NO EASY JUDGEMENTS

I'm not saying that I think Schappele Corby, the 27 year old Australian student given twenty years in an Indonesian prison for possessing 4.1 kilos of marijuana, actually deserves to go to prison. I'm not saying that there weren't serious flaws in the assertions surrounding her arrest, detention and overall motive, including the fact that there was no attempt to conceal the marijuana found in her body-board bag, and that no fingerprints were taken at the crime scene. (Meaning the airport.)

I'm just saying.

When I came to Cambodia the first time, I arrived after a night spent in Malaysia, where I distinctly remember the pilot cheerfully announcing as the plane landed: "We would like to remind you that possession of narcotics carries an automatic death penalty in Malaysia."

Whoa.

Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand do NOT fuck around when it comes to drug possession.

For me, the case of Schappele Corby is tragic either way.

If she was young and stupid and carried some dope in her bag for whatever reason, however unlikely it seems, twenty years in an Indonesian prison seems like cruel and unusual punishment. (Much better than the death penalty that she was predicted to have received, however.)

If she's not guilty, of course, the tragedy is just magnified a thousand degrees.

But the thing is...

There was some international-law-expert-type-of-dude on CNN the other day. He basically said: Look, if you get caught with drugs, in any country in the world, it doesn't matter what you say -- you're going to get nailed. And if you're black or Asian and caught with drugs in Asia, you're fucked.

Meaning, you better have a damn, DAMN good defence ready to save your ass.

I don't think Schappele Corby does.

Her defence is: I don't know how the drugs got there. Somebody must have put them in there at the airport.

Hmmm...

I think this is a likely, probable possibility. I have no doubt it could be the truth.

But the proof?

Some convict in prison says he overheard two guys in jail talking about the case, and how the drugs were slipped in by somebody else.

Hmmm...

Recently Russell Crowe, a fellow Aussie, was quoted as saying that Indonesia should show some consideration, given how much coin Australia had given Indonesia after the recent tsunami.

Not to disagree with Mr.Crowe, who I admire as an actor and who I fear could whip the living shit out of me, but his comment seems to me to be completely irrelevant and totally off-the-mark.

We're talking about somebody who was caught with drugs in a foreign country. She basically has no defence, no tangible proof that somebody else placed the drugs in her bag. If the same thing were to have happened to her in Canada, or the States, or England, the penalty might not have been as harsh, no, but I'm betting she would have served some time. To bring the tsunami into it, to raise it to the level of an international incident, only fans the flames or moral outrage on one side and religious outrage on the other, and such animosity often ignites into thinly-veiled racism.

The same racism that leads Aussies and westerners to condemn those backward Muslim bastards with their hypocritical, inhumane proclamations divorced from reality. The racism that leads Indonesians and other Asians to scorn the morally disrespectful, breast-flaunting westerners who use this sacred land as their own private playpen, carting in whatever disgusting hallucinogens they see fit for their own selfish pleasure.


Distance is tough. Calm, thoughtful analysis is tough. (And I'm not saying I'm providing it. Just trying to think about it, that's all...)

I have no doubt that the Indonesian courts are not bastions of democracy and fair play. But what are they supposed to do? If they let her go, then what's to stop a wave of foreigners coming in, smuggling drugs, and then using the 'Schappele Corby' defence: It wasn't me. If they let her go, then what if it happens again, with a Thai or a New Zealander or a Canuck? Do they negotiate with the governments of every relevant country for the release of every foreigner charged with any crime? Down that way legal madness lies.

A case like this exposes a number rifts in who we are as humans, in what we expect the legal system to do, in how countries can and should intrude on each other's internal legal systems.

I don't think the judgement is fair, and I don't know if she's guilty. As I said, either way, it's a terrible, unimaginable case.

All of this talk of legal diplomacy and corrupt courts and diplomatic reticence obscures the fact that there is, in fact, a young woman at the centre of this maelstrom about to enter an Indonesian prison for two decades. She is human, torn and wounded.

I have no answers.

And I may change my feelings tomorrow.

I wish I knew more about the law. Australian law. Indonesian law. International law. How drug smugglers operate, and how they target their victims. I wish I knew more about human nature. Then my spouting off at the mouth would carry more weight, in my own mind at any rate. (The danger of having easy access to a blog is that it gives you carte blanche to blab about anything you want, no matter how ill-informed you may be.)

For the moment, I would like to look in a dictionary right about now for the exact, definitive definition of the word 'justice', but I'm almost afraid of what I would find, what abstract and ephemeral meanings would be offered and how little, if any relevance or applicability they would have to this particular woman in that specific cell, alone.

And waiting.

TAKE ME BACK

Last night while running down by the river I saw a Khmer man lean over and pick up something that looked like a stick, or a block of wood, or a partially-tree-like object, in any event, and I felt that familiar pain in my gut, the result of neither excess water nor the lingering soreness in my ribs from my tumble-to-the-ground of two days previous but, instead, a psychic reminder of the past that pops up every now and then to remind me to keep my eyes open at all times.

As I've sometimes mentioned on this blog, about four years ago, when I was living in Sagami-Ono, Japan, a crazy homeless fuck with a two-by-four whacked me in the stomach in broad daylight at my local train station while I was walking and reading the first volume of Robert Caro's brilliant biography of Lyndon Johnson.

(Jesus Christ, does that sound precious. Reading and walking and reading an award-winning biography. What a wanna-be intellectual geek you are, Spencer. But it's the truth! I sometimes read when I walk. Still.)

The man was an ethnic Korean; it was the time of the World Cup, and I was white (still am), and perhaps his anger at his own displaced, outsider status in Japan finally got the best of him.

