I DARE YOU: BECOME THE HERO OF YOUR OWN LIFE

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show.

-- Charles Dickens
DAVID COPPERFIELD


A few years ago, when I worked in Japan, I was waiting to take the late-train home from Shin-yurigaoka, where I worked, to Sagami-Ono, where I lived, when I suddenly saw a drunken Japanese salaryman stumble and fall onto the tracks, the light from the oncoming train creating an eerie glow of doom that lit up the night.

I thought: This is the time, the moment, when my authentic humanity will be tested, where I will be called upon to sacrifice myself and my life for a total stranger. I will have to crawl on the tracks and hope that there is time, enough time, to push him and me out of safety. I will see what I am made of, or die trying.

Didn't come to that. The drunk dude quickly rushed to the side of the platform and hurled himself over its edge. The train was still a little ways back. His life might not even have been in danger. Hard to say.

Still.

Made me think.

Am I living the life I'm supposed to be living?

Recently, there had been a Korean exchange student who had actually died doing what had only been a brief, almost-happened-but-thank-God-didn't interlude in my mind, rescuing a Japanese man who had fallen onto the tracks, giving up his life in the process of saving another.

He died a hero.

How do you live as a hero?

Isn't there something arrogant and self-serving in thinking that you can go around and right wrongs, make people's lives better, make a difference in the world? Who the hell are you, anyways, to think such thoughts?

There is the need to distinguish oneself from the pack; there is also the need to become a part of the pack. And in between those two needs is something else, this third, separate sense of self that is a combination of the two -- a martyr crossed with a hermit, a selfless soul who lives for others and an inward isolationist who exists for himself, and himself alone.

We always battle those two forces. We either hold the door open for someone, or we don't. We either thank the saleslady at the A&P, or we don't. We jump onto the tracks, or we don't.

It's a matter of degrees.

We may not be writing our own memoirs, as Dicken's Copperfield did, but the days and weeks and months and years we pass through will be the pages that show whether or not we will be the hero of of our own lives.

The only conclusion I've come to, the one that makes the most logical, moral, ambitious, human sense is: Do it. Be the hero of your own life, however you define 'hero'. Be the one who holds the door, even though nobody says 'thank-you'. Be the one that gets on the plane. Be the one who works where others won't, teaches where others won't. Be the one that steps out of the life of quiet desperation that your peers seem to expect, if not embrace. Be the guy or girl who doesn't park in the handicapped spot. Be the one who doesn't roll their eyes in sarcasm at someone else's kooky idea. Be the one who chooses blind optimism over unthinking cynicism. Be the one who believes that the Oscars are a good and noble thing. Be the one who walks through the open door into a strange and tempting room. Be that guy on the six o'clock news, the feel-good story they always end the broadcast with, the one that returned the money he found on the street, even though he could have kept it and become rich. Be the one who jumps on the tracks to help the girl who fell. Be the one who does the unnoticed things every day that nobody ever gives you credit for. Be the hero you suspect you might be capable of becoming someday, which may be today, for all you know. Why not?

"We're all here to do what we're all here to do," the Oracle tells Neo in The Matrix Revolutions.

I'm not sure what that means, to be honest, but it has a wonderful, ringing, koan-like logic to it.

We are here to do what we are here to do.

So do it.

Be the hero of your own life.

I dare you to.

POST ALERT! POST ALERT!

I posted three new free, extra-strength posts below the one entitled 'What I Want', ones you may not have read yet, assuming there's somebody out there reading this particular post, or any of my posts, for that matter, which is never a sure thing, but if there are, and you're bored by the latest Danielle Steel or Everybody Loves Raymond or even the latest Updike, who, let's face it, can be pretty boring sometimes, simply scroll down.

In any event, please read and feel edified, revolted, charmed or bored at your own discretion.

WHAT I WANT

I want to find out who really assassinated J.F.K. (I think Oswald had a hand in it, but I think elements of the Mafia and the Cubans under Castro played a part.)

I want to publish a novel.

I want to run the Nagano Marathon, because I trained for it three years ago while I was living in Japan, only to blow out my knee a week before the race, and I vowed I'd go back and redeem myself.

I want to change the world. (A little bit.)

I want to visit North Korea, because Canadians can actually go there.

I want to read all of Shakespeare. (Just not tonight.)

I want to be happy. Forever.

I want to travel across Canada by train.

I want to go to Tianeman Square in China.

I want to visit the JFK Assassination Museum in Dallas Texas, housed on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository Building, where Oswald
was said to have fired his fatal shots.

I want visit the hotel room where Martin Luther King was shot.

I want to visit the Audobon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot, because they've just turned it into a museum or archive of his life, I think.

I want to visit all of the above places to connect with moments of history that involve great men.

I want to pass at least Level 3 of the Japanese Proficiency test, which I failed a couple of years ago. (But I was proud of my score, 'cause any score on a Japanese proficiency test, even a score of 1, is pretty good for a kid from St.Catharines, Ontario, I think.)

I want to be more humble.

I want to become the change I want to see in the world.

I want to visit India.

I want to meet Nelson Mandela, Vladamir Putin, and Bill Murray. (Doesn't have to be in that order.)

I want to know if ghosts are real and if UFOs are real. (I kind of suspect they're not, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.)

I want to become reasonably fluent in Japanese.

I want to become reasonably fluent in English.

I want to know where we go when we die (if anywhere).

I want to help people who need help.

I want to meet Stephen King and ask him why, in his novel IT, he has most of the characters remember Stanley Uris saying "The turtle couldn't help us", but nowhere in the flashback sections of the book are these words actually spoken (unless I missed them).

I want to be a leader, not a follower. (Unless I'm in North Korea, because there's only one Dear Leader allowed, and I think he'd be a little pissed.)

I want to know if cracking my knuckles will really give me arthritis in old age, but I'm scared to find out.

I want to go on a tour of the White House.

I want to understand Canadian and Japanese political systems.

I want to see the Cambodian people live in a (relatively) corruption-free society.

I want to see if I have what it takes to have what it takes.

I want to know if having seen almost every episode of Who's The Boss and Different Strokes and The Facts of Life and WKRP In Cincinatti will have any long-term emotional and spiritual consequences, in this life or the next.

I want to know my entire future, just for a moment, and then forget it all.

I want to see if the new Superman movie coming out next year will enhance or diminish my love of the Christopher Reeve movies.

I want to read Roots.

I want to go to England and discover my own roots.

I want to see how they're going to do the stretching effects on Mr.Fantastic and the fire effects on The Human Torch in the new Fantastic Four movie coming out later this year.

I want to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I've started a couple of times, but never finished.

I want to read Yukio Mishima in the original Japanese, because I've heard he's amazing (but that ain't going to happen).

I want reincarnation to be true, because it seems the coolest of all the after-life options.

I want to fully embrace (or at least a little bit) the Buddhist notion of non-attachment that Anakin Skywalker had so many problems with in Attack of the Clones, where we recognize that the glass we're drinking from is already broken, where we realize that that which we are drawing close to us is already pulling itself away, that nothing is permanent, including impermanence.

I want to not want so much.

What do you want?

THE HAPPY DAYS SYNDROME, or WHY WON'T YOU JUST GROW UP?

I have a theory that the reason why so many people in my age bracket (thirty and under) have a difficult time adjusting to adulthood is because the people we grew up with on TV and in the movies were actually significant older than the characters they were portraying.

It's the Happy Days Syndrome. You've got Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph and Potsie, and they're all supposed to be in, like, Grade 10 and 11, and they're played by people in their early to mid-twenties. So by the time that I get to be fifteen and sixteen years old, I look in the mirror, and I see this young little twerp, not looking anything like Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (who was twenty-four playing seventeen), or Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club (also somewhere in the mid-twenties range) and so this weird, out-of-body dislocation takes place. My age doesn't match my image of what that age should be, so I instantly regress.

