle against our own boring, mechanized nature. The urge, the temptation, remains, one that still enclouds me (as you can tell by the beginning of the post.) Nothing new under the sun, we think.

Bah! True or not, we must fight such temptations. As long as we are beginning a new day, as long as we can encounter a person or a place that we have not encountered before, there is always the possibility, always the tantalizing prospect, that newness could result.

(Even when some of those small Ontario towns do feel a little bit drab after awhile. I mean, have you been to Barry's Bay?)

LITTLE GREEN MEN, CAMBODIAN STUDENTS, AND JUST WHAT, EXACTLY, DR.PHIL WOULD MAKE OF ALL THESE ALIEN ANAL PROBES THAT ARE APPARENTLY GOING ON

I'm not saying that teaching English in Cambodia and being abducted by aliens are completely compatible experiences, but, if forced, I would argue before a court of existential law that these two diverse encounters with the unknown share a similar sense of fear, awe, wonder, and, occasionally, harmony.

I think who we are and where we are at particular points in life and time augment what we are reading. I've always loved stories of alien abductions, both fictional and 'true', and have often been intrigued by the tales of those who claim to have been visited by, or kidnapped by, and rectally probed by, alien invaders.

(You'd be amazed at how common descriptions of rectal probes are in the vast span of abduction literature. Forced masturbation also, uh, pops up more often than would expect. Which is odd, because I never needed any coercion, but I suppose that's another post...)

Soon after graduating from university, I attended a book signing given by horror novelist Whitely Streiber at a New Age bookshop in the trendy part of Toronto. (Yes, I was, and am probably still am, the kind of guy who would go to a book signing by the author of Communion. We are what we are.) And it was there that I got a first-hand look at people who not only believe in alien abductions, but have also experienced them for themselves. Streiber seemingly started the aliens-visited-me boom with his own memoir, Communion, and those attending his lecture were filled to burstin' with stories of ships and probes and spacecrafts resting patiently at the bottom of Lake Ontario, waiting for that pristine, perfect moment to ascend. Each piece of information from the featured writer and the surrounding minions was received with a solemn nod of the head from the other participants, like brethern nodding in time to the beats of a sermon from their pastor that they've heard many times before.

I walked out of that little talk and that little store still not convinced that alien abductions were, but I was convinced that some people were convinced.

And now, after having read John E.Mack's 1994 bestseller Abudction: Human Encounters With Aliens, I've found insights and outlooks that are unexpected and illuminating. (And just plain fucking weird, too, but that's to be expected in these kinds of tales.)

Essentially, the book is a series of descriptions of psychiatric sessions conducted between Mack and patients that have been referred to him, all of who have had alien encounters in some way, shape form. (Excluding Neil Diamond fans, because it has yet to be confirmed that he is an alien, but I have my suspicions.) What makes the book so fascinating (and controversial) revolves around the approach Mack decides to adopt -- namely, treating his patients not as victims of a mental disorder but as people who have been traumatized by an experience every bit as unsettling as an assault or a rape. A skeptic turned believer, Mack allows us as readers to view the abduction phenomenon from a personal perspective. Listening to their stories, you will not necessarily become a believer, but you will start to recognize common human needs and longings that are either brought forth from the aliens, given by the aliens, or else emanating directly from a universal human desire for togetherness and hope all that lies within us all.

Oh, and I'll be honest -- there's a lot of anal probing going on, which leads me to suspect that the aliens aren't getting enough loving at home. I know, I know, they say it's for 'experimental purposes', but still. (God, I can picture Dr.Phil seated before a handful of silvery-skinned aliens with tear-drop shaped heads gazing blankly at him with milky dark eyes as he berates them for our amusement: "You do realize, don't you, that there are some issues in your own bedroom in your own galaxy that need to be addressed before you start deciding to invite little Becky over here in Kansas into your kinda twisted reindeer games. Am I getting through to ya? And don't tell me that because you're an alien you can't hear the whistle I'm blowin', 'cause let me tell ya, I've see Close Encounters, I know you hear the horn I'm playin', so that particular dog won't hunt.")

