YOU AMATEUR, or KEEP LOOKING FOR THE NEXT SEPTEMBER

Do you remember when you learned to tie your shoes? Ride a bike? Blow a bubble? Whistle?

I can answer a definitive yes to all of the above questions (or at least most of them), because as a kid we're learning something new constantly, relentlessly, and we're proud of that fact, if not boastful. Look what I can do and look what I did and watch me do a wheelie. Aren't you impressed? Aren't you envious? Aren't you freakin' jealous?

And our brother/sister/mother/grandmother/therapist will nod and smile and say "That's nice, dear", in the same way that the lady resonds to her son while visting Niagara Falls in Superman II, where the kid is proud of the fact that he's holding-and-letting-go of the rails directly over the Falls, which leads to him falling, which leads to Superman soaring down below the mist and catching him, which leads to the brilliant, almost muted throwaway line from the crowd of cheering onlookers that is so strange and out-of-place that it works, barely heard beneath the soaring music: "Of course he's Jewish."

We graduate elementary school and junior high school and get our driver's license and finish high school and graduate college or university and get our first job and then...

Life.

That's what struck me the most after graduating university: life. There was no more ladder to look forward to. Before, there'd always been another September to begin the whole process of achievement and accomplishment again. Upon leaving the world of higher education, there was only, well, tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. Followed by that magnificent experience known as Wednesday.

The best, most concrete thing I've taken from living abroad is the satisfaction gained from acheiving and accomplishing simple things. Living abroad, you become a kid again. You feel good when you make it out of the airport in one piece. When you figure out how to use the Japanese train system, how to purchase a ticket, how to read and understand the Tokyo subway map, you feel like Magellan discovering, um, what ever Magellan discovered. (I skipped History class that day. And okay, yes, you got me, I still haven't quite figured out the Tokyo subway map, but have you ever seen that motherfu--er? It looks, I swear, like some berserk-Picasso model of DNA that exploded in a thousand random routes.) And after spending a week in Phnom Penh, you feel like you've graduated into the I-can-do-anything-and-go-anywhere club. After spending two years here, you've graduated into lunacy. You resort to crack or crystal meth, or writing a blog.

So, be aware. (And beware.) Be aware of the things you learn. Be thankful of them. Be conscious of the unknown methods and manners of life that slowly, almost insidiously become habit, then second nature. Second nature is nothing more than 'I don't get this's evolution into 'It's not really that difficult'.

And second nature should always be suspect, as it can lead to contentment, and lethargy, and reflex. Not necessarily evil in and of themselves, no, but it's good to be a beginner and an amateur, and better to stay that way. It means there's always another September to begin all over again.

EVERYTHING'S BASIC, IN FICTION AND LIFE: EITHER a) A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN, OR b) SOMEONE GOES ON A TRIP...

For a few years after graduating from university and coming to Asia I didn't write much of any kind of fiction at all, because the life I was living (and am living), both in Japan and Cambodia, made the appeal of constructing fantastic realms blending imaginative fantasy and emotional resonance feel somewhat, well, redundant.

Fiction's job is to take us to places we've never been, or show us the hidden depths of the places we (think we) know so well, but the places I was in and the depth I was experiencing in my everday life made the printed page's equivalent somewhat, sort of, in a way, I don't know, kind of, a little bit, basic.

And yet, it is all basic, fiction is, as my old Creative Writing teacher Richard Teleky used to say: "A story is either about these two things: A stranger comes to town, or somebody goes on a trip." Upon hearing these words, after much careful, analytic, university-honed thought, pehaps five seconds, total, I decided that I absolutely agreed, and still agree; stories are either a) about the intrusion of the known into an unknown scenario, or b) the intrusion of the unknown into a known scenario. Don't take my word for it -- think of your favorite book or movie and see if it fits into my teacher's dictum.

(And I was the type of guy, and still am, to a certain degree, that is distrustful of what anybody proclaiming to be a 'teacher' tells me, so for me to go ahead and agree with Mr.Teleky is a big deal, and my initial adolescent vow of never becoming a teacher was put to the test severely, as the first real job I got after university was as, um, a teacher, for, um, five years, so if I'm quoting the guy, you know his word is bond. If you can trust a guy like me who so willingly abandoned his admittedly-not-very-well-thought-out principles.)

For years I tried to write stories that deconstructed the small-town environs that shaped me and made me; confronted by Asia, practically assaulted by Asia, by its people and food and weather and streets, I didn't feel the need to do that for awhile. I still read fiction, yes, but I didn't write it; didn't crave constructing my own imaginative extrapolation of my current surroundings because the real, uncanny world around me was imaginative enough. Why delve into the fantasy when the reality is even more interesting and evocative?

The interesting thing about writing fiction (or trying to) is that it requires you to simultaneously retreat into yourself and remove yourself from the world while also observing, interacting and engaging with the real, concrete people and places around you to a degree that is distracting, if not unhealthy.

In order to write fiction, you have to have read a lot of fiction, yes, but knowing the shapes and countours and crevices of the art form itself does not mean that you, too, can practice it. (Although it certainly helps -- never reading fiction while trying to write fiction is kind of like a musician never listening to music, or a painter never looking at art.) Writing fiction requires a deeper, stranger embrace of life; it forces you to look at all the casual and random events that seek to rob us of our dignity and our stature, forces you to deny the intrinsic randomness of things. What are stories, after all, but a series of interconnected events that gradually, hopefully cumulatively gain meaning? Gain resonance?

In fiction, every scene has a purpose; every line of a dialogue has a reason and a rhythm. In life, we rarely, if ever, begin and end every single conversation with a definitiveness purpose in mind. When we do, such conversations are usually cold and clinical, like phoning your dentist to book an appointment, or else our best-laid conversational plans inevitably end up veering off into divergent, more horrific directions -- the get-well phone call that ends in a break-up, or the I-haven't-seen-you-in-a-long-while embrace that ends up with oh-and-now-I-understand-why-that-is headlock.

Fiction writers look at life and plot and connive and construct. They map out characters that will speak to us of truths we had always known and suspected but never had confirmed. The older I get, the more unreal fiction -- both literary and cinematic -- sees to become. By 'unreal' I mean unrealistic, disconnected from life, more of a stylized form of life.

Which is why we go enter into those realms. Kids embrace fiction because it shows them a new and magic world, or else it shows their own everyday life rocked and distorted with innovative glee. (Hence the appeal of Stephen King and Harry Potter to adolescent minds.) In other words, preteens and teenagers are all too often bored and suspicious of the schools and houses that dot the landscape of their lives, and fiction gives them a larger, more vivid world to connect to. Eventually, many young readers and would-be writers start to see that within those very same schools and houses that used to alienate them so much dwell the secret sources of the stories that in fact speak to our deepest, darkest truths.

The world around us can be, if not explained by fiction, at least translated to a more manageable form, a world of paper that we can hold in our hands, and that our hearts and minds can recognize to be true. That's where the best stories arise from -- that desire to find the mythic truth in everyday encounters.

So, maybe it's time. Maybe it's time I took a stab at fiction again. Time once again to have a stranger come to town, and time to take a trip.

Both of the above possibilities seem, at this moment, wonderfully inviting.

I DON'T KNOW JACKSQUAT (AND NEITHER DO YOU), SO ALL WE CAN SAY IS: HOORAY!!!

A sampling of the questions I ask myself before sleep:

Why is the sky blue? What does the 'C.S.' in C.S.Lewis's name stand for? Why do birds of a feather flock together? What's the Caramilk secret? Are numbers real, Platonic things? What does the 'WKRP' in WKRP in Cincinnati stand for? Did John Wilkes Boothe act alone? Does anybody other than voluntary researchers actually live in Antarctica? Are there Antarticians? (If yes, where do they go to chill?) Is there such a profession as an Icelandic-Japanese translator? Why do snowballs melt when you put them in a freezer? Who came up with the names Canada and Toronto and Ottawa? And if all these names are native Indian names, why do we treat them so poorly? What the fu-- did happen to Amelia Earheart, anyway? Did everyone decide if Tony Danza really and truly was the boss, and if so, why wasn't I invited to the vote? Was Socrates as smart as we think he was, or merely an overrated blowhard, the Greek equivalent of Phil Donahue or Rush Limbaugh or even Howard Stern? How many countries are there? Who invented economics? Was Charles really in charge all that time? (Seems unlikely, because Scott Baio is just one man, goddamnit, not a miracle worker.) Why do most men have two nipples, and why don't I have any? (That's a joke, I swear, I can prove it.) What's Dr.Phil hiding? (Cause I know he's hiding something, that smug s.o.b.) What are you not telling your parents, and why? Why does fire change colour? Why did Michael Jackson change colour? Who was Deep Throat in the Watergate case, and why was he/she named after a porno flick? How do fish breathe underwater, and how do they sleep? Knowing that we're all going to die, but not knowing when, how do any of us sleep?

These are just a representative sampling of the myriad questions that I just, don't, know the answer to.

We like to think, those of us in our late twenties, early thirties, that we're suave and sophisticated and basically all that, but the reality is: We don't know shit. And we never will.

Cause for despair?

Of course not.

Pondering life's improbabilities and unknowns makes life itself worth living. So much to learn, see, contemplate.

Not the least of which is probably the most mystifying, unexplained paradox of them all: Was Colonel Sanders an honest-to-goodness colonel? Like, in the army or navy or marines? Did he fight in WWII? If the answer is yes, as I've said before, then I would like to write and direct the film that details in exquisite and brutal detail the untold tale of Colonel Sanders and all of his fighting-Nazi ways, exemplified by Tommy Lee Jones, acted with a just a hint of the facial growth that would, some day, when the war was over and order restored, blossom into that full-blown beard of the Colonel's that we all know and love so dearly.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

I'm stuck.

The thing is, last night I woke up at about three, three thirty, with the title of today's post stuck in my head, flashing neon: An Embarrassment of Riches.