(The exception to this was the Canadian TV drama Degrassi Junior High, which used real ugly and average looking teenagers, not Beverly Hills 90210 supermodels. And I have my own Degrassi story, if you want to hear it, which is that when I was getting hired to go teach English in Japan, there was a training session in Toronto, and one of the people they brought in to motivate us was a former teacher who was back in Canada after finishing her contract, and she was a girl of about my age, twenty-three or so, short, pleasant, Canadian, and I couldn't figure out where I had seen her before, until I suddenly realized that this was Spike, the girl on Degrassi who got pregnant, the girl with really spiked-out, whacked-out hair, hence the name 'Spike', and I thought oh, so this is where former Canadian TV stars end up, and all of the other new teachers on the break realized simultaneously that we had a Degrassi alumnus in our midst, and that was a fun moment, a real moment, and I think she is back on TV on Degrassi: The Next Generation, which I've never seen because I've been away, and I'm not sure I want to see it, truth be told, because it's somewhat cool but somewhat sad, too, to see the same students who were on the show ten, fifteen years ago returning to play older, wiser versions of themselves. Sometimes the past should stay the past, I think, but I know that bills have to be paid, too.)

Spielberg once said when promoting Saving Private Ryan that if you go back and look at what seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year olds looked like back in the twenties and thirties and forties, you'll see that they simply look older than those in the same age brackets today. I think that's true. Take a look at pictures of your grandparents when they were in their twenties. They look, I don't know, adult. Mature. Advanced. Whereas we have shows like Friends that seem to glorify extended adolescence into a near-religion.

We all advance at different speeds from each other, anyways, but I think the media, its reflections and distortions of who we are at various points in our lives, have more sway than we're usually willing to admit in determining how and why we grow the way we do.

That's my excuse, anyway.

A MOVIE THAT ALMOST EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD HATED BUT I THOUGHT WAS ACTUALLY REALLY STELLAR

Go and watch She Hate Me, Spike Lee's latest film. (It may still be out in some local theatres back home, or already on DVD; I caught it on DVD here, complete with a Spike Lee commentary track, for only two bucks. Go figure.)

If you check out www.rottentomatoes.com, a movie site that tabulates film critics' reviews from across the country and then somehow comes up with a collective score, you'll see that She Hate Me received the whoppingly-high score of 20%. (Meaning, 80% of critics hated it.)

Not a good omen, right?

Ah, but I'm of the belief that you must go and search out that which others collectively despise, because those are usually the very same things that give off glimmers of brilliance.

She Hate Me is a satire and a drama, and it does not fit into any box, and it does not want, or allow, any of its characters to fit into a box. It is messy and sprawling and uneven. It is about sex and money and power and money and sex and money and family and money and sex and what we will do, or think that we have to do, for sex and money. It is about our own images of morality.

It is raw and shaky and not altogether cohesive, like a lot of Spike Lee's films. It is ragged. It juts out. It is sprawling and a little unfocused. Kind of like life (only better lit, with a pretty cool music score, too, which life, unfortunately, lacks.)

Much of the criticism directed at the film had to do with its 'realism'.

A young black executive who is laid off from his corporation because the owners are crooked, callous, Enron-type scumbags who've stolen all the company's money decides to become a stud-for-hire and impregnate lesbians who are unwilling to risk having sperm-donors be the future fathers of their unborn children.

The idea is ludicrous, I grant you that.

But here's the thing: Lee's not going for realism.

It is a satire about money and power. He is playing and toying and challenging the stereotypes we all have about each other. He is asking you to consider what you know and why you know it.

"It's ridiculous that all these lesbian women are enjoying having sex with this man! How condescending! What a patriarchal male fantasy!"

That's what much of the criticism amounted to.

Hmmm. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, Lee is playing with our image of the black super-stud? Do you think he's possibly using these scenes to point out the ridiculousness of such stereotypes: Wow, here's a guy so skilled, so potent, that even lesbians love him!

Or consider the Italian woman he sleeps with, who, when telling him about her family, says: "Relax -- not all Italians are in the Mafia, you know."

And then we see that, of course, her family's in the Mafia. Her father even spouts long passages from The Godfather.

Stereotypes.

About race, ethnicity, sexuality.

This is a film that comes at you in a thousand different directions. It is long (perhaps too long), and the ending is not only somewhat unlikely, but a touch absurd, too.

That's why I liked it.

Movies are not made to be judged equally. Movies are not made equally. They are worlds unto themselves. She Hate Me is about the new age we live in, refracted and reflected. And yet, don't think of its world as our world. People and places are exaggerated and distorted to make a point. Characters and their actions can be seen as metaphors for entire segments of society.

I'm not saying you have to love the fim, or even like it. Humor and style and technique are personal, and you may not respond or react to how they're used here. That's fine. That's the essence of what makes movies work -- our likes and dislikes, our strange passions and quirky loves.

But it just seems that so much of modern cinema is made to be easily chewed, digested, forgotten about. It tells us what it's going to say, says it, then tells us again what it said. We leave the theatre smiling and happy and wondering what's on the radio. She Hate Me left me entertained, yes, but also bewildered, confused and unsure about what I'd seen or what it was supposed to mean.

The film allows you to be a co-conspirator, and it expects you, demands you, to bring your own ideas and insights along for the ride.

THE ROCKETS' RED GLARE, THE BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR, THE TRUE NORTH STRONG AND FREE, WE STAND ON GUARD FOR THEE

So Canada has decided to opt out of the missle defence shield that American wants to implement up in the sky sometime soon.

I know, I know -- you're dismayed, confused, disappointed.

No?

Okay, maybe you haven't heard this news yet, and wouldn't exactly feel disturbed one way or the other now that you have heard it.

I'm with you.

It's does have at least the potential of being interesting, though, if only because it strikes at the heart of certain Canadian insecurities and contradictions, of who we are and where we want to go.

I think what happened is, Paul Martin, Canada's Prime Minister, bowed to political pressure from within his own party, other parties and Canada itself. Before he was prime minister, he was for the shield; now, looking at another re-election, possibly sometime soon, he's against it.

The thing is, let's say there's a missle launched from some bad and evil and petty country, and that missle is targeted at Dubya's bedroom window, and to reach said window, it has to fly its merry course over Canada's airspace.

If Canada isn't in on this super-duper shield thingee, theoretically, Dubya would have to pick up his bedside phone and ask Prime Minister Martin for permission to shoot down that pesky missle, and Paul would have to think about it, consult some people, get back to Dubya first thing in the morning, sleep tight now.

Does that sound likely?

Uh-uh.

We know that the States would want to down that missle whether Canada is with the program or not. End of story.

The larger issue is one of Canadian soverignty, and indepence, and not-relying-on-all-those-crazy-Yanks-down-south.

Canadians have a really weird relationship to Americans. We watch all of their movies and TV, and read their authors, and play their music, and shop over the border whenever we can, and lose our freakin' minds when Conan O'Brien does a week of shows in Canada featuring only Canadian guests, but we still like to assume that we're better, superior, more enlightened than our next door neighbours, even though a heck of a lot of Canadians don't actually know any Americans personally.

I think Canada is a fundamentally different breed of country than America, if only because we've grown up in the shadow of a superpower, but we're not a superpower, and so we've had to figure out, and are still endlessly figuring out: What are we, then, if we ain't the big kid on the block? (Hopefully not a New Kid on the Block, because that band broke up a long time ago, and they were pretty lame to begin with.)

I'm not saying that Canadians opposed to the shield are wrong; they're morally right in their own minds, and you can never cavalierly dismiss someone's morals. Hell, I'm inclined to oppose the shield too, if only for patriotic reasons.

Are these reasons pragmatic or practical, though?

Hmmm.

That's more difficult.

We live in a tough, unforgiving age. In other words, bad stuff, really bad stuff, can happen quick, soon, now.

America is going to do what they want to do whether we like it or not.

The question is, how do we respond? How do we stand up for ourselves? How do we chart an independent course while being, essentially, dependent on the States for our security and well-being? After living in Japan (thousands of years old, with their own freakin' language) and Cambodia (thousands of years old, also with their own freakin' language), I've finally realized how young Canada is, how fundamentally immature and developing this great country is, this cultural mosaic of every language and shade known under the sun.

We've still got a long way to go, though. Got a lot of questions to answer. A lot of uncharted waters to navigate through.

I don't have any answers, but the questions keep coming, and how we respond to those questions in a mature, realistic fashion is what will allow the ongoing Canadian experiment to reach the next level, and the next, and the one after that.

CALL YOURSELF HUMAN

It's fascinating, how you can be walking along, thinking thoughts, counting steps, wondering what to eat for dinner, wondering what you always wonder, and then have your life flip-flopped and tweaked.

Yesterday, I was heading home from work, my white-dress shirt gradually growing damp with sweat as the hot Khmer sun slowly made its lingering descent. (A Cambodian dusk is always a welcome event.) Approaching the stoplight at Sihanouk and Monivong, I heard the excited chatter of children up above.

