This morning on the way in to work, sitting in the company van while somebody else thankfully did the driving, I was reading a book called Deng Xiaping And The Making Of Modern China, and in between pages I glanced out the window, saw a Khmer girl on the back of a moto, watched her lazily scan the van, the passengers, the cars ahead, and I thought: Nobody will ever write a book about her.
Not that it matters, of course. It doesn't. The only reason I thought such a thought was because I was reading a biography, and I read a lot of biographies, and part of the attraction for me is that within the pages of a biography life, with all its messy, nonsensical randomness, is somehow given a strict structure, layout and pattern; it may all be bullshit, may all be part of the arbitrary order imposed, um, arbitrarily by the biographer on his subject, but still -- such a composed, measured narrative gives life itself texture, and meaning, and endurance, so who am I to object?
Still. That girl the one on the back of the bike. Who is she? Where is she going? She will not be part of any grand ideological movements; she will, if she's lucky, get a few years of education, get pregnant, find a husband and a house, settle down. That's that.
(Oh, but of course that is most certainly not that, and you know it, and I know it. She will have fears and heartaches, nights of dirrahea and days of bliss, mornings of confusion and afternoons of Coca-cola sipped through a straw as it quickly grows hot in its pathetic plastic bag. She will work as a waitress, or a cleaner, possibly a clerk, and will experience small but powerful moments of confusion, indecision, something bordering on despair, though she would never classify it as such. She will misunderstand her boss's orders; he will yell at her, repeatedly. She will find a place in the countryside near her parent's home, away from Phnom Penh, from its dusty distractions and snarling web of traffic. She will have a thousand, no, a million moments, small and large, that will, at some point, assemble themselves into something resembling a life. And no one will be there to chart and chronicle her growth, development, decay and death. She will live a life as full and as rich as Lindbergh and Magellan and Jessica Simpson and Deng Xiaoping. The differences between these lives is simply a matter of degrees.)
Placing yourself into the minds of others, trying to see life through their eyes and hearts, is a futile quest; best to leave it to the artists and biographers, the mystics and the lunatics. On the page or the screen, you can speculate, extrapolate, assess. In life, you are faced with flesh, and all that that implies. "I want to see what you see," we say, "know what you know."
But then, were this to happen, we wouldn't be them, we would be us, transfigured.
There is me in the van and her on the bike. A window separates us. I try to understand her as I gaze through the glass, but I can only conceive of my own, slanted image -- a reflection of a reflection. I can do nothing but turn back to my book, my biography of Deng Xiaoping, to a life safely tucked between covers.
I cannot understand that girl on the bike.
(But I will keep trying. To do otherwise is akin to surrender.)
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
WONDERING IF IT'S ENOUGH, OR EVEN RELEVANT
What am I supposed to do? Whenever I can, whenever I have time, whenever I'm on the back of a moto and I'm heading into Star-Mart, which is right near where I work, I stop, give her the remnants of my lunch, even buy her and her friends or siblings a bottle of water.
Is it my fault she's homeless? (Or, if not homeless, at least desperately, relentlessly poor?)
Is it my fault she looks twelve but is probably sixteen?
Is it my fault that sometimes I stop, and sometimes I don't, and sometimes, from the rapid, slightly blurry vantage of the motobike I can see them playing in front of the store, doing
cartwheels, laughing at each other's stupid jokes, pestering all the other customers and drivers who stop for gas or smokes or chocolates?
Back home, see, I never thought about kids without homes, street kids, starving kids. Didn't enter my consciousness. There was school, and work, and snow, and movies, and popcorn. With lots of butter and salt, the key being to ask the kid at the concession stand to put butter half-way through, so that you can get messy, slippery, butterfinger hands all the way down to the end of the bag. This was the important stuff; these were the things that mattered.
And now I often go for lunch at Chi-Cha's, this super-cheap Indian place down by the river, where, for only two dollars, you can get rice and fried chicken and japatee and all kinds of other stuff. What a deal. (Actually, the owner is Bangladeshi. I know because I asked him. He was the first Bangladeshi man I've ever spoken to. In my life. I'm starting to keep track of stuff like this. In the last few months, I've talked to my first Bangladeshi and Swede and Finn and Pole. You always remember your first.)
Then I get whatever I don't eat to go, and I give the rest to the girl in front of the Star Mart off of Monivong Street. Yay for me, right? What a saint. Mother Teresa is shaking in her grave.
But sometimes I don't stop there, at the convenience store; I head straight to work. And I know that that girl is probably waiting. Probably doing her cartwheels and hiding behind the bush and not noticing, not caring about how utterly ripped and dirty her otherwise pretty dress is.
Three, four years ago this wouldn't have bothered me, the fact that she waits there.
Now it does.
But what bothers me more, what sometimes keeps me awake at night, is the possibility that someday I'll leave this country, go home, and this girl, this poor Cambodian kid whose chances in life are slim steadily approaching none, will slip from my mind. She will be a dream-face who will fade the instant after waking, or, if she lingers, only in time for the first jug of juice. By the time the toast is done, she'll be gone. Or she will be shamelessly relegated to an after-dinner anecdote to illustrate my time in the orient, a potent, vanity-strewn plug at my own rather pitiful knowledge of third-world poverty. I will sip tea and finish my story and see the saddened faces of my listeners and eventually I will say, will have to say: "Well, enough of that. Shall we move to the den for dessert?"
I fear that the process has already begun, this desensitization, this exploitation of others for personal glory. She is out there now, under the sun, and I am here, writing this blog. My hope is that you will be moved for a moment or two; my hope is that you will understand what I am trying to get across.
There is something unseemly about this entire process, though I justify it all by believing that exposure itself is akin to empathy; that empathy, in turn, can lead to a shift in one's actions, one's own behavior. You will read what I write about the poor, and perhaps the next time you see a homeless person, a drunk, you will extend a hand, a coin, a coffee. That would be more than I could ask for, and I wonder if it's enough, or even relevant.
While she, the nameless girl, continues her daily dance around the Cal-Tex gas station, waiting for change, for food, smiling her smile, oblivious to me, her fate, the future.
Is it my fault she's homeless? (Or, if not homeless, at least desperately, relentlessly poor?)
Is it my fault she looks twelve but is probably sixteen?
Is it my fault that sometimes I stop, and sometimes I don't, and sometimes, from the rapid, slightly blurry vantage of the motobike I can see them playing in front of the store, doing
cartwheels, laughing at each other's stupid jokes, pestering all the other customers and drivers who stop for gas or smokes or chocolates?
Back home, see, I never thought about kids without homes, street kids, starving kids. Didn't enter my consciousness. There was school, and work, and snow, and movies, and popcorn. With lots of butter and salt, the key being to ask the kid at the concession stand to put butter half-way through, so that you can get messy, slippery, butterfinger hands all the way down to the end of the bag. This was the important stuff; these were the things that mattered.
And now I often go for lunch at Chi-Cha's, this super-cheap Indian place down by the river, where, for only two dollars, you can get rice and fried chicken and japatee and all kinds of other stuff. What a deal. (Actually, the owner is Bangladeshi. I know because I asked him. He was the first Bangladeshi man I've ever spoken to. In my life. I'm starting to keep track of stuff like this. In the last few months, I've talked to my first Bangladeshi and Swede and Finn and Pole. You always remember your first.)
Then I get whatever I don't eat to go, and I give the rest to the girl in front of the Star Mart off of Monivong Street. Yay for me, right? What a saint. Mother Teresa is shaking in her grave.
But sometimes I don't stop there, at the convenience store; I head straight to work. And I know that that girl is probably waiting. Probably doing her cartwheels and hiding behind the bush and not noticing, not caring about how utterly ripped and dirty her otherwise pretty dress is.
Three, four years ago this wouldn't have bothered me, the fact that she waits there.
Now it does.
But what bothers me more, what sometimes keeps me awake at night, is the possibility that someday I'll leave this country, go home, and this girl, this poor Cambodian kid whose chances in life are slim steadily approaching none, will slip from my mind. She will be a dream-face who will fade the instant after waking, or, if she lingers, only in time for the first jug of juice. By the time the toast is done, she'll be gone. Or she will be shamelessly relegated to an after-dinner anecdote to illustrate my time in the orient, a potent, vanity-strewn plug at my own rather pitiful knowledge of third-world poverty. I will sip tea and finish my story and see the saddened faces of my listeners and eventually I will say, will have to say: "Well, enough of that. Shall we move to the den for dessert?"
I fear that the process has already begun, this desensitization, this exploitation of others for personal glory. She is out there now, under the sun, and I am here, writing this blog. My hope is that you will be moved for a moment or two; my hope is that you will understand what I am trying to get across.
There is something unseemly about this entire process, though I justify it all by believing that exposure itself is akin to empathy; that empathy, in turn, can lead to a shift in one's actions, one's own behavior. You will read what I write about the poor, and perhaps the next time you see a homeless person, a drunk, you will extend a hand, a coin, a coffee. That would be more than I could ask for, and I wonder if it's enough, or even relevant.
While she, the nameless girl, continues her daily dance around the Cal-Tex gas station, waiting for change, for food, smiling her smile, oblivious to me, her fate, the future.
Monday, March 28, 2005
SOMETIMES REALITY IS TOO MUCH
Once upon a time, when I was a teenager, a husband-and-wife serial killer team tore my hometown apart.
Everybody who lives (or lived) in my city, St.Catharines, Ontario, has those two or three years permanently carved into the psychic structural landscape of their brain, and all those wounds will soon be reopened with an American film that dramatizes the case called Deadly (www.deadlythemovie.com).
The basics: A Ken-and-Barbie couple, Paul and Karla, who lived in St.Catharines, kidnapped at least two teenage girls, raped them, killed them. They also killed Karla's sister, when their plan to knock her unconscious, videotape and rape her went horribly wrong and she 'accidently' died. (Paul was also later found to be the 'Scarborough rapist' who terrorized Toronto for a good many years.)
One of the girls who they killed was a St.Catharines girl, Kristen French, who lived about five minutes, by car, from my house. When I was in Grade 8 at Dalewood Junior High, she was in Grade 7; we were in the choir together, though I never knew her then, and only figured this out later. (Oh, those small and slim connections we all found to somehow link us to the deceased.)
I can't write about this too much because it's, well, too much -- my idyllic (t0 me) hometown was ripped to shreds when this happened; a part of it died, and a part of all of us who lived there died too, I think.
That may be putting it harshly. I was in early-to-mid high school when all this went down; I went to school, ran track, watched movies, read books. I wasn't obsessed with this case, no, but it was always there for a good two years or so, blatantly exposed each and every day on the front page of The St.Catharines Standard, hiding more delicately on the faces of friends, teachers, family.
How could this happen? A perfect couple, kidnapping teenage girls in broad daylight, raping them, murdering them? This was the stuff that happened in movies and in Stephen King books; this was the stuff that had no business being in my hometown.
I was naive.
And now it's twelve years on, and the wife, Karla, is getting out of prison this summer, while the husband, Paul, will sit in solitary for life, and a movie will make its way to some theatres across America and Canada.
I won't watch it.
I have no problems with them making it; I think freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and it would be very hypocritical of me, who has enjoyed countless true-crime stories, to cry out against the airing of this one, be it in cinemas or on TV.
But you see, when I was sixteen, my family went on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I can remembering watching the Van Halen video Right Now on MTV, and this particular video featured all these cool catchphrases splashed across the screen, and one of them read 'Right now a killer is walking the streets of your hometown', and I thought no, no, not in St.Catharines, sorry, and one of the girls who was on vacation with us at that time was best friends with Kristen French, the girl who would be murdered in a few months, and so, you see, eloquence fails me at a moment like this. I had planned to write more, to delve deeper, to chart how my childhood somehow ended during this time, and how that little inconsequential personal fact pales in comparison to what the victims' families went through, and what they'll go through again with the release of this film, and how it's all bubbling back to the surface again, but I hope you'll forgive me for exiting early from this topic.
Sometimes reality itself is too much.
Everybody who lives (or lived) in my city, St.Catharines, Ontario, has those two or three years permanently carved into the psychic structural landscape of their brain, and all those wounds will soon be reopened with an American film that dramatizes the case called Deadly (www.deadlythemovie.com).
The basics: A Ken-and-Barbie couple, Paul and Karla, who lived in St.Catharines, kidnapped at least two teenage girls, raped them, killed them. They also killed Karla's sister, when their plan to knock her unconscious, videotape and rape her went horribly wrong and she 'accidently' died. (Paul was also later found to be the 'Scarborough rapist' who terrorized Toronto for a good many years.)
One of the girls who they killed was a St.Catharines girl, Kristen French, who lived about five minutes, by car, from my house. When I was in Grade 8 at Dalewood Junior High, she was in Grade 7; we were in the choir together, though I never knew her then, and only figured this out later. (Oh, those small and slim connections we all found to somehow link us to the deceased.)
I can't write about this too much because it's, well, too much -- my idyllic (t0 me) hometown was ripped to shreds when this happened; a part of it died, and a part of all of us who lived there died too, I think.
That may be putting it harshly. I was in early-to-mid high school when all this went down; I went to school, ran track, watched movies, read books. I wasn't obsessed with this case, no, but it was always there for a good two years or so, blatantly exposed each and every day on the front page of The St.Catharines Standard, hiding more delicately on the faces of friends, teachers, family.
How could this happen? A perfect couple, kidnapping teenage girls in broad daylight, raping them, murdering them? This was the stuff that happened in movies and in Stephen King books; this was the stuff that had no business being in my hometown.
I was naive.
And now it's twelve years on, and the wife, Karla, is getting out of prison this summer, while the husband, Paul, will sit in solitary for life, and a movie will make its way to some theatres across America and Canada.
I won't watch it.
I have no problems with them making it; I think freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and it would be very hypocritical of me, who has enjoyed countless true-crime stories, to cry out against the airing of this one, be it in cinemas or on TV.
But you see, when I was sixteen, my family went on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I can remembering watching the Van Halen video Right Now on MTV, and this particular video featured all these cool catchphrases splashed across the screen, and one of them read 'Right now a killer is walking the streets of your hometown', and I thought no, no, not in St.Catharines, sorry, and one of the girls who was on vacation with us at that time was best friends with Kristen French, the girl who would be murdered in a few months, and so, you see, eloquence fails me at a moment like this. I had planned to write more, to delve deeper, to chart how my childhood somehow ended during this time, and how that little inconsequential personal fact pales in comparison to what the victims' families went through, and what they'll go through again with the release of this film, and how it's all bubbling back to the surface again, but I hope you'll forgive me for exiting early from this topic.
Sometimes reality itself is too much.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
ME AND THE MOTODOPS
We're tight, me and the motodops are.
You don't know them? They're the dudes who cruise through the streets of Phnom Penh on their motos like erratic, slightly crazed sharks hunting for human prey, zigzagging past pedestrians and bicycles, cars and cows, ignoring the traffic rules that I'm not sure they even knew existed in the first place. (Actually, that's not entirely fair; I don't think the rules actually exist, and I'm exaggerating about the cows, but last night, around nine, on the back of a moto, I did see three carts of timber being pulled by three men on horses, so you can see where I'm going from).
They're the informal taxi drivers of Camboida, is what they are. From about five in the morning to nine at night, you can basically just walk along any major (and usually minor) street in Phnom Penh, wait five, four, three, two and one seconds, and wham, bam, thank-you ma'am there there'll be, the motodops, wearing their sun-worn baseball caps like a knight wears his helmet, raising their index finger, hoping against hope that you'll say yes, yes, yes, you'll take them for a ride.
The thing is, I usually do -- but not weekdays around five p.m.
Nothing personal. That's just when I walk home from work, slowly, casually, usually trying to read a book as I walk, which proves I haven't learned any lessons from life whatsoever, because I was reading a book as I walked when a homeless nut in Tokyo whacked me in the stomach with a two by four and forever changed my attitude towards violence, but hey -- I live and learn, and then I forget. That's what I do.
The motodops don't know this, though.
They think I want to ride with them.
I could write a whole book on the looks and grins and scowls and words that motodops and I exchange on a daily basis. (And I just might, along with the novel about Santa Claus I'm considering doing, and I am too serious about that baby, just wait.)
A partial and by no means comprehensive list of motodop lingo, both verbal and physical:
The offer: "Motobike, sir?"
The surprised gleam in the eyes: They've seen a foreigner, spotted the potential for money, cash-in-hand, and their body reacts.
The backward glance: A quick shift of their head as they realize they've driven by a foreigner.
The raise of the finger:-- one, two, three: The three,three,three-rides-in-one! offer they offer you as you shake your head in rejection, hoping that the first time you said no was a joke, the second time a maybe, the third time a yes.
The sheepish smile: Common to all Cambodians is the nervous, slightly shy smile that they use when they get embarassed, or are at a loss for words. These smiles are one of the many charms of the Cambodian people; you reject them, and they smile, and they're a stranger, and you smile anyways, and they smile, and that's how humanity gets a few more brownie points because of it.
It does get annoying after awhile, this constant badgering on a daily basis.
It's not a big deal, I tell myself, and it isn't.
And the truth is, when I'm back home, I miss it. Back home, there's only paved roads and odd-shaped cars and traffic walks and everybody ignoring each other, going where they need to go, oblivious to who's next to them, whether they're driving or walking, biking or rollerblading.
Here, on the streets, it's life close-up and personal, life intensified, life and all the human interactions it requires in-your-face, twenty-four seven (or just about). There's dust and dirt, coal and fog, donkeys trucking wood and kids shitting in the sewers. (Which, when you see this, at twelve midnight on a Saturday night, on a darkened backstreet, makes you pause, wretch, wonder what kind of world we live in, what kind of God is presiding.)
And there's also your friendly neighbourhood motodop -- a throwback to another time, perhaps, when a complete stranger would take you from here to there and back again for a small fee.
Funny that I would find that here, of all places.
You don't know them? They're the dudes who cruise through the streets of Phnom Penh on their motos like erratic, slightly crazed sharks hunting for human prey, zigzagging past pedestrians and bicycles, cars and cows, ignoring the traffic rules that I'm not sure they even knew existed in the first place. (Actually, that's not entirely fair; I don't think the rules actually exist, and I'm exaggerating about the cows, but last night, around nine, on the back of a moto, I did see three carts of timber being pulled by three men on horses, so you can see where I'm going from).