I didn't see it coming. I was whacked -- not mafia-style, no, but whacked, nevertheless. I went down. He stood above me, waving that stick like the lunatic he was. Then he dropped it to the ground and went to take a seat by the escalators.

To make a long story short, I called the police, was taken down to the station, and the man was hauled into custody. At the risk of being repetitive, the translator asked me an extremely odd but apt question:

"Do you forgive him?"

I asked him to repeat the question. His English was good, more than good, but perhaps I'd misunderstood him, what with the accent and all.

"Do you forgive him?"

Apparently, in Japanese law, if the victim forgives the perpetrator, that holds some sway with the deciding judge.

I thought about it.

And I realized that I truly, sincerely did not blame the man. Why? Because he was, quite clearly, a fucking nut. Out of his gourd. Gone. He wasn't some punk Japanese kid who hated gaijin and wanted to get even; he was a loon.

I said:

"I don't know if I forgive him or not. I just don't want him there tomorrow, waiting to hit somebody else."

And that was that.

But here we are, three, four years later, and I still remember that body blow. It's my only real encounter with violence. It still stings. Not physically, no, but I'm telling you: violence is scary.

That may sound like an obvious assertion.

It's not.

In a world where KILL BILL is held up as the pinnacle of cinematic art, I think that statement needs to be reiterated: Violence. Fucking. Hurts.

I'm not saying I don't like KILL BILL; I do, and I've liked a lot of violent films. They have their own aesthetic and purpose, like any other genre. (And, incidentally, I still believe NATURAL BORN KILLERS is one of the few films ever made that has maturely looked at what violence is and where it has come from, where it resides within us, and why -- albeit in a satiric, decidely unmature fashion. Hence its brilliance.)

Still.

All that bitching and moaning about us becoming desensitized to violence?

It's true.

Real violence is bloody and messy and stupid and painful. I've seen two dead bodies here in Cambodia -- a moto driver laying in his own blood, and a little kid, a corpse, who'd been struck by a car. Both of them in embarrassingly awkward poses of death. In Japan, I was waiting to get off the train at my station when the doors opened, and the girl standing in front of me, young and pretty, simply fainted, and she did not put out her arms to stop her fall, and she landed on her face, and I can still hear the concrete-smack, and can still see the way the blood from her face splattered like a McDonald's ketchup packet being stepped on.

Real violence hurts. It's ugly and nasty and short and wounding.

I don't think about the dude who whacked me every day, or even every week.

But every month?

Yeah, I think I do.

Shuffling along on a late-winter day, the sun bright, in the safest country in the world. That was me. If the guy had whacked me in the face with his jagged wooden bat, I would have lost an eye, or worse. One blow to the head? I could have been killed.

I won't belabor it anymore.

The point is, yesterday I saw a Cambodian man reach for something solid on the side of the road.

That's it. Simple. An everyday act.

But it took me back, is what it did. Took me back to that random and sudden rush of pain and confusion.

I don't want to go back there any time soon.

But I'm keeping my eyes open.

TEACHING HEMINGWAY

When I was teaching some literature classes at the University of Cambodia a year and a half ago I often used the Hemingway short story A CLEAN, WELL LIGHTED PLACE as an entry point, letting the students know that the author was a brawny, macho fisherman and hunter who had revolutionized the art of twentieth century writing, influenced an entire generation of authors, and finished off his illustrious life by aiming a shotgun square at his skull and blowing his brains out.

Most Cambodians have little exposure to any kind of literature in their own language, let alone English, so I thought I needed to start their education off with a bang. (So to speak.)

Probably a mistake.

Here's why.

The plot of A CLEAN, WELL LIGHTED PLACE is, well, let's just stop right there. There really isn't a plot. A deaf old man drinks in a cafe somewhere in Europe, probably Spain, reluctant to go home. Two waiters, an older man and a younger man, watch the old man drink. The younger man, being younger, wants to go home early to his wife and young child. The older man, being older, and alone, is in no rush. They gossip about the old man: how he's rich, how he once tried to commit suicide, how he is or isn't wasting everyone's time, all of this written in that strange, slightly off-kilter dialogue that doesn't sound like authentic conversation in the slightest, which is why it has a kind of fundamental truth that our own everyday dialogues lack.

No gunshots. No fights. No demonstrable climaxes and conclusions. Just two waiters talking in a bar as the night gets longer.

I taught the story in a bunch of classes, often reading it to them out loud, just for something different, just because they'd probably never had a story read to them. Reading a story out loud was new for me, too, but it was a short one (hence the term 'short story', Scott, DUH), and it's always nice to have Hemingway rolling off the tongue. And reading it multiple times made me respect old Ernest all the more. What he chooses to leave in. What he omits. What he alludes to. Stunning, really.

It's a great story. Nothing happens and everything happens. It's short and slight and philosophical and human.

Verrrrrry tough to teach, though.

But you'd be surprised.

Most Cambodians are not very analytical thinkers; they are not trained to examine the consequences of actions, the possibilities of one's present course of engagement.

But this was a story. And they know about old people, the old people in their villages who sit around, broken, watching the world go by. They know about grief and loss, cafes and waiters. They can latch on to the physical details of the story and the metaphysical ones as well.

There were a lot of new words in the story, new English words, but not as many as you might think, because Hemingway is not ornate and flowery and show-offy. He uses short sentences and short words. His genius comes from what he leaves out and what lies between the words he does use.

Some students objected to the fact that the deaf old man in the story, so the gossip went, had tried to commit suicide. One shouldn't do that, they believed; one should face one's problems, in this life, and endure.

The interesting thing about many Cambodians is that, being a moral, Buddhist culture, they often view the characters in a story through a moral, Buddhist lens. If a character in a story tried to kill himself, or others, that is clearly wrong, so therefore this is not a good story. If a man slept with a woman not his wife, well, this is immoral, so the story should not be recommended.