"Hello! Hello! Hello!"

There were maybe six of them, waving at me, smiling. I waved back, smiled. Cambodian children embody goodwill.

And then the nun came out.

Like, a real nun, the Mother Teresa kind, wearing the same blue and white traditional garb.

"Hello!" she said. "Come inside, come inside, sir."

She grabbed my arm and tugged me along, this smiling Cambodian woman. I checked out the sign on the side of the building: SISTERS OF MERCY MINISTRIES, I think it said.

What am I going to do, say no to a nun? (Even agnostics have to hedge their bets every now and then.)

Up the slight row of stairs, and there they were -- kids, a couple dozen of them, from infants to ten year olds, playing on the ground, resting in their beds. Some of them were smiling and healthy. Some of them just layed there, their eyes distant and blank. I met one boy, perhaps two, who had no hands; they looked as if they had been hacked off, leaving only two little stumps. So I smiled and shook the stumps.

Does that sound strange? It is. It's strange and bizarre and heartbreaking beyond belief, shaking the stumps of a two year old boy. It makes you feel sick and guilty and helpless.

The nun pointed out another child that had just arrived that day. He had five brothers and sisters, and the father had just been killed in a construction accident, leaving the mother unable to care for this newborn. So, here he was. The nuns took him in, no questions asked, mind the stairs on your way out. Simple. There was an Asian-Canadian woman there from Toronto, where I went to university, helping out with the kids. Strange, the connections that can be forged so far from home.

Have you ever been in an orphanage? After teaching in a few of them, I can reassure you that they are very, very humbling places. And a Cambodian orphanage can take the cake. Any worries you have about your own life are thrown out the window, instantly. You don't want to consider the lives of these children in the future. Even their lives now are somewhat sad, or completely sad. One little boy just came up to me and grabbed onto my leg and wouldn't let go, as if I were his favorite uncle, not some total stranger. The nun told me that these children have very few people to talk to, hug, hold. Come back anytime, she said. Anytime.

And, of course, as the announcers on TV would say, 'these are the lucky ones'. And they are. There are a lot of kids in Cambodia that dwell on the streets, sleep in the rain, scavenge for food. These kids have light, space, warmth.

I'll come back, if only to chill with the kids for a little while. If only to get in touch with something that is so remote and yet so near.

I walk by this place every day! I'm outside, and they're inside, and that's the conundrum right there. None of this is different from what goes on back home, of course; none of this is necessary unique. It's the details and degrees that are different, the hacked off limbs, the deformities from birth. I have hands and some of them don't; I have a place to go to, and they don't.

Maudlin, I know, and self-pitying, and all those other emotions that Cambodia drags up from inside you. A perpetual pity party, if you want to look at it that way.

But it's important, I think, to remember that there are places, on the same roads that we walk, the same streets that we drive, that are filled with the forgotten, the left behind, and those who dedicate their lives, with no reward, to helping them get by. It's important to remember what society chooses to forget.

If we don't, how else can we truly, honestly call ourselves human?

WHY CHRIS MAY (OR MAY NOT) ROCK THE OSCARS

Once again, I'm stuck in Asia when the Oscars roll around.

I've missed them the last, what, six years, having been in Japan and Cambodia without cable. Now I have cable, true, but I think the show's airing taped, a couple of days after the event. (Incidentally, cable in Cambodia is weird -- you get channels from Italy and the Philippines and Taiwan and Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. Rich Cambodians can even watch selected Canadian dramas, should they so choose. Nobody in Canada watches Canadian dramas, so I'm not sure why Thai TV carries them, but...)

I'll get to see the show, I guess -- just not live.

That's when Chris Rock works best.

Chris Rock is, I think, one of the funniest stand-up comedians I've seen in the last decade. Probably the funniest. Because he tells the truth.

Notice I said 'stand-up'. On Saturday Night Live and in the movies, Rock comes across as rather stiff and uncomfortable. Not a good actor, I don't think, although the movie he directed, Head of State, had its moments. They were few and far between, but when they hit, they hit.

Chris Rock live, however, no-holds barred, is a sight to see. He is blunt and political and nasty. He stalks the stage like a panther looking for its kill. More importantly: he's funny. Laugh-out loud funny. Sometimes piss-your-pants funny. Sometimes silly, often crude, always blatant. Seinfeld says what we're all thinking; Rock says what he's thinking, which is always riskier. And usually funnier, too.

(At the same time, I don't think he oozes comedy. Guys like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy and Martin Short and Mike Myers -- if you think they're funny, that is -- seem to me to be touched by the comedic gods. They are comedy personified. And, yes, three of those dudes are Canadian, but I'm not nominating them for nationalistic reasons. I swear. Look, we guys also gave the world Celine Dion, so I know we're not perfect.)

Rock works for his jokes. He gets that wild look in his eyes as he stalks out the laughs before slaying them, and us. They are, quite often, pointed commentaries on racism in American society. I can't vouch for their accuracy, not being American, but I can vouch for their impact. He's funny.

(Not that he's only about race. Funny is funny is funny, and he's funny no matter what he's talking about. He's got a quick, agile mind. I saw him on Regis once talking about his newborn daughter: "I just hope she doesn't end up on the pole." Regis asks him what the 'pole' is. Rock says: "The stripper pole. If your daughter ends up on the pole, you have officially failed as a father. End of story.")

The Academy Awards, God love 'em, can be a bit stuffy, though. I have no doubt Rock's jokes will be clean. I have no doubt they'll be funny, too. I just wonder if some kind of comedic disconnect will take place, because everybody's so uptight and waiting and wondering if they're going to win that little bald and golden trophy, and then they have to sweat it out and listen to Rock try and slam the industry that they're a part of. If the audience's not into it, if they wait a little too long to laugh, that silence might seem really long and really deep as it passes on through the TV screen.

But good luck to him. Chris Rock tells the truth (as he sees it), and he seems to me to be in the tradition of Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, who were all reporters whose primary beat was life itself, the small stuff and the big stuff. Fundamentally, the human stuff.

Let's hope Rock rocks so he'll keep on having a forum for telling the truth for as long as we want to hear it.

AS TIME GOES BY: JOANIE LOVES CHACHI, INEVITABLY FALLING ICE CREAM CONES, AND WHY NOT TO CHEW GUM ONSTAGE AT YOUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION

I refuse to believe it's February just because the calendar says it is, not only because it's bloody hot and freakin' sunny out, as it is all day, every day, but also because I'm convinced that time has sped up since I've graduated university, that the universe itself has undergone some radical shift in temporal distortions, unless it's only now, on the cusp of thirty, that I'm finally realizing how life works.

Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"

It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"

(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)

And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.

So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.

A morbid thought?

Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.

In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.

And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.

(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)

I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)

And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)

They're all we've got, those moments.

Maybe they're enough.

EITHER WAY

Sometimes I think it would be nice to move back to my hometown and get a small apartment and find a job at the arena where I used to play hockey as a kid, Bill Burgoyne Arena, where I could work in the concession stand, serving Cokes to parents who wait patiently for their kids to emerge, stinky and sweaty, from the after-game calm of the dressing rooms, as my parents once waited for me. In the downtime I could read books, jot notes for my own book, observe a place and a time that was once simply part of my life and is now only a memory of life. I could get reacquainted with the city and the people that made me. Not a bad gig, really -- the cold of the arena, the sounds of slapshots and whistles, the faces of the kids. I could take a skate every now and then, I'm sure. Hot chocolate whenever you want. There are worse places to work.

And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.

I think I could carve out a life, either way.

ISN'T THAT CLEVER?

So super-canuck Keanu Reeve's next movie is about a lonely guy living in an empty house who ends up exchanging letters with Sandra Bullock, who also somehow lives in that same house, only two years in the future, see, so they have a long-temporal relationship going on, not merely a long-distance one.

Clever.

And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.

Also clever.

That's the problem, though.

So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.

If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.

So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.

And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.

Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.

Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)

It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.

It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.

You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)

So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.

Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.

I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.

I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.

Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...

Kind of clever, no?