They're the informal taxi drivers of Camboida, is what they are. From about five in the morning to nine at night, you can basically just walk along any major (and usually minor) street in Phnom Penh, wait five, four, three, two and one seconds, and wham, bam, thank-you ma'am there there'll be, the motodops, wearing their sun-worn baseball caps like a knight wears his helmet, raising their index finger, hoping against hope that you'll say yes, yes, yes, you'll take them for a ride.
The thing is, I usually do -- but not weekdays around five p.m.
Nothing personal. That's just when I walk home from work, slowly, casually, usually trying to read a book as I walk, which proves I haven't learned any lessons from life whatsoever, because I was reading a book as I walked when a homeless nut in Tokyo whacked me in the stomach with a two by four and forever changed my attitude towards violence, but hey -- I live and learn, and then I forget. That's what I do.
The motodops don't know this, though.
They think I want to ride with them.
I could write a whole book on the looks and grins and scowls and words that motodops and I exchange on a daily basis. (And I just might, along with the novel about Santa Claus I'm considering doing, and I am too serious about that baby, just wait.)
A partial and by no means comprehensive list of motodop lingo, both verbal and physical:
The offer: "Motobike, sir?"
The surprised gleam in the eyes: They've seen a foreigner, spotted the potential for money, cash-in-hand, and their body reacts.
The backward glance: A quick shift of their head as they realize they've driven by a foreigner.
The raise of the finger:-- one, two, three: The three,three,three-rides-in-one! offer they offer you as you shake your head in rejection, hoping that the first time you said no was a joke, the second time a maybe, the third time a yes.
The sheepish smile: Common to all Cambodians is the nervous, slightly shy smile that they use when they get embarassed, or are at a loss for words. These smiles are one of the many charms of the Cambodian people; you reject them, and they smile, and they're a stranger, and you smile anyways, and they smile, and that's how humanity gets a few more brownie points because of it.
It does get annoying after awhile, this constant badgering on a daily basis.
It's not a big deal, I tell myself, and it isn't.
And the truth is, when I'm back home, I miss it. Back home, there's only paved roads and odd-shaped cars and traffic walks and everybody ignoring each other, going where they need to go, oblivious to who's next to them, whether they're driving or walking, biking or rollerblading.
Here, on the streets, it's life close-up and personal, life intensified, life and all the human interactions it requires in-your-face, twenty-four seven (or just about). There's dust and dirt, coal and fog, donkeys trucking wood and kids shitting in the sewers. (Which, when you see this, at twelve midnight on a Saturday night, on a darkened backstreet, makes you pause, wretch, wonder what kind of world we live in, what kind of God is presiding.)
And there's also your friendly neighbourhood motodop -- a throwback to another time, perhaps, when a complete stranger would take you from here to there and back again for a small fee.
Funny that I would find that here, of all places.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
AUDIBLE GAPS
The sound of my fingers tapping the keys. People chatting in languages I can't even identify, let alone understand. Honking cars. Hawking streetkids, yelling daily, daily, the new one, the new one. A familiar word of Japanese. Flip-flops doing their languid flips and flops across the tiled floor. A door creaking open. A chair being pulled back. A drawer opening. A calculator sliding across the desk.
I hear all of this, and my mind wanders, and I suddenly wonder what it would be like to be deaf, to have these ordinary, everyday sounds absent from my consciousness. Can you miss something you never had? Do deaf people dream of sounds, and if so, do they savor those sounds, cherish them for whatever length of dream-time is available that particular night, or do they resent those intrusions from an outside, possibly celestial force? What do they hear inside of their head when they awake? Is it an empty or hollow sound, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell? Can they find pockets of audible noise in the silence of their thoughts that those of us in the hearing world neglect to locate?
I'm twenty-nine, and there is so, so much I do not know. So many questions I've yet to ask.
I hear all of this, and my mind wanders, and I suddenly wonder what it would be like to be deaf, to have these ordinary, everyday sounds absent from my consciousness. Can you miss something you never had? Do deaf people dream of sounds, and if so, do they savor those sounds, cherish them for whatever length of dream-time is available that particular night, or do they resent those intrusions from an outside, possibly celestial force? What do they hear inside of their head when they awake? Is it an empty or hollow sound, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell? Can they find pockets of audible noise in the silence of their thoughts that those of us in the hearing world neglect to locate?
I'm twenty-nine, and there is so, so much I do not know. So many questions I've yet to ask.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN (AND AGAIN) or WHY CADDYSHACK II IS BETTER THAN YOU'VE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE
WARNING: Some major-league, big-time, movie-geek loving is about to commence. If you don't get off on reading about movies, this one might not be for you. But to paraphrase Martin Short as Ed Grimley, pondering the possibility of his idol, Pat Sajak, against all odds actually being an okay guy: "But then again, maybe it will be, it's hard to say..."
All those whiners and moaners who declare that Hollywood isn't making anything original anymore obviously haven't heard the news that a director for The Santa Clause III (starring Tim Allen) was just hired, that Saw 2 is on the way, that big screen versions of Baywatch and The Dukes of Hazzard and Bewitched are in the can (or almost there), that remakes of War of the Worlds, Death Race 2000 and Herbie The Love Bug are in the cards, that Final Destination III and X-Men III and Spider-Man III and Hellboy II and Batman Begins and Superman Returns are coming soon, or most importantly of all, that Miss Congeniality II: Armed and Fabulous is currently showing at a cinema near you (but not near me. Thank God).
Things are getting crazy. When for-the-love-of-god Miss Congeniality gets a sequel five years after its original release, something's out of whack.
(Full disclosure: I watched Miss Congeniality, in the theatre, yes, but I was in Japan and there was nothing else on, I swear, and I needed a touch of home, and William Shatner, proud Canadian that he is, was the closest thing I could find, and he was the best part of that movie, and so even though I guess by admitting that I paid money to see it, even if that money was Japanese yen, I thereby contributed to the profit margin that deemed a sequel feasible, it's still not right for the follow-up to be made, not proper, no, not sane.)
And this is coming from a guy who, as I've elaborated before in this humble little space, actually likes sequels.
The thing is, growing up, I watched a lot of episodic television, where you got to watch and grow with and even love the characters as they, and you, journeyed through life. (Yes, yes, I said 'love'. I'm not saying I 'loved' Nell Carter on Gimme a Break or Natalie on The Facts of Life or Lee Majors on The Fall Guy or Mr.Drummond on Diff'rent Strokes or DaisyDuke on The Dukes of Hazzard or the brown haired girl on Silver Spoons or -- wait a minute. I guess I am saying that. Kids love stupid things, right, like the sound of farts and the taste of Pez, so I'll admit it, I loved them all, those second-rate actors on those admittedly-lame sitcoms, but they were my childhood, and they made me laugh, and if that's not a recipe for love, what is?)
Movies, though were altogether bigger, grander, with more depth and power and bravado. Seeing a sequel, two, three, five years after the original was an affirmation of sorts, a twisted acknowledgement that the elements that we loved and cherished in the first films were not isolated at all, that they continued, they endured, they twisted and moved and aged but still retained their authentic, orginal ability to sneak into our hearts. (A childish romanticism, sure, but I actively seek to hold on to that which once moved me, fearing what will happen if I let such fundamentally silly notions go free, fearing who I might become, jaded and cynical and crusty.)
I should also add that I abhor the act of giving sequels plain old numbers: 2, 3, 4, etc. Back in the day, when there was a sequel, it was given a roman number, for chrissakes, a II or III or IV. It gave sequels a certain dignity, a certain link to the past, as if they were but mere chapters in a larger, denser story. So I'm classifying all sequels with a roman numeral, regardless of how they appeared when they first came out. Cuz I'm a weird guy that thinks about this stuff.
And so, in that spirit, which only a ten year old waiting with something approaching delight bordering on awe for the lights to go down before the show begins can truly appreciate, I appeal to you to search for that child within yourselves, however deeply buried he/she may be. Ladies and gentlemen, I now present the good sequels:
1) French Connection II -- great. One of Hackman's best performances ever. If Robert Redford's The Candidate has the best final line ever, French Connection II has one of the the greatest final shots ever -- not visually or stylistically all that impressive, no, but it rocks the house simply for the clear and present punctuation point it provides for the series. For its finality, brevity, simplicity, this can't be beat.
2) Back to the Future II and III -- wonderful, convoluted mind-warps. Touching and silly. I was so excited when Back to the Future II came out I couldn't eat or sleep, that's how much I'd been waiting for it. And me and my friends Eric and Steve loved it so much that we couldn't contain ourselves in the parking lot of the Pendale Cinemas when it was all over, so excited that there was a Part III on the way.
3) The Godfather II and III -- exceptional. Landmark. Everything movies should be. (Yes, even the third one. I'll defend it to my grave as a fantastic coda, or epilogue, to the first two films, which are, hands down, the two best films of the last thirty years, with Apocalypse Now running a close third, which means Coppola is the man, even still, even now, despite his daughter's success. And it was while watching the new version of Apocalypse Now in the theatres in Japan a few years back that I had an epiphany during Robert Duvall's famous "I love the smell of napalm in the morning"speech. During that scene, as he spoke, I had thought something I had never, ever thought before during a movie: This is one of the greatest moments ever put to film. The juxtaposition of words and image, of the beauty of what he was feeling and the horror of what he was saying, the madness of war personified in the grace and wretchedness of this soldier -- it's cinema, that's all. Whatever cinema can or should do, whatever dialogue should or can be, whatever thematic resonance can or may be highlighted, it's all there, in that scene. You can't get better. You can't.)
4) The Two Jakes, the sequel to Chinatown -- Intricate and involving. I still haven't figured out what all went down, and yes, you won't understand anything that happens in the movie unless you watch Chinatown, like, immediately before watching this one, that's how much it relies on the first one, but still. Jack Nicholson directed this one, and he proved he can direct; I wish he'd direct more.
5) Rocky II -- "the sweatiest movie ever made" according the folks on Cheers. And the best of the four sequels.
6) More American Graffitti -- flawed but original. (Does the word 'graffitti' have two effs and two eyes? Or even two tees? Not sure about that one.) I bet that you didn't even know that there was a sequel, did you? Now, the first one is probably the one movie in the history of cinema that really, truly doesn't need a sequel, but the thing was, Lucas had promised Universal another film, and after the success of Star Wars, the studio said hey, we want that film to be a sequel to the first Graffitti, the idea of which Lucas hated, but he said all right, f--ck it, we'll do a sequel. Hired some guy named B.W.Norton, and the film takes place on New Year's Eve at various points in time over the span of five years, and it features most of the original cast, even Harrison Ford (but sorely missing Richard Dreyfuss), along with a lot of experimental, split-screen type effects, the last gasp of alternative seventies filmmaking, you could say, and while I can't say it's a really good movie, it's different, it's honest, it attempted to do something, if not fresh, at least unstale.
And now, sequels I would never, ever publicly admit to liking (except for here, on a blog nobody reads, although I realize that these may be held against me in a future cinematic court of law):
1) Caddyshack II -- Jackie Mason is an amiable replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Stack does stuffy like noone else, Dan Ackroyd does a suitably odd offshoot of Bill Murray's character from the first one and Chevy Chase is at his supreme level of cheviness. What's not to like?
2) National Lampoon's European Vacation -- More classic Chevy. Highly underrated.
3) Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol -- Good comedic work from Guttenberg. His swan song to the series.
4) Rocky IV -- As a die-hard Rocky fan, I loved the fourth installment as a kid and hated it as a teenager, coming to think that it violated the simplicity of the original, but now I see it as the ultimate '80's amplification of the Cold War, the Rocky mythos stripped down to its comic-book ethos, then pumped up and overblown to exaggerated, kinetic effect, with Stallone as a director being the MTV Michael Bay of the '90's, a style abandoned for Rocky V, which brought us (more or less successfully) back to the grittiness of the original.
5) The Karate Kid III -- Daniel and Mr.Miyagi's relationship matures. The story's stupid; their bond is touching.
6) Psycho III -- Anthony Perkins' directorial debut, and a violent, creepy, dread-inducing little film, much better than the second installment and light years ahead of the fourth one. Doesn't come anywhere near the original, of course, but it's tight and lean and actually adds some, dare I say it, touching insights into that great cinematic character, Norman Bates.
7) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier -- Canadian legend William Shatner's directorial debut, generally regarded as the worst in the series, but I think it's actually quite smart, funny and philosophically ambitious. Yes, the effects near the end suck, and the structure is a little wonky, but if you look at it as a big-screen version of one of the original episodes, you might like it.
8) Halloween II and V -- The original is, hands down, the scariest flick I think I've ever seen, next to the original Exorcist (which operates on its own, heightened level of cinematic greatness). The second one picks up, literally, at the end of the first one (like Rocky II and Back to the Future III and III), and the plot is, well, Michael Myers killing some more. (When SNL's Mike Myers, Canada's golden boy, hit it big, I said: "Hey, he stole the Halloween guy's name!" Cuz that's the kind of kid I was...) The thing is, the first one and the second one all take place during the same night. That's a hell of a long night. The gore is more, the suspense a little less, but Donald Pleasance is fantastic, as always, and it still does an admirable job of plucking our universal fears. The fifth one I included just because, by rights, there's now way this movie should be any good -- but it has a genuinely freaky-deaky, cliffhanger ending. I never saw Part III, or part VIII.
9) Superman IV: The Quest For Peace -- This movie was butchered in the editing room after disastrous test screenings, as they cut over forty-five minutes out of the flick. In the original version there were actually two Nuclear Mans, not just one. You're shocked, I realize this. (I know what was cut out because I read the comic book version as a kid, in addition to the novelization. Yes, I was a geek.) But actually, if you watch it again with a somewhat open mind, it's not half bad. Similar to Star Trek V, it kind of feels like one of the old Superman comics you'd pick up in the quarter bin at the comic book shop on rainy Saturday afternoon. Reeve is great as always as Superman, and Hackman as Lex Luthor is, well, Hackman -- fantastic, as always. There are some nice bits with Clark and Lois, with scenes that are, dare I say it, charming. At ninety minutes the film is ridiculously short, and the final twenty minutes of the movie don't make much sense at all, and the special effects aren't that great, but it's a Superman movie goddamnit; my childhood self demands I at least like it. And I do.
(I was going to go on and defend Superman III, as it's one of my favorite movies, ever, but I don't have the energy, and I've defended it before. And let me just say that while I'm looking forward to Bryan Singer's new Superman movie due out next year, with the unknown Brandon Routh in the title role and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, the original films will always be, well, sacrosanct. The canon. The link to my childhood. So they could just release all four back on the big screen for a week or two and I'd be happy.)
Hmmmmm...
By this point, you've either been a) nodding your head in appreciation and interest, as you, too, have seen more movies than is humanly healthy or b) you are thinking I've completely lost my fu--ing mind, and are wondering how I ever made it out of high school. (I wonder that sometimes, too.)
But, we are what we are.
And I've just realized something.
This post was supposed to be about the moral bankruptcy of most sequels, but I must admit, based on the above evidence, that I like a hell of a lot of those that have been made. Even the bad ones. Which means that, even with a degree in Creative Writing (it is too a real degree, I swear), umpteen university Literature classes, four years in Japan and two years in Cambodia, I'm not as worldly and sophisticated as I'd assumed.
Still.
Was there really, really that much of a demand for a Miss Congeniality II?
(Oh, as I've mentioned before, I watched Ocean's 12 on DVD here, and I couldn't understand what happened. Didn't get the twist at the end, the whole heist-explanation thingee. I'm readily admitting that. I'm chalking it up to the fact that the copy I saw had French titles, so I wasn't sure what was happening on what day in the film. That's my excuse, rather than just admitting I wasn't bright enough to follow what was going on.)
All those whiners and moaners who declare that Hollywood isn't making anything original anymore obviously haven't heard the news that a director for The Santa Clause III (starring Tim Allen) was just hired, that Saw 2 is on the way, that big screen versions of Baywatch and The Dukes of Hazzard and Bewitched are in the can (or almost there), that remakes of War of the Worlds, Death Race 2000 and Herbie The Love Bug are in the cards, that Final Destination III and X-Men III and Spider-Man III and Hellboy II and Batman Begins and Superman Returns are coming soon, or most importantly of all, that Miss Congeniality II: Armed and Fabulous is currently showing at a cinema near you (but not near me. Thank God).
Things are getting crazy. When for-the-love-of-god Miss Congeniality gets a sequel five years after its original release, something's out of whack.
(Full disclosure: I watched Miss Congeniality, in the theatre, yes, but I was in Japan and there was nothing else on, I swear, and I needed a touch of home, and William Shatner, proud Canadian that he is, was the closest thing I could find, and he was the best part of that movie, and so even though I guess by admitting that I paid money to see it, even if that money was Japanese yen, I thereby contributed to the profit margin that deemed a sequel feasible, it's still not right for the follow-up to be made, not proper, no, not sane.)
And this is coming from a guy who, as I've elaborated before in this humble little space, actually likes sequels.
The thing is, growing up, I watched a lot of episodic television, where you got to watch and grow with and even love the characters as they, and you, journeyed through life. (Yes, yes, I said 'love'. I'm not saying I 'loved' Nell Carter on Gimme a Break or Natalie on The Facts of Life or Lee Majors on The Fall Guy or Mr.Drummond on Diff'rent Strokes or DaisyDuke on The Dukes of Hazzard or the brown haired girl on Silver Spoons or -- wait a minute. I guess I am saying that. Kids love stupid things, right, like the sound of farts and the taste of Pez, so I'll admit it, I loved them all, those second-rate actors on those admittedly-lame sitcoms, but they were my childhood, and they made me laugh, and if that's not a recipe for love, what is?)
Movies, though were altogether bigger, grander, with more depth and power and bravado. Seeing a sequel, two, three, five years after the original was an affirmation of sorts, a twisted acknowledgement that the elements that we loved and cherished in the first films were not isolated at all, that they continued, they endured, they twisted and moved and aged but still retained their authentic, orginal ability to sneak into our hearts. (A childish romanticism, sure, but I actively seek to hold on to that which once moved me, fearing what will happen if I let such fundamentally silly notions go free, fearing who I might become, jaded and cynical and crusty.)