But I give them much credit, these old students of mine.

We're talking about nineteen, twenty year old students in Cambodia, reading a Hemingway story in its original English. (Understanding Hemingway back home, for well-educated, middle-class kids on the tail end of their teenage years is no mean feat, let alone for learners of a second language.) Some of them didn't bother, but those who did usually had something to say, and it was usually something interesting. Insightful. Some of them had read the story two or three or four times, diligently underlining the words they didn't understand, looking them up in the dictionary, trying to comprehend.

I'll remember that. All those afternoons. Me, in my white dress shirt, raising my voice, trying to teach Hemingway to a bunch of Cambodian students. The children of genocide. While the air conditioner hummed, and the electric fans did their robotic, rotating dance.

WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Last night while driving to the airport to drop off some friends, in the midst of an early-evening rainstorm that was as pleasant as it was unexpected, a woman approached the taxi looking for money, holding what looked to be a dead baby in her arms.

I'm not sure if the child was actually deceased. It was cloudy and dark, and the rain was persistent on the windshield, but still, there was an air of finality about the kid draped across her hands.

I'm telling you, this country...

Sometimes it's tough to take, is what I'm saying.

A squeegee kid in downtown Toronto wiping down your front windshield to make an extra coin is annoying, yes, but it doesn't usually force you into existential conundrums. But a woman wielding a child who, if not dead, is at least a)under age one, and b) seriously, almost mortally sick tapping on your window, looking for change, does, in fact, force you to question the workings of the universe.

This is a somewhat random tangent, but I was reminded, for reasons that are sensible, perhaps, to me and me alone, of a book called EYES WIDE OPEN, a memoir of Stanley Kubrick's final film written by his co-writer on the picture. It's an interesting read, although how accurate it is I can't quite judge; there are transcripts of endless late-night conversations between the filmmaker and the screenwriter, but I remain suspicious of their authenticity. Did he tape record these conversations? Are they half-remembered reconstructions from a vantage point of two years later? This remains unsaid.

Point is, the writer remarks on how he brought up the film version of SCHINDLER'S LIST, after Kubrick commented that there were no good films on the Holocaust. (Little known fact: Kubrick was actually Jewish -- but, like Norman Mailer, is one of the few twentieth century famous artists who did not make Judaism itself centrepieces of their art. Another little known fact: Kubrick, who was notorious for his refusal to fly, leading even his Vietnam-era picture FULL METAL JACKET to be shot in England, where the American filmmaker had settled, actually had a pilot's license. This kind of trivia fascinates me. Especially because I think Kubrick is a genius.)

"You think SCHINDLER'S LIST was about the Holocaust?" Kubrick asked. "SCHINDLER'S LIST was about six thousand Jews that lived. The Holocaust was about six million Jews that died."

And I can't for the life of me ascertain why, precisely, I thought of that comment last night, watching this poor woman with her probably-dead child knock on a taxi window, perhaps using the corpse for sympathy.

But I think it has something do with failure.

Most people's lives are failures. Most people's lives are wretched. I'm not saying there isn't joy, and family, and pockets of contentment. It's just, after two years of living in a country that is the tenth worst in the world for women and children to live in, I've come to the conclusion that most people's lives are, in fact, very, very morbid and short and painful. It's just a fact. We're insulated from it back home, sheltered from it, but here, man, it confronts you. It shoves a dead baby in your face and says: Help me, motherfucker. Help me.

I think Kubrick was on to something. I'm not saying that I don't like SCHINDLER'S LIST, because I do think that it's a great film, and Spielberg's a great filmmaker, one who consistently shines the light into people's lives and elevates them.

But Kubrick was a darker soul. He understood that the true story of life in all its macabre glory is not about those who succeed. It's about all of those who fail. Is to make a film about the Holocaust which highlights the survival of a few immoral considering that the multitude that perished?

I don't know. I don't think so. Art has many chambers; some feature redemption, while others embrace nihilism.

But either way, sometimes life -- not often, but sometimes -- trumps art and invokes emotions that can't be replicated on a silver screen.

I was in a car last night, headed for the airport. A lady approached the car, in the rain, holding what may or may not have been a dead child, hoping that it would score her some extra cash.

I can only quote Morgan Freeman quoting Hemingway at the end of SEVEN, which I, in turn, have quoted before, yes, but man, it seems more and more apt. It's something that I have to cling to every now and then, when the night is long and the moon is gone and I realize that life is indifferent, absolutely, relentlessly indifferent, to who we are and what we want. Life couldn't give a fuck.

The Hemingway quote: "The world is a beautiful place, and it's worth fighting for."

Morgan Freeman said: "I agree with the second part."

BRAIN DRAIN, GATORADE STYLE (OR, AT LEAST, AUSTRALIAN GATORADE STYLE)

After returning from my run this morning I realized that I wanted some Gatorade, or Adams Ale (an Australian form of Gatorade), but I remembered that I didn't have any left, that I had checked the fridge last night and it was Gatorade-free, but something in the back of my brain, or perhaps in the centre, told me that that was a lie, that Gatorade existed somewhere in the apartment, independent and fruity and good.

My brain was right.

On the windowsill in my bedroom was an almost empty bottle of 'blue chill' Adams Ale. (I think that's what it's called. Blue something, at any rate. It tastes, to use technical language for a moment, 'fucking awesome', like the blue freezies you used to get when you were a kid.)

But this is the thing. I thought that I didn't have any left, because there wasn't any in the fridge. And I had forgotten that I had a bottle on the windowsill, waiting. But I hadn't completely forgotten, no, because something inside of my head was telling me that my initial conclusion was wrong.