ANOTHER HAND, NOT MY OWN

About twelve, thirteen years ago I woke up in the middle of the night, rubbed my eyes, turned over, stretched out my right arm to grab my pillow and, instead, felt another hand, not my own, and I sure as hell knew that there hadn't been anybody else sleeping beside me when I crawled into bed, but there it was, the hand, and my fingers roamed downwards, against my will, and there was an arm attached to that hand, and I thought it was a dead body, was sure it was a dead body, until, suddenly, a strange but familiar tingling sensation emanated from this mysterious arm, transferring its energy into my own flesh, and I just about screamed before I realized that this energy was, in actuality, my energy, that this unknown arm was my arm, that my left arm was, in fact, asleep, and while it had felt like my left arm was align with my horizontal frame, that was a lie, a trick of the mind, because my left arm had actualy been lazily sprawled outwards, and now the feeling was coming back, not the gone-to-sleep feeling but the normal-arm feeling, and with it the realization there was only me in that bed, me and no corpse, and within moments the feeling was back, my arm was back, independent no more.

(Which made me kind of sad, because nobody likes to sleep alone.)

THE (NON-EXISTENT) BEST MOVE IN CHESS, or WHY ENVYING PAULY SHORE IS ACTUALLY A REALLY GOOD THING

How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day.


-- Goethe


Unless you don't have a shred of empathy for your fellow human beings, living in a country like Cambodia forces you into some heavy-duty existential inquiries, most of them centred upon your own mobility as a reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy westerner, crossing paths, on an hourly basis, with some of the poorest people on earth.

Why am I here? Why are they there? We inhabit this same earth, we breathe the same air, and we are all mortal. (To crib from J.F.K.) But we ain't equal. What's it all about?

I'm reading this book right now called The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of logotherapy, which essentially puts the 'soul' into psychological therapy. It's very readable, understandable, credible. All the answers you need to know about life's problems in three hundred pages. And for three-fifty American.

A precis:

1) Why are we here?

As Neil Peart, the brilliant drummer and lyricist from the Canadian rock band Rush put it: "Why are here? Because we're here. Roll the bones."

In other words, we are here to do the tasks before us. Period. If we have a task before us, a task worth doing, then we have found our meaning and purpose in life.

2) Why is life not giving me what I want?

The question is phrased backwards; it is not what life is not giving us -- it's what we are not giving life.

We tend to view life as this swimming pool that we're wading through -- not even swimming, usually, just wading, as if it's separate from us, as if it is remote from us.

When things go wrong, we lash out at life itself.

Ain't gonna work, according to Frankl.

It is not what we are demanding from life that's crucial -- it's what life is demanding from us. What are we putting back into the biosphere? What are we not living up to? When you invert the question, the onus comes back to us, and our own responsibilities towards those around us.

3) What if I consider myself a loser, a has-been, a good-for-nothing yahoo who makes
Pauly Shore look like Kofi Annan?

Not to worry, says Frankl. Feeling this depressed and wretched is actually a good thing.

Why?

It's proof that you have an ideal in your head, an image, an oasis of sucess and prosperity that eludes you.

Ah, but the image is there, you see. It exists. It emanated from inside of you.

And once you have that kind of picture in place, you now have a task before you -- the
ideal that you wish to move towards. If you have a task, you can now have a responsibility. If you have a responsibility, you can take action. You may not ever reach those ideals, but
so what? You know what they are, and you know what you're striving towards.

4) What's the meaning of life?


I now quote Frankl, 'cause he's more educated than me. He didn't watch as many episodes of Who's the Boss or Growing Pains as I did, no, but his analysis still tops my paraphrasing:

...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but ony in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...


Couldn't have said it better myself.

All the answers to life, it seems, in the paragraph above.

So:

Life is meaningless, pointless, filled with endless human suffering -- a logical conclusion, after almost two years in Cambodia.

Ah, but there is no such thing as 'life' -- there is his life, and her life, and your life, and that guy over there's life.

There is a person, at a point in time, in a specific place. The meaning is found based on the specific tasks faced before them. If they have the means to radically invigorate their life, this could be known as creative. If they are stuck there, against their will, this could be experiential. If their situation is terminal or life-threatening, it is attitudinal. Even when you have nothing at all left in life, when you're on your way to the gas chambers, as Frankl was, you still have the ability to judge how you react to it; you still have the capacity to choose your view.

Impossible to boil life's insanity down to all of these platitudes, isn't it?

But they makes sense to me.

They have a form and a shape, Frankl's words, that I can grasp.

They allow the petty demands of each day to acquire a meaning and resonance that not only explains life, but justifies it, too, allowing all of our duties and actions to be seen as what they are: expressions of will, and grace, and direction.

SHARE IT

I just read on the net that 'gonzo' journalist Hunter S. Thompson pulled a Hemingway and did himself in. Gun to the head. Literary immortality guaranteed.

Never read much of Thompson -- his stuff was too topical, too of-the-times for me to get into very much. His work kind of slipped by me, like the Beats, who I've still yet to read. He pioneered a kind of reckless journalistic style that shook things up and took the government and American society to task for all their moral failings. He was played in the movies twice, by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and by Bill Murray over twenty-five years ago in a film (unseen by me) called Where the Buffalo Roam.

Thompson wrote for www.espn.go.com until his death, and his last article was about 'shotgun golf', a new, more-than-slightly lunatic idea of his that he talks about with Bill Murray. It's a strange article, and fun, and, in light of what's happened, creepy and sad, too.

Suicide is one of those things that can't be explained, rationalized, figured out. Doesn't matter if you're a famous writer or the snowmobile repairman down at the garage, the one with the lazy right eye; the end result is the same, and the resulting sorrow and confusion is just as intense for those left behind.

But it's also kind of a taboo in our culture, isn't it? We don't like to talk about it all that much, yet it exists, and it's real, and it's daily, in Canada and Cambodia and Japan.

Speaking of Nippon, the suicide rate over there is freakin' huge; just today, I read that an executive of Seibu, one of the big rail companies in Japan, did himself in in light of some investigation into the company's wrongdoings. If you've done something wrong, it's the noble thing to do in Japan, offing yourself; it gives you a dignity in death you lacked in life.

I used to wonder why there were so many mirrors looming over the railway tracks in Tokyo, until I read that it was done to prevent people from jumping in front of the trains; psychologists believe that if you see your own reflection before you take the leap, you might think twice. (The trains would always be delayed because of suicide jumpers, and the families of the victimes would be presented with the bill. There was even an announcement that if you were going to kill yourself, could you please kindly not do it at rush-hour, thereby saving the inconvenience of thousands of passengers?)

So now another famed writer has been added to that infamous list headed by Hemingway and Mishima and Plath. A sad club to a part of. We won't know why Thompson decided to do it; we never do. People have reasons that even reason can't persuade.

But let me just say this: If you ever, even for a moment, for whatever reason, even contemplate joining that list, stop. Take a breath. Pick up the phone. Switch on the net. Check your e-mail. Call your friend. E-mail me, even. Breathe again. (Oh, but that won't happen to me, you think, and you're probably, most definitely right, but I'm just saying: thoughts are things of their own, with their own erratic orbits, so you have to be prepared for where they may lead. You have to guard against your own levels of tolerance.)

Nothing's gained when someone loses like that, loses the only game we're all playing, all the time, like it or not. The world always unknowingly mourns and contracts when death comes via this method. It's like a law of nature or something, this galactic sense of futility.

There is always someone out there to share your pain. There is always someone out there to listen to your voice. There is always a way up, even if you don't believe that, and you don't even have to believe it; it's enough to believe that others believe it, and they can pull you up, one yank at a time.

Immortality is not guaranteed, no, and neither is the moment after next, but what you do have is this moment, right now, in your hands. Don't be afraid to share it.

HOW DO YOU KNOW?

At what point do you settle? 'This is my life, and this is my house, and this is my street, and this is my job, and this is my life' -- at what point do you, should you, must you actually say all of that? Acknowledge all of that? Is there a predetermined hourglass inside of all of us that indicates when this declaration has to take place? If there is, I haven't heard the delicate sands of that hourglass just quite yet, which scares me and consoles me at one and the same time.

Some people settle at nineteen in their hometown, just down the road from where they grew up. They watch the same TV channels they always did, go to the same movie theatres, order pizza from the same pizza shop, the one that has the pizza with the good cheese, the thick cheese. Others never settle; they stay here for a year, there for another, before heading off down the road, late for the plane, early for the boat, whatever. Always a new place, road, encounter.

People in Cambodia settle young, because they don't have a choice, because they don't have money, because they live where they live and work where they work and if they have to travel to get a job, well, then they do what they have to do. It's not a 'lifestyle option'. It's life, and they live it, and that's that.