I didn't know what it meant, or what it referred to; I still don't, and yet here I am, writing this blog, and there you are, reading it. (I'm assuming you're reading it, of course, which might not technically be true. You may be skimming this post, rather than really reading it, which is fine by me, kemo sabe; many a blog, many a site has been nothing more than background music for me, too, as the real stuff of life plays itself out before me. Let this site be the wallpaper of your day.)

Sometimes promises made in the dead of night should not be kept. Even promises to oneself. In my groggy, half-there, half-nowhere state of mind, I decided that I would, come hell or high water, write a blog with this title today. (And no, I don't know what 'come hell or high water' actually, truly means, either. I mean, the problem with this particular image is that the really strong, truly frightening component has been placed first -- 'hell'. And so what are we left with to round off the phrase? 'High water.' Oooooh. I'm scared. Either hell is going to get me or, no, it can't be - high water! How terrifying! Maybe I'll get wet and even have to change my shirt! Then again, I chose it, didn't I, so my bad. Which is another phrase, 'my bad', which somehow became popular while I was living in Japan and attempting, in vain, to master the infinite subtleties of Japan's ancient and equivalent phrase -- sumimasen. I think it's already gone out of fashion, 'my bad'. But I'm still using it and hoping to be so unhip that I'm hip. Let me know if it's working.)

So, I apologize, is what I'm trying to say. Here you were, taking time out of your day to find something interesting, enlightening, or at least not-boring, and all I can tell you for the time being is that I was required, by my conscience, to write a post with the above title, even though it doesn't really matter if I change my mind and decide to write about another, even more interesting topic, like Working with Shika or Dating Jacoba Style or Five Things You Should Really, Really Know About My Sister-In-Law -- all future posts, by the way. You've been warned, ladies, and only time will tell if I'm joking. (Cue spooky Dr.Evil laugh...)

There's nothing particularly embarassing in this post so far, despite the title. (Unless you count my writing itself; I'm praying you won't, and don't.)

In fact, all I can relate to you is the flash-flame of memory that lit some kindling in my brain this morning as I was being driven to work in the company van, and something felt familiar, oddly familiar, something about the van, and the people squished together inside of it, captors in a Corolla, and then it hit me, the, I don't know, vanness of it all, and I remembered being in high school, travelling to track and cross-country meets in the backs of vans, and university, too, travelling to various cities around Ontario each and every weekend, a bunch of twenty-something runners crammed in a too-tight van, with one particular wiseass by the name of Lucas Kent, a good guy, sitting in the back of the van and tying the rest of his teammate's shoelaces together, the type of stunt you see in a bad teen movie, and yet there it was, in real life, the group of us trying to stand up at one time only to be jiggered this way and that way by our illicitly linked laces, our cheeks turning red as Lucas laughed his ass off, and we being embarrassed in spite of ourselves, while Lucas laughed his deep and rich laugh.

So there it is: an embarrassement of riches.

Over and out.

Mission accomplished after all.

THE RIVERSIDE SAINT AND THE OVERCHARGING MONK, or JUST HOW MUCH DID YOU SAY A DONATION WAS ?!?)

Two (relatively) religious incidents, separate but parallel:

1) Leaving Hurley's Cantina the other night, where I was sharing a late-night drink with an old university colleague of mine and Al Rockoff, the photojournalist that Malkovich portrayed in The Killing Fields (and who still spends six months of the year in Phnom Penh), I was slipped a religious pamphlet by a young American traveller. ("Just a little something as you travel through Cambodia," he said, smiling. They're always smiling.)

What if you had only five minutes to live? it asked. Inside was the usual yada yada yada, information about saving my soul and accepting Christ and avoiding Satan. All the stuff I've yet to do. (Just haven't gotten around to it.)

I stuck it in my wallet, hopped on a moto and went home.

2) While typing a post on my blog at Galaxy Web a monk wandered over, looking for money. This in and of itself is nothing new; monks often patrol and glide their way through the businesses around town each and every morning, asking for money, because here, in Cambodia, it's considered a common courtesy to slip one of the purple-robed ones a few thousand riel every now and then. (Gives good karma, and all.)

This time, though, was different. And annoying. The smiling monk (they're always smiling) carried a ledger book, pencilled into which was a fee. For me, one thousand riel. (About twenty five cents.) It was a little odd, a little formal, especially from somebody supposedly on the Middle Path, but whatever. When in Rome. I pencilled my name and gave him the riel and went back to my blog.

My acquiesence was matched by another foreigner's fury. (Well, perhaps 'fury' is a bit too strong; let's just say he was royally, possibly galactically, pissed, and leave it at that.)

Why? Well, the donation 'fee' that came after mine, which the monk smilingly insisted that he pay, amounted to five US dollars. The foreigner -- maybe Italian, maybe Belgian, decidedly not Canadian, because we're meek, which means I guess we'll inherit the earth, although when is anyone's guess, and probably not until the NHL strike is over, anways -- reacted sharply. He didn't swear, no, but his bulging eyes and red cheeks made swearing redunant. He said a few sharp words, insisted that the owner of the Internet shop pay the monk simply to get him the hell out, and lectured the monk, who spoke no English, about how ridiculous this whole escapade was.

So.

Here we have two (admittedly) minor incidents spaced twelve, thirteen hours apart, each of them involving individuals trying to force their religious views on others. (One involving pamphlets, one involving money.)

These don't bother me so much as they make me sad. Make me, I don't know, disillusioned.

I don't know if there's a god. If there is, I suspect that we haven't grasped his/her/its true shape and form and, most importantly, intent. This is a cosmic issue that is so vast and deep that to have it reduced to pamphlets handed out at riverside bistros, or donation-fees
pre-determined in a Buddhist ledger is, well, profane.

There's nothing inherently wrong with what the Christian or the monk were doing; one was spreading the word, one was accepting donations (albeit expensive ones). They were both doing what they felt was right. (Unless the monk was not a real monk, only dressed as one to scam money, which is not entirely unpossible.)

Still.

With all the fundamental questions that horrific events like the tsunami necessitate regarding the nature of a Higher Being (like for example if there is a God, and he/she/it has given man free will, and we are responsible for our actions, right, got that, then why the hell did he/she/it inflict, or at the very least not prevent, something like a tsunami, which is something that is most definitely not man-made, unless you argue that man has not yet devised a detection-system, thereby we're all at fault, which is straining the point a bit too far), it just seems, I don't know, mundane to have such noble and worthwhile questions cheapened. To have warnings that I'm going to hell in five minutes unless I repent, or that I must pay what a monk says I must pay because he, well, says so, and all of this given a plain and simple form on rather-cheap paper, ends up robbing me of whatever spirituality the saint and the monk are trying to convey.

If there is a God, I think he/she/it is above all of this kind of stuff.

SOMETHING ONLY A HUMAN WOULD DO

Having just finished reading Among Insurgents : A Walk Across Burma by Shelby Tucker, a memoir of the author's trek through Burma during the late eighties (when the country was in the midst of a civil war between indigenous people and the government that continues to this day), I've had confirmed what I've always suspected: our own adventures and epiphanies that we achieve in life are often, almost inevitably, overlooked or disregared by others, and that this is not only a good thing, but a necessary one, too. Necessary for our humility and sense of place.

Tucker decided to walk across Burma for the hell of it. Because it was something crazy and extreme. He met a young Swede in a bar, told him that he (Tucker) needed a companion in his journey because his wife would not allow him to go otherwise, and would he (the Swede) like to fill the bill? The Swede thought about it for a few moments, drank his beer, then said sure, why not, let's do it. A walk across Burma would be fun.

It was to be more than fun, of course; it included sneaking over the border from China, wandering around uncharted land while befriending and enlisting the services of various ethnic Burmese that were at war with the military government, and ending with a final vault over the border into India, where they were arrested and held captive for months on end, while the Indian government tried to figure out if this crazy Brit and his motivations could actually be true -- that he was not a spy, no, but just someone who wanted to walk across Burma for the hell of it.

There's a wonderfully telling line near the end of the book where Tucker notes the look of indifference that clouds an an Indian officials face when told of how Tucker and his companion walked, walked, through Burma; it was a hint, Tucker says, of the same indifference he would be faced with upon returning to Britain and telling others of his exploits.

What matters to us does not matter to others. This is a blunt and direct truth I've learned over the years. The transformations and experiences that shape us and mold us and wreck us and rebuild us are, for the most part, interior; when these same experiences are given a shape and a form, whether they are vocalized or put in print, quite often their power is diluted, or even lost.

Why is that?

It's not that we're not interested in other's lives, experiences, attitudinal shifts and religious transformations; we are, intensely so. We go to movies like Schindler's List and tune in to Oprah and read blogs like this on a regular basis (or, um, semi-regular? occasionally?) because we want to feel what others felt, and, simultaneously, want to see that our feelings and emotions have emotional siblings out there in the world, that strangers may think and act similar to us, that we are not alone. We live vicariously through others because we need to connect to ourselves.

There's a limit, however, and that limit is something akin to the space, the physical space, that separates me from you, her from him. There is a gap between people, and that gap is what we are constantly trying to fill. One of the greatest lines in the history of cinema was written by Sylvester Stallone for Rocky, when his girlfriend's brother, Paulie, wonders what Rocky sees in Adrian: "I've got gaps, she's got gaps, together we fill gaps."

We all want to fill gaps. But some gaps our ours and ours alone to fill. My experiences in Japan and Cambodia can't fully be appreciated by you, no matter how much writing I do, no matter how many pictures I show you, no matter how many books and documentaries I direct your attention to. What happened to me happened to me, and it is for me to process; you are welcome to join in the discussion, offer encouragement and commiseration, but if I expect anything else from you, any other declarations of empathy or enthusiasm, well, I'm setting my self up for disappointment.

You achieve your high school diploma. You become a dentist. You recover from a fall down the stairs. You finally pass the driving test (after four tries). You lose the ten pounds. Gain it back. Lose it again.

These are all worthy and trying and distinctly human acts. They are part of your own struggle to achieve in life. And their ultimate fulfillment comes from you and you alone, and that should be enough; that should be sufficient.

It usually isn't; we often want more -- more praise, more attention, more accolades.