So my question is:

Why does the brain do that?

I mean, physically: what's going on in the circuits of my head that enables me to half-way glimpse and remember an already existing energy drink, while the other half of my brain denies its existence?

It's those little quirks that fascinate me. (Of course, I still find Stallone's comedic performance in OSCAR fascinating, too, but I'm telling you -- it's better than you'd think.) Ever since I watched THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS on my friend's VCR, the first VCR of anyone I'd ever known, I've been hooked on questions regarding any and all gray matter.

(And you should check out that flick, THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS, if you get a chance. Great Steve Martin. Steve Martin when he was still a 'wild and crazy guy', and before he'd descended into his BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE/CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN phase. And did you know that they're actually, sincerely making CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN II? And the weird thing about Martin is, he's a pretty good writer; he writes these witty, satirical pieces for THE NEW YORKER, and then makes unfunny movies that he must KNOW are unfunny. I don't mind that they're sentimental; PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES is sentimental to the extreme, but it's also funny as hell. I'm not totally begrudging the guy; I'm just saying, he's better than the movies he's been putting out there, as his writing proves. He needs to get back to his roots. And do you see the random roads our brains can take us on when we're not paying attention?!? Next thing you know I'll be writing about FULL HOUSE...)

Or yesterday:

I grabbed my housemates' bottle of water instead of mine. Except that it wasn't water, it was Crystal Light lemon drink, and so when I took a swig of the Crystal Light, thinking it was water, I almost spit the stuff out all over my lap. Why? Because my brain had prepared my lips for the taste of water. Instead, my lips tasted lemon. And my tongue reacted. (Tongues have a way of doing that.)

Our brains should come with instruction manuals, like model airplanes. They don't. All we get are parents. (I guess that's somewhat of a compensation.)

The older I get, the more fascinating the inner-workings of the brain get. Are they autonomous entities, these brains of ours? Are they separated from our soul, or even our mind (if you're not soul-inclined)? How much power does a brain have? If the power is immense, as I suspect it is, what accounts for the longevity of FULL HOUSE? (Damn. I knew that, having entered my consciousness, my brain frame, that FULL HOUSE would rear its ugly little head. That show was on for like eight years. I mean, come ON. One, two years, fine. But EIGHT? Couldn't all of the brain power associated with coming up with unfunny one-liners for stepford-like kids have been put to better use?)

We focus on the 'big questions' when examining the brain: notions of intellectual capabilities and existential possibilities.

But the smaller ones are just as intriguing, I think.

What the brain chooses to reveal to us, and why. What we remember, and forget, and remember again. How the fresh smell of newly-cut grass reminds us of a day in childhood that was random and common, but somehow is still alive, restive and patient, lodged somewhere in the backs of our cranial compartments.

I was going to say something else, something vivid and profound, but I've forgotten what I was going to say.

I'm blaming my brain.

(If I remember, you'll be the first to know. Maybe even before I know it.)

WHERE YOU ARE IS WHERE IT'S AT, or THE RANDOM WALK PROBLEM

George Polya, a Hungarian mathematician, liked to take walks around the local park. During this circular route he kept bumping into the girlfriend of a colleague of his. The colleague, quite understandably, was more than a little peeved; he thought Polya was tricking to pick up his woman. Polya thought: Well, wait a minute --if I'm walking around the same place enough times, and she's standing still, it's inevitable that we'll bump into each other.

Thus was born the Random Walk problem: If you walk around enough in an infinite grid, you will return to the same point over and over again.

(The above anecdote was found in a book review of a new mathematical book atwww.bostonglobe.com, which, in turn, was found via the always interesting www.artsandlettersdaily.com.)

Sounds simple. I guess it is simple.

But western culture is obsessed with moving on, moving forward, gaining some form of 'closure'.

Eastern culture (if there is such a monolithic thing) is much more, well, adaptive and inclusive in its sensibilities.

I'm reading a book called FIRE IN THE LAKE: THE VIETNAMESE AND THE AMERICANS IN VIETNAM, by Frances Fisher, and it raises an interesting point. (One among many.) Part of the reason why the U.S. got their butt kicked royally during the Vietnam war revolved around this notion of karmic inevitability, if you will. (And I'm hoping you will.)

The Vietnamese, being an ancient culture, saw minor conflicts and major wars as being an inevitable part of the cycle of history, a recurring phenomenon that was as unavoidable as it was volatile. The U.S., being a relatively young and anxious whippersnapper of a country, fretted incessantly about the 'domino theory' of communism; they were obsessed with stopping the onslaught of a vague, ominpresent threat that had very little relation to the Vietnamese reality. The Vietnamese were willing to be sly, and patient, and unbreakable; they had inhabited that land for thousands of years, and would do so for thousands more, and they would not yield to America's collective military force. They understood that they could (metaphorically, if not literally) wander their land for hundreds of years, but conflict would always be there, war would always be there -- if not for them, then for their sons and daughters, and grandchildren, and their heirs. There was no sense being impatient; karma's wheel would spin again and again, sometimes stopping on death, other times on defeat, but spin it would, regardless of communism and democracy, Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson. They would wait it out.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Perhaps Polya was right. If you walk long enough and far enough, eventually you'll end up where you started from. Maybe not physically, no, but physical journeys are only a fraction of the myriad travels we embark on. Who we are, and what we pass on, derives from what we do, and where we go. But the starting point and ending point is so blatantly obvious that we all too often overlook it in our necessary search for the 'other' and the 'destination'.

Perhaps all of our voyaging, all of our shipwrecks, have a larger, cosmic pattern, one that leads us away from our identity and yet somehow, at some point, tempts us back into a new yet archetypally primitive version of who we always were.