I should also add that I abhor the act of giving sequels plain old numbers: 2, 3, 4, etc. Back in the day, when there was a sequel, it was given a roman number, for chrissakes, a II or III or IV. It gave sequels a certain dignity, a certain link to the past, as if they were but mere chapters in a larger, denser story. So I'm classifying all sequels with a roman numeral, regardless of how they appeared when they first came out. Cuz I'm a weird guy that thinks about this stuff.
And so, in that spirit, which only a ten year old waiting with something approaching delight bordering on awe for the lights to go down before the show begins can truly appreciate, I appeal to you to search for that child within yourselves, however deeply buried he/she may be. Ladies and gentlemen, I now present the good sequels:
1) French Connection II -- great. One of Hackman's best performances ever. If Robert Redford's The Candidate has the best final line ever, French Connection II has one of the the greatest final shots ever -- not visually or stylistically all that impressive, no, but it rocks the house simply for the clear and present punctuation point it provides for the series. For its finality, brevity, simplicity, this can't be beat.
2) Back to the Future II and III -- wonderful, convoluted mind-warps. Touching and silly. I was so excited when Back to the Future II came out I couldn't eat or sleep, that's how much I'd been waiting for it. And me and my friends Eric and Steve loved it so much that we couldn't contain ourselves in the parking lot of the Pendale Cinemas when it was all over, so excited that there was a Part III on the way.
3) The Godfather II and III -- exceptional. Landmark. Everything movies should be. (Yes, even the third one. I'll defend it to my grave as a fantastic coda, or epilogue, to the first two films, which are, hands down, the two best films of the last thirty years, with Apocalypse Now running a close third, which means Coppola is the man, even still, even now, despite his daughter's success. And it was while watching the new version of Apocalypse Now in the theatres in Japan a few years back that I had an epiphany during Robert Duvall's famous "I love the smell of napalm in the morning"speech. During that scene, as he spoke, I had thought something I had never, ever thought before during a movie: This is one of the greatest moments ever put to film. The juxtaposition of words and image, of the beauty of what he was feeling and the horror of what he was saying, the madness of war personified in the grace and wretchedness of this soldier -- it's cinema, that's all. Whatever cinema can or should do, whatever dialogue should or can be, whatever thematic resonance can or may be highlighted, it's all there, in that scene. You can't get better. You can't.)
4) The Two Jakes, the sequel to Chinatown -- Intricate and involving. I still haven't figured out what all went down, and yes, you won't understand anything that happens in the movie unless you watch Chinatown, like, immediately before watching this one, that's how much it relies on the first one, but still. Jack Nicholson directed this one, and he proved he can direct; I wish he'd direct more.
5) Rocky II -- "the sweatiest movie ever made" according the folks on Cheers. And the best of the four sequels.
6) More American Graffitti -- flawed but original. (Does the word 'graffitti' have two effs and two eyes? Or even two tees? Not sure about that one.) I bet that you didn't even know that there was a sequel, did you? Now, the first one is probably the one movie in the history of cinema that really, truly doesn't need a sequel, but the thing was, Lucas had promised Universal another film, and after the success of Star Wars, the studio said hey, we want that film to be a sequel to the first Graffitti, the idea of which Lucas hated, but he said all right, f--ck it, we'll do a sequel. Hired some guy named B.W.Norton, and the film takes place on New Year's Eve at various points in time over the span of five years, and it features most of the original cast, even Harrison Ford (but sorely missing Richard Dreyfuss), along with a lot of experimental, split-screen type effects, the last gasp of alternative seventies filmmaking, you could say, and while I can't say it's a really good movie, it's different, it's honest, it attempted to do something, if not fresh, at least unstale.
And now, sequels I would never, ever publicly admit to liking (except for here, on a blog nobody reads, although I realize that these may be held against me in a future cinematic court of law):
1) Caddyshack II -- Jackie Mason is an amiable replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Stack does stuffy like noone else, Dan Ackroyd does a suitably odd offshoot of Bill Murray's character from the first one and Chevy Chase is at his supreme level of cheviness. What's not to like?
2) National Lampoon's European Vacation -- More classic Chevy. Highly underrated.
3) Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol -- Good comedic work from Guttenberg. His swan song to the series.
4) Rocky IV -- As a die-hard Rocky fan, I loved the fourth installment as a kid and hated it as a teenager, coming to think that it violated the simplicity of the original, but now I see it as the ultimate '80's amplification of the Cold War, the Rocky mythos stripped down to its comic-book ethos, then pumped up and overblown to exaggerated, kinetic effect, with Stallone as a director being the MTV Michael Bay of the '90's, a style abandoned for Rocky V, which brought us (more or less successfully) back to the grittiness of the original.
5) The Karate Kid III -- Daniel and Mr.Miyagi's relationship matures. The story's stupid; their bond is touching.
6) Psycho III -- Anthony Perkins' directorial debut, and a violent, creepy, dread-inducing little film, much better than the second installment and light years ahead of the fourth one. Doesn't come anywhere near the original, of course, but it's tight and lean and actually adds some, dare I say it, touching insights into that great cinematic character, Norman Bates.
7) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier -- Canadian legend William Shatner's directorial debut, generally regarded as the worst in the series, but I think it's actually quite smart, funny and philosophically ambitious. Yes, the effects near the end suck, and the structure is a little wonky, but if you look at it as a big-screen version of one of the original episodes, you might like it.
8) Halloween II and V -- The original is, hands down, the scariest flick I think I've ever seen, next to the original Exorcist (which operates on its own, heightened level of cinematic greatness). The second one picks up, literally, at the end of the first one (like Rocky II and Back to the Future III and III), and the plot is, well, Michael Myers killing some more. (When SNL's Mike Myers, Canada's golden boy, hit it big, I said: "Hey, he stole the Halloween guy's name!" Cuz that's the kind of kid I was...) The thing is, the first one and the second one all take place during the same night. That's a hell of a long night. The gore is more, the suspense a little less, but Donald Pleasance is fantastic, as always, and it still does an admirable job of plucking our universal fears. The fifth one I included just because, by rights, there's now way this movie should be any good -- but it has a genuinely freaky-deaky, cliffhanger ending. I never saw Part III, or part VIII.
9) Superman IV: The Quest For Peace -- This movie was butchered in the editing room after disastrous test screenings, as they cut over forty-five minutes out of the flick. In the original version there were actually two Nuclear Mans, not just one. You're shocked, I realize this. (I know what was cut out because I read the comic book version as a kid, in addition to the novelization. Yes, I was a geek.) But actually, if you watch it again with a somewhat open mind, it's not half bad. Similar to Star Trek V, it kind of feels like one of the old Superman comics you'd pick up in the quarter bin at the comic book shop on rainy Saturday afternoon. Reeve is great as always as Superman, and Hackman as Lex Luthor is, well, Hackman -- fantastic, as always. There are some nice bits with Clark and Lois, with scenes that are, dare I say it, charming. At ninety minutes the film is ridiculously short, and the final twenty minutes of the movie don't make much sense at all, and the special effects aren't that great, but it's a Superman movie goddamnit; my childhood self demands I at least like it. And I do.
(I was going to go on and defend Superman III, as it's one of my favorite movies, ever, but I don't have the energy, and I've defended it before. And let me just say that while I'm looking forward to Bryan Singer's new Superman movie due out next year, with the unknown Brandon Routh in the title role and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, the original films will always be, well, sacrosanct. The canon. The link to my childhood. So they could just release all four back on the big screen for a week or two and I'd be happy.)
Hmmmmm...
By this point, you've either been a) nodding your head in appreciation and interest, as you, too, have seen more movies than is humanly healthy or b) you are thinking I've completely lost my fu--ing mind, and are wondering how I ever made it out of high school. (I wonder that sometimes, too.)
But, we are what we are.
And I've just realized something.
This post was supposed to be about the moral bankruptcy of most sequels, but I must admit, based on the above evidence, that I like a hell of a lot of those that have been made. Even the bad ones. Which means that, even with a degree in Creative Writing (it is too a real degree, I swear), umpteen university Literature classes, four years in Japan and two years in Cambodia, I'm not as worldly and sophisticated as I'd assumed.
Still.
Was there really, really that much of a demand for a Miss Congeniality II?
(Oh, as I've mentioned before, I watched Ocean's 12 on DVD here, and I couldn't understand what happened. Didn't get the twist at the end, the whole heist-explanation thingee. I'm readily admitting that. I'm chalking it up to the fact that the copy I saw had French titles, so I wasn't sure what was happening on what day in the film. That's my excuse, rather than just admitting I wasn't bright enough to follow what was going on.)
MY (ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE) CAREER AS AN INTELLIGENCE AGENT IN THE CANADIAN C.I.A.
A week or two ago I was flipping through an old copy of Reader's Digest I had brought back from Canada last September, and I noticed an article I hadn't read before, about a Canadian aid group that was investigating prostitution here in Phnom Penh and its surrounding areas, and it only took me a few seconds of reading to realize that the main dude in the profile, the Canadian do-gooder at the centre of it all, was the same guy who tried to recruit me into a branch of the Canadian C.I.A. two summers ago.
Let me back up.
In the late summer of 2003 I was chilling on the waterfront in Cambodia, sitting at one of the numerous drinking joints that line the river, throwing back a Coke with a Canadian friend. She introduced me to her friend, another Canadian, who was heavily involved with a (you guessed it) Canadian aid group here. Nice guy -- very polite, well-spoken, good humored. He was a campaign consultant for Preston Manning and Mike Harris and the Tories back home -- kind of like the Canadian version of the Republicans.
He asked me what I did, where I'd been, yada yada yada. After learning that I'd spent four years in Japan, he started asking about my Japanese level, how fluent I was, bla bla bla. Then he said something to the effect of:
"Well, you know, I'm involved with a lot of different groups, one of which is ________, which basically monitors various kinds of transmissions that are emanating from different foreign elements, and they ensure that proper communication systems are within place between neighbouring nation-states, and they're always open to engaging people with various different language capabilities."
I had no idea what he had said.
But I got his email, remembered the name of the organization, looked it up on the web.
It was basically an offshoot of CSIS, the Canadian CIA -- a communications agency that 'monitors', which means 'spies', on other countries. They need people with language capabilities from all over the world, because, I guess, even Canada, yes Canada, is continuously spying on everybody all over the world.
Just for the hell of it, I emailed this organization, told them a variation of this story, asked how to apply. Somebody got back to me right away, in a very cordial, professional email, detailing to whom I should contact, with this caveat: "Oh, and if you do manage to get an interview, please don't tell them you contacted me, or know who I am. Cheers!"
(Full disclosure: I'm not sure I used the word 'caveat' correctly, but I thought I'd give it a shot.)
Weeeeeeeeird.
The thing is, I've always been interested in intelligence gathering organizations. I think the C.I.A. is up to more nefarious stuff around the globe than we can even begin to contemplate; I think its reach is wide and sharp and octopular in its range. (That's not a word, 'octopular', but I decided to throw caution to the wind there.) Seeing Oliver Stone's J.F.K. and reading Norman Mailer's massive novel Harlot's Ghost whetted my appetite at a young age for the illicit political machinations that governments perform in the name of national security. I like reading about it, thinking about it, and trying to figure it all out -- in the movies, in books, and in real life.
And this time, real life caught up to me.
But it made me wonder:
Was this young Canadian's entire aid group here in Cambodia nothing more than a front group for the Canadian C.I.A.? Is this how young recruits are, well, recruited? Over late-night Cokes in Phnom Penh? Does the fact that he positioned himself as a consultant to Canada's conservative parties mean anything at all?
Who knows?
Kind of fun, though.
I'm from St.Catharines, Ontario, see. To even contemplate the fact that I may have been a possible candidate for recruitment into the Canadian C.I.A., and that this whole endeavor went down in Cambodia, of all places, is proof that Life with a capital 'l' will gladly, even eagerly, throw its own warped and tantalizing surprise parties every now and then.
(Oh, and if you managed to read all of this post all the way to the end, please don't tell anybody that I contacted you, or that you know who I am. Cheers!)
Let me back up.
In the late summer of 2003 I was chilling on the waterfront in Cambodia, sitting at one of the numerous drinking joints that line the river, throwing back a Coke with a Canadian friend. She introduced me to her friend, another Canadian, who was heavily involved with a (you guessed it) Canadian aid group here. Nice guy -- very polite, well-spoken, good humored. He was a campaign consultant for Preston Manning and Mike Harris and the Tories back home -- kind of like the Canadian version of the Republicans.
He asked me what I did, where I'd been, yada yada yada. After learning that I'd spent four years in Japan, he started asking about my Japanese level, how fluent I was, bla bla bla. Then he said something to the effect of:
"Well, you know, I'm involved with a lot of different groups, one of which is ________, which basically monitors various kinds of transmissions that are emanating from different foreign elements, and they ensure that proper communication systems are within place between neighbouring nation-states, and they're always open to engaging people with various different language capabilities."
I had no idea what he had said.
But I got his email, remembered the name of the organization, looked it up on the web.
It was basically an offshoot of CSIS, the Canadian CIA -- a communications agency that 'monitors', which means 'spies', on other countries. They need people with language capabilities from all over the world, because, I guess, even Canada, yes Canada, is continuously spying on everybody all over the world.
Just for the hell of it, I emailed this organization, told them a variation of this story, asked how to apply. Somebody got back to me right away, in a very cordial, professional email, detailing to whom I should contact, with this caveat: "Oh, and if you do manage to get an interview, please don't tell them you contacted me, or know who I am. Cheers!"
(Full disclosure: I'm not sure I used the word 'caveat' correctly, but I thought I'd give it a shot.)
Weeeeeeeeird.
The thing is, I've always been interested in intelligence gathering organizations. I think the C.I.A. is up to more nefarious stuff around the globe than we can even begin to contemplate; I think its reach is wide and sharp and octopular in its range. (That's not a word, 'octopular', but I decided to throw caution to the wind there.) Seeing Oliver Stone's J.F.K. and reading Norman Mailer's massive novel Harlot's Ghost whetted my appetite at a young age for the illicit political machinations that governments perform in the name of national security. I like reading about it, thinking about it, and trying to figure it all out -- in the movies, in books, and in real life.
And this time, real life caught up to me.
But it made me wonder:
Was this young Canadian's entire aid group here in Cambodia nothing more than a front group for the Canadian C.I.A.? Is this how young recruits are, well, recruited? Over late-night Cokes in Phnom Penh? Does the fact that he positioned himself as a consultant to Canada's conservative parties mean anything at all?
Who knows?
Kind of fun, though.
I'm from St.Catharines, Ontario, see. To even contemplate the fact that I may have been a possible candidate for recruitment into the Canadian C.I.A., and that this whole endeavor went down in Cambodia, of all places, is proof that Life with a capital 'l' will gladly, even eagerly, throw its own warped and tantalizing surprise parties every now and then.
(Oh, and if you managed to read all of this post all the way to the end, please don't tell anybody that I contacted you, or that you know who I am. Cheers!)
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
WHAT I KNOW
One and one is two.
A glass of lemonade, pink or yellow, is, hands down, the best tasting stuff in the galaxy.
Bill Murray's work in Lost in Translation is overrated.
Bill Murray's work in Stripes, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mad Dog and Glory, Rushmore, Scrooged and Meatballs is way, way, way underrated.
Saying Bill Murray is underrated is now overrated.
The Jesuits who tried to convert the Japanese all those many moons ago believed that the Japanese language was created by the devil in order to thwart their efforts -- and I tend to agree with them.
The Japanese language is very, very, cool.
The last line of Robert Redford's The Candidate is probably the greatest final line in movie history.
The first line of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is probably the greatest first line in literary history (according to me.)
People are good.
People are bad.
People are neither good nor bad, but driven to either by those around them.
Running is the equivalent of that old line about the guy finding his friend bashing his thumb in with a hammer, and, when asked why he does it, answers: "Because it feels so good when I stop."
Winning a race does wonders for your self-esteem and sense of place in the universe.
Losing a race you're supposed to win blows. (But it's true, I know, you learn more in losing than you do in winning.)
I haven't won a race in thirteen years.
I haven't eaten chocolate since lunch.
People living in Ontario don't think of themselves as 'Ontarians'.
People living in Alaska sometimes think of themselves as 'Alaskans'.
There is no such thing as 'Asia' -- just Japan, and Cambodia, and China, and Burma, and...
The last episodes of Family Ties, Cheers and Newhart ended perfectly.
The last episode of The Waltons was unseen by me. (And will, God willing, remain so.)
Life gets really, really harder the older you get, physically and emotionally.
Getting older is much, much better than the alternative. (Which is death.)
That lady who they've pulled the fluids out of the in the States should be allowed to live, because there's no written, legal proof that she said she didn't want to live if she were ever in such a state, only the statements of her husband, and besides, starving someone is not the way to go.
Watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off at twenty-nine, as opposed to fifteen, is a revelation -- what was once mini-James Bond heroics now comes across as a tender, somewhat innocent look at teenage idealism.
Watching The Battleship Potemkin at seven on a Wednesday morning in your film theory class is never, ever recommended.
A pink and orange sunset can't be beat.
The mysteries of the universe will never be explained to me. (Or you, for that matter).
We should keep on asking the universe to account for itself, even though it won't answer.
Dr.Phil should not be trusted.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen should not be trusted.
Smiling and being polite will get you everywhere in life.
Asking other people really interesting questions about their life, even though you're not really interested, will not only allow you to get to know them better, but will also open a new way of approaching your life on this earth that can only lead to greater and great avenues of enlightenment.
Random email inquiries when looking for a job are highly, highly recommended.
Existenialism is the only rational way of looking at life -- but it gets awfully depressing after awhile.
The final few seasons of Who's The Boss, when Tony and Angela finally got it on, got awfully depressing after awhile.
The smell of freshly baked cookies is proof, if not of God, at least of the possibility of one of His descendants still walking among us.
Boxing is cruel, barbaric, idiotic, and a truly humane, wonderful endeavor, life in a microcosm, life distilled.