The reality is, we ain't going to get it, because most people are locked into their own little worlds, and while, occasionally, we break out of those interior spheres, it's only momentarily, and it's only peripherally. The work you do and the life you lead has to be fulfilled by you and appreciated by you on its own terms. If it has weight and resonance, others will be inspired by your struggles, but such secondary inspiration shouldn't be your point.

The great novelist Paul Theroux asked a French rower, who had performed some ridiculously difficult feat of aquatic endurance alone in a rowboat, why he had done it. "Animals find something to eat, a place to live, protection for their children. All very safe and orderly. I wanted to do something only a human would do."

Yes. Something only a human would do. It is not sane to walk across Burma, or travel for years in Japan and Cambodia, but it is human. It speaks of what we are capable of and what we can accustom ourselves to. It lifts us out of life and into a higher plane of perception.

And it is, in the end, singular. The bike chain you fix on your own. The cookie you don't eat. The orphan you adopt. The card trick you learn. The rehabilitation for your knee that you endure. You can write a book or a run a marathon or walk across Burma, and, as the old saying goes, one billion red Chinese don't give a shit. And it's true. Others may be entertained or illuminated or even inspired, but the only person it will truly mean anything to is you and you alone. It will remain an insignificant and meaningless footnote in the ongoing history of the world.

That's the glory of it.

GET A JOB (OR TWO, OR THREE...)

The other day I came out of the Internet cafe and said hello to the owner of Nike's Pizza House, located right next door. (Originally it was named 'Nikee's', with that extra 'e', but the owner said that some foreigners said that 'Nike' was a famous shoe brand that customers would recognize right away. So, in went the new 'e'.)

"How are you?" the owner said. He is a Chinese Khmer who is always smiling and always talking; despite the fact that he has eight, count 'em, eight, children, he apparently doesn't lack energy. (I personally side with the theme song of the old seventies Dick Van Patten show, that eight is enough to fill our lives with joy. But that's just me.)

We chatted for a minute. He asked how my work was, and I told him that I wasn't teaching anymore (though I might be soon), that I had moved on to a different job.

He was a bit confused.

"You only have one job?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Why don't you have two jobs?"

A pause.

"Well," I said, "one's enough for me."

He smiled and nodded and looked a little bit confused.

In Cambodia, I have always held the belief that Cambodians are, well, a little bit lazy.

Intelligent, yes, and compassionate, sure, but most Cambodians will do the absolute minimum of work necessary to get the job done. (This is not necessarily a bad thing; the opposite, overwork to the point of exhaustion, is not necessarily the greatest of endeavors.) There is an old expression: The Vietnamese plant the rice; the Cambodians watch it grow; and the Laotians listen to it sing.

But the pizza shop owner's comments stuck with me, because I've heard them before, from different people, in different variations.

Most Cambodians, by necessity, work two, three jobs. The students I used to teach at the university usually went to two or even three universities -- one in the morning, afternoon and evening, the philosophy being: one degree is great, but why not go for three B.A.s at the same time?

(Which, of course, leads to situations in which the students never complete their homework because, teacher, they have to finish their homework from their other schools, and weekly, sometimes daily (hourly?) scenarios where students high-tail it out of your class because you see, teacher, they have to go write an exam at their other university.)

Still, I realize I was wrong to a certain extent; I bought into the stereotypes I usually spend so much time trying to tear down. Cambodians are workers; they will work two or three jobs and not complain. (I can't see many westerners doing that.) They work because they have to, and they need to; my perceived vision of them being 'lazy' stems from the fact that they do not do more than they humanly have to to get by in life.

Which, when you think about it, is not all that bad a philosophy to live by.

It leaves time for other things in life, like life.

MY GUT FEELING SAYS...

"But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized...It is the product of analytic processes being condensed to such a degree that its internal structure may elude even the person benefitting from it...The intuitive decision-making of an expert bypasses orderly, logical steps precisely because it's a condensation of such orderly logical steps in the past."

- Herbert Simon,
The Wisdom Paradox



You decide to buy the ticket and get on the plane. Or not. That little feeling in your stomach that is half-way between a claw and a caress tells you to avoid stepping on the boat, so you do, and the boat sinks. The stranger in line beside you at the movies cautiously asks you for a drink, and you agree, equally cautiously, and you end up getting married. (Then divorced.)

All because of non-rational, non-linear thought processes that we call 'intuition'. (Doctors may call it 'indigestion'.)

Is it as mysterious and cosmically cool as we like to think, though? Or is there a more intellectual, analytic process at work, one that is decidedly more rational but exceedingly less exhilarating.

Apparently Herbert Simon, author of the excerpt from his book, um, excerpted above, thinks so. Intuition, he seems to argue, is nothing more than the repository of experience; intuition is nothing more than a neurological short-cut to the proper choice in any given situation, based on the accumulated wisdom we have made from other decisions we have made in the past.

Hmmmm...

Sounds logical.

But what about when we encounter an experience that we haven't had much experience in, uh, experiencing?

I decided to come to Cambodia, in large part, because I had gone to Japan. I made the decision in Japan, flying here directly from there. I thought about the pros and the cons, the long-term consequences and the short term consequences, the interesting points and the potentially dangerous points. (Via a technique learned from Edward DeBono -- a simple one, but remarkably effective.) So it was somewhat analytical, yes, but I still followed my gut. (Which was much bigger then, my gut, but I don't think weight actually influences the intuitional process.)

But coming to Japan for the first time was a pure 'intuition' decision. I had no experience in much of anything at age 23; I just thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and the little voice in my head and my stomach said: Ah, fuck it -- just go and see what happens. I didn't rely on past experiences travelling overseas, 'cause I hadn't been overseas; I didn't compare the working possibilities to other high-level jobs I had, 'cause I hadn't had any other high-level jobs. I just went because I felt it was the thing to do.

So the adult and analytical side of me agrees with Simon's article in principle; many of the decisions we make come from remembrances of things past, and evaluation how those memories compare with the choices in front of us in the here and the now.

But the irrational side of me, the eleven-year old side of me that refused to ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation because it would be a betrayal of Captain Kirk and his crew, finds all this analytical mumbo-jumbo distasteful. (A vow I kept, although I did see a few of the movies featuring Picard and his gang.) There's so much about the brain that we don't know, so many alleyways and caverns within our gray matter that still await exposure. I would like to think that there are mystical underpinnings at work; that intuition serves as a shortcut to some spiritual force in the universe that does not guide our progress, no, but hints at what is karmically best and proper and true for our journey through (what we call) life.

That's just my gut feeling, anyway.

ZOMBIES -- GOTTA LOVE 'EM (OR ELSE)

Last night on TV I caught the first few minutes of the remake of Night Of The Living Dead that came out in the early nineties. (The reason for the remake, I think, was that the writer-director of the original flick, George Romero, was shut out of the considerable profits that resulted from its success, and he, naturally, wanted a bit of financial payback that was long overdue; he was a writer and producer of the new version, which Tom Savini, special-effects grand goremeister, directed.) I hadn't seen the flick in probably eleven, twelve years, and so I was a little surprised to find myself more than a little freaked out by the opening cemetary scene, complete with lurching zombies and a screaming woman and ominous music that sounded, well, ominous. (I remember watching the original version and the new version back to back in my bedroom in St.Catharines with my friend Mike, both of us trying to stay up all night one New Year's Eve back in early high school, and back-to-back zombie flicks seemed like the way to sustain our sleepy selves. Haven't thought about that night in a long time. That was many years ago.)

Zombies are scary. I don't know why. I think it's because there's just something fundamentally wrong with them. Dead bodies dressed in suits are not supposed to shamble around among us. And they're so relentless, zombies are; they shuffle and poke their way forward, never getting deterred, never getting discouraged. They come, slowly, and they will keep coming, undaunted, until they eat you, and kill you. Simple. Primal. Almost unapologetically, ghoulishly pure.

I haven't seen any of the new zombie movies that have popped up over the last few years -- the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, or 28 Days Later -- but there's a reason why they keep coming back. (The movies, that is -- not the zombies. I'm sure they have their own reasons, the zombies, but I know not what they are...)

Horror is all about metaphor, and zombies are a perfect, twisted metaphor for who we (sometimes) are and what we (potentially) could become: mindless, shambling shells of our former selves. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead was set in a shopping mall and was a savage indictment of consumption and excess; he has a new zombie film set to premiere sometime this year called Land of the Dead, and I imagine he'll take some more incisive shots at what western society has (d)evolved into.

The one downside about zombie films is that they are, by their vary nature, awfully repetitive, derivative and one-dimensional. There's not much that zombies can actually do; you have to have a pretty clever story, with intriguing characters, as well as appropriately spooky music and visual flair to offset and somehow accentuate the gloomy monotony of zombies shuffling through graveyards and parking lots.

Still, they're an acquired taste, zombie movies are. (As are zombies themselves.) Not everyone's cup of tea. If done poorly, these flicks are atrocious to sit through and easy to forget. If done well...

You may find yourself looking over your shoulder every now and then as you leisurely wander through your local park on warm, spring afternoon, as dusk paints the sky its patented brand of purple. You may glance nervously at the lingering shadows that start to form between the bushes, behind the shrubs. You may start to slowly tremble when you hear behind you footsteps that softly pad their way across the grassy field. Towards you. And you alone.

POINTING FINGERS IN CAMBODIA

Yesterday or the day before, I'm not sure which, marked the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Phnom Penh. (I'm sure you threw a party with popcorn, Coke, party favors, all the fixings, to celebrate the whole shebang). Anyone who has spent anytime in Cambodia can tell you: In some respects, everything's different; in others, it's as if the whole murderous reign happened only last year, or last month, or even last week.

Last night at Panasastrasa University, New York Times and former Washington Post journalist Elizabeth Becker, the author of When The War Was Over (the first book I read and probably the best book I've read on the Khmer Rouge), gave a short lecture, followed by a rather lively, animated discussion. Her talk centred around her memories of Phnom Penh during the early seventies, when Cambodia was in the midst of a civil war, before Pol Pot and his homicidal gang took over the country. She actually met Pol Pot, interviewed him, but this was before anybody knew that he was 'Pol Pot'; she got chills just from the encounter, but even she did not know the depths to which his regime would eventually descend. She spoke of how literate Cambodians used to be, the spirit of goodness and generosity that they exuded and that she still found here, embodied by the owner of the Monument Books bookshop, who was trying to be a good and honorable man in a society drenched in corruption. It was her first visit here in ten years; she was sickened by the wealth that exists hand in hand with the grinding poverty.