In the end, after the trekking is complete, we can only arrive at ourselves.

WHY ME?

Why me, God?

Well, yes -- why you?

Why am I 'me' and you 'you'? Why aren't you 'me', or vice versa? And why aren't any of us Dr.Phil but Dr.Phil himself? I mean, couldn't we all be Dr.Phil if we really, really wanted to?

This is the thing. The Cambodia thing. The why-am-I-a-rich-white-foreigner-while-everyone-else-here-is-living-and-breathing-an-impoverished-miserable-state thing.

(I'm not sure what the 'Dr.Phil' thing is, truth be told. But I'll let you know when I figure it out.)

If you're not careful, if you're not conscientious, if you're not keeping track of your own moral faculties, or lack thereof, it's very easy, almost convenient, to become so accustomed to the poverty existing here that you just let it slide right over you, like a front-lawn sprinkler on a warm summer's day. So fine and fresh that you barely even notice it.

Take today. At lunch. Me eating a chicken sandwich on a sidewalk cafe overlooking the river. (The Jungle Bar cafe, in case anyone's interested. And yes, the sandwich wasn't half-bad.) A parade of beggars and dudes selling sunglasses and kids selling papers dutifully ply their trade, ritualistically ask you if you would like some shades, a paper, a shoeshine. There are also the obligatory number of really, really screwed up kids. I don't mean mentally; I mean physically.

One of them approached me for some coin today. (Or cash, rather, since there are no coins in Cambodia.) He had no arms, this kid. He had no legs, this kid. He had stumps for both sets of limbs. And he hopped off his chair, moseyed his way across the pavement to ask me for a little money. I slipped him 500 riel, placing the bill carefully between the stumps of his arms. He smiled and thanked and was on his way.

And I thought nothing of it.

A kid with no arms and no legs shuffling his way across the dirty street like a crab, and I give him money, and he moves on.

And I think nothing of it.

I don't know whether to commend myself or slap myself in the face.

The point is, you get used to it. You just do. You get used to being the person who has a spare bit of change; you grow accustomed to being the man, the one, the person who lives above all the rest of the poor and the meek who actually come from this land, this Cambodia.

Maybe it's a good thing -- me being aware. Me, occasionally, every now and then, acknowleding, to myself and others (namely you) that the wretched exist, and, surprise surprise: they're not so wretched after all.

Still.

I sometimes wonder: Why me, sipping a glass of bottled water, as the limbless boy wonder ekes out his meagre trade?

I'm not sure.

But it is what it is. Perhaps that's what I'm learning as I'm growing: it is what it is.

I do know that the boy with no arms and no legs doesn't wonder. He just flashes his grin, fights with his brother, grips the paper money between his stumps and under his chin as best as he can, and then moves on.

After all, the day his hot and and the day is long, and there are many more foreigners just down the way. No sense in wasting any time.

SHOCK AND AWE

'Shock and awe' may be the specific words that the U.S. military has decided to use to designate particular aerial campaigns of destruction in Iraq, but I felt similar emotions while watching the University of Cambodia's talent show last night. (And with less debilitating side-effects, though hopefully as long-lasting.)

'Shock', in the sense that the kids pulled it off. They put on the show, a four-hour show, and it was entertaining and heartfelt and amateurish and wonderful. Khmer traditional dance, Khmer love songs, western rock songs, a fashion show featuring casual and formal clothes -- all were included, to the delight of the Cambodian audience, who showed their appreciation with suitably rambunctious applause and indicated their boredom in another typically Khmer way, by talking incessantly through whoemever happened to be trying to get their attention.

'Awe', in the realization: They're just like me.

This is an emotion I've felt again and again, in Japan and Cambodia, and its resiliency, its ability to sting and prod me, may have something to do with how brainwashed we are back home. Led to believe that other people in other lands are fundamentally different.

Don't get me wrong.

Khmers and Japanese most certainly ARE different from westerners, in ways both comical and profound.

But FUNDAMENTALLY different?

I don't think so.

Watching the exhausted performers after the show, most of them in their late-teens to early twenties, I was struck by how, well, familiar they seemed. Smiling contentedly for celebratory photos. Laughing. Letting off steam. On the radio western pop played, and I heard the familiar refrain of the song that seemed to haunt my final year of high school, 'What's going on'. (You know the one: "I said hey -- what's going on...') While it played, and as I watched the students smile and pose, smile and pose, I felt a weird little inadvertent time-slip take place, as if I was the main character in Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, the one who bops back and forth between various incarnations of himself.

Where was I? St.Catharines or Phnom Penh? How old was I? Eighteen or twenty-nine? Were these Canadians or Cambodians? Did I matter?

Shock and awe. I'm surprised more people haven't piped up about the inappropriateness of using a word like 'awe' to describe an action that decimates people's existences on impact.

If destroying human lives via mechanical means needs a slogan, well, I guess it works as well as any other. But 'awe' should be reserved for sunsets, or the milky way, or Dr.Phil's luminescent dome. It shouldn't be utilized to highlight how well metal can destroy flesh.

I know that war is sometimes necessary. I know that casualties are inevitable. I know that bombs work.

But I also know that those students I watched last night, disciplined in their work then released in their enthusiasm, were part of some kind of small, incremental legacy. For when I was three, four years old, those same students' parents and families were living (or not living) through the Khmer Rouge era. They were a part of a nationwide mass slaugther. And now their kids, only twenty years later, were celebrating after a Sunday afternoon talent show, in the centre of a city that lay deserted only two decades before. They had more in common (in some fundamentally light-hearted and human way) with my Grade 13 Drama class that put on a play than with their dying and imprisoned Cambodian brethren of a generation past.