People in Canada and America, for the most part, have no real grasp of what utterly abysmal conditions most people in the world live in.
Poor people are usually, almost always, nicer than rich people.
Poor people do not necessarily resent rich people; they just want a piece of the pie, too.
Books are one of the Platonic forms that, um, Plato talked about.
Alexander is actually a great movie, advanced, ahead of its time. (I'm serious.)
No one else will believe that Alexander is actually a great movie, advanced, ahead of its time.
Fifty is the new forty, and six is the new eight months.
Humor is hard (see above).
Roberto Benigini is really, really funny.
Gilbert Gottfried is really, really, really funny.
Nobody watches Canadian dramas.
Everything is relative, including knowledge (but the human heart isn't, hence its eccentric, elusive tastes...)
A glass of lemonade, pink or yellow, is, hands down, the best tasting stuff in the galaxy.
Bill Murray's work in Lost in Translation is overrated.
Bill Murray's work in Stripes, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mad Dog and Glory, Rushmore, Scrooged and Meatballs is way, way, way underrated.
Saying Bill Murray is underrated is now overrated.
The Jesuits who tried to convert the Japanese all those many moons ago believed that the Japanese language was created by the devil in order to thwart their efforts -- and I tend to agree with them.
The Japanese language is very, very, cool.
The last line of Robert Redford's The Candidate is probably the greatest final line in movie history.
The first line of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is probably the greatest first line in literary history (according to me.)
People are good.
People are bad.
People are neither good nor bad, but driven to either by those around them.
Running is the equivalent of that old line about the guy finding his friend bashing his thumb in with a hammer, and, when asked why he does it, answers: "Because it feels so good when I stop."
Winning a race does wonders for your self-esteem and sense of place in the universe.
Losing a race you're supposed to win blows. (But it's true, I know, you learn more in losing than you do in winning.)
I haven't won a race in thirteen years.
I haven't eaten chocolate since lunch.
People living in Ontario don't think of themselves as 'Ontarians'.
People living in Alaska sometimes think of themselves as 'Alaskans'.
There is no such thing as 'Asia' -- just Japan, and Cambodia, and China, and Burma, and...
The last episodes of Family Ties, Cheers and Newhart ended perfectly.
The last episode of The Waltons was unseen by me. (And will, God willing, remain so.)
Life gets really, really harder the older you get, physically and emotionally.
Getting older is much, much better than the alternative. (Which is death.)
That lady who they've pulled the fluids out of the in the States should be allowed to live, because there's no written, legal proof that she said she didn't want to live if she were ever in such a state, only the statements of her husband, and besides, starving someone is not the way to go.
Watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off at twenty-nine, as opposed to fifteen, is a revelation -- what was once mini-James Bond heroics now comes across as a tender, somewhat innocent look at teenage idealism.
Watching The Battleship Potemkin at seven on a Wednesday morning in your film theory class is never, ever recommended.
A pink and orange sunset can't be beat.
The mysteries of the universe will never be explained to me. (Or you, for that matter).
We should keep on asking the universe to account for itself, even though it won't answer.
Dr.Phil should not be trusted.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen should not be trusted.
Smiling and being polite will get you everywhere in life.
Asking other people really interesting questions about their life, even though you're not really interested, will not only allow you to get to know them better, but will also open a new way of approaching your life on this earth that can only lead to greater and great avenues of enlightenment.
Random email inquiries when looking for a job are highly, highly recommended.
Existenialism is the only rational way of looking at life -- but it gets awfully depressing after awhile.
The final few seasons of Who's The Boss, when Tony and Angela finally got it on, got awfully depressing after awhile.
The smell of freshly baked cookies is proof, if not of God, at least of the possibility of one of His descendants still walking among us.
Boxing is cruel, barbaric, idiotic, and a truly humane, wonderful endeavor, life in a microcosm, life distilled.
People in Canada and America, for the most part, have no real grasp of what utterly abysmal conditions most people in the world live in.
Poor people are usually, almost always, nicer than rich people.
Poor people do not necessarily resent rich people; they just want a piece of the pie, too.
Books are one of the Platonic forms that, um, Plato talked about.
Alexander is actually a great movie, advanced, ahead of its time. (I'm serious.)
No one else will believe that Alexander is actually a great movie, advanced, ahead of its time.
Fifty is the new forty, and six is the new eight months.
Humor is hard (see above).
Roberto Benigini is really, really funny.
Gilbert Gottfried is really, really, really funny.
Nobody watches Canadian dramas.
Everything is relative, including knowledge (but the human heart isn't, hence its eccentric, elusive tastes...)
I MISS HOT SHOWERS
I miss hot showers.
There. I've said it.
I'm living in a country where only 20% of the population (give or take) have access to toilets, or running water, a country where the life expectancy hovers around age 50, a country where the prospects for a reasonable, livable, decent life (I didn't say happy) are slim and far between. (And what a weird phrase that is. Not even sure what it means. Sorry about that.) I shouldn't be thinking of my own personal comfort needs.
Still.
I miss hot showers.
In my apartment, there's only cold showers available. Often, that's enough. After a run, or on a particularly hot day (which means every day), a cold shower can feel damn good. Soothing. Rejuvenating, even.
Still.
I haven't been entirely without a hot shower in my almost two (gulp) years of living here. I've had them at the hotels I've stayed at, the guest houses I've stayed at.
So, let's see -- less than five hot showers in two years?
It's not that I think about them that often, to be honest. But every now and then, the memory of a hot shower, potent and fierce, appears in my mind, like a picture you can only feel, not see.
And then I think of most Cambodians, who have never experienced and will never experience the simple goodness of a hot shower. I swallow my pity and get on with my day.
Still.
I admit it.
I miss hot showers.
There. I've said it.
I'm living in a country where only 20% of the population (give or take) have access to toilets, or running water, a country where the life expectancy hovers around age 50, a country where the prospects for a reasonable, livable, decent life (I didn't say happy) are slim and far between. (And what a weird phrase that is. Not even sure what it means. Sorry about that.) I shouldn't be thinking of my own personal comfort needs.
Still.
I miss hot showers.
In my apartment, there's only cold showers available. Often, that's enough. After a run, or on a particularly hot day (which means every day), a cold shower can feel damn good. Soothing. Rejuvenating, even.
Still.
I haven't been entirely without a hot shower in my almost two (gulp) years of living here. I've had them at the hotels I've stayed at, the guest houses I've stayed at.
So, let's see -- less than five hot showers in two years?
It's not that I think about them that often, to be honest. But every now and then, the memory of a hot shower, potent and fierce, appears in my mind, like a picture you can only feel, not see.
And then I think of most Cambodians, who have never experienced and will never experience the simple goodness of a hot shower. I swallow my pity and get on with my day.
Still.
I admit it.
I miss hot showers.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
ARTIFICIAL EMBRACES CAN STILL LIGHTEN THE GLOOM
Today I received an email that I thought was a legitimate email because the name sounded real, somewhat familiar, almost (but not quite) like a grade-school classmate I used to know, and the tagline was 'Regarding tomorrow', so I thought it might be about work, but it turned out to be spam, which pissed me off, but then I imagined the Internet in ten, fifteen years time, when our emails will all be video emails, and we'll be able to see the faces of people as they give us their messages, and I imagined myself, age forty, forty-five, alone in a room, rain streaking the window, opening my Inbox on a particularly gloomy morning, finding it empty, but seeing my Junkmail full, full of stranger's faces, salesmen's faces, smiling, saying hello, their grins broad, their hair permed and pressed, all of them wanting to talk to me and me alone, and for some reason I can't quite understand this made me feel good, accepted, embraced, if only in an artificial way.
INDIFFERENCE
I've been thinking about slums recently.
Right down the street from where I live, there's a bunch of buildings that look like a bomb blast went off inside of them about ten, fifteen years back, a Die Hard style explosion gone awry, minus the modern-day heroics of a Bruce Willis to ease the pain and suffering. A lot of families live there, with husbands and wives, kids and clotheslines; these buildings look like overblown doll houses, their bare and shoddy rooms exposed for the whole world to see. Or at least that part of the world living on Sothearos Boulevard, I guess. (Not that that many doll houses look like remnants of shrapnel itself, only magnified.) This could be called, I guess, a slum.
There's a lot of them here in Phnom Penh. On my first trip to Cambodia, when I spent a week in Battambang, a Cambodian English teacher took me around to see the slums. There were no houses there, no buildings, just shacks, strips of wood tied together, a home cobbled out of necessity. All filled with desperately poor, perpetually smiling families. One boy had a growth that covered most of his face, a blue whoopee cushion stretching from brow to chin on the right hand side, but he was alert, friendly, open. He was a kid.
Slums are the subject, in part, of a book I'm reading called The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon and Edward Burns. (No, not that Edward Burns; this one's a former cop, now a schoolteacher.)
These two writers chronicle a year in the life of the streets of West Baltimore, exposing the families and community that thrive in one of the 'worst' neighbourhoods in one of the most crime ridden cities in America. Its a brutal, piercing, heartbreaking book, focusing on a handful of people, a handful of families, a handful of drug addicts; the book exposes the drug subculture that exists in its own, enclosed universe.
I said 'worst' neighbourhoods, as if I know what I'm talking about. I grew up in a safe town; there was no inner city in my city. The closest I've come, in Canada, was when I lived for four years on-campus at York University in Toronto, just down the block from what is basically the most dangerous intersection in Canada, Jane and Finch. Even the name, 'Jane and Finch', brings back memories of, well, avoidance, mostly. You didn't want to go down there. Too dangerous. Too hostile. (What they meant was, let's be honest, too 'black'. )
I ventured into that forbidden zone once, with the guy who lived next to me in my dorm; we went to McDonald's, and had our meals, and were not shot, not even once.
And now I'm living right near a place that would, in some ways, make the intersection of Jane and Finch look positively bubbly. And I'm alive. And I haven't been shot.
The thing is, it's just so, so, so outside of my scope. I read books like this, and you marvel at the humanity of the people, and weep over the stupidity and futility of the justice system, the police system, the rehabilitation system. These are people whose whole lives revolve around getting the next fix, people whose entire world centres upon drugs, and getting some, stealing some, killing for some.
In North America (and most the world, I guess), the undercurrent is always race. Leave the blacks for the inner cities, while the whites will commute to their jobs in downtown Atlanta and Dallas and Boston and Baltimore, and get the hell out of Dodge come quitting time.
I see it in America, I see it in urban Canada, and I see it in Africa, especially, Rwanda and Sudan, particularly. The bottom line: Black lives are devalued. (Doesn't take a rocket science to see it that way.) That's the nasty truth that politicians will never divulge. Our people, our politicians, my countrymen, collectively, when it comes right down to it, don't give a flying fu-- what happens to the dark-skinned poor, be they in Canada or America or Cambodia or Rwanda. That's the only explanation I can come to.
(Not that it's necessarily conscious, or pre-ordained, or inherently malevolent; indifference has its own unseen escalation, its own blind, alarming evil.)
I'm not trying to present myself as some do-gooder, a noble white, the enlightened one. (If that's the way I come across, I'll take the blame. And hell, maybe it's a valid criticism, to some extent. I sometimes think I should go back home and just go teach English or rudimentary Japanese to the kids in the schools at Jane and Finch, and then I think 'you precious bastard, like they need a white person like you to help them along'. I feel stupid for thinking of the idea, then stupid for feeling stupid. It's just that I come from a world that was pretty white-bread, and I've seen the world, lived in Japan, lived in Cambodia, and I'm trying, in my own way, to piece together what I've seen and feel; trying to reconcile the harsh reality of the world with the Leave It To Beaver suburban environment that molded me, for better or for worse.)
I don't have any answers.
And, to some extent, it goes beyond race, this indifference to the development of those on a lower scale than ourselves. There's something primal in the way we react to poverty, the way we flinch from it, the way we divert our movement and our attention from its nasty grip.
In Phnom Penh, it's in your face, every day, but you can still look away. Back home, ifyou're lucky, you can do more than look away -- you can move away, and see its aftereffects only on the evening news, in between Wheel of Fortune and Everbody Loves Raymond. You can react to poverty only as a theoretical concept, if you so choose, as an ideology, even, rather than as the stinking, putrid mess that it is, a living, breathing organism that consumes you and spits you out and moves on to the next piece of prey.
I just know that generations of people, be they black or white or Hispanic or Sudanese or Khmer, are screwed from the get-go. Yes, yes, yes -- there will always be those who can overcome adversity. I have confidence in the individual; I have the belief that we can rise above our circumstances.
But I also know this:
There are schools in West Baltimore, and there are schools on Jane Street and Finch street in Toronto, and there are (a few) schools somewhere near the slum near my house in Phnom Penh, and, to be honest, I don't think very many successful people care one way or another what goes on inside of them, or what happens to them. And I can bet you that these schools' books suck, their facilities blow, and that their teachers, overworked and good souls that they are, do not have the means to deal with a situation that seems to be deteriorating decade by decade, year by year.
Who do we blame?
Where do we start?
I don't have any answers.
But maybe if we keep asking the questions, that's a start? A small one, true, but a start nevertheless?
Or am I dreaming?
Tell me I'm not.
Right down the street from where I live, there's a bunch of buildings that look like a bomb blast went off inside of them about ten, fifteen years back, a Die Hard style explosion gone awry, minus the modern-day heroics of a Bruce Willis to ease the pain and suffering. A lot of families live there, with husbands and wives, kids and clotheslines; these buildings look like overblown doll houses, their bare and shoddy rooms exposed for the whole world to see. Or at least that part of the world living on Sothearos Boulevard, I guess. (Not that that many doll houses look like remnants of shrapnel itself, only magnified.) This could be called, I guess, a slum.
There's a lot of them here in Phnom Penh. On my first trip to Cambodia, when I spent a week in Battambang, a Cambodian English teacher took me around to see the slums. There were no houses there, no buildings, just shacks, strips of wood tied together, a home cobbled out of necessity. All filled with desperately poor, perpetually smiling families. One boy had a growth that covered most of his face, a blue whoopee cushion stretching from brow to chin on the right hand side, but he was alert, friendly, open. He was a kid.
Slums are the subject, in part, of a book I'm reading called The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon and Edward Burns. (No, not that Edward Burns; this one's a former cop, now a schoolteacher.)
These two writers chronicle a year in the life of the streets of West Baltimore, exposing the families and community that thrive in one of the 'worst' neighbourhoods in one of the most crime ridden cities in America. Its a brutal, piercing, heartbreaking book, focusing on a handful of people, a handful of families, a handful of drug addicts; the book exposes the drug subculture that exists in its own, enclosed universe.
I said 'worst' neighbourhoods, as if I know what I'm talking about. I grew up in a safe town; there was no inner city in my city. The closest I've come, in Canada, was when I lived for four years on-campus at York University in Toronto, just down the block from what is basically the most dangerous intersection in Canada, Jane and Finch. Even the name, 'Jane and Finch', brings back memories of, well, avoidance, mostly. You didn't want to go down there. Too dangerous. Too hostile. (What they meant was, let's be honest, too 'black'. )
I ventured into that forbidden zone once, with the guy who lived next to me in my dorm; we went to McDonald's, and had our meals, and were not shot, not even once.
And now I'm living right near a place that would, in some ways, make the intersection of Jane and Finch look positively bubbly. And I'm alive. And I haven't been shot.
The thing is, it's just so, so, so outside of my scope. I read books like this, and you marvel at the humanity of the people, and weep over the stupidity and futility of the justice system, the police system, the rehabilitation system. These are people whose whole lives revolve around getting the next fix, people whose entire world centres upon drugs, and getting some, stealing some, killing for some.
In North America (and most the world, I guess), the undercurrent is always race. Leave the blacks for the inner cities, while the whites will commute to their jobs in downtown Atlanta and Dallas and Boston and Baltimore, and get the hell out of Dodge come quitting time.
I see it in America, I see it in urban Canada, and I see it in Africa, especially, Rwanda and Sudan, particularly. The bottom line: Black lives are devalued. (Doesn't take a rocket science to see it that way.) That's the nasty truth that politicians will never divulge. Our people, our politicians, my countrymen, collectively, when it comes right down to it, don't give a flying fu-- what happens to the dark-skinned poor, be they in Canada or America or Cambodia or Rwanda. That's the only explanation I can come to.
(Not that it's necessarily conscious, or pre-ordained, or inherently malevolent; indifference has its own unseen escalation, its own blind, alarming evil.)
I'm not trying to present myself as some do-gooder, a noble white, the enlightened one. (If that's the way I come across, I'll take the blame. And hell, maybe it's a valid criticism, to some extent. I sometimes think I should go back home and just go teach English or rudimentary Japanese to the kids in the schools at Jane and Finch, and then I think 'you precious bastard, like they need a white person like you to help them along'. I feel stupid for thinking of the idea, then stupid for feeling stupid. It's just that I come from a world that was pretty white-bread, and I've seen the world, lived in Japan, lived in Cambodia, and I'm trying, in my own way, to piece together what I've seen and feel; trying to reconcile the harsh reality of the world with the Leave It To Beaver suburban environment that molded me, for better or for worse.)
I don't have any answers.
And, to some extent, it goes beyond race, this indifference to the development of those on a lower scale than ourselves. There's something primal in the way we react to poverty, the way we flinch from it, the way we divert our movement and our attention from its nasty grip.
In Phnom Penh, it's in your face, every day, but you can still look away. Back home, ifyou're lucky, you can do more than look away -- you can move away, and see its aftereffects only on the evening news, in between Wheel of Fortune and Everbody Loves Raymond. You can react to poverty only as a theoretical concept, if you so choose, as an ideology, even, rather than as the stinking, putrid mess that it is, a living, breathing organism that consumes you and spits you out and moves on to the next piece of prey.
I just know that generations of people, be they black or white or Hispanic or Sudanese or Khmer, are screwed from the get-go. Yes, yes, yes -- there will always be those who can overcome adversity. I have confidence in the individual; I have the belief that we can rise above our circumstances.