Once you get past the icky-gooey aspect of these testimonies, complete with cosmic dissections and incisions and strange glowing fluids from questionable sources, you discover that so many of the abductees' see their experiences, diverse as they are, as a common means of discovering more about themselves and the universe they (and we) inhabit. Some see the aliens as trying to teach humans more about unlimited compassion and love, while others see them as warning us as to what our selfish, indulgent, destructive ways will eventually lead to. In all cases, however, Mack sees these alien intrusions as a challenge to our normal, historical, dualistic scientific understanding of space and time, human and other, Bert and Ernie, individual consciousness and collective evolution. Either aliens are trying to eradicate the boundaries between these tradionally dualistic concepts, Mack is implying, or the subconscious desires of a hell of a lot of people demand that we do so. (Mack is not exactly objective, either; he believes these people and their encounters, and suggests we need to reevaluate what we consider 'reality'.)

Standing in front of a classroom in Cambodia, attempting to explain to my ESL students my own thoughts pertaining to the Prime Minister's latest crackdown on anyone who dares to criticize him or his totalitarian policies, I suddely felt a sudden emotional alignment with these abductees. For what has my adventure been, both in Japan and Cambodia, if not an encounter with the unknown, an unconscious attempt to link myself with something larger and grander and denser than my own puny mind?

The tangents of life inevitably end up being the teachers of life. One need not see a streaking saucer light up the ink-black sky, symbiotically bond with female extraterrestrials or discover that oneself is actually the spawn of little green men to benefit from what a certain sense of displacement can offer. Relizing that I was giving my students my own, admittedly naive, opinion regarding Cambodian domestic politics vis-a-vis South East Asian political machinations, I realized, too, that I had, in my own, specifically human way, had a cosmic and spiritual evolution that challenged my notions of day-to-day reality, of what is right and wrong, mundane and far-fetched. My Japanese experience certainly bore little relation to my Canadian upbringing, and my time in Cambodia has done much to expand a small-town consciousness that knew little of life that had not been gleamed from the multiplex-glow of the silver screen or the pages of a comic book.

So, yes. I will keep scanning the skies, dreading and hoping that one day, some day, I might spot a definitive glowing sign that we are not alone in the cosmos. But I will also keep scanning the eyes of my students, trying to keep in mind that what is alien and foreign is subjective and personal, and that transcendance need not coincide with a spaceship's door drawing open. After all, for the moment, the door to my classroom is near enough.

SIMPLE

Simple things are better. This is what I'm starting to believe. Simple food, simple sun, simple stories. We live in an age that appreciates complexity and endorses the maze. I like mazes too. But in the end mazes get you to the same place as a straight line.

This is not to say that simple things have to be simplistic. I would even argue that the more clearly and simply something is told, expressed and conveyed, the more complex it is. Once things are streamlined, we retain the essence but lose the appendages. The absence of those offshoots thus allows us to view what we see and hear with an imaginative exploration that would be unnecessary had everything been explained and dissected in exhaustion.

Think of Million Dollar Baby. Love it or hate it, the movie has a pretty simple story. A young boxer coached by an aging boxer. Tragedy results. People are changed. A lot of people who slagged the film slagged it because they had seen it all before, it wasn't original, yada yada yada. Well, perhaps. But as John Irving once said, after you forget the machinations of the plot, what you remember about a story is the emotional resonance that the characters created for you. You may not remember what they did or how they did it, but you remember the feelings the author instigated in your own heart. I can't remember scene-by-scene what happened in Million Dollar Baby, but boy do I remember the effect. Why? Ordinary people in a difficult situation. Bad things happen to them. I feel their pain, as Clinton would say. Simple.

It's not cool or hip or fashionable to acknowledge the simplicity of sentiment, but it's sentimentality that makes the world go 'round. I sometimes think that people don't apply the same standards to art that they accept in life. Meaning, we demand that art be rigorous and cynical, deep and multi-layered, complex and multi-faceted, but what moves us the most in life? The homemade birthday card your kid gives you for your birthday. The rise of the sun on a winter morn. The feel of the first raindrop on your palm. This is what makes our day and deepens our lives. The simple things.

I like a long book better than a short book. I like big movies with big themes and extended running times. But what I remember most from these experiences are the simple scenes and moments that serve as anchor for all that has come before or will follow. Kevin Costner choking up in the courtroom in J.F.K. Rocky pointing out that the trunks on his picture don't match the real shorts he will wear, and the promoter telling him: "It doesn't really matter, does it, Rock? I'm sure you'll give 'em a good show." The look in Eastwood's eyes when he realizes what Hillary Swank is asking him to do. Kevin Costner at the end of No Way Out wistfully quoting exiled Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, thereby succinctly explaining his entire rationale for remaining on the run throughout the film. Al Pacino in The Godather Part III shly telling the priest at the Vatican that it's been a long time since his last confession. Small moments. Simple moments.