We in the west are raised with the belief that we can do anything and be anything and live anywhere and survive to tell the tale (returning with wallet-size photos, too). We can travel the world and explore the world and still have a couch to come back and crash on.

Still, at a certain point, life takes over. You will have a place and a time that is yours and yours alone, like it or not, ready or not.

How about it?

Is this your time? Is this your place? How do you know?

WHY READ?

The problem with a love of reading is that it can disconnect you from the real world around you, making you think thoughts and imagine images that don't have any relation to what's right there in front of your face. You read a book about Taiwan, and suddenly your brain is immersed in facts and figures that are interesting, compelling, potentially moving, but the cars that pass by your house, the birds that chirp overhead, the clouds that do their cloud-like things, remain unnoticed. The reality you inhabit becomes an appendage to the more vibrant world that your intellectual pursuits provide.

So what do we read for then? To connect to something bigger than us. To gain insights into who we are and why we do the things that we do. To know that we are not alone.

But we know that already, don't we? We can walk outside, turn right, knock on our neighbour's door, and our loneliness becomes an illusion. There's a person there, asking who we are and what we want. The deeper insights that books allow, the knowledge that we gain, pales in comparison to the flesh that we now face, flesh attached to a face, and a chest, and a torso, flesh that forces us to confront another living creature, and share our loneliness, our confusions and questions.

Books are an escape. Books are a journey. Books are the means by which we makes sense of a senseless world. These are the reasons that readers give for living and loving books. They're the reasons that I give, too.

But is it all bull? If you want an escape, step out your door. Go on a journey to a new place, a new street, a new shopping mall. If you want to make sense of a senseless world, ask your local priest, rabbi or grocery-store clerk. Those are real people, stuck in the same world you are, dealing with the same daily aggravations that drive us all slowly, unavoidably insane.

I think our love for books is simpler than that, and it comes down to words. Words, words, words. We like words. We like what words do. We like the way they interact with themselves and our own psyche.

Everything else -- escape, knowledge, entertainment -- is a byproduct of what those words do to our nervous systems. We read because are bodies are wired to get off on the electric, kinetic effect that good words grouped together can create. We like the sounds that are formed in our head as our eyes scan the page. We like the buzz and the pulse. All the other good stuff is a not-so-accidental offshoot of the language; the letters are our entrypoint into those other worlds and our lifecraft when we're lost. They give us what the real world withholds -- all of the emotion, all of the knowledge, encapsulated in twenty-six member states, with none of the attachment that life demands.


If you don't get off on the language, you don't get off on reading. And if you do, it's good to remember that life, too, has its own occasional rewards, as transitory as they sometimes seem.

FIFTEEN YEARS FROM NOW

A cool and almost wet Saturday morning. Rare lately. Appreciated now. A respite from the sun and sweat. A rotating fan blows on my neck. An empty Pink Lemonade Snapple bottle sits beside the computer. It has been awhile since I've tasted a Snapple, and it tastes good, tastes real, even with all its artificial, sweetened glory. I can see and feel all of these things, and for some strange reason this makes me feel good, as if I'm appreciating that which is usually neglected, as if the little things have somehow become big things in my mind, achieved a weight that they deserve but aren't usually allowed. I think of all the things that have been crammed into my head, useless things, irrelevant things, facts and dates and names and scents from my past, my high school, my classroom in Japan, thousands of raw, inert facts, learned and glimpsed once, then stuffed away, forgotten. It can be overwhelming, if dwelled upon, but then I remember to focus on this fan right here and right now, and the wind from the fan, and the lack of heat, and the taste of Snapple still on my lips, and for some reason I can't quite explain I hope that I won't forget this moment, that it will come back to me on a cold winter night fifteen years from now, when I am forty-four, in Canada, awake, listening to a winter storm, that it will give me a strange sort of comfort, a remembrance of youth, if nothing else, before I sink back into sleep.

WHAT NOW?

I read an old interview with playwriter/screenwriter/filmmaker David Mamet recently, which got me thinking about the kind of stuff I like to think about, which is the future, the past, fate, destiny -- you know, all of those esoteric concepts that are always overlooked in school, in favor of such important, crucial ideas like imaginary numbers and the International Date Line. (I still don't get 'imaginary numbers'. And try explaining what the International Date Line is to a group of slightly confused Cambodian university students. I've been there. It wasn't pretty.)

Mamet was making kind of an offhand remark, which is where all the great wisdom is inevitably found. He was saying that there really is no 'future' -- that the very concept of the 'future' is simply a means by which those in power maintain power. "Do what we say, and do it now, or else W, X and Y will take place. Oh, and maybe even Z, if you're not careful."

Makes sense to me, especially in light of multiple 'terror warnings' and threats of attack on American soil. We sacrifice our daily lives for what might be, could be, probably won't be.

I like to think of it like this: The future is now, just extended, like a twirly straw, and we never, ever get there, because it is always now, this moment, and not then, or the next moment. It's forever now.

Which puts even the very concept of the 'future' in a tricky place. Where will I be in that mythical, non-existent point in time? Will I still be in Cambodia five years hence? Unlikely, very unlikely, but not impossible. And when (or if) that five year span comes to a head, will I then proclaim: "Aha! I'm now in the future!" No. I'll simply be here, at this moment, doing this thing. Plain and simple. The year 2000 didn't feel like the year 2000 because it wasn't the year 2000, not the one we'd grown up with, that futuristic realm of flying cars and skyway escalators. It was simply now.

And now it's then, and the year 2000 actually seems rather quaint, pre 9/11 and all.

So then: where do we position ourselves, if there's never a next, and only a now? We have to plan for the future, but since it never comes, how do we know if our plans have been fulfilled? One day you wake up and say "Damn, I'm almost thirty," and of course you don't feel thirty, because it was always up-ahead and down-the-line. The plans you made were for that thirty-year old self transplanted from whatever your twelve or fifteen or twenty-one year old self was thinking and feeling and hoping for.

All I know is, the future doesn't exist, but I'd still like to go there, just to chill out, hang out, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. When I was younger the future was, indeed, the undiscovered country, this strange and foreign land, waiting to be discovered, if not conquered, but now I see it more as a way-stop, the fast-food place at the side of the highway that you take a break at before getting back on the road again. It's not a place you dwell in. You prepare for it, and you have 'future preference', as Bill Clinton's old prof used to say, but it's merely the repository for this present moment. Everything we're doing is preparing ourselves for the next now. And the next. And the next.

So you better make sure that your now has some weight, purpose and dignity to it, because it's a linked chain, this collection of present moments is, like the Buddhist concept of a reincarnated soul: one candle lights the next, then the next, then the next, so that there is no clear differentiation between the various lives; they are all part of the same, fluid line. Moment leads to moment to moment, each of them building and shaping the next, influencing the next. Each lending gravity or grace to what follows.

So, take care now, is what I'm saying.

It's all you've got.

ONLY CONNECT

What makes good writing good?

I ask because I'm reading this novel right now called Mailman, by J.Robert Lennon, and it's about -- you guessed it -- a mailman, one who inhabits modern-day American suburbia, and it's very well-written, clever, filled with these long and looping sentences that are designed to draw you into the story but also designed, in part, to show off the linguistic dexterity of the writer, drawing attention to the quality and elasticity of the writing, kind of like what I'm trying to do now, writing a long sentence that still somehow has some semblance of control, so you can flip the pages and say: "Damn, this guy's good."

See what I mean?

The novelist Elmore Leonard on his rewriting process: "If it sounds like writing, I cut it."

Meaning, if the language in the story draws attention to itself as language, the author is, basically, showing off. Letting the reader know that he or she is a talented wordsmith, a gifted craftsman; if you're spending all of your time admiring the pretty way that the piece is put together and not concentrating (or caring) about the story, something's out of whack.

I tend to agree.

Take Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian poet/novelist who wrote The English Patient. Fabulous poet, but I can't really get off on his novels, because they're, I don't know, too poetic. Every sentence is this crisp and sharpened jewel. You're meant to pause and ooh and ahh after every phrase.

Poetry, in my humble opinion, is the place for showing off your verbal skills, your ways with words, your capacity to turn English on its head. Poetry is the dazzling little sparkles of sunshine that drift through the summer afternoon; prose is the beam of light itself, pointed and purposeful.