During the q and a session following the lecture, a recurring theme arose: blame. It was ultimately, and almost eloquently, expressed at the end of the question session by a Khmer university professor, who wondered: Why aren't we focusing blame on the U.S.'s role? The UN? China? They are culpable; they played a role in Cambodia's demise.

In some respects, he's absolutely right. And the young Cambodians were right to applaud so feverishly and approvingly whenever anybody mentioned the Vietnamese or Americans that needed to be held accountable. Question after question centred on: ______ is to blame, and _________ is at fault.

And yet...

Elizabeth Becker made a point that I agree with: Cambodia's tragedy of the 1970s was, at its core, a Cambodian tragedy. It was an internal civil war. Other countries share blame, as does the UN; indifference and collusion have their own sentences of guilt.

But there's a trend in Cambodia that is natural, understandable, but not, in the end, acceptable: the pointing of fingers. It's the Vietnamese fault. It's the Americans fault. It's the UN's fault. It's China's fault. Even now, many Khmers are worried that Vietnam still wants to invade Cambodia. Even now, politicians somehow expect the US to save the day here to atone for their past sins, while Becker made clear: You know what? The US just, doesn't, care. Cambodia is too small, too insignificant, too politically worthless in the grand scheme of things; it's the Rwanda and the Sudan of Asia, to a certain extent. Cambodia is Asia's baby now, and besides, America, as the lone superpower, will, by necessity, do whatever it wants; you can blame till the cows come home. If the US wants to invade a country, it will do so; if the US wants to bomb the shit out of a country, like it did in Cambodia, searching for Vietcong, it will do so. It is not fair and it is not right and it is, like it or not, the way that the world works; for Cambodians to expect America to accept blame is pointless, politically naive, and futile. The country is rooted in the past, which is fantastic for religion and culture and fatal, absolutely homicidal, for advancement and moving forward.

And this ceaseless, even relentless desire to blame outside sources overlooks and underestimates the degree to which this twisted revolution arose from the Khmer people themselves. The Germans have accepted responsibility for their Nazi, wartime past, moved on, and the world, more or less, has forgiven them; Japan has yet to accept blame for their own WWII atrocities, and their ongoing textbook and ocean-border disputes with China are a sad testament to how wartime resentment can linger. And fester. I don't think that Cambodians have even begun to come to terms with their own role in their own descent. (I'm not blaming them, believe me; this country has suffered and suffered. I think their fears and concerns are valid and necessary -- but not helpful, not realistic.)

As Becker also pointed out, this country so desperately needs a Khmer Rouge UN Tribunal (which will, hopefully, begin soon), because if the Cambodian Khmer Rouge can get away with mass murder then, of course they can get away with corruption now. If the government can get away with slaughtering innocents for years on end, of course they can get away with stealing land that doesn't belong to them.

There is an unexamined, festering wound in this country that has not been healed, and until the Cambodians who masterminded the massacres (those still left alive, at any rate) are put on trial and put in prison, the lesson of 1975-1979 will be: We can kill whoever we want, and get away with it.

And if that's the case, then the corruption will continue, and so will the pointing fingers, looking for someone, anyone, to take the blame.

INTERTIA AND ADVANCEMENT, AND ALL THEIR SWEET, RESONANT FALLOUT

What am I doing here? Why am I still here?

These questions, more or less, were recently posed to me by Jenn (www.1ljenn.blogspot.com) in response to one of my postings, and they are actually quite good questions, valid questions, complex in their simplicity and difficult in their essentialness.

There are a thousand answers I could give, or none at all, and the silence would be just as telling as the abundance. (But if I offered silence, then this would be a blank blog, sort of a Buddhist approach to blogging, perhaps, but ultimately not that satisfying, I think. I've actually heard the sound of one hand clapping, I have, and it's not as interesting or fulfilling as the sound of two hands typing. I swear. Silence has its limits.)

Was it Einstein that said bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, and those at rest tend to stay at rest? (It was either Einstein or Elvira, queen of the night, but I'm not sure which.) The thing about travelling abroad, living abroad, is that you are simultaneously in motion and at rest. At rest, in the sense of having a home, a place to work, a city to live in. In motion, in the sense of being constantly bombarded by people and places, things and stuff, that alter your trajectory and instill a sense of wonder at the world that is not impossible to find at home, no, but is more difficult. More elusive and transitory.

It's easier to find wonder here, even amidst the poverty, perhaps because of the poverty. On the weekend I went with a friend and a few others to the province of Kompong Speu, about an hour outside of Phnom Penh, to a village whose name I no longer remember and could never pronounce, and we stayed at the house of a student at my old university, a gentle young man kind enough to invite a few foreigners to his house for the end of the Khmer New Year. (The Khmer New Year lasts about a week or so, and is filled with drinking and dancing and dousing, using water, of anyone and everyone who happens to be in sight. Said water often seen hurtling from the hands of a delinquent youth on the back of a moto or the side of the stree6; said water often seen slamming into your face and your neck and your chest.)

The village was another world -- in this one, but not of it. Located about an hour from Phnom Penh, accessible by a main road that gradually, windingly leads to smaller, divergent paths, it is small and dusty and dirty and green and lush and, above all, fasincating. Populated by 150 families, all of them farmers, it is a reminder that the world can, and often is, a small and contained place, oblivious to the grandmasters who plot and plan our lives.

The houses are wooden, often two stories, suspended on stilts above the land, overlooking rice fields and dirt fields and home to six, seven, eight and more people per plot. There are no cars or motos; people travel by bicycle, or they walk. They have animals to lead, pigs and dogs and cows and chickens. An abundance.

Being a foreigner in a place like this is to be a guest and a celebrity, a curiosity and a marvel, all in equal measure, simultaneously. We participated in various games that, even now, in
retrospect, seem distant and unreal, a memory viewed through a foggy glass. I was blindfolded and given a large stick; up ahead, twenty or so feet in front of me, hung suspended on a rope tied between two poles were three small pots filled with water. I had to walk five steps, then swing, three times. If I was lucky enough to hit a pot, well, it would break, and water would fall, and I would avoid the falling shards of pottery, and a group of happy Khmers would make some money while others would lose it (as even the poor love to bet).

Alas, it was not to be. I swung three times, but failed to hit a pot, knocking only the horizontal beam. In my darkened, blindfolded state, I thought it was a ceramic pot; I thought I was half-way lucky. Only when I the blindfold was removed and I was faced with the laughter and applause of a hundred and more Khmers did I realize my folly.

There were more games -- sackraces, amongst others -- followed by a night of eating and dancing, with the adults and children enjoying the last few, lingering hours of the Khmer New Year in an open field, with a blaring soundsystem, with endless beers, with laughing children and adults and teenagers dancing, dancing, dancing, as only the Cambodians can do. There was a wide and dark sky, a half-shrouded silver moon, the sounds of laughter and youth; there was all of this, and more. (I'm not even mentioning the night spent sleeping under the gossamer spread of a mosquito net.) Another world was exposed to me, and I eagerly, almost greedily, took a look. And another. And another.

Even the flat-tire on the car ride home couldn't dampen the good feelings that had been gathered and cultivated the day before. (Chaos is mandatory in Cambodia.) The sister who studies English so hard, in love with the tangled syntax and grammar; the fierce hugs of the commune chief; the smiles and respect afforded to us by the townsfolk, who have nothing, and yet willingly gave us it all, and more -- this is what I recall, what sticks. These images, and the strange, almost mystical fabric of Asia itself, its superstitions and people, the hazy fabric of reality that seems to tear and glimmer more often, more brightly, than back home.

Why do I stay? If I wanted to be anywhere else than I would be somewhere else. If I was supposed to be in a different land, or my homeland, than I would be there. I stay because in two months, two years, I might be gone, and I need to live now, here, in this place.

I stay, for now, which is all I have, because I want to advance -- or, if not move forward, at least expand the paths of my inertia, broaden my stability, dig a trench not longer, no, but deeper, wider, stronger.

WHERE DOES IT STOP?

It's difficult keeping track of Canadian politics abroad, given that I mostly rely on www.thestar.com or, occasionally, www.borque.org to keep me up to date, but reading recently about the kick-backs, bribery and all around money-going-where-it's-not-supposed-to scandals back home has reinforced how far I've come in the last few years in understanding a little more clearly how the world works. (Notice I said a little more clearly; I still don't really understand what the world does, and why, and towards what purpose, but I know more than I did five, six years ago, and I guess it would be scary if that weren't the case.)

Scandals at the UN involving huge sums of money. Scandals at home in Canada involving Canadian politicians funnelling money to people and corporations that will support their causes. Scandals and uproar between Japan and China, as each side baits the other with nationalistic rhetoric. Just today in the New York Times there was an interesting article analyzing how the Chinese government was carefully orchestrating the latest round of 'spontaneous' protests against Japan. And all of these crooked shenangians inevitably seem to involve money and power and connections among the elite of the elite.

Maybe it's just because I've been living in Cambodia for almost two years. The pages of the Cambodia Daily routinely depict the kickbacks that take place between those who want to move on up in the world. Hell, I've had to do it myself. Upon losing my passport last year I had to give the nice and friendly policeman a little bit of bribe to make the transactions go smoothly. (Yes, I lost my passport. Not recommended, and especially not recommended when you're living in freakin' Cambodia, because the Canadian embassy here doesn't do new passports; only the embassy in Thailand can make new ones, and so I had to wait a month for a new one, and the thing is, it was a new passport I had lost, my old one having reached its four score and ten, or thereabouts, and the moral of the story is: Scott is a knob. A first-class one.)