The only ones worth remembering, really.

THE DICE MAN COMETH

Let us give in to the dictates of the dice, that shakeable plastic mandate of chance. Was it not chance that began my Asia sojurn, and was it not chance that brought me to Cambodia? A newspaper article about trafficked children; a one-week trek to investigate further. What if I had not read that particular page of that particular paper that particular day? What if I had been about to read the page when a knock came on my door -- a student early, a teacher confused? Had that occurred, I would not be in Cambodia, and would not now be writing the words you're reading. Given such odds, surely chance has a fortune and trajectory all its own.

Such are the thoughts one has after completing Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man (which I discussed in the previous post). At first the very concept -- a man deciding to rule his life by the toss of a die -- seems nothing more than a clever gimmick, a post-modern plot device designed to wring a few chuckles out of a conveniently designed narrative hook. Not so. It is, instead, a fundamentally human book, questioning why we are here, where we are going, and what, exactly, is the point of it all.

Consider a scene two-thirds of the way through the book. Rhinehart, about to be banned by the American Medical Association, must defend himself before a committee of his skeptical peers. What follows is a brilliant dissection of modern-day life, of what is expected of us as individuals, people, parents and citizens. Is it ludicrous to number a series of choices from one to six, roll the dice, and choose the option based on the number that has come up? Perhaps. But what has been the alternative, Rhinehart wonders. A world that insists on a fixed identity, that allows no deviation in thought or routine, is a world consumed by greed and envy, war and pestilence. If, indeed, modern psychiatry is such a wonderful, beneficial development, then why is everyone so supremely fucked-up? Has it to do with our stubborn denial of all of our wishes? The fireman who wishes to sail boats; the businessman who longs for a life in the tropics. We do not allow ourselves to do what we want to do, and are restricted by our very conception of who 'we' are. By using the dice, by allowing random chance to dictate our decisions, we enter an immense degree of excitement and unpredictability into existence. We allow ourselves to do things and think things and be things that we would never do otherwise. The rut of life becomes a meandering path whose ultimate destination will and must remain unknown. A life of freedom, it is.

Brilliant, the book is. Not because it endorses the narrator's thesis, but because it plays it out, advances it, allows us to see the marvels it produces and the horrors it depicts. The dice tells us to rape someone; the dice tells us to murder someone. Do we go through with it? The dice tells us to be loving and kind for no reason; the dice tells us to be gentle. Does that change us in any lasting way? Fascinating, the various permutations that result.

It has been a long, long time that I have a read a novel so full of life and so questioning of life. (The irony being, I suppose, that the book was written a good five years before I was born. How fascinating, I always think, that there were people thinking concepts way beyond my comprehension even before I was conceived. Ideas I'm contemplating for the first time were thought of, mulled over, accepted or dismissed decades and centuries ago. It makes me feel connected to a larger stream of humanity, for some reason.) For many of us, life seems to be set on a pattern: we can see what's coming from day to day, and we can be pretty sure of the results. But to allow chance to play a part, to see the means by which our own personalities could change and shift and transform if we allowed chance to become the predominant mode of our existence -- what strange twists and turns would result!

I have to admit, I'm tempted. Not to, you know, use the dice to decide whether I move from Cambodia to Timbuktu. But to choose this book or that, this movie or that movie -- yes, I can see the fun and play that the dice of chance could inflict.

Ah, but where to stop? That is the what the book asks. What would happen if you push chance to its ultimate end point?

LET THE DICE DECIDE

What if your entire life was determined not by degrees or intention but by the roll of a die? That's the premise behind Luke Rhinehart's funny and disturbing 1971 novel The Dice Man, in which a New York City psychoanalyst, bored by his life, profession and patients, decides to let the dice do the talking. Whatever the dice says, he does. Roll a five, be like Jesus for a day; roll a seven, try to seduce everyone. In a world that believes we are all nothing more than bundles of neuroses wrapped inside our own impenetrable egos, why not just let fate, in the form of dice, be our guide? Simplifies things.

And the discoveries it can lead to! Listen:


New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.

I also created problems...



And so it goes. Why live a life predetermined by who we think we are or by what others think we are? If our personalities are so rigid and dormant, simply give the dice the power to dictate change. Roll a seven, tell my boss to fuck off; roll a two, buy the first ticket to Acapulco. The dice rules. Where it leads, our psyches follow.