This is not to say that language isn't important when reading a story, or writing a story. It's everything. But the style of the writer should serve the path of the story. You should be sucked in by the writer's prose, yes, but not astonished. Some of my favorite writers, muscular
wordsmiths like John Irving and Norman Mailer, are always insightful, graceful writers, working wonders with our puny language, but it always has a point, their prose; it always has a direction. It's subordinate to the characters and the plot and the theme. It's functional, this use of language, which makes its occasional leap into profundity that much more, well, profound.

I say all of this because writing a blog, even as casual as one as this, is still an exercise in language, in tone, in voice. I'm not writing this the same way that I would write a term paper, or short story, or a letter to the editor. I'm trying to emulate the kind of breezy, conversational tone that most blogs and e-mails have tended to adapt over the last five years or so, because it's easy to read and fun to write. (Who wants to go through life writing term papers every day? Or reading them, God forbid...)

It's my little theory that a whole new form of writing has developed since the dawn of the Internet, and blogs are just an example of it, this kind of casual, lackadaisical prose, trying to simulate the way we speak. It used to be that you did your rigid, serious, writing type writing for your teacher or your boss or your editor (if you were a writer); any casual tone was saved for the recipient of your letters, but realistically, not too many people are writing letters anymore.


So writing in more or less the same way that we speak was not really what people did, until the
Internet exploded and blogs were invented and suddenly everyone around the world was able to read pretty much whatever they wanted. And then you throw in cell phones and text
messaging and who knows what else, and suddenly language is shifting, mutating, morphing into something almost unrecognizable.

As long as it's rooted in communication, it's fine with me. Language started out as merely that, right? Purely functional. And then people got good at it, developed a flair for it, and, bingo bammo, art was formed. Prose was formed. Poetry was formed. And sometimes the artistic flaunting of one's own gifts got in the way of the entire purpose of art which was, well, communication.

The Internet brings us full circle, back to communication, back to me having something to say and you waiting to hear it. (Okay, maybe you're not waiting to here what I have to say...) It's the newest addition to what Gutenberg started awhile back. (No, not Steve; I'm talking about the printing press dude, although he might be distantly related to the Short Circuit star).

So here's to blogs and prose and poetry and every other way that we try to link ourselves with another's thoughts, minds and hearts. Here's hoping that, despite all our recent technological advancements, we never lose sight of language's original intent, nor the wonderfully artistic and malleable ways we can put it to use.

LIL KIM, MODELS FEAR FACTOR AND ALL THOSE CLOSED, IMPENETRABLE DOORS

Across from my apartment, across the street, across the park, just to the left, lies the North Korean embassy in Phnom Penh. It's about a minute walk from my place. A huge house behind a huge gate with not-so-huge guards guarding it. (Cambodians are pretty short.) Outside, on the Clearasil coloured walls, there are a collection of pictures of that kind, sweet, lovable dictator known as Kim Jong Ill. (Oh, and I spelled 'coloured' with a 'u' in it because that's the way that Canadians spell it, and I felt very patriotic for a second there. Flaunting my heritage and all.)

The former Cambodian king, Sihanouk, is good buddies with Kim Jong, graduate of the Don King School of Hair Design. Literally hangs out with him in North Korea three, four months out of the year. The current king, Sihamoni, actually studied filmmaking in North Korea in the 1970's. (How bizarre is that? NYU film school, maybe. USC film school, sure. North Korea?)

Yes, bizarre is the word for that hermetic kingdown.

Sometimes, when I'm walking or running by the North Korean embassy, I glance at those framed photos of the dictator and notice the lackadaisical attitude of the Khmer guards, and the gate to the place that is sometimes swinging open, and I wonder what would happen if I just ran inside.

Not that I would do it. I'm crazy enough to live in Cambodia, true, but not crazy enough to force my way into the North Korean embassy.

But still. I genuinely want to know: What goes on in there? Is there a need for a North Korean embassy here, and a rather big one to boot? I know that there are two North Korean restaurants in Cambodia; I wrote about my visit to the one in Phnom Penh in an earlier blog, as it's owned by the father of an old North Korean student of mine. (I think he's gone back to North Korea, that student, to join the army. Good grief.) So maybe the employees of the restaurant need the facilities of the embassy, 'cause they sure as hell aren't allowed out much on their own, if at all, to wander around the 'democracy' that is Cambodia. Maybe they're training spies -- for who or where or what, I couldn't tell you.

But I want to know.

What do they do in there? Are the North Koreans that are living here sending back secret information to Pyongyang? Hell, I have cable here, and last night I watched an episode of 'Models Fear Factor'. The North Korean embassy has a satellite dish, so maybe everyone inside there was chillin' and watching that, too. Do they go back home and say to their sheltered brethren: "Look yo, you would not believe what's going down in the outside world."

There are so many closed doors in the world. I don't want all of them opened, no, but I do want some of them pried ajar. Just for a moment. Just so I can take a peek.

We pass by them every day, these buildings that guide and shape our world, and there's one right across the street from me, a strange, forbidding one, a North Korean one, and I want to climb that fence, drop to the ground, rush the doors, see what happens. I want one less mystery in the world, just for a day, a moment.

I want all those closed doors to open.

HEAVEN AND EARTH

The other day I watched Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, probably his least known film, and, in my mind, one of his best. I first saw it during those slowly dying days of high school, Christmas '93, when Schindler's List had taken the cinematic world by storm. There was little room left for yet another Stone flick about Vietnam. It came, went, disappeared. (Much like Alexander has done.)

I've watched it a few times over the years. It keeps drawing me back. And then I watched it, here, in Phnom Penh, eleven years on, and I picked up so many things I'd never noticed before -- in its story of a young, traditional Vietnamese peasant woman and her life as it's torn asunder by the Vietnam war, both in Asia and America, it achieves a kind of still, Buddhist grace. I'm older, the movie is the same, but it's a new experience now, a richer experience.

So much to love about this movie -- its images, its heart, its blatant, overt romanticism. It is not cynical and hip; it replicates a more innocent, Asian view of the world, where ghosts and fate and karma are all linked with bombs and bullets and helicopters flying overhead.

The main character was criticized as being too passive at the time of its release, too much of a pawn in the story, tossed around from incident to incident -- which, to me, pretty much misses the whole point. Anybody who's spent anytime in Southeast Asia will recognize the raw deal that most young girls have on a continual, daily basis -- the lack of any viable options. The lack of control they have over their own lives. We have so many ingrained notions about narrative, so many expectations. This movie does not necesarily fulfill those, or even try to, which is its strength.

If you've travelled over here, you'll recognize the subtle acts of corruption depicted in the film, the innocent smiles, the wide sky and bright sun. This is a movie about tone and texture and images, which is why the plot gets a little stalled in the end, a little overcrowded, a little rushed.

But so what? Who goes to movies for plot, anyways? We go to experience another life, another view of the world. The narrator of this movie is a Vietnamese peasant woman. Think about that. When was the last time you ever had a female narrator for an entire film? I can't think of one. Let alone a village girl who sees her life as a working out of her own karma. Stone may have a reputation as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, but this film proves the range of his interest, the depth of his feeling.

Why would anyone back home get it? It approaches life at an angle that most people have never been priviliged to see from. I loved it back in high school, but I didn't get it; I was intrigued and haunted by its image, its tone, and, most importantly, its fantastically sumptuous music by the Japanese composer Kitaro. As Stone notes in a rambling-but-oh-so-fascinating director's commentary, the score is popular the world over, streaming forth from elevators and taxicabs. It has a heart, this music does.

So does the film. I recommend it. Don't go in expecting a well-plotted, well integrated storyline. Don't go in with your own point of view of the world (although I guess it's impossible not to, right?) Just watch it, and imagine the story from the heroine's perspective, Le Ly Hayslip, and allow yourself to be sucked in. Allow the grace to take over.

OUR CYNICAL, SARCASTIC CULTURE, JAPANESE HIRING PRACTICES, AND WHY ANTHONY ROBBINS (DESPITE HIS SLIGHTLY CRO-MAGNON APPEARANCE) TRULY IS THE MAN

We have to choose what to believe:

1) Life is either an endless slog through a neverending series of browbeating, soul-destroying humiliations, or

2) it is a battleground through which we can seize our ultimate potential, help others grasp theirs, and live each day as a spiritual, enlightening progress towards our ultimate purpose.

Guess which theory Anthony Robbins would choose?