That means something.

Something worthy of the words 'shock' and 'awe'.

WHO THE HELL IS MARILYN MILLER?

Who the hell is Marilyn Miller?

I haven’t the foggiest.

It’s her name, however, that is scrawled on the title page of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles, an old Japanese novel (in translation) that I picked up at a used book shop here in Phnom Penh.

This edition of the text was published in 1968. This was pre-Scott, possibly even pre-Pauly Shore, though I’d have to check on that one. My parents were twenty. George Lucas was figuring out if his award-winning student films meant that he had some kind of a career as a filmmaker. Vietnam was heating up, and Cambodia was in the beginning stages of being torn apart. A long time ago.

And there was Marilyn. Alone at her desk, perhaps, or riding a bus, or waiting for the chicken to cook. Japanese literature was not that popular in the west thirty-five years ago; she must have been literate, educated, possibly even a teacher. Perhaps she had been to Japan. She might even have spoken Japanese herself, though that, too, is somewhat unlikely.

I love finding books with inscriptions on them from real, ordinary, sloppy and wonderful human beings. I bought a book awhile back by C.S.Lewis about religion, his favorite topic, and there was an inscription on the cover page, and I googled the name and lo and behold, the bearer of that name was a preacher out in Utah. (I felt like emailing her, to tell her that I have a copy of a book that she read in the mid 1970’s. Could be fun. But I worried that she might try to convert me, and so I resisted the urge. (And, come to think of it, this was the same bookshop where I picked up my other-inscribed book, too. Perhaps there are entire bookshops devoted simply to books that have hand-written inscriptions on their cover pages. I could spend days in a bookshop like that, reading the messages, imagining their lives. Not just days – I could spend my whole life in a shop like that.)

I’m not sure why pen-and-ink inscriptions from ordinary folk hold such a strange spell over me. Perhaps it’s because books are so personal; for a brief period of time, but an honest period of time, are thoughts merge with the author’s. We become literary hermaphrodites, for lack of a better word. We write our name, usually in pen, sometimes in pencil, on the front page of a book, and it does…something. Something solid. What, I don’t know. But it makes us feel part of something solid and real and concrete.

It’s the same reason we inscribe books to others, to put down in print our love and our friendship and our goodwill. Recommending a book to someone, inscribing a book to someone, implies that we have considered the contours of another’s mental landscape, and judged that this book will somehow find a home on that psychic plane. Which is why it’s somewhat sad to find an old book in a bookshop bearing an inscription – a birthday gift, or a Christmas one, or a graduation present. The receiver has read the book, presumably, then sold it. Nothing wrong with that. I guess. But does the givee realize this is what happened? That something chosen with, if not love, at least attention, was, at some future point in time, discarded, traded for cash?

Stupid thoughts. I know. But still. We can only be in one place at one time, but the books we’ve read, the books we’ve taken in the taxi and on the boat and inside the detention hall, they can travel. They can glide. Almost forty years ago a woman named Marilyn Miller bought a book, and forty years later, I hold it in my hands. I smell it. It retains its power. That means something. I don’t know what, but it does. I feel this to be true, and I believe it.

Is she still alive, this Marilyn?

I hope she's out there.

I hope she’s had a good life. There may have been heartache: lost loves, broken children, cancer. I suppose that’s inevitable. She may still be alive, somewhere in the American Midwest, or in a retirement home in Newfoundland, or on a cattle farm in western Australia. Even as I write these words, she could be watching television, cooking dinner, arguing with her second husband, who she doesn’t love as much as the first, no, but he is better in bed, she’ll give him that much (grudgingly). She may even be beginning to read another book, and she might even be writing her name in the same clean, legible script on the title page.

And who knows?

That very same book could somehow end up in my hands one day.

Or in yours.

THE UNGRIPPABLE BEANBAG

Nobody ever told me how tough life is. Nobody ever pushed me down onto a slightly-ratty but still-plush beanbag and handed me a Flintstones glass of ice-cold lemonade and said: "Life is actually pretty tough, kid, so you better get a grip."

I'm not blaming anyone. That's what you get for having great parents, a comfortable life, four walls and three square. You are provided with a foundation. Most people don't even have that. It's just that the foundation often has cracks or holes that can't be filled. Then you have to dig deep and grib the beanbag and hang on. (You ever try gripping a beanbag? It ain't easy.)

Have you seen Spartan, with Val Kilmer? (I don't mean 'with' Val Kilmer, meaning sitting beside him. I mean, he's in the movie. Though if you did see it sitting beside him, that would be cool, too.) It's a thriller written by David Mamet, which will mean everything to some of you and nothing to most of you.

Mamet is a playwright, screenwriter, director. He creates his own language and his own world in which that language operates. Kilmer plays a Secret Service agent whose job it is to protect the President's daughter. She is kidnapped. His job, quite simply, is simple: Get the girl. Find the girl. At one point, when 'all is lost', as they say, he acquiesces. He abandons his mission. A woman close to the daughter implores him to continue. When he excuses himself by saying that it's not his job anymore, it's 'their' responsibility, she cuts him short: "There is no 'they'," she says. He had a mission -- to find the girl. He hasn't accomplished it. End of story.

It's a smart and witty and brilliant film. At its core lies what is at the core of most of us -- our sense of self, of what we must do, and the inevitable obstacles that lie in wait to thwart our plans.

The truth is, there are a lot of 'theys', and none at all. In the end, there is you. There is what you are putting out into the world. 'They' will not help you. All we can do is accept responsibility, as hard as that is, as fruitless as that is, and move on. Move forward. When you find yourself blaming 'they', 'them', 'the boss', 'the wife', the battle has been lost. You have forgot your mission. You have acquiesced. For even if by some stroke of Satan there is a 'they', it is irrelevant.