It's a funny, startling book, and I'm only a hundred pages into it. It postulates a kind of wacky approach to life that is also, somehow, the flip-side of transcendent, a philosophical argument for human nature that is as daring as it is frightening. It simultaneously removes the concept of personal responsibility while endorsing a random approach to decisions that could very well lead to madness or enlightenment.

What should I do tonight? Make a list, roll the dice. Should I grow a moustache or shave my head? Roll the dice. Roll a six, quit my job; roll a seven, demand a promotion. The audacity it would require to follow through on such a philsophy is a little bit more than I can handle.

And yet...

Tempting, isn't it? To just let the dice do the talking. What changes would ensue! The cover of the tattered paperback states: "Few novels can change your life. This one will." Ha! Publishing hyperbole, right? Right? I mean, who could seriously decide to do such a thing, no matter how absurdly enticing it sounds. Culturual suicide, it would be. Why, if you gave in to the dice, you would become another person. (Or the person you were meant to be?) You would do things you never dreamed of. (The things you always wanted to?) You would go to strange and exotic lands for no reason at all. (To fulfill an innate longing for adventure and exile?) Man is, at heart, a rational, sympathetic creature. (Roll a seven, stab a cat.) Man is kind. (Roll a four, insult a stranger on the street.)

Let the dice decide? Let fate and chance be intertwined forever more by a plastic green sage?

Maybe I'll roll the dice and find out. If it's a two, the dice will dictate my decisions; if it's a four, I will proceed along the orderly, mundane path of my own insecure obligations.

Maybe that's where we all are in life -- holding the dice, wondering if and when we'll give it a toss. And desperate to see if our number turns up.

PAKISTAN: A TOUCH OF THE HAND ON THE EDGE OF A SHOULDER

Out of a clear blue sky the walls came tumbling down. I'm assuming they tumbled. It looks like most of the homes were made from stone, and stone hurts. Stone is hard. Stone falling out of a sunny day, warm and bright, is harder. The pain is the same. Buildings made like that, from stone, could do nothing but tumble. The buildings themselves and the stones that sustain them. But something eased the fall. I feel it.

To lose one's life like that! So quickly! A fall on the head from a rock. Simple. Almost clean. And yet only moments before a mother and a daughter and a son and a husband were eating a meal, making love, preparing for work, getting ready to farm, ending an argument, trying to think of something to say, something. Anything. All of the above and none of the above. The entire range of human experiences and emotions from time past and time future were encapsulated into those few seconds. I am sure of it. Everything we have ever done, everything we will ever do, was there. Present. Within the space between their hands and their head existed all that we as humans can and should be. It was there, I say -- our pain and our hope and our fear and our love. Almost tangible. In the background, a rumble may have been heard. Yes, quite possible -- this harbinger of doom. Perhaps they knew, instantly, all of them, across the land, that death was here. It had come for them. Melodramatic, yes, but from my limited perspective, in conditions such as that, in a life such as that, melodrama would be the order of the day. In houses made of stone, melodrama is not even melodrama any longer. So the sound of an earthquake, while distant, almost instaneous, would have to have been heard. A familiar sound, I'm sure.

But part of me insists otherwise. I would like to believe that in their final moments on this earth something else was going on, taking place, coming to fruition, something other than a heart beating faster and a snap, grim realization that prayer was necessary, now, immediately. They knew they would be dead, or maimed, or injured. They knew that. But in that moment, when the land started to rumble, when the stones started to fall, I imagine a touch of a hand on the edge of a shoulder. That's all. A tiny, almost imperceptible gesture from mother to son, father to daugther, wife to husband, grandfather to stranger. Somebody was touched in that final moment. The gap that exists from you to me and they to them was breached in a final, futile attempt at eternity. Each knew what the other meant. They may have even been looking at each other, directly, without judgement. That would have been nice. And yet the touch is what matters. When the earth opened up all was lost, yes, forever, certainly, but one would like to imagine an exit from this realm that left the lingering remnant of contact, however brief. To think: that some were able to take that touch with them. Amidst the dust and the shrieks and the rocks stained red, no trace of such a touch remains, true, but how could it? There are some things eternity claims for itself.

BEATING THE RAIN

I have yet to decide whether the world is as large as our own imaginations or small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of a child’s hand. Somewhere in between, I would think, but frequently, daily, events occur that threaten to swing the pendulum one way or the other for good.