For those not in the know, Anthony Robbins is America's premier motivational speaker, star of countless late-night infomercials, personal coach to hundreds of elite athletes, businessmen, politicians and statesmen, guru to anyone and everyone seeking to become better than they are at the present moment.

He is, depending on how you look at it, an inspirational role model or a complete and total crock.

(Or maybe a bit of both.)

Upon hearing even the name 'Anthony Robbins', a lot of you are either rolling your eyes. I want you to think about why.

A few years back there was an Esquire profile of the man titled 'Wouldn't YOU like to be Anthony Robbins?' It followed him around for a day or two, detailing how slightly larger than life, is-this-guy-for-real his existence seemed to be, requiring an energy level, a positivity level, that was not only inhuman, but somehow subhuman, too. (I'm not sure what that means, either, but it sounds good, so I'm going with it.)

A lot of people consider Robbins to be nothing more than a scam-artist out to con vulnerable, desperate people who need a little pick-me-up in their lives.

That's always a possibility. I happen to think there's a lot to what he says, what he represents, what he advocates.

Most of what Robbins preaches is not new; it's the packaging that sets him apart, the packaging of himself, and what he' s selling, which is positivity, planning ahead, modelling yourself after others who have succeeded in the same fields that you want to succeed in, and then going after what you want.

Take the firewalk.

At his seminars, Robbins has people walk on burning coals.

Why?

Because once you do something you did not think you would be able to do, it leads you to question what other limitations you have imposed upon yourself. And once you do that, you start to see that a lot of what society imposes on us seeks to limit ourselves and our place in the world. Robbins wants to cut through the cultural conditioning and allow the individual to emerge in all his or her proper glory.

Already, people are rolling their eyes. That's your right.

But I think that's also what western culture conditions us to do.

We're a very cynical, sarcastic culture. We celebrate David Letterman and Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live and the cult of insincerity. (All very, very funny guys, by the way.) It's hip and cool to be glib. It's almost expected that you view the world with a cynical air by the age of, oh, fourteen. The world is a terrible place, and we are merely pawns, and the government is corrupt, and pass the remote because The Sopranos starts in five.

And as much as I like Michael Moore, the man and his movies, I still believe that there's a fundamental flaw in what he's preaching, which is this: it's not constructive. It's all about using humor and wit to point out flaws with the people in power, without ever, ever proposing another alternative. (Unless that alternative is the mere act of voting, getting the guys in power out, and oh then the world will be fine and dandy, and you will be satisfied, and your life will better.) Which is fine, in limited doses. But when that becomes your worldview, when your whole attention is focused on taking apart the people who are actually doing things without simultaneously focusing on what should be done by you and you alone, we're regressing as a people.

What does this have to do with Anthony Robbins? Good question. Give me a minute...

Okay.

It comes down to this: the education we receive throughout the first twenty-one years of our lives barely prepares us for any kind of job whatsoever, let alone for the emotional, physical, psychic toll that living itself does to our nervous systems. In our school systems, we don't get any, I mean any, advice on how to tackle the problems of life head-on, without fear; we don't get (or at least I didn't) any educational, I don't know, invigoration or preparation, are not indoctrinated with the sense that destiny is within our hands, with the belief that we can go out and do things in the world, invigorate the world, even change the world.

Anthony Robbins preaches change, and self-mastery, and even that latter term is something that many people right away would scoff at.

Why? Because, as Robbins himself has often pointed out, we celebrate the victim in our culture. If we're not feeling well, we get lots of attention around the water cooler. If we have emotional problems that are dragging us down, we can go on Oprah or Dr.Phil or Jerry Springer and become celebrities because of our misfortunes. We medicate ourselves with countless drugs to boost our self-esteem.

What Robbins talks about isn't necessarily enticing. He's talking about putting back in your own hands. He's speaking on the need to believing that you have to be a victim of yourself and whatever 'system' you're currently railing against. He simply highlights what all of our teachers should talk about -- the necessity of making goals, of believing in yourself, of seeking out those who have done fantastic things and finding out exactly how they did them, and how those rules could possibly apply to ourselves.

Did you get any of that kind of advice in high school or university? I sure as hell didn't.

In Japan, the year before you graduate, you go to countless job fairs and check out myriad companies and decide, a year in advance, which company you want to work for. When you do graduate, you know what you're doing and where you're going.

I used to tell my students in Japan that back home in Canada, when you graduate, you...graduate. You get a piece of paper. You get a handshake and a smile and a kick out the door into the real world. ("Good luck! Have fun! The Prozac's in the medicine cabinet, second shelf, next to the cough syrup!") There's rarely any systematic (or even haphazard) approach to life talked about.

(I'm not saying the Japanese way of doing things is necessarily better, or worse, because there's a lot of disadvantages to their hiring structures as well, but boy, at least they have something in place.)

I think it's sad, in a way, that even the name Anthony Robbins usually conjures up snickers and chuckles and rolls-of-the-eyes.

That says something about who we are, I think. It says that any open display of passion, of energy, of excitement, becomes a source of disdain. It says that we've given up on our true potential before we've begun.

We are what we think about all day long, somebody once said.

Can you imagine if we had somebody like Anthony Robbins teaching our kids, each day, every day? Can you imagine the amount of self-confidence they'd have?

This all comes spewing out simply because, as I approach thirty, I see a lot of sapped lives and cynical people. I see wallowing and self-pity (often from myself) and unnecessary misery.

I want to believe in the good stuff. I choose to believe in the good stuff, the Robbins stuff, the 'Just Do It' stuff, because the alternative, quite frankly, blows. I decide to believe that we are the masters of our own destiny, that we can be and dream and do great things, heroic things, however we define 'heroism' to ourselves. I want to believe that what Anthony Robbins says is the truth, because that's a better way to live, a more heightened way to live. I want to believe in the power of our individual selves. I want to believe.

Don't you?



(For a really long and interesting interview with Anthony Robbins from What is Enlightenment magazine, in which he talks about the relation between self-mastery and spirituality, click here:)

www.wie.org/j15/robbins.asp

RECOMMENDED READING: GEORGE PELECANOS

If you're ever looking for anything good to read, real to read, I wholeheartedly recommend the 'Derek Strange' novels from George Pelecanos. (You can probably find them either in the 'Mystery' section of your local bookstore, or they might just be stacked in the general 'Fiction' area.)

Pelecanos has written twelve or so novels, of which I've read three, the ones featuring
Washington, D.C. private detective Derek Strange. (The Strange novels are Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus and Hard Revolution. You can find them in paperback under the 'Warner Vision' label.) Strange is an African-American p.i. with a fondness for old spaghetti westerns and beautiful modern women. (Morgan Freeman or Laurence Fishburne or Samuel L. Jackson would all be perfect as the main character for the likely screen adaptation.) He's got a new wife and stepson, coaches little-league football, has lived in D.C. his whole life, has a somewhat, how shall I put it, 'racially sensitive' white partner who moonlights in a bookstore (and loves Wild West stories).

I'm making these books sound light; they're not. I'm making them sound like 'thrillers' or 'police procedurals', but they're not those, either. They are novels. They deal with the moral issues of our times. They are about people and places in situations that most of us will never see, thank God, and there is drugs, blood, guts, and hard, relevant, biting social commentary about what it means to be black and what it means to be white in the ghettoes of present-day D.C.

The characters are well-drawn, the dialogue is authentic, and the stories move. There's no wasted breath.

So-called 'crime fiction' seems to be where it's at these days, where the novel shows its true, authentic force, what it can do better than any other media. Literary snobs still look down on it, but I guess, being snobs by definition, they look down on everything, right?

These are books that entertain you and make you think and make you feel. On every page.

If you don't usually read genre stuff, or even don't read much of anything, don't be shy.

Pelecanos is the real deal. He'll draw you in. I promise.


(For an interesting interview with George Pelecanos, go to:
www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum100.html)

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST (MINUS THE PROUST), or WHY ROCKY IV IS BETTER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

I'm probably the only person in the entire world, other than the author himself, to have actually read every single page of Sylvester Stallone's first and last novel, Paradise Alley. (Or the only person to even know that he wrote a novel. Or care.)

Yes, I said 'author' and 'Sylvester Stallone' in the same sentence. And I meant it, too.

How do I know that he wrote the book, and not some ghostwriter?

Because there's a line in Rocky V where Paulie, Adrian's brother, sick of her stubbornness, tells offs his sister by saying: " You live in this fairy tale world, where the air don't move! You're like a season that don't change."