But I also know this:
There are schools in West Baltimore, and there are schools on Jane Street and Finch street in Toronto, and there are (a few) schools somewhere near the slum near my house in Phnom Penh, and, to be honest, I don't think very many successful people care one way or another what goes on inside of them, or what happens to them. And I can bet you that these schools' books suck, their facilities blow, and that their teachers, overworked and good souls that they are, do not have the means to deal with a situation that seems to be deteriorating decade by decade, year by year.
Who do we blame?
Where do we start?
I don't have any answers.
But maybe if we keep asking the questions, that's a start? A small one, true, but a start nevertheless?
Or am I dreaming?
Tell me I'm not.
Monday, March 21, 2005
YOURS TO DISCOVER
The weird thing about blogging is not necessarily the fact that you have to create this online, virtual version of yourself that somehow represents and encapsulates the sum and total of how you view the world (and thus how it views you), all through the medium of a highly literate, supremely witty prose that highlights your intelligence and plays down your less palatable characteristics, the worst of which is your tendency to hum The Brady Bunch theme song when you're really, really nervous.
(Actually, that does sound weird enough for most people, doesn't it. And I don't hum that theme song in tense situations. I swear. In those cases, nine times out of ten, I opt for Diff'rent Strokes. Facts of Life, maybe.)
But the weirder thing, in my view, is that it's not really that strange at all, this new-age practice of posting your thoughts for the world to see, instantly letting the mostly-indifferent denizens of the planet know what they really weren't that interested in hearing about anyways.
Yout get a blog, and you start writing, and you try to nail down a 'voice'.
Very similar to writing fiction, really, only in fiction the voice is either a) some omniscient narrator, so your 'voice' has to be kind of an all-knowing, all-seeing sage type of deal, or b) a first person narrator, which is not really 'you' but the voice of the character who is telling the story, which means that you have to write it the way that he/she would write it. (Or even how 'they' would write, if you're referring to this really cool novel by Joyce Carol Oates called Broke-Heart Blues, and I urge you, implore you to read it, as it encapsulates the high school experience better than most books I've ever read, viewing it from the teenage perspective and the middle-age perspective, and the cool thing is, it does so by using a 'they' narrator -- a group of people, a collective, nameless 'they' that shouldn't work but does, wickedly so.)
Not that you really have to think of your 'voice' too much, but it's usually there, nonetheless, this insistent rumbling in the back of your brain that's telling you how to write what it is that you want to write about.
It's new, this voice, this blogging voice, at least to me; before last, what, last October, I guess, it didn't exist.
Kind of like learning a new sport, or another language. The cool thing about learning Japanese was realizing, after awhile, that a new-me had been created, a Japanese-speaking-me that literally was not in existence before I went to Japan. (Not that I'm fluent or anything, but still, being able to hold a minimal conversation in a language that you didn't know only two, three years before is a little freaky -- it's the birth of a whole new aspect of yourself.)
So it's best to look at blogging, I guess, as a kind of endeavor that is at least the equal of learning how to scuba dive or play contract bridge. (Not that I know how to do either. Not that I even know what contract bridge is, exactly, because for years I thought it was an actual bridge in England, because in Empire of the Sun the young boy, Jim, tells his mother at bedtime that he's writing a book about contract bridge, only I thought he was talking about an edifice, not a game, so there you go.)
You figure out how to do it, and you do it.
Only in blogging, there's no rules, because anybody can post anything they want. Film reviews, book reviews, naked pictures of infamous people -- the game is open, 'cuz the forum is yours, the voice is yours.
Yours to birth, develop, hone or disregard; this new aspect of yourself has at least the possibility of being as interesting as the 'you' that talks to your parents, tells off your brother, calms down your neighbour.
And yours to discover, as the Ontario license plates say -- a daily, weekly, monthly discovery. For you and you alone to judge (negative posters be damned).
Shouldn't all life be as accessible as this?
(Or maybe it already is.)
(Actually, that does sound weird enough for most people, doesn't it. And I don't hum that theme song in tense situations. I swear. In those cases, nine times out of ten, I opt for Diff'rent Strokes. Facts of Life, maybe.)
But the weirder thing, in my view, is that it's not really that strange at all, this new-age practice of posting your thoughts for the world to see, instantly letting the mostly-indifferent denizens of the planet know what they really weren't that interested in hearing about anyways.
Yout get a blog, and you start writing, and you try to nail down a 'voice'.
Very similar to writing fiction, really, only in fiction the voice is either a) some omniscient narrator, so your 'voice' has to be kind of an all-knowing, all-seeing sage type of deal, or b) a first person narrator, which is not really 'you' but the voice of the character who is telling the story, which means that you have to write it the way that he/she would write it. (Or even how 'they' would write, if you're referring to this really cool novel by Joyce Carol Oates called Broke-Heart Blues, and I urge you, implore you to read it, as it encapsulates the high school experience better than most books I've ever read, viewing it from the teenage perspective and the middle-age perspective, and the cool thing is, it does so by using a 'they' narrator -- a group of people, a collective, nameless 'they' that shouldn't work but does, wickedly so.)
Not that you really have to think of your 'voice' too much, but it's usually there, nonetheless, this insistent rumbling in the back of your brain that's telling you how to write what it is that you want to write about.
It's new, this voice, this blogging voice, at least to me; before last, what, last October, I guess, it didn't exist.
Kind of like learning a new sport, or another language. The cool thing about learning Japanese was realizing, after awhile, that a new-me had been created, a Japanese-speaking-me that literally was not in existence before I went to Japan. (Not that I'm fluent or anything, but still, being able to hold a minimal conversation in a language that you didn't know only two, three years before is a little freaky -- it's the birth of a whole new aspect of yourself.)
So it's best to look at blogging, I guess, as a kind of endeavor that is at least the equal of learning how to scuba dive or play contract bridge. (Not that I know how to do either. Not that I even know what contract bridge is, exactly, because for years I thought it was an actual bridge in England, because in Empire of the Sun the young boy, Jim, tells his mother at bedtime that he's writing a book about contract bridge, only I thought he was talking about an edifice, not a game, so there you go.)
You figure out how to do it, and you do it.
Only in blogging, there's no rules, because anybody can post anything they want. Film reviews, book reviews, naked pictures of infamous people -- the game is open, 'cuz the forum is yours, the voice is yours.
Yours to birth, develop, hone or disregard; this new aspect of yourself has at least the possibility of being as interesting as the 'you' that talks to your parents, tells off your brother, calms down your neighbour.
And yours to discover, as the Ontario license plates say -- a daily, weekly, monthly discovery. For you and you alone to judge (negative posters be damned).
Shouldn't all life be as accessible as this?
(Or maybe it already is.)
Sunday, March 20, 2005
FLAGS IN THE BREEZE
I saw a flag fluttering in the wind on the banks of the river here in Phnom Penh. There were a bunch of flags, actually, all of them representing the various countries of the world, all of them moving swiftly, almost gracefully, with each warm, insistent push of the afternoon breeze.
"It would be a nice to be a flag," I said to my friend.
"Why?"
"I don't know. You'd have a kind of dignity."
"Yes, but you'd be stagnant."
I hadn't thought of that. There is a certain regal grace about flags, I think, but it's true -- for all of their ceremonial exteriors, they can't go anywhere; they can only fly in one place. And without the wind, they droop, looking forlorn and defeated.
Silly, isn't it? Ascribing these human characteristics to something as inherently lifeless as a piece of silk strung up in the sky.
Still.
Living in Cambodia, where Buddhism and reincarnation is a matter of course, I can't help but thinking: What if everybody's right? What if we do come back? And who's to say we have to come back as living, breathing, sentient beings? Why couldn't we come back as flags?
Personally, I like the idea of coming back, of returning to life again and again, only in another shape and form, in another era and place. There's a wonderful cosmic and spiritual serenity in that concept.
Of course, the part of my brain that deals in logic (a small part, true, but it's there, it exists) wonders: If reincarnation is true, how could it all have begun, this whole rebirth thing? I mean, people have been living and dying for millenium, and how did this all start? If you believe in evolution (and I do), then how does evolution come into play? How do you logically link the scientific and the spiritual? And what about this idea that if you are a bad person in your former life, you will pay for it in the next life? Rich people here use that as a means to justify their own station, their own greed; the poor are poor because their souls are unworthy, paying in this life for their sins of their previous ones.
I can't reconcile all of this; I don't know, and I will never will. (I hope.)
Makes just as much sense, though, as believing that there is a place somewhere up there that we all go when we die, where everything is goodness and light forever and ever. Not sure that I buy that, either.
No matter.
Maybe there's a heaven, or maybe there isn't. Maybe we come back again, and maybe we don't. There are still those flags, the ones that fly down by the river, and I can go and see them whenever I wish.
All the other questions, the big questions, the life-and-death questions, can wait. I can pause for a few moments in the hot and dusty stillness of a Phnom Penh afternoon, pause and watch the flags do their flag. Watch them flutter in the breeze, before the wind dies down for another day.
"It would be a nice to be a flag," I said to my friend.
"Why?"
"I don't know. You'd have a kind of dignity."
"Yes, but you'd be stagnant."
I hadn't thought of that. There is a certain regal grace about flags, I think, but it's true -- for all of their ceremonial exteriors, they can't go anywhere; they can only fly in one place. And without the wind, they droop, looking forlorn and defeated.
Silly, isn't it? Ascribing these human characteristics to something as inherently lifeless as a piece of silk strung up in the sky.
Still.
Living in Cambodia, where Buddhism and reincarnation is a matter of course, I can't help but thinking: What if everybody's right? What if we do come back? And who's to say we have to come back as living, breathing, sentient beings? Why couldn't we come back as flags?
Personally, I like the idea of coming back, of returning to life again and again, only in another shape and form, in another era and place. There's a wonderful cosmic and spiritual serenity in that concept.
Of course, the part of my brain that deals in logic (a small part, true, but it's there, it exists) wonders: If reincarnation is true, how could it all have begun, this whole rebirth thing? I mean, people have been living and dying for millenium, and how did this all start? If you believe in evolution (and I do), then how does evolution come into play? How do you logically link the scientific and the spiritual? And what about this idea that if you are a bad person in your former life, you will pay for it in the next life? Rich people here use that as a means to justify their own station, their own greed; the poor are poor because their souls are unworthy, paying in this life for their sins of their previous ones.
I can't reconcile all of this; I don't know, and I will never will. (I hope.)
Makes just as much sense, though, as believing that there is a place somewhere up there that we all go when we die, where everything is goodness and light forever and ever. Not sure that I buy that, either.
No matter.
Maybe there's a heaven, or maybe there isn't. Maybe we come back again, and maybe we don't. There are still those flags, the ones that fly down by the river, and I can go and see them whenever I wish.
All the other questions, the big questions, the life-and-death questions, can wait. I can pause for a few moments in the hot and dusty stillness of a Phnom Penh afternoon, pause and watch the flags do their flag. Watch them flutter in the breeze, before the wind dies down for another day.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
ALTERING YOUR TRAJECTORIES, OR WHY BELIEVING IN THE LOCH NESS MONSTER IS THE WAY TO GO
"Some people would say that because we don't know, it can't be. I would say that because we don't know, we don't know."
- Charles Towne,
Physicist, Nobel laureate
And so in this corner we have the world of ghosts and devils, spirits and shamans, Loch Ness monsters and all of those other unseen, unborn mythical-or-not creatures that go bump in the night, and then in the other corner we have faith, stability, crosses and candles, crucifixtions and chants, certainty and faith.
You either believe that Oswald did it, or that the whole bloody mess was an elongated, elaborate, massive conspiracy.
You either believe that people from the other side continue to enchant us and guide us and listen to us, literal angels on our shoulders, or you hold firmly to the view that the coffin, once in the ground, or the ashes, once in the urn, are the complete and sum total of all that is left of our earthly selves.
This and that.
Either/or.
Worlds of certainty versus universes of ambiguity.
But let's say this, and I'll say it quietly. I won't make a fuss, or raise my voice. There are those in the other room, the one right next to you, who may disagree with what I'm saying, and we don't want to offend them, piss them off, alter their trajectories.
What if the physicist is right? What if all of our uncertainties are not necessarily reflective of any ultimate end-goal? Because we don't know means, well, we don't know. Period. Turn the page.
It doesn't mean that there is a God, or that there isn't. It doesn't mean that UFOS actually exist, or that they don't. It doesn't mean that death is the end of this life, or the beginning of another one.
Just because you're not sure about your new job doesn't mean that it won't turn out to be something spectacular. Just because you can't figure out your life now, doesn't have to lead to you not figuring out your life in the near future, or ever.
It just means that all of the myriad mysteries of the universe, whether they be the exact size, shape and texture of this close and present galaxy or the exact size, shape and texture of your husband's toupee are simply riddles waiting to be solved at some future date. The worth of our own uncertainties can be validated by their own essential unknowability.
It's okay not to know, in other words. To not know means you will keep attempting to know. To not know means you will allow other entrances to be opened. To not know means that the door is always half-open, not half closed.
I'm not sure if the Loch Ness monster really, truly exists.
But I'm betting that he does.
Besides, a life with even the slimmest possibility of a Loch Ness monster silently floating beneath the misty gloom of a Scottish night is a life that I would gladly alter my trajectory for, if necessary.
- Charles Towne,
Physicist, Nobel laureate
And so in this corner we have the world of ghosts and devils, spirits and shamans, Loch Ness monsters and all of those other unseen, unborn mythical-or-not creatures that go bump in the night, and then in the other corner we have faith, stability, crosses and candles, crucifixtions and chants, certainty and faith.
You either believe that Oswald did it, or that the whole bloody mess was an elongated, elaborate, massive conspiracy.
You either believe that people from the other side continue to enchant us and guide us and listen to us, literal angels on our shoulders, or you hold firmly to the view that the coffin, once in the ground, or the ashes, once in the urn, are the complete and sum total of all that is left of our earthly selves.
This and that.
Either/or.
Worlds of certainty versus universes of ambiguity.
But let's say this, and I'll say it quietly. I won't make a fuss, or raise my voice. There are those in the other room, the one right next to you, who may disagree with what I'm saying, and we don't want to offend them, piss them off, alter their trajectories.
What if the physicist is right? What if all of our uncertainties are not necessarily reflective of any ultimate end-goal? Because we don't know means, well, we don't know. Period. Turn the page.
It doesn't mean that there is a God, or that there isn't. It doesn't mean that UFOS actually exist, or that they don't. It doesn't mean that death is the end of this life, or the beginning of another one.
Just because you're not sure about your new job doesn't mean that it won't turn out to be something spectacular. Just because you can't figure out your life now, doesn't have to lead to you not figuring out your life in the near future, or ever.
It just means that all of the myriad mysteries of the universe, whether they be the exact size, shape and texture of this close and present galaxy or the exact size, shape and texture of your husband's toupee are simply riddles waiting to be solved at some future date. The worth of our own uncertainties can be validated by their own essential unknowability.
It's okay not to know, in other words. To not know means you will keep attempting to know. To not know means you will allow other entrances to be opened. To not know means that the door is always half-open, not half closed.
I'm not sure if the Loch Ness monster really, truly exists.
But I'm betting that he does.
Besides, a life with even the slimmest possibility of a Loch Ness monster silently floating beneath the misty gloom of a Scottish night is a life that I would gladly alter my trajectory for, if necessary.
Friday, March 18, 2005
IGNORANCE IS BLISS (ISN'T IT?)
"The abscence of alternatives clears the mind wonderfully."
-- Henry Kissinger
Recently, I was reading the new biography of J.F.K. that's currently out in paperback, and a Khmer colleague asked who the handsome man on the cover was.
"It's Kennedy," I said.
A pause. A nod.
"Who?" he asked.
"John Kennedy? The American president who was assasinated?"
Another pause. Another nod.
Not a freakin' clue.
In a country like Cambodia, information, let alone knowledge, is still somewhat restricted. A luxury, if you will, reserved for those with satellite dishes and access to the Internet.
Unlike most of us in the west, who basically have access to everything, all the time, whenever we want, whether we want it.
Do we need it all?
Do we need any of it?
There's a certain cultural, snobbish level of awareness that seems to exist back home -- meaning, if you don't watch this program, or read this book, then there's something wrong with you. The inverse works too -- if you do watch this kind of program, or that kind of book, then there's something wrong with you. You're either too intellectual, too refined, or you're too ignorant, too trailer-park. You either follow Oprah's book club, or disdain it. (I think it's a great idea, in case you're wondering -- anything that gets people reading.)
We often judge ourselves, and others, by what they like to watch, or read, and not necessarily by what they do. (Which is a very scary thing, I'm starting to realize; people who are as passionate as all get out about their books and movies and the world's reactions and accolades to their particular fetishes are often the same kind of people who don't do jackshit about any real injustice in the real world.) Some of the biggest jerks in the world are the most educated, erudite people you would ever want (or not want) to find; some of the nicest people in the world haven't read a goddamn thing in their lives.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be that the more we read, and think, the better people we become?
I don't think it ends up that way, though.
Don't know why that is. Maybe it's because we're simply assaulted on a daily basis by, well, everything. Billboards and ads and our parents and our teachers and our co-workers, all of them saying: This, this, this, you gotta read it, watch it, BE it.
How much is enough, though? How many really, really good movies come out in a single year? I'm talking exceptional. One? Maybe two?
How many amazing, life-changing books?
Do we need all this, all this, all this stuff jammed into our heads to inform and enlighten us? Can't we just step outside of our house, look up at the sky, feel the sunshine, taste the snowdrops, and wait for enlightenment to come in its own sweet time?
Not that I'm saying that illiteracy is a good thing, or ignorance, or indifference. I'm guilty of all the sins I describe, and they may not even be sins; they may be what's necessary to survive and compete in a competitive world. We do have to know what's going on in the world, and why, and what we can do about it. No question.
Still.
Living here, in Cambodia, you see the simple. You see the farmers. You see the bicycles. You see TV channels that play only government approved speeches or endless, endless song-and-dance shows. You see a conformity, yes, and political repression, true, but you also see...
An engagement. With the real world. With daylight and tarmac. (Not by choice, no, but once can't deny that, despite genocide, despite mass murder, despite the wrenching heartache that exists here, and will exist for decades to come, there is, in the end, innocence. I don't know how it's here, or why it's here, but it's here, I swear, I see it.)