Today I was walking along the street, reading a book, feeling terribly sorry about the fact that a Khmer kid on his bike had almost been bumped by me into a tree only moments before. When I felt his bike hit my shoulder, I looked up from the book and turned back around to chart the progress of his descent, expecting him to fall, dreading his fall – but no, he was still streaming along at quite a good little clip; my accidental nudge had sent him careening towards a tree. He applied his brakes just in time, but for a moment or two the outcome was in doubt. I pictured him slamming head-on into the tree, his neck broken, his eyes alert but empty. Would I be to blame? How could anyone know? You would think that I wouldn’t read as I walk, given that I got the shit whacked out of me by a crazy Japanese homeless man a few years back while strolling along with a book in tow, but I tend not to learn from my mistakes. In any event, I saw that the kid was alright – death was not coming for him today, at least not by my invitation. I went on my way. And yes, I kept on reading. (And now I'm feeling really, really guilty about the fact that I did...)

I suppose I’ve gotten completely sidetracked off of my original point, but only peripherally, because I had meant to say, before I so rudely interrupted myself, how frequently we think of things for no reason whatsoever. Right after the kid-almost-hitting-the-tree-due-to
my-accidental-nudge incident, I suddenly remembered that the fellow who picked me up from the airport on my first night in Japan was a teacher who was leaving the land of the rising sun in another week to take over a position at a school in Singapore; five years later, my boss at the University of Cambodia turned out to be another fellow who had left that same job in Singapore, his position to be filled by the teacher who picked me up at the airport. Got that?

How many countries are there in Asia, how many teaching positions, and yet by some weird quirk of fate I can find a link between these two associates of mine, neither of whom have met the other, but both of whom have met me.

Or this:

While waiting in line for my return visa at the Cambodia-Vietnamese border, I chat up the Cambodian man next to me. Turns out he owns the busline I’m taking. Turns out that he works part of the year in Japan. Turns out he lives in the same city in Japan that I lived in – Sagamihara, in Kanagawa prefecture. Had we once shared a train in Japan? Entirely possible. Probable, even. And there we were, one foot in Vietnam, one foot in Cambodia. What a world.

There is nothing necessarily remarkable about such occurrences, which makes it all the more remarkable, in my book. I’m quite certain that the kid who I almost banged into a tree earlier today has crossed paths with other Cambodians I’ve met in town, or other foreigners who I’ve worked with in the city. And who knows? Perhaps he will encounter a relative of mine two, three years down the line, who knows where. Not I. The world shrinks. Then expands.

For example:

I’ve met people in Japan who not only grew up in my hometown but hung around the same friends that I once had. I was once even able to determine inside of thirty seconds exactly which house a girl lived in. Like so:

Me: “Where are you from?”

Her: “Canada.”

“Me too. Where in Canada?”

“Ontario.”

“Where in Ontario?”

“Near Niagara Falls.”

“Where?”

“St.Catharines.”

“Fuck off! I’m from St.Catharines!”

“Really? Where’d you go to elementary school?”

“Pine Grove.”

“No way! I went to Michael J.Brennan.” (The Catholic school that was physically connected to my public school.:

“Did you live near there?”

“I lived on _________ street.”

“ _________ street. Do you know Rick Denham?”

“My family lives right across the street from Rick Denham.”

And so it goes. Within a minute of meeting a stranger in a bar in downtown Tokyo, I’m able to ascertain what her childhood home looks like. At a certain point in time when we were both ten, eleven years old, I may have even bumped into her while playing street hockey in front of her house. A cold November wind may have been blowing that day. The sky would have been dark, of that I’m sure. Threatening rain. I would have gone home early, the pick-up game of street hockey over and done, and she would have rushed inside, both of us beating the rain, neither knowing that our paths would cross again thousands of miles from home and miles removed from youth.

If I were to step out of my apartment in Phnom Penh and bump into my high school history teacher, would I be surprised? Yes. Shocked? No. The world is smaller than I once believed. Small enough to fit in my hand? Of that I know not.

But ask me tomorrow what I think. Who knows? By that time, the world may prove itself once again to be borne anew: as small as a perfect blue pearl, with a mystery and rhythm that once again confounds me.

LIFE WILL FIND A WAY

Phnom Penh continues to get its props from the rest of the world, as today's edition of The Cambodia Daily informs me that The Economist Intelligence Unit, affiliated with The Economist magazine, has ranked this fair city as one of the least liveable cities in the world, achieving a position of 122 out of 127, behind the capital of Zimbabwe and ahead of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. (Ah, but Baghdad and Kabul were not included in the list; surely this town is better than those towns.) The cities were assessed on stability, health care, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. Apparently, well, Phnom Penh blows.