Rocky V came out in 1990; Paradise Alley came out in 1978. (Paradise Alley was a script Stallone wrote before Rocky, actually, which he then turned into a book and a movie after Rocky's success.) I read the novel and noticed the line 'you're like a season that don't change' because I remembered that line from the final Rocky flick; it was a line I'd always liked. Had a touch of poetry to it. Then I read the book, and noticed it again; Stallone stole his own line from his own book to use in the Rocky V screenplay twelve years later.

(Scott, you may ask, why the hell do you know this stuff? To which I can only answer: Well, I notice things like that, because, um, those are the kinds of things I notice.)

I read it when I was working at the downtown library in St.Catharines back in high school. (Tori, if you're reading this, that copy is probably still lurking somewhere in the shelves.) It was a hardcover, with a photo on the back of Stallone sitting in front of a dressing-room mirror, hands clasped over his face. I even remember the dedication, to his first wife: To Sasha, who takes away the rain.

(I told you I remember and notice strange stuff.)

I was interested in writing. Always had been. Tried to read everything out there that seemed interesting. I was getting more and more interested in movies, too, and I had always loved the Rocky movies as a kid, and when I was fourteen, fifteen, I watched them again and again and again. (I was racing cross-country then, and I used to watch the training montages to pump me up the night before a race.)

I realized that the first Rocky, especially, had a pretty damn good script. And Stallone had wrote it, and had been nominated for an Academy Award for it. And he wrote all the Rocky movies, and he directed II through IV, and he wrote and directed Paradise Alley, and he wrote and directed the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive, too.

In the early nineties, when I was in high school, Stallone was making junk like Stop!Or My Mom Will Shoot and Cliffhanger and Demolition Man. (Actually, I have a soft spot for Cliffhanger because it was the first 'R' rated movie I saw in the theater as a legitimate 'adult'. Saw it three times in the theatre, actually, because it was very cinematic and kind of cool, truth be told, which freaked out my Canadian Literature and Drama teacher Mr.Dimartle. "You saw Cliffhanger three times? In the theatre?" I don't think he'd seen any movie in the theatre since probably Bonnie and Clyde. Let alone three times. Let alone the fact that it was a Stallone movie. But he's a good guy, so I forgive him his trespasses, as he forgives mine.)

Stallone's cinematic legacy was that of a pumped-up, monosyallabic, pretty-damn-bad actor.

Which he was.

But...

He'd wrote Rocky, see. And Rocky II. Good scripts. Human scripts. And he was a good actor in those, too. A real and honest one. And I was interested in writing. And if the image of a writer was a nerdy guy in a room smoking cigarettes, well, Stallone didn't fit the image.

It taught me a good lesson, is what I'm saying. To look beyond the surface of things. To delve deep into a person. To not rely on stereotypes. To not take things at face value. To not necessarily believe what the media and everyone else around you is saying. To look past exteriors. All the stuff we're supposed to learn in kindergarten but never really do.

I was thrilled to see Copland back in '97, the last good movie Stallone made, perhaps the last good movie he'll ever make. The director, James Mangold, knew he could act, knew he could get a good performance out of Stallone in a movie that included such heavyweights as Robert
DeNiro (the best American film actor ever), Ray Liotta and Harvey Keitel. There's not much Stallone can do well, as an actor, but what he does do well, he does very well -- two or three things only, mostly facial expressions, vocal expressions, that accenuate his droopy eyes and give him a tender, sympathic look. But Mangold knew what to look for and ask for, and he exploited Stallone's strengths to good effect.

Ah, the strange obessions I have...

Most of you don't care, nor should you. We all have our own quirks. We all have these eccentric cultural, societal likes and dislikes we don't talk about with people. This is one of mine: defending Sylvester Stallone to the world. Why? Because it's a strange and goofy thing to do. Because I'm a contrarian by nature and choice. Because when you're a teenager you still don't know how the world works, and you rely on what you're told, and I was learning that most people thought Stallone was a loser while I was learning that he wrote scripts and novels and offered something others neglected, and ignored. It was my own secret and my own theory, and it's important to remember who we used to be and what we used to love.

I always try to look for the full story of someone, and Stallone had a hell of a story -- kicked out of multiple schools, a struggling actor, writer, Academy Award nominee, biggest movie star in the world, now a somewhat sad, fading has-been. In the first Rocky, everyone's watching Apollo Creed on the TV, and the bartender says a disparaging remark, to which Stallone says: "This guy went out and took his best shot and became champion of the world. What kind of a shot did you ever take?" And some director was once accused of only having one or two good ideas, to which he responded: "Yeah, but most people don't have any good ideas, so one or two ain't bad, really." That's my take on Stallone: he latched onto a hell of a concept, and he rode it, and he took a shot. Almost everything else he made is garbage, true, but he took a shot. (Although I could defend his comedy Oscar, if you want me to, because it's actually not that bad. But you probably don't want me to, do you...)

I still maintain that Rocky is a great movie with a great script. (We have to stay true to our adolescent selves, after all.) I've realized that Stallone, as a director, evolved into the Michael Bay of the mid-eighties (which is a good thing or bad thing, depending on how you look at it); that Rocky IV is better than you think if you accept it as it is, which is a comic-book style allegory of Cold War tensions, not the gritty realism of the first film in the series; that First Blood is a tight, taught thriller; that most of his work his complete garbage; and that he really, really shouldn't have sung the title song to his directorial debut Paradise Alley. (Yes, Stallone himself sang the title song. Honest to god.)

We have to stay true to our adolescent selves. We have to remember what we used to love, and why. We have to defend the people and times that nudged us forward.

RUN, CONDI, RUN

A canidate for the presidency of the United States of America is worried about the effect his religion will have on the popular vote, and the people are worried, too. Will his religion affect his decision-making process? Is his religion suitable for America's highest office?

Am I talking about George 'Dubya' Bush?

No, I'm talking about John F.Kennedy.

I just finished reading the new biography of him, the one subtitled An Unfinished Life. An interesting read, if only because I discovered a) Kennedy was really, really, really sick for most of his life and all of his presidency, constantly pumped full of steroids and painkillers for his horrible back, ulcers, etc; and b) 'womanizer' does not really do justice to Kennedy's accomplishment's in that department. If bedding women was analagous to playing hockey, Kennedy would be Wayne Gretzky and Clinton would be Russel Crowe in Mystery, Alaska. (An obscure reference, but I'm in an obscure country, so what the hell.)

The author of the book makes a pretty convincing case that Kennedy was the right man at the right time. Unbelievable, what Kennedy had to deal with -- Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union. He basically pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was internationally focused and forward thinking.

And he was a Catholic.

Big deal?

Actually, yeah, it was a big deal. A huge deal, especially in the run-up to the election. I hadn't realized what an earth-shattering effect his run for the presidency was at that time. The whole debate centred around: Is America ready for a Catholic presidency?

The question of today is: How about a black female president?

It's possible.

After all, Canada had a female prime minister for a little while. (Okay, okay, nobody really liked Kim Campbell that much -- a nice lady and all, but following Brian Mulroney is not exactly going to win you any prizes. And the world didn't exactly pay too much notice at the time.)

Condoleeza Rice is wowing the world with her European tour right now, showing poise, grace, and ice-cold, rock solid firmness. She is one tough cookie. She is also disciplined, refined, elegant, intellectual and driven.

Dick Morris, Clinton's old campaign consultant, has a column today debating the likelihood and merits of a possible Condi run.

(See it here: www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/DickMorris/020905.html)

She would be a shrewd, more than capable coutnerpoint to Hillary's inevitable run in 2008.

Can you imagine that? These two vying for the world's top prize?

I don't know if Condi will run; a lot can happen in the next four years. (And boy does it look like the U.S. is gunning for Iran.) I think she could run, though, I think it's possible, maybe even likely, and I think she would do very, very well.

I like her. I like her stamina and resilience and singlemindedness. I may not necessarily agree with all of her boss's policies, but I appreciate and admire her very human struggle, the fact that she has risen from the very centre of racial segregation to the centre of her nation's government. It's kind of sad, though, that most of black America (with good reason) resents the administration she represents; kind of sad that her success can't be shared by the masses the way it should be.

Was America ready for a Catholic president in 1960? They were. It was a slim win, yes, but they were.

Is America ready for a black female president?

The world waits.