Change is coming to this country, yes, and it's a good thing, and a welcome thing, but when I begin to hear everyone talking about how they must, absolutely must watch the latest Desperate Housewives, well, that may be the day that I pack my bags and book my ticket home.
-- Henry Kissinger
Recently, I was reading the new biography of J.F.K. that's currently out in paperback, and a Khmer colleague asked who the handsome man on the cover was.
"It's Kennedy," I said.
A pause. A nod.
"Who?" he asked.
"John Kennedy? The American president who was assasinated?"
Another pause. Another nod.
Not a freakin' clue.
In a country like Cambodia, information, let alone knowledge, is still somewhat restricted. A luxury, if you will, reserved for those with satellite dishes and access to the Internet.
Unlike most of us in the west, who basically have access to everything, all the time, whenever we want, whether we want it.
Do we need it all?
Do we need any of it?
There's a certain cultural, snobbish level of awareness that seems to exist back home -- meaning, if you don't watch this program, or read this book, then there's something wrong with you. The inverse works too -- if you do watch this kind of program, or that kind of book, then there's something wrong with you. You're either too intellectual, too refined, or you're too ignorant, too trailer-park. You either follow Oprah's book club, or disdain it. (I think it's a great idea, in case you're wondering -- anything that gets people reading.)
We often judge ourselves, and others, by what they like to watch, or read, and not necessarily by what they do. (Which is a very scary thing, I'm starting to realize; people who are as passionate as all get out about their books and movies and the world's reactions and accolades to their particular fetishes are often the same kind of people who don't do jackshit about any real injustice in the real world.) Some of the biggest jerks in the world are the most educated, erudite people you would ever want (or not want) to find; some of the nicest people in the world haven't read a goddamn thing in their lives.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be that the more we read, and think, the better people we become?
I don't think it ends up that way, though.
Don't know why that is. Maybe it's because we're simply assaulted on a daily basis by, well, everything. Billboards and ads and our parents and our teachers and our co-workers, all of them saying: This, this, this, you gotta read it, watch it, BE it.
How much is enough, though? How many really, really good movies come out in a single year? I'm talking exceptional. One? Maybe two?
How many amazing, life-changing books?
Do we need all this, all this, all this stuff jammed into our heads to inform and enlighten us? Can't we just step outside of our house, look up at the sky, feel the sunshine, taste the snowdrops, and wait for enlightenment to come in its own sweet time?
Not that I'm saying that illiteracy is a good thing, or ignorance, or indifference. I'm guilty of all the sins I describe, and they may not even be sins; they may be what's necessary to survive and compete in a competitive world. We do have to know what's going on in the world, and why, and what we can do about it. No question.
Still.
Living here, in Cambodia, you see the simple. You see the farmers. You see the bicycles. You see TV channels that play only government approved speeches or endless, endless song-and-dance shows. You see a conformity, yes, and political repression, true, but you also see...
An engagement. With the real world. With daylight and tarmac. (Not by choice, no, but once can't deny that, despite genocide, despite mass murder, despite the wrenching heartache that exists here, and will exist for decades to come, there is, in the end, innocence. I don't know how it's here, or why it's here, but it's here, I swear, I see it.)
Change is coming to this country, yes, and it's a good thing, and a welcome thing, but when I begin to hear everyone talking about how they must, absolutely must watch the latest Desperate Housewives, well, that may be the day that I pack my bags and book my ticket home.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU
In the heat of a Phnom Penh afternoon my mind flashes back, way back, to when I was eight or nine years old, to a night spent crawling along, and through, and between, the emerald green grass that lined the grounds of Muskie Bay cottages, somewhere in Ontario, all of us there, in that place, some looking for me, some hiding like me, as we played the game, that game that children play almost against their will, and I remember the moonlight, and I remember the shadings of the shadows, I do, and the blades of grass scratching against my face as I crawled along the edge of the fence, and right now, at this moment, there's nothing more I would wish for you than the sudden emergence of an insignificant childhood memory, if only for an instant, so you could feel what I feel, this surprising but welcome snapshot of who I was then, at that moment, in that place, there and then, no other time, no other when, this respite from reality that makes me pause, forces me to smile, before the sunlight comes back and the present is returned, against my will.
HOW TO END POVERTY IN ONE EASY STEP: MORE MONEY!
"A man is only as faithful as his options."
-- Chris Rock
Something struck me the other day when I read about Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's oil company in Iraq, overcharging some of their projects to the princely sum of a hundred some odd million bucks. (It was a baseball that struck me, actually, and a hard one, too. Note to self: Keep your head up more.)
It reminded me of an incident at work, where I proofread a letter directed to a certain government agency that was in cahoots with a local photocopy shop in town; the government department submitted an invoice to my NGO that stated that the photocopies had cost sixty dollars, when they should only have cost around thirty -- they'd pocketed the rest, and neglected to mention that fact in the fake receipt they had the shop write up (with a promise of future business, I'm sure.)
A hundred million bucks in Iraq; thirty bucks in Cambodia. But who's counting, really.
And yet there it is, the sly, not-so-subtle way that corruption works. You pocket the change when nobody's looking. You overcharge photocopies by ten, fifteen cents a sheet; in Iraq, you overcharge an oil pipeline by ten, fifteen thousand a pipe. That's how it's all done -- this siphoning away of money from one person's pocket to another. In stages.
The current cover of Time/Asia highlights an upcoming book by economist Jeffrey Sachs, the guru for ending poverty in the new millenium. He's obviously highly qualified, knows his stuff much better than I do, but still -- I don't trust the validity of his theory.
His solution to ending poverty is more bucks -- more bucks, more bucks, more bucks. You pump the money into these developing countries, spend it judiciously, and change will happen; change will emerge.
All well and good. But how do we do that? In the Time article, he briefly sidesteps the problem of corruption, stating that countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan are enormously corrupt, and look how well they've done, and they're proof that this excuse of 'corruption' is little more than protracted, emphatic whining, and so what we need is more, extended, committed action by the world's elite. We need more of your cash, in other words.
I've no doubt that the central tenet of his theory is true. Just because a country is corrupt doesn't mean that it can't progress and chip away at the global scourge that is poverty.
But his reasoning is flawed. It's like saying that smoking is good for you because my 105 year old grandfather has smoked six packs of cigarettes a day since he was 11, and he's still alive, so there you go.
The exceptions do not prove the rule in this case.Just because some countries have gotten around it, that doesn't mean that others will. Or can.
I admit: I'm a novice at this stuff, this economist stuff, this poverty stuff. I know not what I speak.
But I do know what I've seen firsthand here in Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in the world. I know the number of Mercedes Benzes I see barrelling around the capital. I know the reports I've checked that highlight the teeny-tiny discrepancies between what something should have cost, and what the government has said it cost.
Twenty bucks here. Forty bucks there. That's the Cambodian style.
Fifteen thousand here, thirty thousand there. That's the how the big boys at Halliburton do it.
No doubt, Jeffrey Sachs knows more than I will ever know. But it seems like he bops in and out of a country, visits the poor villages, thinks up solutions, writes them down, then implores the world to take action.
More money is the answer, yes.
But people are people. And new clothes need to be bought. And school tuition has to be paid. And that Landrover looks very, very tempting. And that summer cottage in Maine, the one near Kennebunkport, is a bit pricey.
Humans are humans are humans. When no one's looking, they do what they do.
When examining how to rationally, sensibly eliminate poverty, to deny the ramifications of that simple statement is to enter into realm of eternal academia, where the answers are clear and pristine, and the day-to-day reality of implementation are someone else's problem, to be solved on another, distant day.
-- Chris Rock
Something struck me the other day when I read about Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's oil company in Iraq, overcharging some of their projects to the princely sum of a hundred some odd million bucks. (It was a baseball that struck me, actually, and a hard one, too. Note to self: Keep your head up more.)
It reminded me of an incident at work, where I proofread a letter directed to a certain government agency that was in cahoots with a local photocopy shop in town; the government department submitted an invoice to my NGO that stated that the photocopies had cost sixty dollars, when they should only have cost around thirty -- they'd pocketed the rest, and neglected to mention that fact in the fake receipt they had the shop write up (with a promise of future business, I'm sure.)
A hundred million bucks in Iraq; thirty bucks in Cambodia. But who's counting, really.
And yet there it is, the sly, not-so-subtle way that corruption works. You pocket the change when nobody's looking. You overcharge photocopies by ten, fifteen cents a sheet; in Iraq, you overcharge an oil pipeline by ten, fifteen thousand a pipe. That's how it's all done -- this siphoning away of money from one person's pocket to another. In stages.
The current cover of Time/Asia highlights an upcoming book by economist Jeffrey Sachs, the guru for ending poverty in the new millenium. He's obviously highly qualified, knows his stuff much better than I do, but still -- I don't trust the validity of his theory.
His solution to ending poverty is more bucks -- more bucks, more bucks, more bucks. You pump the money into these developing countries, spend it judiciously, and change will happen; change will emerge.
All well and good. But how do we do that? In the Time article, he briefly sidesteps the problem of corruption, stating that countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan are enormously corrupt, and look how well they've done, and they're proof that this excuse of 'corruption' is little more than protracted, emphatic whining, and so what we need is more, extended, committed action by the world's elite. We need more of your cash, in other words.
I've no doubt that the central tenet of his theory is true. Just because a country is corrupt doesn't mean that it can't progress and chip away at the global scourge that is poverty.
But his reasoning is flawed. It's like saying that smoking is good for you because my 105 year old grandfather has smoked six packs of cigarettes a day since he was 11, and he's still alive, so there you go.
The exceptions do not prove the rule in this case.Just because some countries have gotten around it, that doesn't mean that others will. Or can.
I admit: I'm a novice at this stuff, this economist stuff, this poverty stuff. I know not what I speak.
But I do know what I've seen firsthand here in Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in the world. I know the number of Mercedes Benzes I see barrelling around the capital. I know the reports I've checked that highlight the teeny-tiny discrepancies between what something should have cost, and what the government has said it cost.
Twenty bucks here. Forty bucks there. That's the Cambodian style.
Fifteen thousand here, thirty thousand there. That's the how the big boys at Halliburton do it.
No doubt, Jeffrey Sachs knows more than I will ever know. But it seems like he bops in and out of a country, visits the poor villages, thinks up solutions, writes them down, then implores the world to take action.
More money is the answer, yes.
But people are people. And new clothes need to be bought. And school tuition has to be paid. And that Landrover looks very, very tempting. And that summer cottage in Maine, the one near Kennebunkport, is a bit pricey.
Humans are humans are humans. When no one's looking, they do what they do.
When examining how to rationally, sensibly eliminate poverty, to deny the ramifications of that simple statement is to enter into realm of eternal academia, where the answers are clear and pristine, and the day-to-day reality of implementation are someone else's problem, to be solved on another, distant day.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
FREUD, BURGER KING, THE ODAKYU LINE TRAIN, AND ALL THOSE NEW, UNEXPLORED PLACES, SO SHINING AND COMPLETE
"Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."
-- Freud
When you travel someplace new, whether it's to Southeast Asia or to the new Burger King downtown (the one that used to be a dry-cleaning place, back in the day), there's the tendency to believe that this unseen-until-now location has emerged, shining and complete, for you and you alone.
In a way, it has.
Things don't come into existence until we experience them for ourselves. You and I and President Bush and Prime Minister Martin can read about Iraq, its people and its problems, until our eyes start to fall out of their sockets, but until we go there, and talk to the people, and examine their problems, it's not real, not authentic, not solid.
The thing of it is, when we actually do go to these new places, the inverse occurs, thus completely screwing up our view of the world. Meaning, we find out: 1) That this is place has never before revealed itself to our innocent eyes; and 2) that it has, however, revealed itself to a lot of other eyes. The Burger King that is new for us, the customer, ready for a Double Whopper and fries at the opening-day sale, is most definitely not new for the fast-food manager, who has spent the past two weeks hiring teenagers, firing teenagers, hiring them again, and trying to figure out just how much ketchup is needed on a daily basis. (My estimation: a lot.)
Look at it it this way. I travel to Japan, a hick kid from Canada, and for me, each and every subway stop, not to mention buildings, elevators, even rooms, are fascinating, somewhat inexplicable adventures. For the salaryman standing next to me on the Odakyu line train as it rumbles and tumbles towards my stop, there's nothing transcendent going on. This is life, and he is living it, and his stop is just up ahead, could you kindly please step aside, thank you and I'm sorry. (Japanese are polite.)
Or I can come to Cambodia and immerse myself in a word that is poor, and corrupt, and filled with street children and teenage prostitutes. The mind reels; the jaw drops. For Cambodians? To them, um, it's Wednesday.
What is new for me is blase to you, and vice versa.
The trick of life is encountering the new, learning from it, burrowing deep, and then moving on. (Or, if you stay put, keep burrowing.) Both in Japan and Cambodia, the moment I arrived, I started reading about these completely, totally foreign places -- memoirs, biographies, history books, travel books. Just to make sense of the place. Just to allow myself a taste of
what these places were all about, written by people who lived there and loved them.
Freud was right. (Yeah, yeah, I know Freud doesn't need the props, but let's give credit where credit is due, shall we?) As the world gets smaller, as the Lonely Planet guidebooks continue to multiply like randy rabbits, so much of the world's mystery is being steadily, tragically eroded. Everywhere has been chronicled, examined, even blogged; everywhere has been held up to scrutiny, enjoyed, reviled. Poems have been written, books have been written, songs have been written -- about everywhere, really.
But don't despair.
Because I'm betting that there's places you haven't been. Others may have been there, yes, even poets, but you haven't.
Maybe it's Iceland. Or Germany. Or Quebec. Or St.Petersburg.
Or it might be the new Italian place, the one that your sister loved and your best friend hated. The one next to the new Burger King. The one whose door is always being held open by the smiling, pudgy owner.
They're all there, these places, so thoroughly trod upon by others and utterly uncontaminated by you. Shining. Complete.
What are you waiting for?
-- Freud
When you travel someplace new, whether it's to Southeast Asia or to the new Burger King downtown (the one that used to be a dry-cleaning place, back in the day), there's the tendency to believe that this unseen-until-now location has emerged, shining and complete, for you and you alone.
In a way, it has.
Things don't come into existence until we experience them for ourselves. You and I and President Bush and Prime Minister Martin can read about Iraq, its people and its problems, until our eyes start to fall out of their sockets, but until we go there, and talk to the people, and examine their problems, it's not real, not authentic, not solid.
The thing of it is, when we actually do go to these new places, the inverse occurs, thus completely screwing up our view of the world. Meaning, we find out: 1) That this is place has never before revealed itself to our innocent eyes; and 2) that it has, however, revealed itself to a lot of other eyes. The Burger King that is new for us, the customer, ready for a Double Whopper and fries at the opening-day sale, is most definitely not new for the fast-food manager, who has spent the past two weeks hiring teenagers, firing teenagers, hiring them again, and trying to figure out just how much ketchup is needed on a daily basis. (My estimation: a lot.)
Look at it it this way. I travel to Japan, a hick kid from Canada, and for me, each and every subway stop, not to mention buildings, elevators, even rooms, are fascinating, somewhat inexplicable adventures. For the salaryman standing next to me on the Odakyu line train as it rumbles and tumbles towards my stop, there's nothing transcendent going on. This is life, and he is living it, and his stop is just up ahead, could you kindly please step aside, thank you and I'm sorry. (Japanese are polite.)
Or I can come to Cambodia and immerse myself in a word that is poor, and corrupt, and filled with street children and teenage prostitutes. The mind reels; the jaw drops. For Cambodians? To them, um, it's Wednesday.
What is new for me is blase to you, and vice versa.
The trick of life is encountering the new, learning from it, burrowing deep, and then moving on. (Or, if you stay put, keep burrowing.) Both in Japan and Cambodia, the moment I arrived, I started reading about these completely, totally foreign places -- memoirs, biographies, history books, travel books. Just to make sense of the place. Just to allow myself a taste of
what these places were all about, written by people who lived there and loved them.
Freud was right. (Yeah, yeah, I know Freud doesn't need the props, but let's give credit where credit is due, shall we?) As the world gets smaller, as the Lonely Planet guidebooks continue to multiply like randy rabbits, so much of the world's mystery is being steadily, tragically eroded. Everywhere has been chronicled, examined, even blogged; everywhere has been held up to scrutiny, enjoyed, reviled. Poems have been written, books have been written, songs have been written -- about everywhere, really.
But don't despair.
Because I'm betting that there's places you haven't been. Others may have been there, yes, even poets, but you haven't.
Maybe it's Iceland. Or Germany. Or Quebec. Or St.Petersburg.
Or it might be the new Italian place, the one that your sister loved and your best friend hated. The one next to the new Burger King. The one whose door is always being held open by the smiling, pudgy owner.
They're all there, these places, so thoroughly trod upon by others and utterly uncontaminated by you. Shining. Complete.
What are you waiting for?
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
WHY CALLING IN SICK TO YOUR FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN IS THE KEY TO A HAPPY LIFE
"Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem."
-- Henry Kissinger
That's why I never liked school as a kid. Because once you start, whether it's from nursery school or pre-kindergarten or kindergarten or whenever, the train ain't stopping. Each grade is progressively more difficult than the one before it; Grade 5 is harder than Grade 6, Grade 7 is harder than Grade 8, and so on and so on, all the way up until the end of university.
And what's the reward for all of our academic all-nighters?
Real life!
That ain't right. We study, we slave, we go without Springer on a daily, even weekly basis, only to be rewarded by the reality of having to find an actual paying job in the world outside of academia.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, either.
Once we get a job, if we're any good at it, we eventually get a better job. And what does 'better' actually mean?
More responsibility.
More workload.
More headaches.
Just a few years ago, Bush was chilling as owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, trying to figure out who to trade and who to keep. Trying to line up which beer company would sell the suds at his Texas stadium, probably. And now? Now he carries around a suitcase that contains the secret codes that can launch nuclear weapons at a moment's notice.
Think about it.
Kind of a leap in responsibility, no?
Do we want all that added pressure in our lives? (Not that we all carry around nuclear launch codes, no, but some of us do.)
Maybe yes.