But this is the thing friends and neighbours, ladies and germs: What are we to make of this distinction? If I was safe and sound back home in the St.Catharines of my childhood, I would take one look at a list like this and imagine Phnom Penh to be a place of perpetual destruction: explosions, rapes, murders and lawlessness. (The kind of place I imagined Beirut to be as a kid.)

It's not. It's a desperate place, yes, poor and decrepit, certainly, but there are most definitely a lot of rich folks in this town, and more than a fair share of interesting sights and sounds. None of which is relevant to the report, I realize, which focuses more on the standard of living, but the aftereffects of the report will linger in people's minds around the world. Phnom Penh equals danger, despair, a place one would not want to endure for any extended period of time.

And yet, life is more resilient than that. For the poor of this town, Phnom Penh is, indeed, an inhospitable place; good luck finding any help from the police or the hospitals if you are absent from cash. Having said that, quoting the great Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, life will find a way. People will live, and keep on living, and keep on reproducing. The schools will be shit, the hospitals abominable, the safety questionable, but life will hop and skip ahead, regardless.

Which is not to say that the report is wrong; I tend to agree with its conclusions, formulaic as they are, stastical as they are. There is just more to it. There is always more to it.

Oh, and what city was the best city in the world to live in, you ask?

Vancouver, Canada.

And yet I would bet my bottom dollar (or just my bottom) that if I were to walk around Vancouver and Phnom Penh on an average day and count the number of smiles I see, there would be no contest -- Cambodia's capital would top that survey, for what it's worth.

CHACHI AND WINKLER AND THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)

I've just read that Scott Baio has replaced Henry Winkler as the lawyer on the television comedy Arrested Development, a show I've sporadically caught a time or two here in Cambodia, and this decision, this changing of the comedic guard, has me convinced that some kind of shift in the basic fabric of the space-time continuum has just taken place.

Let me back up.

The single funniest comedic bit I've ever seen features pint-sized, bug-eyed comedian Gilbert Gottfriend musing to himself about why, exactly, Scott Baio from Happy Days got his own sitcom spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi, but Henry Winkler didn't. He imagines a group of TV executives pondering the possibilities:

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

"Chachi, yeah, but Winkler..."

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

And so on.

(To find this funny, life-changingly funny, you have to a) think Gilbert Gottfried is, quite possibly, Christ returned, or b) just be, like, really, really weird. I am both of the above, and just remember -- if the above bit wasn't funny at all to you, it's because he does it on stage so much better than I do it in words, and, like I said, I'm kind of weird.

Back to the present.

What I'm thinking is: What are the odds that Scott Baio would once again bump Winkler out of the spotlight? I know, I know -- apparently Winkler left for another gig, a new gig, on a new sitcom. But still. Arrested Development is apparently getting all the critical props, if not the viewers. Baio will be back in at the forefront of our collective human consciousness. Chachi will be on everybody's lips, not the Fonz. And, even more than the above reasons, the really odd thing is that Gottfried's timeless, legendary joke still works in this new situation. Just imagine a bunch of studio execs rationalizing their decision to hire Chachi over the departing Winkler, and you can use the same damn lines.

Which proves, you ask?

I mean, do you really need to ask?

It proves that Gottfried was on to something, that's what. It proves that he, Baio and Winkler are part of some unholy cosmic alliance that somehow is able to not only influence the comedic mindset of an entire generation, but are also incredibly, painstakingly patient. The gap between Gottfried's initial Baio/Winkler joke and the latest news is well over a decade and a half. It's all adding up. The signs are here. The Bible Code is in place.

I'm telling you, this is equivalent to Indiana Jones finding the lost ark of the covenant, or Charlie's grasping of the golden ticket that led to the chocolate factory, or Steve Guttenberg deciding to do that fourth Police Academy flick, the one with the Citizens on Patrol. It's that earth shattering, is what it is.

Don't believe me?

Just think.

When was the last time you heard of this kind of close connection between a comedian and two stars of a seventies sitcom beloved by millions?

Never, that's when. It hasn't happened. Until now.

The Apocalypse is upon us, folks. Lock the doors and put the kids to bed. Say your prayers and count your blessings.

As for me, I'll be pondering the eternal question that man has grappled with for millenia: Does Joanie really love Chachi?