Only you can live through your life, and only you can change it.

(And I sometimes hate getting advice given to me, so take all of the above with a grain of salt. But sometimes it's nice to know that it's not just you -- everybody else thinks life is really, really tough, too, so remember that. Remember that the cool guy in Starbucks tapping away on his laptop who seems to have it all together is just as scared shitless as you are. He is. I swear.)

In that spirit:


Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game play it with intensity -- play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word 'engagement.' Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked 'no exit', yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.

-- Robert S. DeRopp
The Master Game


If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before! We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience, a third and fourth 'wind'. We find amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed, because habitually we never push through the obstruction of fatigue.

-- William James



Why should we be in such a desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

-- Henry David Thoreau


If you don't change the direction you're going, you're likely to end up where you're headed.

-- Chinese proverb


Man is not the sum of what he has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.

-- Sartre


If you come to fork in the road, take it.

-- Yogi Berra

THE PEPSI GIRLS

I walked by them again yesterday -- the Pepsi Girls.

I call them that because they are the ones who line the streets at almost each and every corner, glumly sitting before an array of Pepsi and 7-Up bottles filled with what is obviously not any kind of soda known to man. Said substance is yellow and greasy and the glass from the bottles often catches the glare of the midday sun, snatches it, giving both the liquid inside and the bottles themselves a vivid, almost pristine glow.

(Notice I said 'soda' a few sentences back. Canadians NEVER say soda; only Americans do. Canadians just say 'pop'. And why is that? In the fifties, it was called 'soda pop', right? So why did the Yanks grab the 'soda' and the Canucks grab the 'pop'? Who decides these kind of linguistic rights? I'm trying to a be man of the people, all people, so I'm including both phrases here.)

No, gasoline is what's in the bottles. These little make-shift stands are where the motodops stop to fill up their bikes. (There are gas stations in Phnom Penh, yes, but they're usually for the big cars driven by the corrupt government officials.)

And usually, almost always, it's the girls doing the selling -- young girls, teenage girls, sitting under the hot Cambodian sun hour after hour, day after day, their heads wrapped in kromas to keep out the sun. (Does that actually work?)

I don't drive a moto. If I need to get somewhere, I just hold up my hand and a moto will stop and take me for a ride. (Both literally, and, sometimes, monetarily, too.) There's no reason on earth for me to buy gasoline from them.

And yet, sometimes I feel like giving them money. The Pepsi girls. Why shouldn't I? I sometimes give money to homeless people, beggars, wandering children. Why shouldn't I give a little bit of cash to these young ladies that are wasting their teenage years trying to support their families?

Living in a country like Cambodia is a test of one's altruism. A test of one's sanity, too. You can't give to everyone, so, if you are inclined to give, you have to choose. And even this process of deliberation, this conscious decision to give to person A but not to person B, to judge who is the poorer, the weakest, the neediest, this whole process sickens me, in some ways, gnaws away at my sense of self. These girls need an education; they need a future. They do not need a few stray dollars from a guilt-ridden westerner.

It is guilt that compels us, isn't it? Whether it's money for the tsunami-victims, or money for the Pepsi girls, it's all wrapped up in a big-red ribbon of guilt. I have what they do not; I am full while they are empty. This is not right, so I must give.

I will see the Pepsi Girls again. (I see them every day.) They're not looking for money from me; I don't have a bike, or a car, or any need for a bottle of gasoline, so their all-too-freuent glares at me are stares that they would give any foreigner. They are not looking for hand-outs.

But still, the urge. To prove that I'm a good person. To prove that I'm a caring person. To prove that I will give while others do not.

A human urge, yes, but a selfish one?

I'm not sure.

But I'm not sure that it matters, either.

Whether I give or not, whether my coin greases their palms or not, the Pepsi Girls will still be crouched on their plastic stools tomorrow, or the day after that, or a week from now, or a decade from now.

Either them, or their younger sisters.

Or, in time, their daughters.

The only real difference will be the shape and colour of the Pepsi logo gracing each and every bottle.

A trivial but strangely heartbreaking thought:

Pepsi's logo doesn't change all that often -- only once every twenty, thirty years, right?

Right now, at this very instant, for reasons I can't quite articulate but that seem perfectly natural and appropriate (to me), that little fact saddens me.

It saddens me a lot.

SHADOWS AND ILLUMINATION

Last night at my old school. Me, visiting friends. Friends, rehearsing. Watching the last of the students clean up their gear as they finished practicing for the first annual (?) University of Cambodia Business Marketing Students Fashion and Entertainment Show. (Or something like that.) A makeshift stage, 'L' shaped, occupying the centre portion of the upstairs conference centre. The lights, dim. The floor, cluttered. Empty Coke bottles. Paper wrappers. The remnants of Cambodian clean-up habits. Strange. Drink, eat, drop. A custom I've never gotten used to.

Elegaic. That's the word. A good word, too, I think, one of those words that makes me think that the English language does, in fact, have certain pieces of vocabulary that rival the depth of meaning and insinuation found in Japanese. Shining through the windows that lined the far wall I could see the random, shifting flow of traffic's residue; the glow from golden headlights cast their roving arcs across the contours of the room on an intermittent basis. Shadows, mixed with illumination.

Some students changed into streetclothes behind closed doors, behind my back. Behind: muffled, excited voices. In front: only silence. Emptiness. I felt both solitary and content. (Is one, in fact, dependent on the other? I'm not sure.)

For a few moments, less than a minute, I was alone in the conference hall. Dozens of folding chairs lined in rows. An empty lectern, looking forlorn, almost hurt. (No speaker would be coming tonight.) On Sunday, there would be students and parents and teachers and curious spectators, all eager to see the fashion, the skits, the singing, the dancing, but for now the room was empty. Almost expectant.