Maybe our reward for all of our hard work in school and on the job is more work, work that allows us to, hopefully, challenge ourselves, achieve our potential, reach for the top and possibly cure a major disease, if we're lucky. (Or even a minor one.)
Still.
Underachievement is underrated, in my book.
And kids need to know what's coming.
I think it's incumbent on every parent to sit their child down the evening before their first day of kindergarten and say:
"Tonight is the last night of your life. Stay in the bath a little longer, play with the rubber duckie, read The Cat In The Hat one more time. I'll even let you stay up late. Because after tomorrow morning, it ain't gonna get any easier."
Or maybe it's better to keep that particular speech to yourself.
If I knew at four what I know now, I might have played sick that first day of school.
And the next, too.
And the next...
-- Henry Kissinger
That's why I never liked school as a kid. Because once you start, whether it's from nursery school or pre-kindergarten or kindergarten or whenever, the train ain't stopping. Each grade is progressively more difficult than the one before it; Grade 5 is harder than Grade 6, Grade 7 is harder than Grade 8, and so on and so on, all the way up until the end of university.
And what's the reward for all of our academic all-nighters?
Real life!
That ain't right. We study, we slave, we go without Springer on a daily, even weekly basis, only to be rewarded by the reality of having to find an actual paying job in the world outside of academia.
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, either.
Once we get a job, if we're any good at it, we eventually get a better job. And what does 'better' actually mean?
More responsibility.
More workload.
More headaches.
Just a few years ago, Bush was chilling as owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, trying to figure out who to trade and who to keep. Trying to line up which beer company would sell the suds at his Texas stadium, probably. And now? Now he carries around a suitcase that contains the secret codes that can launch nuclear weapons at a moment's notice.
Think about it.
Kind of a leap in responsibility, no?
Do we want all that added pressure in our lives? (Not that we all carry around nuclear launch codes, no, but some of us do.)
Maybe yes.
Maybe our reward for all of our hard work in school and on the job is more work, work that allows us to, hopefully, challenge ourselves, achieve our potential, reach for the top and possibly cure a major disease, if we're lucky. (Or even a minor one.)
Still.
Underachievement is underrated, in my book.
And kids need to know what's coming.
I think it's incumbent on every parent to sit their child down the evening before their first day of kindergarten and say:
"Tonight is the last night of your life. Stay in the bath a little longer, play with the rubber duckie, read The Cat In The Hat one more time. I'll even let you stay up late. Because after tomorrow morning, it ain't gonna get any easier."
Or maybe it's better to keep that particular speech to yourself.
If I knew at four what I know now, I might have played sick that first day of school.
And the next, too.
And the next...
ACCIDENTAL INSERTS
I found a photo in my desk at work. Never noticed it before. It's a man and a woman who I don't know, seated at a table I've never sat at. Strangers, in other words. They're smiling. Probably at a party. They are white and the people behind them are brown. Everybody looks like they're having a good time; everybody looks happy.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
It made me feel lonely -- for me, for them, for the person who took the photo. Don't know why, really. There's something about a photo that's been abandoned that has a somewhat tragic feel to it. A photo should be in a photobook, or someone's wallet, or pinned on a fridge, next to the grocery list and little Becky's slightly skewed portrait of Granny. Not lying forgotten in a grey desk.
And who are the people in the photo? Are they married? Still together? Is one of them dead, while the other is alive, grieving? They've gone on and lived a life but this portrait of them, this piece of them, lay in a drawer in my desk, covered in dust. They've moved on, but this memory, this tactile projection, has remained static. Glimpsed only belatedly, by me, a stranger.
Whenever I look at old photos I've taken, I always notice the strangers, the people passing behind the people I've photographed. Where are all those strangers right now, those accidental inserts? Are they dead or alive? Content or miserable? Fed up with life or thrilled with the days they have left? And they don't know that they're in a photo of mine; nobody told them.
And how many photos am I in that I don't know about? Has somebody snapped a picture of me, unknowingly, aiming for their friend? Maybe somewhere in Canada, or Japan, or even Cambodia, there's a part of me -- a finger, a left foot, the back of my head -- that exists only in the corner of a stranger's photo.
Another me, incidental but still there, nonetheless.
Monday, March 14, 2005
DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY
I will be happy when I get the job. When I pass the test. When I find my wallet. When I eat that pizza. When _____ loves me. When I go on vacation to Club Med this summer. When I buy that new couch, the blue one, the one for the living room. When I lose the twenty pounds. When Kirstie Alley loses forty pounds. When peace comes to the Middle East. When we follow Rodney King's advice and all get along. When the bumper on my Buick finally gets fixed. When the baby stops crying. When my lotto numbers fall into place, one glorious ping-pong ball at a time.
The other night I watched this British show hosted by a dude named Parkinson (unknown to me), and one of his guests was a very famous female cooking writer/host, Nigella Lawson (also unknown to me; I'm not up on my British celebrities, I guess). Apparently, her first husband had died a long and lingering death, and she married her second one less than two years later. When questioned about the British press's rather unsympathetic reaction to this turn of events, Lawson basically said: "I've always been a believer that if you get the chance to have a little happiness in your life, you have to take it, no matter where or when you are."
Which got me thinking.
(Flashback to the final episode of Cheers, where Sam tells Woody: "Thanks, Woody, you've given me something to think about there." And Woody says: "Ah, I'm sorry, Sam, I hate when somebody does that to me.")
Is happiness something to be grabbed, taken, possibly stored? Is it our human right, or a privilege?Can get we get it? Hold on to it? Is it a state of mind or an actual, physical state?
I don't know. I do know that happiness always seems to be over there somewhere -- up ahead, around the corner, second light on the right. Can't miss it.
And yet we do miss it, don't we? All the time, constantly. We think we're happy, and then the moment passes. (That moment can last for five seconds or five years, depending on the person.) We look at others thinking, I wish I were that happy, not realizing that they are looking at us and thinking the exact same thing.
Perhaps it's a class thing, this notion of 'happiness' being something we deserve, something we can wield and clutch. I don't think the poor of Cambodia think about 'happiness' all that much; they are too busy trying to survive. This is not saying that they don't want all the good things that we want. (Wow, that's a double negative sentence for you.) Of course they do. But I don't think that they put such a premium on their happiness. If they have money for today, food for today, they are happy. Genuinely, demonstrably happy. You can see it in their smiles, smiles that we've lost, or never had. If there exists the possibililty that tomorrow there will be no money, no food, well, so be it. That's tomorrow. For today, all is fine.
I'm simplifying things, I'm sure, but it just seems that we in the west crave happiness more than ever, with less and less people actually getting it. Everybody back home seems to be either drugged up or shooting up, looking for a state of medicinal, chemical bliss that will endure.
Maybe it's not supposed to endure, this happiness. Maybe those moments when we catch ourselves thinking 'I'm happy' are what happiness is all about -- an instant, a certain place in time, not directly connected to anything long-term, or even lasting. Maybe it just means recognizing that we're here, alive, breathing. Waiting for the day's twilight, and knowing that's enough.
The other night I watched this British show hosted by a dude named Parkinson (unknown to me), and one of his guests was a very famous female cooking writer/host, Nigella Lawson (also unknown to me; I'm not up on my British celebrities, I guess). Apparently, her first husband had died a long and lingering death, and she married her second one less than two years later. When questioned about the British press's rather unsympathetic reaction to this turn of events, Lawson basically said: "I've always been a believer that if you get the chance to have a little happiness in your life, you have to take it, no matter where or when you are."
Which got me thinking.
(Flashback to the final episode of Cheers, where Sam tells Woody: "Thanks, Woody, you've given me something to think about there." And Woody says: "Ah, I'm sorry, Sam, I hate when somebody does that to me.")
Is happiness something to be grabbed, taken, possibly stored? Is it our human right, or a privilege?Can get we get it? Hold on to it? Is it a state of mind or an actual, physical state?
I don't know. I do know that happiness always seems to be over there somewhere -- up ahead, around the corner, second light on the right. Can't miss it.
And yet we do miss it, don't we? All the time, constantly. We think we're happy, and then the moment passes. (That moment can last for five seconds or five years, depending on the person.) We look at others thinking, I wish I were that happy, not realizing that they are looking at us and thinking the exact same thing.
Perhaps it's a class thing, this notion of 'happiness' being something we deserve, something we can wield and clutch. I don't think the poor of Cambodia think about 'happiness' all that much; they are too busy trying to survive. This is not saying that they don't want all the good things that we want. (Wow, that's a double negative sentence for you.) Of course they do. But I don't think that they put such a premium on their happiness. If they have money for today, food for today, they are happy. Genuinely, demonstrably happy. You can see it in their smiles, smiles that we've lost, or never had. If there exists the possibililty that tomorrow there will be no money, no food, well, so be it. That's tomorrow. For today, all is fine.
I'm simplifying things, I'm sure, but it just seems that we in the west crave happiness more than ever, with less and less people actually getting it. Everybody back home seems to be either drugged up or shooting up, looking for a state of medicinal, chemical bliss that will endure.
Maybe it's not supposed to endure, this happiness. Maybe those moments when we catch ourselves thinking 'I'm happy' are what happiness is all about -- an instant, a certain place in time, not directly connected to anything long-term, or even lasting. Maybe it just means recognizing that we're here, alive, breathing. Waiting for the day's twilight, and knowing that's enough.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
THE 'SOAP BUBBLE THINGEE' THEORY OF LIFE
I once thought of writing a book called My Alternative Lives, using the conventions of space fiction, some of whose ideas are the same as those on the frontiers of physics. But the plot here would be that the lives of the doctor, the animal doctor, the farmer, the explorer would run concurrently with my life, set in other parallel universes or 'realities', continually influencing mine. As in those cases of multiple personalities, where only slowly do the personalities inside a woman or man become aware of each other, the heroine of this book -- me for argument's sake-- would slowly come to know that multiples of herself are living these other lives...
-- Doris Lessing,
Under My Skin
Aha! So Lessing voices something I've always suspected, that physicists are also now starting to toy with, this notion of parallel universes, parallel lives.
For example: Let's just say that you went to the high school downtown rather than the one closest to you. The moment, the instant you made that decision, another, divergent path of your life opened up. There was, in effect, two of you, travelling parallel paths that never meet.
But it could be more than that.
The you that chose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. The you that went to the dance versus the you that stayed home and watched Perfect Strangers. The you that decided to stay in high school a year longer because you were a young, pimple-faced, scared little kid who didn't know what to do in life (and still don't -- welcome to the club.)
What if, at each and every moment, we split, diverge, separate into alternate selves in alternate universes? This could be a comforting notion; soothing, even. It means that that which we have lost is not really lost at all, just diverted to a different stream of space and time. It means that our unfulfilled dreams have in fact, been fulfilled -- just by a different edition of ourselves.
Maybe our lives are like those soap-bubble thingees we played with as kids, where you dip the ring into the gloop, hold the hole up to your lips, and blow out the bubble. What begins as one big bubble soon, almost instantly, multiplies into more and more. All different, all originating from the same source.
And who knows? Maybe right now there's another version of myself discounting this same theory, in another blog, in another realm.
And maybe one day we'll be able to meet.
-- Doris Lessing,
Under My Skin
Aha! So Lessing voices something I've always suspected, that physicists are also now starting to toy with, this notion of parallel universes, parallel lives.
For example: Let's just say that you went to the high school downtown rather than the one closest to you. The moment, the instant you made that decision, another, divergent path of your life opened up. There was, in effect, two of you, travelling parallel paths that never meet.
But it could be more than that.
The you that chose chocolate ice cream over vanilla. The you that went to the dance versus the you that stayed home and watched Perfect Strangers. The you that decided to stay in high school a year longer because you were a young, pimple-faced, scared little kid who didn't know what to do in life (and still don't -- welcome to the club.)
What if, at each and every moment, we split, diverge, separate into alternate selves in alternate universes? This could be a comforting notion; soothing, even. It means that that which we have lost is not really lost at all, just diverted to a different stream of space and time. It means that our unfulfilled dreams have in fact, been fulfilled -- just by a different edition of ourselves.
Maybe our lives are like those soap-bubble thingees we played with as kids, where you dip the ring into the gloop, hold the hole up to your lips, and blow out the bubble. What begins as one big bubble soon, almost instantly, multiplies into more and more. All different, all originating from the same source.
And who knows? Maybe right now there's another version of myself discounting this same theory, in another blog, in another realm.
And maybe one day we'll be able to meet.
LINGERING BUSBOYS IN RESTAURANTS
The other day I received an out-of-the-blue email from an old running friend of mine from high school, Tim Ames, who I hadn't heard from since I was seventeen years old. I even remember the last time I saw him, the day I pulled out of a race at Copps Coliseum in Hamilton because my leg suddenly decided to go bonkers on me. And now here is, twelve years later, alive and well and living in western Canada, engaged to be married, doing well. He survived; I survived.
You remember that line from Stand By Me? "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant." It's so true. When you're young, you meet people, hang out, chill, and then wham -- they're gone, and you usually never see them again, and yet they've somehow been able to carve a little gauge in your heart that, if you're lucky, turns into a scar.
There's that old saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those that leave home and those that stay. The former are usually more interesting."
I agree with that sentiment, but at the same time, it doesn't really matter; if you stay, somebody's leaving, and if you leave, somebody stays behind. There's always the residue of life, its emotions and memories, left behind; there's always a kind of resonance that can still be heard and felt months, even years later. Perhaps it's nothing more than the abscence of an individual whose life intersected with yours.
We all know that growing old sucks -- nothing but work, family, crises, mortgage, retirement and, eventually, death to look forward to. (With some compensations in between, I'm
assuming.)
And yet, there are these other, more intricate layers and circuits that we are never really told about because they form part of an emotional matrix that people take for granted, not properly recognizing these pathways as the pulsing heart of our interior lives.
We are young for so short a time and old for so long (if we're lucky.) We leave behind our childhood and adolescence like candy wrappers dropped casually on a random street, because what other choice do we have, really? We can't stay in the past; our bodies and minds won't let us, and most of us wouldn't choose to to do that anyways. (Pee-Herman, maybe.)
But I think, for good or for bad, that's where we're shaped, during those first eighteen, nineteen years of life. We form views of the world based on people we've met, places we've lived in, teachers we've slept with. (I'm joking, I'm joking.) Our lives intertwine with so many others in so many small and insignificant ways -- the paper boy, the elementary school janitor, the convenience store clerk who smokes and reads Cosmo as if it's Tolstoy.
The refreshing, surprising and oddly reaffirming notion that arises when hearing from somebody who knew you when you were a kid is this: They knew us then, before all the bad and tough and confusing stuff happened. (At least, the adult version of the bad and tough and confusing stuff.) They knew you before anybody else did, and that's how they remember you, and perhaps they're your link to your younger, purer self.
Or maybe it's less dramatic than that. Maybe it's just a simple human thing, this contact with someone who shared a certain portion of your life. Maybe it's just a pleasant diversion from life's grittiness, a blast of nostalgia that could lead to a greater adult friendship, or even just goodwill, plain and basic goodwill, that will linger through the years.
I asked Tim if he knew what had happened to some of our old running buddies, and he wasn't sure; for now, they exist only as memories, even though the real world, I'm sure, has pushed them on and forward. But he said that my brother had mentioned an idea of a 'running reunion' somewhere down the line.
I hope it happens. Because we all know that even busboys in restaurants sometimes hover and linger around your table longer than expected.
You remember that line from Stand By Me? "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant." It's so true. When you're young, you meet people, hang out, chill, and then wham -- they're gone, and you usually never see them again, and yet they've somehow been able to carve a little gauge in your heart that, if you're lucky, turns into a scar.
There's that old saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world -- those that leave home and those that stay. The former are usually more interesting."
I agree with that sentiment, but at the same time, it doesn't really matter; if you stay, somebody's leaving, and if you leave, somebody stays behind. There's always the residue of life, its emotions and memories, left behind; there's always a kind of resonance that can still be heard and felt months, even years later. Perhaps it's nothing more than the abscence of an individual whose life intersected with yours.
We all know that growing old sucks -- nothing but work, family, crises, mortgage, retirement and, eventually, death to look forward to. (With some compensations in between, I'm
assuming.)
And yet, there are these other, more intricate layers and circuits that we are never really told about because they form part of an emotional matrix that people take for granted, not properly recognizing these pathways as the pulsing heart of our interior lives.
We are young for so short a time and old for so long (if we're lucky.) We leave behind our childhood and adolescence like candy wrappers dropped casually on a random street, because what other choice do we have, really? We can't stay in the past; our bodies and minds won't let us, and most of us wouldn't choose to to do that anyways. (Pee-Herman, maybe.)
But I think, for good or for bad, that's where we're shaped, during those first eighteen, nineteen years of life. We form views of the world based on people we've met, places we've lived in, teachers we've slept with. (I'm joking, I'm joking.) Our lives intertwine with so many others in so many small and insignificant ways -- the paper boy, the elementary school janitor, the convenience store clerk who smokes and reads Cosmo as if it's Tolstoy.
The refreshing, surprising and oddly reaffirming notion that arises when hearing from somebody who knew you when you were a kid is this: They knew us then, before all the bad and tough and confusing stuff happened. (At least, the adult version of the bad and tough and confusing stuff.) They knew you before anybody else did, and that's how they remember you, and perhaps they're your link to your younger, purer self.
Or maybe it's less dramatic than that. Maybe it's just a simple human thing, this contact with someone who shared a certain portion of your life. Maybe it's just a pleasant diversion from life's grittiness, a blast of nostalgia that could lead to a greater adult friendship, or even just goodwill, plain and basic goodwill, that will linger through the years.
I asked Tim if he knew what had happened to some of our old running buddies, and he wasn't sure; for now, they exist only as memories, even though the real world, I'm sure, has pushed them on and forward. But he said that my brother had mentioned an idea of a 'running reunion' somewhere down the line.
I hope it happens. Because we all know that even busboys in restaurants sometimes hover and linger around your table longer than expected.
Friday, March 11, 2005
DREAM ON
I had a dream the other night that I was back in Japan, visiting my old school, talking to the teachers who were still there, and it was an intense dream, a vivid dream, the kind that you have when you are a kid but not so much later on in life, when dreams become little more than near-empty waystations between sleep and waking, pit-stops for weary minds.