This is an entire country that is essentially run by greasing the palms of those who have what you want. And I've gradually realized that I was really, really naive about how the world works, and what it takes to move ahead, and how power corrupts, absolutely.

Part of Canadians current outrage has to do with our essential naivety, I think. The government's not supposed to be doing these things, we say. How dare they think they can get away with it!

Sentiments I agree with one hundred percent. But the reality is, well, to a large extent, the world over, this is what governments do, plain and simple. And it's not only limited to governments; one only has to look at the boys of Enron and Martha Stewart to realize that those on top, those in power, do not play by the same rules as everybody else.

I'm not saying the entire social system and governmental, military-industrial complex everywhere in the world is fundamentally corrupt. What I think I'm saying is that there are channels and avenues of illicit interactions that have always been there, are there now, and will continue. You can't stop them; you can only circumvent them. You can put safeguards in check. You can have, like, laws. (Cambodia is pretty much a lawless society; chaos and anarchy results. On the roads, in my school, in the courts. And in my house. But that's, um, another blog...) As Chris Rock so wisely pontificated, "A man is only as faithful as his options."
When your options multiply, fidelity becomes an endangered, cloistered species.

But where does the culpability end? I'm putting the blame on the Martha Stewarts and Paul Martins of the world, but what about me? I had to pay off the police chief to get my passport back; I'm part of the same system I'm so gleefully indicting. I have no excuse, I say; I do what nees to be done, I say. I believe it and it's bullshit and I can't reconcile the two. Where does it end, and where does the blame, should the blame, stop?

WHO SAYS WE CAN'T HAVE NEON SIGNS FLASHING ON OUR FOREHEADS THAT SIMPLIFY AND ADVERTISE WHO AND WHAT WE ARE?

Having just watched The Upside of Anger, the new Kevin Costner/Joan Allen/dysfunctional family flick that was actually quite good, entertaining and moving and funny, I've come to a couple of conflusions:

1) Actresses today, young and old, have no wrinkles, at all, on any portion of their faces stretching from their forehead to their ears. They all look as if they've never spent a day oftheir lives in any kind of real-world situation that involves stress or precipitation or perspiration. There were four daugthers in this movie, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-four or so, and the mother, Joan Allen, who must be in her mid to late forties, and none of them had anything even remotely resembling real, honest-to-goodness facial expressions that looked authentic. Why? Because they've all botoxed the hell out of the foreheads, I'm guessing, which means that when they get really, really angry, their face contorts into various positions, none of them betraying the hint of a wrinkle. Totally takes me out of the movies these days, wondering how all these women have such perfect faces.

2) I really, really don't like titles that thematically state the message of the movie. The Upside of Anger is a clever title and all, but it's so generic and blatant; it's so direct. It's like that movie from a few years called The Myth of Fingerprints. Titles should have a hint of the specific in them, I believe. (Exceptions abound, of course, none more so than Do The Right Thing, the perfect title for a pretty much perfect movie. But exceptions only exist for the masters.)

I do think it would be cool, however, if each of us could have thematic principles related to our lives flash across our foreheads when it's thematically appropriate in real-life situations. Let's say you get angry -- wham, bam, ' the upside of anger' flashes across your face with a neon intensity. That way it would be easier to figure out what kind of a person somebody is, whether they're a prophet or a prick, a saint or a sinner. You could walk into a bar and come across a Fonzie wannabe with a 'Be Cool' sign beneath his brow, or a major-league whiner bitching and moaning about their lack of a salary could have ' Million Dollar Baby' slapped beneath their chin. The possibilities are endless, the likelihood, well, not likely...

A HUMBLE (?) REQUEST

I'm just a little curious as to how many people are actually reading this blog on a daily (or even bi-monthly) basis, so I'm wondering if I could request each and every one of you who is reading this blog right now, at this moment, to post a comment? It'll just take a second, much shorter than it takes you to read my usual mindless, seemingly endless rants, and all you have to do is click the 'comment' button at the end of this post, and if you want to remain anonymous you don't have to leave your name if you don't want to, you can write 'Here', like you did in grade school when they took attendance, or 'present', or 'not here' (which some joker always said, and it always got a laugh too), and then choose to be anonymous, or leave a pseudonym, like 'Felipe from Three's Company' or 'Erik Estrada from Chips' or 'Vladmir Putin from Moscow' if you want.

I haven't installed one of those people-counting-thingees yet, so I'm just wondering how many people are reading this thing at any given time.

Thanks!

DARKNESS HAS NO DOMAIN

"There should be a health warning on countries like this. If you want to go somewhere and be unaccountable, this is the ideal place, because there are no rules."

-- Eddie Gibson's father, on Cambodia

Where is Eddie Gibson?

Who is Eddie Gibson?

He's a young British dude, early twenties, who high-tailed it out of England and flew off to Cambodia for fun in the sun -- ditching his university classes in Leeds without telling a soul. Stayed in Cambodia awhile, met up with a Cambodian female 'friend' at the Heart of Darkness bar in Phnom Penh, travelled around the country, eventually told his parents he was coming home on such-and-such a flight, only to leave them waiting at the airport, wondering where the hell he was.

He's been missing for months now, and his father was here recently, trying to make sense of his son's life, wondering where the hell he was, and if he was alive, and if not, well, let's not think about that too much.

Cambodia has that effect on people -- the let's-throw-caution-to-the-wind-and-live-life-to-the-fullest attitude that can quickly turn the bubbly-wine of your spirit to cyanide here. The drugs and the booze and anything else you could possibly imagine (and many things you don't) are cheap, cheap, cheap -- and so, to a certain extent, is human life.

I walk past the New York Hotel everyday after work. I think this is where Eddie was staying the night before he went missing. He was a real, genuine, honest-to-god person, people, who went to the same bars I went to, probably at the same restaurants, rode the same motos on the same streets. And, unless he's just been cruising the country for the last six months on his bike, taking in the blood-red sunsets and crystal-white beaches, he's been swallowed up by this very same place.

Gone.

This is the edge of the earth, of course -- and yet, it isn't, not at all, not ever. We like to believe that danger and suspicion and murder and shadows, dense, triumphant shadows, are the providence of poor and desperate countries like this one.

I used to think so. But, as I've written about before, I was attacked in broad daylight in Japan, the safest country in the world, by a crazy homeless man wielding a two-by-four; a serial killer and his wife preyed upon the streets of my hometown, St.Catharines, which had been my Mayberry (squared).

For me to then come to Cambodia and lionize it as a den of desititution and debauchery, well, that would be misleading. Don't get me wrong -- in many, many respects, this country is a cesspool of the worst that humanity has to offer -- drugs and prositution, human trafficking and pedophilia. It's raw and gaping and visceral here; I'm not denying, could not, deny it.

The thing is, it's open here. It's in your face. It's obvious and clear and, above all, expected.

A homeless nut whacking me in the stomach in Sagamihara, Japan, was not expected; a husband and wife team of murderers in my hometown was not expected.

So, yes, one should use caution here. One should be aware that this is not Mayberry, and Andy Griffith and little Ronnie Howard will not be walking by with their fishing poles anytime soon, whistling their favorite song. Eddie Gibson is missing, and I fear for what could have happened to him; I fear that this beautiful yet indifferent land could have eaten him whole.

But I will keep up hope that he's alive, safe, chilling in some backwater village somewhere up in Battambang province. Cambodia is cruel and heartless, yes, but it is a place on earth, no more, no less, and darkness itself, the darkness within us, has no exclusive, geographic stranglehold on the human heart.

THAT'S JUST ME -- I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT...

"Responsiveness to the subtle motions of inner feeling is as much an art as sailing, and is entirely untaught in schools. Surely, if our neurologists are the first to admit that they do not understand the brain, isn't it possible that the brain -- and the nervous system as a whole -- is wiser than the conscious intellect? For conscious intellect is only a fragmentary use of the brain, bound to the cumbersome process of linear thinking, which cannot -- without long deliberation-- synthesize more than a few variables. But the brain regulates thousands of bodily processes at a time without having to think about them, and this -- not one's personality -- is the self."


-- Alan Watts
In My Own Way


This is me, and this is what I'm doing, and this is who...I...am.

What a joke!

According to Watts, that is.

Watts is the new-age, Buddhist, access-to-the-Orient dude that popped up in the fifties and sixties and essentially introduced Eastern philosphy to us tight-asses in the west.

I haven't read a lot of his stuff, but I'm making my way through his autobiography, which is a fascinating read. Didn't know that Watts, the quintessential Buddhist in my mind, was actually a Catholic priest (!) for a while, and his thoughts on religion, philosophy, life and our own, individual, essentially-meaningless-and-therefore-extremely-meangingful lives are compelling. His conception of what God is or isn't, could or could be, should or shouldn't be, is animist and Buddhist and Christian, all for the price of one -- God is us, and we are God, and He is none of us, and this Moment is God, and...

You know the deal.

As the old saying goes, if you're into this kind of stuff, then this is the kind of stuff you'd be into.

Watts' rebels against having to pretend to have some kind of authentic, permanent 'self'; his whole conception of ego is fundamentally a Buddhist one: a human construct that we selfishly and recklessly hide behind, a shield by which we try to construct and maintain a vision of ourselves when, in reality, no 'self' exists at all.

The excerpt I posted at the beginning of this, um, post, hints at a physical explanation for the metaphysical paradigm that Watts has built for himself.

We tend to think of our 'personality', as Watts points out, as our 'self'. In other words, the 'you' that watches Desperate Housewives and reads Plato and practices softball and strums the guitar -- that's you, the 'you' that the world will love and embrace or despise and reject. Essentially, 'you' are a laundry-list of your likes and dislikes.

But what about the 'you' that grows your hair, or moves your feet on the treadmill, or types the words on the keyboard, or scans the morning paper as you listen to morning deejays do their laugh and chuckle and let's-check-in-on-the-traffic? The 'you' that is responsible for getting you through the day safely, the 'you' that doesn't trip on the curb that would fling you headlong into traffic? (Is 'headlong' a word? If it is, it shouldn't be, and I apologize for using it.) The 'you' that is a series of motor-skills, neurons-in-the-brain pathways?