My firm, scientific, educated opinion is that dreams are completely whack. (You can quote me on that.) I'm not sure what the hell they are; I'm not sure if Freud was onto something or not (I think Freud had some issues, personally. I'm sure he got offended when trying to fix people's problems and they'd just look at him and say: "What are you, Freud?" and he'd say, "As a matter of fact, I am.")
I'm starting to believe that dreams are just the minds way of blowing off some steam. We don't really know the mind really works anyways, right? Amazing that we're able to hold ourselves together for the sixteen, seventeen hours we spend each day on our feet, trying to make our way through life without tripping and falling to the carpet and getting rugburn across our chin. (A weird image, a strained metaphor, but I'm going with it.)
Some things I find odd about dreams:
1) We're always the main characters. Usually, anyways. And there's usually a narrative involved. And we're inevitably the main protagonist, active, excited, scared-shitless participants in our own imaginary, nocturnal escapades. Whenever people wonder about why books or novels or comics are so popular, about why we love stories so damn much, I think back to dreams; I think back to what we do every night when we hit the sack. (No, not that -- the other thing.) For some reason, our brains are hardwired to respond to life's stimuli by creating non-sensical narratives for ourselves, that may (or may) give clues as to our true, most secret intentions and wishes.
2) Dreams are freakin' nuts. I used to have dreams where I was riding a giant bagel down a winding, endless waterslide. Or I dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? which one???) that I was streaking alongside a comet through space as the universe hid its own little shuck and jive to my intergalactic beat. Or I dreamt that I watched Star Trek VI before it came out in the theatre, and that was my dream -- me, in the theatre, watching the movie. (And let me tell you, my dream version of the flick was absolutely awesome. Way better than the real version, though I like that too.) And then there's times when I'm dreaming that I'm reading a book, and in the dream I'm actually reading it, and I'm admiring my writing, and then my dreaming self says 'wait a minute, hold on, you can't be admiring this writing because it's actually your writing, and you're not really reading it at all, buddy -- your eyes are closed'. Yes, yes, that's true, but my eyes get tired when I dream of reading, and how is that possible?
4) Dreams are erratic. When I was a kid, I once had a really long, intricate dream that dissolved into thin air when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but miraculously, when I went to bed, it was back, unedited, commencing in the same place in the story from where I left it. Swear to god. And then there are other dreams that last for a minute, maybe less, as dream-time, sleep-time, is impossible to register, while other dreams merge and seque into another -- modern-day Ontario, welcome to ancient Egypt...
5) Dreams are scary. Fear in dreams is far deeper, broader and with a greater overall reach than whatever spooky stuff goes down in real life. When I was a child, I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and noticed something hanging from the chan-
delier that hung over our front hallway. That 'something' was, in fact, multiple 'somethings', multiple bodies, in fact, and they were dead and rotted, distorted and bloody, and when I ran into my parents room I found nothing but an old chest that slowly opened to reveal a black-gloved hand holding a pistol. The hand pivoted, pointed, and fired. I tried to scream but no sound came out, and then the shot hit my face, and I died, which was when I woke up. Whoa. That was scarrrrry, boys and girls. Another time I dreamed I was shot, and I slowly, slowly died as I lay on the street, and as I felt my life slink away, again, I awoke. (Maybe in my past life I was shot? Maybe I was J.F.K.? Or Franz Ferdinand? Or some anonymous, hopeless kid on the six o'clock news, caught in the crossfire back in early '75? It's possible.)
3) Dreams hold the key. If there's another world, an alternate dimension parallel to our own, I think it's in dreams that we access it. If there's a soul, a spritual plane to our existence, I believe that dreams are somehow connected. If there are ghosts, and an afterlife, dreams provide the gatekeeper and the gate. In dreams we are free and wild and scared and proud and young and old and whatever it is that our sleeping selves want to be.
If only life were like that.
My firm, scientific, educated opinion is that dreams are completely whack. (You can quote me on that.) I'm not sure what the hell they are; I'm not sure if Freud was onto something or not (I think Freud had some issues, personally. I'm sure he got offended when trying to fix people's problems and they'd just look at him and say: "What are you, Freud?" and he'd say, "As a matter of fact, I am.")
I'm starting to believe that dreams are just the minds way of blowing off some steam. We don't really know the mind really works anyways, right? Amazing that we're able to hold ourselves together for the sixteen, seventeen hours we spend each day on our feet, trying to make our way through life without tripping and falling to the carpet and getting rugburn across our chin. (A weird image, a strained metaphor, but I'm going with it.)
Some things I find odd about dreams:
1) We're always the main characters. Usually, anyways. And there's usually a narrative involved. And we're inevitably the main protagonist, active, excited, scared-shitless participants in our own imaginary, nocturnal escapades. Whenever people wonder about why books or novels or comics are so popular, about why we love stories so damn much, I think back to dreams; I think back to what we do every night when we hit the sack. (No, not that -- the other thing.) For some reason, our brains are hardwired to respond to life's stimuli by creating non-sensical narratives for ourselves, that may (or may) give clues as to our true, most secret intentions and wishes.
2) Dreams are freakin' nuts. I used to have dreams where I was riding a giant bagel down a winding, endless waterslide. Or I dreamt (dreamed? dreamt? which one???) that I was streaking alongside a comet through space as the universe hid its own little shuck and jive to my intergalactic beat. Or I dreamt that I watched Star Trek VI before it came out in the theatre, and that was my dream -- me, in the theatre, watching the movie. (And let me tell you, my dream version of the flick was absolutely awesome. Way better than the real version, though I like that too.) And then there's times when I'm dreaming that I'm reading a book, and in the dream I'm actually reading it, and I'm admiring my writing, and then my dreaming self says 'wait a minute, hold on, you can't be admiring this writing because it's actually your writing, and you're not really reading it at all, buddy -- your eyes are closed'. Yes, yes, that's true, but my eyes get tired when I dream of reading, and how is that possible?
4) Dreams are erratic. When I was a kid, I once had a really long, intricate dream that dissolved into thin air when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but miraculously, when I went to bed, it was back, unedited, commencing in the same place in the story from where I left it. Swear to god. And then there are other dreams that last for a minute, maybe less, as dream-time, sleep-time, is impossible to register, while other dreams merge and seque into another -- modern-day Ontario, welcome to ancient Egypt...
5) Dreams are scary. Fear in dreams is far deeper, broader and with a greater overall reach than whatever spooky stuff goes down in real life. When I was a child, I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and noticed something hanging from the chan-
delier that hung over our front hallway. That 'something' was, in fact, multiple 'somethings', multiple bodies, in fact, and they were dead and rotted, distorted and bloody, and when I ran into my parents room I found nothing but an old chest that slowly opened to reveal a black-gloved hand holding a pistol. The hand pivoted, pointed, and fired. I tried to scream but no sound came out, and then the shot hit my face, and I died, which was when I woke up. Whoa. That was scarrrrry, boys and girls. Another time I dreamed I was shot, and I slowly, slowly died as I lay on the street, and as I felt my life slink away, again, I awoke. (Maybe in my past life I was shot? Maybe I was J.F.K.? Or Franz Ferdinand? Or some anonymous, hopeless kid on the six o'clock news, caught in the crossfire back in early '75? It's possible.)
3) Dreams hold the key. If there's another world, an alternate dimension parallel to our own, I think it's in dreams that we access it. If there's a soul, a spritual plane to our existence, I believe that dreams are somehow connected. If there are ghosts, and an afterlife, dreams provide the gatekeeper and the gate. In dreams we are free and wild and scared and proud and young and old and whatever it is that our sleeping selves want to be.
If only life were like that.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
YOU THINK SO, DO YOU?
It's hard, really hard, to admit when we're wrong.
Right now, a lot of Democrats in America are getting worried. Biting their nails. Nibbling at their lower lips. Reaching for those cigarettes on the nightstand.
Why?
Because things over there in the Middle East are getting...interesting. Elections in Iraq. Upcoming democratic elections in Egypt. Lebanon standing up for itself. Israel and Palestine trying to sort stuff out, and actually, kind of, getting somewhere.
All because of Bush.
Aha!
Instantly, upon hearing the word Bush, you went into a defensive mode. I heard it! His name inspires either revolt or rejuvenation, and I'm betting which side of the fence you fall on, and I'm betting that it's not conducive to Dubya's health and prosperity.
That's fine. That's cool. I'm Canadian, after all, and I can afford to be a little, well, detached from it all. You want to hate Bush, draw swastikas on his newspaper-photo forehead, go right ahead. Or if you want to love the man, chill in Crawford, go for a little fishing with him, fine by me.
What interests me is not the man himself but the way that his actions, and subsequently your reactions to his actions, affects the way that you respond.
Let's put it this way. Right now, things are going (relatively) pretty good in the Middle East.
That makes Democrats uneasy.
Why?
Not because they don't want things to go well in the Middle East; they do. But they don't want it to be because of Bush, and if the tide does start to turn because of the President's actions, that will be a bitter pill that many Democrats refuse to swallow.
Works both ways, though. Let's say this temporary thaw in Middle Eastern hellraising is just that -- temporary. Let's say the proverbial fit hits the shan over the next six months, a year, two years, and the Middle East explodes in violence. Republicans will not blame Bush, despite all of his efforts and interventions; Republicans will point their fingers somewhere else.
That's what we, as humans, do.
Because it's hard to admit we're wrong. Because we're raised in a society that demands that we have a belief, a firm belief, a pretty much fixed belief, and that we stick to what we believe, come hell or high water.
Fine. All well and good. But the world is not a fixed place, so why should our beliefs be?
Because letting go of those beliefs is hard, soul-damaging work; labels are easier. Labels are the way we make our way through the world. I am white and he is black and she is Democrat and he is a Republican, and all of these classfications enable the building of blocks in our brain to allocate our judgements accordingly -- this person goes here, that person goes there.
But life doesn't work that way. People change and shift; so do events.
We have to find another approach to the way we view things, something beyond our initial, judgmental impulses.
Edward DeBono (www.edwdebono.com), who I've written about before, tries to do this, to go beyond what society has conditioned us to think is right and wrong, doable and not-doable, plausible and implausible. So much of the way we are brought up concerns itself with defending our own position, come hell and high water, without logically considering why we are so, so, so protective of our beliefs.
Consider the construction of the modern judicial system. There is a prosectuor and defendant;
each is trying to win. If the prosecutor has information that would help the defendant, do you think he/she would unleash it? And vice-versa. It is set up as a game, with a winner or a loser. Whoever can argue the best, persuade the best, wins. Truth is a by-product, an irrelevant afterthought.
I'm not saying this is completely wrong, or that I have a better alternative. (I'm from St.Catharines, alright?) But I'll steal DeBono's metaphor: It's like the wheels on a car. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with having a car with only two wheels; it's just not
enough. There's nothing wrong with our courts systems either, or healthy debates between conflicting parties -- but are they enough? Are these kind of paradigms designed to actually find the truth of a given situation, or are they designed as forums for the relentless defense of our own egos?
My point (and I think I have one; feel free to disagree) is that our own thoughts and views on issues are so tied up with our psyche and our peers, our own feelings and emotions and those of our family, friends and compatriots that it's become increasingly difficult to shift perspectives and swallow our pride and admit that we're going about something the wrong way. It's very, very hard to stop; disengage; step back; and consider. It's very, very difficult to admit that, you know what, I'm not really sure about something. Society tells us that if we don't have an opinion about something now, this very second, then we are apathetic drifters.
So, again, I say 'George W. Bush', and, for 99% of you, your mind is made up: savior or saboteur, saint or slimeball. If you think the man is a twit, you will not be receptive to anything positive I have to say about the man; if you think he's doing a good job, any criticisms coming from me will be tossed-over-the-shoulder right away, plain and simple. (I'm generalizing, but you get the picture.)
The advent of the Internet allows us to broaden our minds and consider points of view alien to our own. The danger is that we will just continue to sample that which reflects back our own beliefs.
I think it's important to at least listen to others who believe stuff that we don't. You ever listen to Rush Limbaugh? (Your mind whirs -- judgement time!) I disagree with most of what he says, 80 per cent of what he says, but you know what? He's actually kind of entertaining. Often funny. Uses satire well. I don't implode after listening to him; he doesn't really change my mind about much. But I learn how people different from me think.
It's a brave new world, yes, linked as never before, but filled with the same old two hundred countries. There was just an article the other day about how a lot of people are getting pissed off at the Indians on the other end of the line who man the phones for various different call-centres, the ones who are 'stealing' all the jobs from the Americans. The customers would get ticked off, then tell off, the Indians, insulting their ethnicity and ability.
We gotta get beyond all this. I don't know how we actually go about doing that, but I think it starts by investigating why we feel the way that we do, and acknowledging that thoughts change, that we change, and that we are, in the end, sometimes, like it or not, fallible.
Unless, of course, you try to tell me that Oliver Stone is a hack.
'Cause then you'd just be wrong.
Right now, a lot of Democrats in America are getting worried. Biting their nails. Nibbling at their lower lips. Reaching for those cigarettes on the nightstand.
Why?
Because things over there in the Middle East are getting...interesting. Elections in Iraq. Upcoming democratic elections in Egypt. Lebanon standing up for itself. Israel and Palestine trying to sort stuff out, and actually, kind of, getting somewhere.
All because of Bush.
Aha!
Instantly, upon hearing the word Bush, you went into a defensive mode. I heard it! His name inspires either revolt or rejuvenation, and I'm betting which side of the fence you fall on, and I'm betting that it's not conducive to Dubya's health and prosperity.
That's fine. That's cool. I'm Canadian, after all, and I can afford to be a little, well, detached from it all. You want to hate Bush, draw swastikas on his newspaper-photo forehead, go right ahead. Or if you want to love the man, chill in Crawford, go for a little fishing with him, fine by me.
What interests me is not the man himself but the way that his actions, and subsequently your reactions to his actions, affects the way that you respond.
Let's put it this way. Right now, things are going (relatively) pretty good in the Middle East.
That makes Democrats uneasy.
Why?
Not because they don't want things to go well in the Middle East; they do. But they don't want it to be because of Bush, and if the tide does start to turn because of the President's actions, that will be a bitter pill that many Democrats refuse to swallow.
Works both ways, though. Let's say this temporary thaw in Middle Eastern hellraising is just that -- temporary. Let's say the proverbial fit hits the shan over the next six months, a year, two years, and the Middle East explodes in violence. Republicans will not blame Bush, despite all of his efforts and interventions; Republicans will point their fingers somewhere else.
That's what we, as humans, do.
Because it's hard to admit we're wrong. Because we're raised in a society that demands that we have a belief, a firm belief, a pretty much fixed belief, and that we stick to what we believe, come hell or high water.
Fine. All well and good. But the world is not a fixed place, so why should our beliefs be?
Because letting go of those beliefs is hard, soul-damaging work; labels are easier. Labels are the way we make our way through the world. I am white and he is black and she is Democrat and he is a Republican, and all of these classfications enable the building of blocks in our brain to allocate our judgements accordingly -- this person goes here, that person goes there.
But life doesn't work that way. People change and shift; so do events.
We have to find another approach to the way we view things, something beyond our initial, judgmental impulses.
Edward DeBono (www.edwdebono.com), who I've written about before, tries to do this, to go beyond what society has conditioned us to think is right and wrong, doable and not-doable, plausible and implausible. So much of the way we are brought up concerns itself with defending our own position, come hell and high water, without logically considering why we are so, so, so protective of our beliefs.
Consider the construction of the modern judicial system. There is a prosectuor and defendant;
each is trying to win. If the prosecutor has information that would help the defendant, do you think he/she would unleash it? And vice-versa. It is set up as a game, with a winner or a loser. Whoever can argue the best, persuade the best, wins. Truth is a by-product, an irrelevant afterthought.
I'm not saying this is completely wrong, or that I have a better alternative. (I'm from St.Catharines, alright?) But I'll steal DeBono's metaphor: It's like the wheels on a car. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with having a car with only two wheels; it's just not
enough. There's nothing wrong with our courts systems either, or healthy debates between conflicting parties -- but are they enough? Are these kind of paradigms designed to actually find the truth of a given situation, or are they designed as forums for the relentless defense of our own egos?
My point (and I think I have one; feel free to disagree) is that our own thoughts and views on issues are so tied up with our psyche and our peers, our own feelings and emotions and those of our family, friends and compatriots that it's become increasingly difficult to shift perspectives and swallow our pride and admit that we're going about something the wrong way. It's very, very hard to stop; disengage; step back; and consider. It's very, very difficult to admit that, you know what, I'm not really sure about something. Society tells us that if we don't have an opinion about something now, this very second, then we are apathetic drifters.
So, again, I say 'George W. Bush', and, for 99% of you, your mind is made up: savior or saboteur, saint or slimeball. If you think the man is a twit, you will not be receptive to anything positive I have to say about the man; if you think he's doing a good job, any criticisms coming from me will be tossed-over-the-shoulder right away, plain and simple. (I'm generalizing, but you get the picture.)
The advent of the Internet allows us to broaden our minds and consider points of view alien to our own. The danger is that we will just continue to sample that which reflects back our own beliefs.
I think it's important to at least listen to others who believe stuff that we don't. You ever listen to Rush Limbaugh? (Your mind whirs -- judgement time!) I disagree with most of what he says, 80 per cent of what he says, but you know what? He's actually kind of entertaining. Often funny. Uses satire well. I don't implode after listening to him; he doesn't really change my mind about much. But I learn how people different from me think.
It's a brave new world, yes, linked as never before, but filled with the same old two hundred countries. There was just an article the other day about how a lot of people are getting pissed off at the Indians on the other end of the line who man the phones for various different call-centres, the ones who are 'stealing' all the jobs from the Americans. The customers would get ticked off, then tell off, the Indians, insulting their ethnicity and ability.
We gotta get beyond all this. I don't know how we actually go about doing that, but I think it starts by investigating why we feel the way that we do, and acknowledging that thoughts change, that we change, and that we are, in the end, sometimes, like it or not, fallible.
Unless, of course, you try to tell me that Oliver Stone is a hack.
'Cause then you'd just be wrong.
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