Why can't that 'you' be just as authentic and valid as the one who meets-and-greets the guests before dinner, taking off their coats, commiserating with their traffic-was-just-terrible stories?

In other words, once you start down the road of defining who you are and what you are, you start to realize that it's a no-win game. Where do you end? (Or even begin?) We are all the things that we do and the things that we are, physical things, and they're all connected, the thinking parts of us and the parts of us that are flabby and smelly and stale. We're all shifting, evolving, transforming all the time, constantly; we're all slinkies, in other words, crawling down the stairway of life. The slinky that gets to the bottom of the stairs is the same one that started at the top -- it just bended and swayed along the way.

My take on it, anyways.

(But that's just me. I don't know about you.)

FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD

I'm not saying that I believe everything the fortune teller told me, or even any of it, but still, when someone takes out the cards and reads you your fate, whether they be mystic or saint or the blackjack dealer in Room 234, you listen, and you listen carefully. (At least I did, anyways.)

Backtrack:

I was on the beach, Hawaii Beach, to be precise, even though this beach is not anywhere near Hawaii but is to be found instead in the lovely and sceanic port of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, named after the former King himself. (And it really is lovely and scenic.) The occasion is a work sponsored getaway, at which free accomodation is provided, a meal and dancing is par for the course, and lazing on the beach under a broiling sun while deceptive waves hint at a tsunami-free future is not mandatory, no, but encouraged.

The fortune teller was a lucky (?) break.

A few of the other staff members were having their fortunes read, so I figured what the hell, life's short, let's give it a go. I'd never had my palms read or my future told, and last year I read a really interesting and enlightening book called A Fortune Teller Told Me by an Italian journalist, Tiziano Ternani (who passed away last year). The book chronicle's Ternani's adventures around Asia as he travels by land and by sea to chat with various fortune tellers of all shapes, colours and sizes, after vowing not to journey by air for an entire year after being warned not to do so by a particularly insistent sage. His conclusion: Most fortune tellers use similar tactics, relate similar stories, but every now and then, when you least expect it, you hear something about yourself that, if not unsettling, is, at the very least, spooky.

Not that I believe in any of this, of course.

She looked like a typical middle aged Cambodian woman -- forty to forty five, long gray hair, a little plump. (Actually, the life expectancy of most Cambodians is around fifty something, but women usually live a little longer than men, just like everywhere, so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt.) She sat before a spread-out blanket, on the sand, a pack of regular playing cards in her hands. A Cambodian staff member from our work would act as translator. Everything was set.

Split the deck three times, I was told. I did so. She placed a handful of cards on the blanket, and asked me to pick three.

Thus, it began.

First, she made some general statements -- that I loved my friends very much, that I was a kind man, that I would have good luck from now until October. (My birthday's in October, which worried me a little.) And even though I am kind, I have to be careful, because those around me, those I call my 'friends', are out to deceive me. She stated that I don't rely on others for work, that I find it myself. She also said that I was of mixed nationalities.

Interesting.

Whether I'm a kind man is not up to me to declare, and whether my friends are deceiving me, scheming and plotting and forming conspiracies to silence me, well, I'll soon find out, I guess. The other stuff rings true -- I have relied on myself for work these last few years, purposely staying independent, travelling from country to country. And I am of mixed nationalities, in a sense, since my father's originally from England.

I asked her: "Am I going to die young?" (For some reason, don't ask why, I've always had this feeling. I'm not sure what 'young' is -- thirty-five, forty, but it's a feeling I've had.)

She promptly said no, no, that I will live to be 96 years old. (My great-grandmother died at 96).

The final parlor trick was a reading of my signature. A chaotic, slightly reckless person I am, according to her, after reading my John Hancock.

So there you have it. No burning incense or thundering clouds or black magic; just a deck of cards, and a blanket, and a few, seemingly random observations. I thanked her, headed back to the waves, looked out at the sea.

Nonsense, of course. A bunch of generalities, applicable to anyone at all, really.

Still, there were enough specifics -- somewhat general specifics, to be sure, but applicable to me and my life nevertheless -- that it left me thinking. Left me wondering. What do I do with those words? Do I apply them? Do I discard them like seashells lovingly picked by a young child on the beach only to be forgotten hours, if not minutes, later? Why believe any of it? Nothing more than a money-making scam. Nothing more than wishful thinking, priced for sale.

I stood on the beach and looked out at the dock that stretched into the beginning of the beginning of the sea. It looked similar to docks I'd seen in Ontario, docks I'd seen in Shimane. The water, the ocean, the small islands visible from the shore -- these, too, were familiar. In that moment I found myself unsure of where I actually was at that present moment in time -- Canada, Cambodia, Japan? If I were to have woken up here, on this beach, with no recollection of who I was or where I'd come from, I would have nothing to guide me. Nothing to hint at home.

A vast and concentrated universe this is.

Sometimes, on certain specific (albeit isolated) days, when the sun is bright and the waves lap the shore at the right, regulated pace, when fortune tellers deal their decks of cards on blankets that shield their feet from the hot and slippery sand, I'm tempted, if not encouraged, to wade into the water and wait, patiently, anxiously, for celestial signals that will reveal the universe's splendor in all its maddening simplicity and glory.

I'm tempted to believe.

THE ABSOLUTE, LIKE, NECESSITY OF OLD SITCOMS' LEADING MEN IN REINFORCING HUMANITY AS MORE THAN ONE BIG DRUNK LEANING AGAINST A LAMPPOST

Is humanity itself (and I'm definitely including myself here, although others might debate the validity of my inclusion) fundamentally, at its coure, the equivalent of Woody on Cheers? Or Barbarino on Welcome Back Kotter? Or Bull on Night Court?

Are we all, at our fundamental core, way down deep, just plain and simply stoooooooooooopid?
Sometimes I think so.

Sometimes I don't.

But sometimes I do, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that I've been around a little bit these last few years. I've been to Hiroshima. I've checked out the killing fields. I've taught former heads of Toshiba, and Cambodian orphans, and been almost robbed by a motodop at midnight in Phnom Penh, and ridden a double-decker bus in Hong Kong, and had a personal tour of director Akira Kurosawa's former film studio by his long-time art director (and even got to hold the actual mask worn by the dude who plays Godzilla). There are many, countless, untold thousands of things I haven't done, and still hope to do, but I have certainly seen and heard and felt and thought about much, much more than I had ever anticipated. I used to think that life could be learned through a book; now I know that's not true.

I also know some other things, too.

The variety of life. The variety of people making their way through that life, this life, our life that we all share. It's mind-boggling, it really is. You can tell yourself all you want that you are a sane, rational, clear-headed individual -- but when you are stuck in a foreign land where you do not know a single soul, and you can't speak the language, and you are far from home, if that home still exists, you will be confronted with the essential fragility of who we are and what we think that we can be. It's not a pretty picture, or an enviable experience, but it's definitely a human one, and I recommend -- if for no other reason that it will allow you to feel like an immigrant, alone and forgotten, and that has to be a good thing, a good feeling, I'm sure of it.

The variety, though, is what leads to the questions. Questions that can't be answered.

Are we all the same, us humans? I guess so, yes, I think so, but after living in Japan for four years, and in Cambodia for almost two, I can also that there are differences, and these differences arise from living in groups, and these groups are ethnically and nationally oriented, and there is very little that we, as humans, can do that to rectify this imbalance.

Do we need to rectify it?

I don't think so, actually; perhaps that's too strong a word. What we need is balance. What we need is perspective.

Perhaps this goes back to my earlier post on the pope's passing (scroll down if you're interested).

We all want to believe what we believe. That's fine. All well and good. And we're in a certain stage of civilization's development where we have now, thankfully, accepted that other people's beliefs do not necesarily match our own. In other words, you are Jewish and free to perform your rituals and observe your holidays and do what it is that the people in your faith do; I am Muslim (for example; I haven't converted -- yet), and I practice my faith, and we agree that while our faiths our separate, they are also equal.

That's the theory.

Still.

Much of the world if not most of the world is composed of varying civilizations that offer unique and singular takes on religion and culture; I'm sure Iran and Japan share many things, but there's a lot that's different, too.

And yet our cultures breed us to believe, deep deep deep down, that we are right.

Think about it. The way we talk, the way we dress, the way we eat, the political opinions we hold -- our culture gives them to us.

Recently (and by 'recent' I refer to the last, oh, two hundred years) things are shifting because people are moving, travelling from one culture to another for work and for play, cross-pollinating their species, merging cultures. There is a fertilization of ideas and outlooks that is taking place; I recognize this. Things are changing for the good, I believe. In part.

But still...

A roundabout, long-winded way to get to my point (and it's debatable that I have one), which is: People are good and decent and kind, yes, but we are, I've come to conclude, also more than a little stoooopid. We harbor our resentments. We root for the home team simply because we live in the same city as the team; we root for our country against their country simply because we live where we live. We go around proclaiming that our country is the best country in the world to live, while dozens, if not hundreds of other countries'citizens shout the same repetitive mantra. We worship the faiths of our family simply because they told us to.

We instinctively align ourselves with others who feel the same way that we do, the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination.

It thus serves a purpose, this lamppost does -- but not the one it was intended for.

Maybe that's what my fears come down to.

We, as humans, absolutely crave support, not illumination; it's what gets us through the night. We listen to those who will tell us what we want to hear. We listen to the radio stations that play what we like. We watch the shows that confirm our own conceptions of the world. We approach life based on the models that have been formed by us, or by what we form ourselves. We are firm, and unflexing, and do not want to change. We are stubborn.

So are we stooooopid?

I guess so.

But I take consolation in the fact that Woody on Cheers, Barbarino on Kotter and Bull on Night Court were mere supporting players. They leaned on others for support -- and if those leads, those Sam Malones and Mr.Kotters and Judge Harrys did not offer total illumination, they at least provided a little bit of light.

Which is maybe all we can hope for.

WHY POPEYE, EMBODIED BY ROBIN WILLIAMS, IS GOOD FOR THE CHILDHOOD SOUL

Something you loved at five years old should not be the same thing you love at twenty-nine years old. You're supposed to have matured in your artistic tastes, put your childish thoughts away, realized that our preschool likes and dislikes, even loves and fears, are something to be left behind, not intentionally sought after.

But after watching the DVD of Popeye, I can state, unequivocally, once and for all: Naaaaah.

Viewed objectively, as a so-called adult, Popeye is a strange movie. It's photographed and directed like a drama, because the director is Robert Altman, one of the most respected, if not revered, directors of the last fifty years (MASH, The Player, Nashville, McCabe and Mrs.Miller, Short Cuts, The Long Goodbye, and on and on). It's paced like a drama, too. The story is episodic and rambling, without even a hint of a plot. The characters are, by necessity, cartoons; Robin Williams plays Popeye brilliantly, and Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl is, well, the cartoon come to life. And yet they are given adult quirks and lines of dialogue that I didn't understand at five but can certainly appreciate a quarter of a century later. To top it all off, it's a musical.

The whole idea is ludicrous. "I know! We'll make a big-screen version of the old Popeye cartoons, but it'll be live-action, paced like a drama, and, of course, it'll be a musical! What's not to love?"

A crazy notion.

But what a great film.

Again, I can't really view it objectively.

Nor do I want to.

As a child, there was something altogether right about seeing your animated, comic-book heroes come to life in a format that at least approximated reality. Such adaptations showed that there was a definitive link between the 'real' world and the world of comics and books; it was possible for one to transcend the other. I could read the Superman comic books, then see Christopher Reeve's version of the character boldly fly across the screen. I could devour Batman's adventures at night in my bed, then watch him on TV in the campy-but-as-a-kid-I-didn't-know-it TV show. (I knew there was SOMETHING odd when Adam West, as Batman, pulled a can of Shark-Repellent Spray to fend off a bothersome great white, but I couldn't place my finger on why.) I could catch Popeye cartoons on Sunday mornings, which were straightforward and simple and funny and goofy, and then see Popeye transformed into a living, breathing person as embodied by Robin Williams -- alert, funny, a simulation of the cartoon but there, a real person (or as real as any of us can be).

A lot of stuff in movies and TV shows goes sailing directly over kids' heads, but that's an altogether good thing; it allows children to understand that they can still enjoy something on a basic entertainment level while subtly, almost covertly implanting the notion that there's something, well, more going on underneath the surface, ideas and messages and allusions that point to a world larger than the one they know.

Popeye can jump out of a cartoon into the real world, yes, but this real world will be strange and funny and slightly off-kilter and, while similar to the world you know, only vaguely so -- that's the message, at five, I unintentionally, against-my-will, got.

As for the message I got at twenty-nine, while watching it again?

I can't do better than what the man himself said:

I am what I am and that's all that I am.

THESE ARE THE RULES

While watching a highly influential Catholic priest bear the brunt of BBC'S HardTalk interviewer the other night, I found myself in a strange and unexpected position, as I actually found myself agreeing with most, if not all, of what the holy man said. (I'm assuming that he's 'highly influential', because his official title was 'The Most Revered Such and Such'. He's not just a reverend; he's the most reverend. I have no idea what that means, or if it's even grammatically correct, but it sounds kind of cool, like something a rapper would declare for himself.)

Not that I'm saying that I agree with what the Catholic church stands for, necessarily, because I'm as about as agnostic, on-the-fence, maybe-there-is-or-maybe-there-isn't kind of guy that you could find when it comes to believing in the existence of a Higher Power. (If there is a God, I think he would resemble either Dustin Hoffman or Johnny Carson. I don't know why; something about the quiet confidence they both have. An ease with their power and ability. Either those two, or Pauly Shore, who may, in fact, be the Prodigal Son, already returned to us, but we're too ignorant to notice. Put a beard on him, have a few shots, squint your eyes a bit -- just tell me that dude doesn't look like Jesus. ) The church's attitudes on abortion, gay marriage, divorce, you name it, clearly aren't in line with what most free-thinking societies in the world will tolerate anymore.

And yet...

This priest the other night is a die-hard, given-my-life-to-the-church kind of guy, right? He's in it for the long haul. He's accepted the doctrine, gone through the rituals, accepted the life. And his argument to the interviewer boiled down to, essentially, and I'm paraphrasing:

"Look. These are the rules of this particular religion that we belong to. What we believe is based on our interpretation of divine scripture -- the word of God, not the word of the state, or the word of the president, or the word of Sally Jesse Raphael. It's not the church's jobs to move with the times, to get with the times, to bend and sway with the people's will. This is what we believe. It may not be practical in a modern world, or even sensible, but you know what? These are the rules of the club, rules that have stood the test of time for centuries. You're either in or your not."

(That was a very loose paraphrasing of his remarks, by the way.)

I'm with him on that. With something as sacred as religion, you don't take it lightly, and you don't change it lightly; you can't add an amendment here or there every two, three hundred years if the Book that you're following, whose Word you are following, you believe to be divine. It is what it is; if you don't like those rules, if you think they don't apply to your life, fine -- choose another religion. Or none at all.

That's my take on it, anyways. As I said, I'm not a Catholic or a Christian, and I don't follow any particular faith. It's not my deal, at the present moment; it's not for me. (I could barely handle it when my high school teachers used to tell us to do chapter four, pages twelve to fifteen, because I always wondered why, who says we have to, and they would say we do, so just do the work, so organized enforcement of spiritual rules ain't my cup of tea.)

As a certified not-sure-what's-out-there kind of guy, then, to me, the big argument seems to centre upon: The church is not in step with modern mores and attitudes. To which I would answer: That's right, because that's the nature of the beast; it's an old, almost ancient religion -- if you think it's views are archaic and obsolete, well, they probably are, but rules are rules. (Other issues, like the effect these views have on attitudes towards AIDS and abortion are senstive and extremely relevant politically, emotionally, even spiritually, but again, this is the nature of religion itself -- interpretation of ancient texts, and we can't expect a religion that strives to maintain the sanctity of God's original intent to change with the same ease and grace as The Dukes of Hazzard did when switching their lead roles from Bo and Luke to Coy and Vance for a season or two. And if there was any time in life when I did believe in God, it was when the original Dukes, Bo and Luke, returned to their show after their extended hiatus --which was, I think, the result of a contract dispute, but that was in the real world, which had no logical or relevant boundaries on my immersion in that fuller, more plausible fictional one; at that point in time, my seven-year old self would have gladly, even enthusiastically accepted the notion of divine grace -- what other explanation could there be? Man, was I happy they came back to Hazzard. But don't get me started...)

It's like saying that the rules of basketball should be changed, because it's not fair that only really tall guys get all the breaks; short people should have an automatic in. Or declaring that playing hockey with skates is ridiculous because time has shown that this gives an advantage to fast skaters; slow skaters are left behind. The game should thus be played on grass, or even sand, but not ice. And who says that a 1500 metre running race has to be 1500 metres? That excludes those who are better at short distances, not to mention those who are disabled, or even just fat.

Silly comparisons, I know, but my point is, often adjustments are necesary in life; the rules are, occasionally, altered. But at a certain point you have to say: You know what, if we make any more changes, than this isn't the game we started with at all anymore. If we take skates away from hockey and change the surface from ice to sand, and make everyone wear wet t-shirts instead of shoulderpads, and pair the teams boy-girl boy-girl, at a certain point you're forced to declare: This ain't hockey. It's something different entirely -- maybe equally valid, equally entertaining, but not hockey. Call it something else.

Religion comes with rules. Religion comes with principles. I don't think it's the job of the religion itself -- whether it's a Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Islamic one -- to change. There are many sects, many denominations, many possibilities, but they all come with certain guidelines and unbreachable barriers, based, in the end, on the essential uncertainty of faith itself. If you can handle the rules set down based on this faith, maybe it's for you. If not...

I was royally pissed off when I was a kid that both Marvel's Secret Wars II and DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, the most entertaining comic book series I had ever read, had finite runs -- Marvel's book being nine issues, DC's being twelve. But I knew that going in; I knew they were limited series, not ongoing ones. I accepted the rules that the companies were playing by, and I played the rules, bought the books, and accepted the limitations, which largely centred around the sadness I would feel when both series ended. It wasn't fair; I didn't agree with it. But I bought the books because I wanted the experience.

The Catholic church is saying: If you want the experience, well, these are the rules. It's okay to not live up to them from time to time, or even often, because we're all sinners, but these are the rules. You either follow them or you don't. You're either a Catholic or you're not. If you come to a point where the rules don't match your own, personal, experienced view of the world, maybe it's time to question what you thought you believed in -- which could lead to a deeper, stronger faith, or an unexpected, painful exit.

Either way, we're the ones that have to change, not them.

WEBSITES AND BLOGS THAT I READ THAT YOU MAY WANT TO, TOO (OR YOU MIGHT NOT, IT'S UP TO YOU, THERE'S NO PRESSURE, DO WHAT YOU WANT)

Because I'm too lazy to write a regular blog entry, I thought I'd just list some of the sites and blogs that I frequent on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/centennial or millenial basis. I don't read all of these blogs every day or even every week, but they hold my interest from time to time, and feel free to click on the links to check them out for yourself. (And if you don't like them, blame me. I'm serious. Send me emails and postings stating why you think these websites suck. I'll cry, but the truth hurts.)

Sites I sometimes read:

www.moviecitynews.com -- Compiles articles and interviews on anything and everything related to the film business.

www.peterdavid.net -- The website of comic-book writer Peter David. His daily observations on the industry and life.

www.artsandlettersdaily.com -- Compiles articles and interviews on anything and everything related to the world of arts and, um, letters. Kind of high-brow and intellectual stuff.

www.nytimes.com -- Always has interesting stuff. And a well-written Sports section. And a well-written Movies Section. And a well-written Books section. And a...

www.thestar.com -- Toronto's daily newspaper.

www.cnn.com -- International news. It also has transcripts of its programs, so I can read what happened on Larry King the night before without having to stare at his suspenders for extended periods of time. (Have you seen those things lately? The man is getting out of control.)

www.khmer440.com -- Discussion groups and articles on life in Cambodia. I know, I know -- you're tired of hearing about Cambodia on the news, in the classroom, at work, in your evening papers. But just in case you're not getting enough, there's lots of goofy discussions here for your entertainment pleasure.

www.japantimes.com -- One of Japan's daily English-language newspapers. In the 'Arts' section, check out Donald Richie's book reviews. He's an American who has lived in Tokyo for fifty years, and is an expert on Japanese cinema, and always writes well on all aspects of Japanese culture.

www.moviepoopshoot -- Irreverent articles on the movie industry. Owned and run by Kevin Smith of Clerks fame (or infamy).

www.newsarama.com -- I gave up collecting comics when I was twelve, thirteen years old, but glancing at this site every now and then has me itching to get back into it.

www.frankstallone.com -- The website of Stallone's musician/actor younger brother. (Don't try and tell me that you don't already frequent it whenever you can.) Churchillian in his intellect, Clintonian in his eloquence, Frostian in his poetic grace, Browkawian in his delivery, Romanoian in his humor, Albrightian in his seriousness, and, it almost goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, Stallonian in his Stalloneness. (Does 'Stallonian' have an 'e' or not? I always got that one wrong on school tests.)

www.christiansciencemonitor.com -- I'm not sure what 'christian science' actually is. I don't remember taking a course like that back in high school, though I might have. I'm also not exactly sure what they monitor, or why, or how much they get paid. But it's a good newspaper, regardless.

www.drudgereport.com -- Slightly tabloidy right-wing news agency from the States (run by a dude named Matt Druge). Always has a scoop, real or imagined.

www.rushlimbaugh.com -- Most Americans despise Rush or love him. I, being Canadian, am impartial. I thought he was a very entertaining radio host, not as rabid or delusional as his detractors claim. He's satirical, and satire requires distortion, and a lot of people don't get that. I disagree with most of what he says, but his website does a good job of highlighting his interesting opinions of the day, and, if nothing else, he's an apt critic of the American media establishment (while simultaneously being part of it.)

www.newyorker.com -- Sometimes snooty, but very well-written articles about arts and cultures and occasionally politics, too.

www.friendster.com -- This is the website where you can link up with everybody all over the world and exchange messages; it's always free, forever, and there are very few other things in life that kill an hour or two like this website does. Please feel free to drop me a line to add me as a 'friend' if you're already a member and so inclined, or post a comment on this blog if you want me to 'invite' you. (I think you have to have somebody 'invite' you to become a FRIENDSTER member. Not that I'm expecting an onslaught of willing participants, but you never know.)

Sites that are named after me:

www.scottspencer.com -- This has nothing to do with me, but it does offer 'creature and character design'. Make of that what you will.

www.scottspencer.net -- This also has nothing to do with me, but it does feature a Boisie, Idaho businessman who shares my humble little name, and it offers, and I quote, "North America's largest corporate ballooning operation." And hey, I've always said that if I could have my name associated with corporate ballooning, my life would be complete. And so now it is.

www.scottspencer.ca -- In the process of being built. For this Scott Spencer.


Blogs I read:

www.amandaberlin.blogspot.com -- A well-written, sharp and witty take on one woman's life in New York City by a talented young writer. Honest, good-with-a-phrase, and including almost as many movie references as this blog, so it had-me-at-hello right there.

www.1ljenn.blogspot.com -- The random thoughts and musings of a funny, sometimes-stressed, artistic lawyer-in-the-making in D.C. (With nice postings of interesting pieces of art, paintings and photography, every week or so.)

www.oddmuse.blogspot.com -- Life in Thailand (soon to be the States, then Halifax) as seen from the perspective of a poetic and ribald young Canadian woman. (I think I used 'ribald' correctly.) Observant and unique.

www.shewhoeats.blogspot.com -- For something completely different, try this food blog written by an old friend in Japan; it was nominated for 'best-food blog' last year, and this site was what gave me the idea of starting a blog in the first place. (Not that this blog is food-related, but you can still blame Chika, not me, for the blog you're now reading -- direct all hate mail to her.) Interesting observations, well-written, and with photos of various kinds of delicious-looking food so clear and lifelike that you will feel stuffed just from reading it.

www.lexablog.blogspot.com -- One family, one small town, one writer in western Canada. Good stuff, like a Canadian Dave Barry.

www.jesterinjapan.blogspot.com -- Written by my old running buddy and member of the I-survived-Cookie-Jarvis's-jokes-support group, now (permanently?) ensconced somewhere in Japan. ('Ensconced' is another one of those words I'm not sure I've used correctly, because you never hear it out loud, but I thought I'd give it a shot.) Not updated frequently, but he's teaching the youth of Japan, and the children are our future, so I cut him some slack.

www.wilwheaton.net -- The writer from 'Stand By Me' is now, um, a writer. Interesting blog about family and acting and writing, and he gets about, like, 100 posts a day. (I'm aiming for 100 posts total in the next, oh, ten years.

(For anyone whose blogs I may have forgotten to list, my apologies; my brain is tired...)

LET IT RAIN

Last night I awoke to a strange and surreal sound.

Rain.

I almost thought I was dreaming. So familiar a sound, and yet it had been almost six months since I had last heard drops hitting a roof, rain falling in erratic, slender sheets, puddles rapidly forming. Even the crackle of thunder had a familiar but foreign feel, as if it were not a memory but merely a remnant of one, dredged up from the basement of my subconscious.

Wonderful, to have the commonplace become mysterious and alluring.

The rainy season is about to begin, I guess, which is always ironic in Cambodia, because it happens to coincide with the hottest months of the year, April and May, months that scorch and slay any belligerent fool who opts to minimize what the merciless heat can and will do.

But last night, for a moment, hovering between the waking world and dreams-now-forgotten (though I wish I could remember, I do, I do) a modest form of majesty crept into my world, a natural cascade of water doing its rhythmic dance.

I fell in and out of sleep, waiting for the rain to stop, but it didn't, not until daybreak. Not until I'd been reminded of what had been lost for months on end and had now returned, unannounced, like a stray and forgotten pet finally finding its way home.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?

Think about it: When you were fourteen, fifteen years old, you didn't know shit.

And when you actually were fourteen, fifteen years old, you looked at four and five year olds and thought: They don't know shit. Thinking hopscotch is cool. (Do kids still play that game?) Thinking running around in circles until you crash to the ground from dizziness is a good time. Finding whoopee cushions funny. (Wait. I still do find whoopee cushions funny. Bad example.)

And you were right. They didn't know how silly, uninformed, altogether ignorant they were.

And now I'm pushing (big gulp, and not the 7-11 kind) thirty, and I look at twenty year olds, and I think: They don't know shit.

Fine. We grow as we get older, we mature, our thinking-processes change, yada yada yada, pass the remote. I get all this.

But someone who is forty is looking at me and thinking: He has no idea what he's in store for.

And they're right. I don't. And if you told me, I probably wouldn't believe you, or I'd dismiss you with the wave of a hand, as I tend to, and think: Well, it ain't happening to me, buddy.

And my grandfather, who's eighty-five, must look at people who are fifty and think: They are so clueless.

Where does it end, is what I'm getting at.

We acquire wisdom as we get old; we fu-- up, make mistakes, piss people off and choose roads less traveled, which leaves us sometimes -- not always -- wondering whether that made all the difference.

And yet, paradoxically (a word I love using, by the way, and try to sneak into play whenever I can), we have convictions. We have certainties. We tend to believe that what we believe right now will be our sum and total conception of the universe forever and ever, the power and the glory, amen.

It's inevitable that our thought processes change; in fact, it's almost mandatory that they do so. You shift, evolve, live on the planet and formulate thoughts -- and the thoughts you have at forty will rarely, if ever, resemble those you had at fifteen. (Unless you're super-duper religious, and even in that case, changes, over millenia, are accepted into the doctrine; even the pope, so I've heard, believed in evolution. (I didn't until the early nineties, when I came across Pauly Shore and realized that he was, in fact, the 'missing link'.)

That's what makes me mad at all those people who view their opinions of films and books as firm, almost sacred entitlements. They like something, it's genius. They hate it, it's garbage. If you have a differing opinion, well, you're wrong. Plain and simple.

The reality is, we change, and the movies and books change with us. Read a book you loved at twenty-two, and read it again at twenty-nine, and it will not be the same book, of this I am sure. This does not preclude you from loving it -- but I'm betting that you love it in a different way. A more subtle, reasoned way.

The thing is, it has to stop, this process. That's what I'm suggesting. Maybe I can get some kind of amendment going; I won't petition the Canadian government, no, I'll take it directly to whatever religious deity is on-watch tonight. (Then again, I lean towards agnosticism, so this could get tricky.)

In any event, it's too tiring, this whole decade-by-decade reevaluation that I (begrudingly) admit we all must go through to qualify for our Thinking-And-Evolving-Human-Card that gives us certification as a rational adult and a free Double Whopper with large fries and a Coke. (Sidenote: No western franchises in Cambodia. None. No KFC, no Mickey Dees, no Wendy's. They have their own version called BB World, and they recently had to change the logo because McDonald's somehow found out about this place and noticed that the 'w' in 'World' looked a little too much like the golden arches. Funny how McDonald's can penetrate Phnom Penh fast-food franchises, but Paramount and Universal haven't noticed that their movies are available on bootleg DVDs the same day they come out back home. Not sure how that works.)

I know what I know (or at least I know what I'm not sure of, in any case), and I would like these simple, self-held truths to be durable, lasting, even eternal, like a parent's love for a child, or the Ten Commandments, or Geraldo's moustache. (Think what would happen if he shaved that thing right off. Pandemonium, people.)

But I keep thinking of myself at age 32, and 37, and 46; I keep thinking of the man who will look back on these blogs, and wonder: What was he thinking?

Well, the answer is this, I'm afraid. This blog. At this moment in my identity, it's all I've got. It may be wrong; it may not be enough. But it's mine, and it's here, and it's what I believe. Maybe that's enough.

But, you know, check back with me around ten or eleven tonight.

Things change, after all.