This is somewhat new in Cambodia, this random assemblage of young, untrained talent. So is the discipline that's required -- the practices, the repetitions, the sense of focus and intentness that I see in my old students' eyes when they go over their dance moves, one by one, again, one more time. They've never worked for anything before; they've never been pushed before. And they are responding. Elated.

I left the room. Soon the room would be completely dark. It felt like the last episode of some sitcom that has extended its expiry date for far too long, that final episode where the main characters leave their house/apartment/school behind, taking one last, lingering look at the place they called home.

I've always loved those episodes.

BIG WILLIE STYLE

I've finally figured out the reason why Shakespeare has frightened me so much. It's not the erudite vocabulary (though the words are certainly flowery and alluring), and it's not the convoluted plots that wander from here to there, through winding narrative backroads that loop in on one another (though they certainly do that, too).
No, the scary thing about Shakespeare is this: It's all conversations.

That's right -- it's the dialogue that does me in. (Even the all to0 frequent monologues are, in fact, dialogues, with the audience as co-conspirators.) And considering that ALL of Shakespeare's plays, (and all plays in general, for that matter) are dialogue, that means I either conquer my fears or head on over to the Judy Blume section of the library for once and for all.

Of course, I'm in a wounded state. I just made it through (barely) THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, mostly because a) I realized I hadn't tackled old Willie in a long, long, time and b)I saw a copy of the DVD of the new MERCHANT OF VENICE featuring Al Pacino as Shylock in the video store, and I want to see it, I do, but I also want to underSTAND it when I watch it.

Having finished the play, I can attest that I comprehended, tops, twenty, twenty-five percent of what went down. (It was only while reading the critical notes at the back of the text that I realized: Oh. This was a comedy. Somehow the jokes went RIGHT over my head.)

It's the dialogue, see.

In real life, we talk to communicate. As do Shakespeare's characters, of course, but they communicate in verse and in riddle, in poems and in parallelograms, it seems like, and I'll be damned if I can ultimately figure out what they're saying, to themselves or each other. It's poetry, is what it is, rich and full and evocative. It's not the way that people have ever spoken to each other in the history of the world, or at least in the history of EVERYBODY LOVES RAMOND. (Never seen it, heard it's good, r.i.p.)

But I guess that's the point. We go to the theatre, we go to the movies, for something more-than-life. We go to the theatre to see language elevated, to see life elevated.

Shakespeare's plays provide that. They hint at what life could be and might have been like, in a denser time.

They should be watched, I think, to be fully comprehended; they were meant to be performed, after all, not read. Right now Denzel Washington is playing Brutus in JULIUS CEASAR, and man oh man would that be a sight to see. (Included in the cast is Canadian Shakespearan great Colm Feore, who also played the bad guy in THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, but don't hold that against him; I saw Feore performing CEASAR in Stratford, Ontario, during my second year of high school, minus the Denzel.) Reading the play is difficult enough; I can't imagine performing it, night after night. Then would be the time when Shakespeare's words came truly to life; then would be the time when you could appreciate, truly and deeply, what the words can and must do. (I can't imagine how Shakespeare is translated. I would LOVE to know Japanese well enough to read Shakespeare in Japanese. I'm tempted to spend the rest of my life doing just that -- studying Japanese more so I can understand Shakespeare in another, ulterior context, and I'm halfway serious about that. But maybe it's better I don't. There was a Japanese translator who committed suicide after trying to translate Faulkner into Japanese, so perhaps some things are best left a mystery.)

If there was a Shakespeare. Many people think he didn't even exist, that the dude who wrote the plays was Marlowe, or the Queen of England, or an amalgamation of a dozen other playwrights. A new book by Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields is the latest in a line of texts backing up this claim.

I'm all for the discussion. Bring it on. Keep forcing stiffs like me to be interested in this guy, because even though it hurts like hell to read his stuff, and even though my brain feels tired and aggravated after a twenty-minute session with the words (and what words they are!), there is a resonance, an aftertaste, that promises better and longer feasts to come, if I endure a little longer.

YOU, TOO, CAN LEARN FROM A NUDE CZECH SUPERMODEL CLINGING TO A TREE

It's not often that a nude Czech supermodel clutches to a tree for eight hours while the aftereffects of a tsunami continue to ravage and torment the people and places that swirl and twirl around her precarious perch. If that were me, and I were a nude supermodel, clutching for dear life to a submerged tree on a completely submerged beach in Thailand, it would totally make me think about life a little bit.

(I mean, that episode of Family Ties where Alex's life-long friend died in a car accident and Alex spent the whole episode sequestered in a psychiatrist's office made think about life, too, but this was different. And I'm not saying that I haven't been a nude supermodel in the past; I'm just not one now. That period of my life is over, for better or worse. And I do have a slight connection to the world of fully-clothed supermodels, given that Linda Evangelista grew up in my hometown -- St.Catharines, Ontario-- and the street I lived on for eight years was called Evangelista Court, named after her family. So between my nude supermodelling days in the past, and the whole Evangelista-hometown-old street connection, I can totally relate the supermodel in the tree.)

Petra Nemcova was on Larry King Live yesterday. She's the aformentioned nude supermodel who survived the tsunami while her fiancee, a disarmingly ordinary looking guy, perished. While watching the show, I was struck by her goodwill, her attitude, her positive view of life, her tenacity. Since most supermodels I've ever seen have been stuck-up bitches, I was blown away by how damn, well, nice she was. After every question taken from the callers she would smile genuinely and say: "Thank-you very much for your question." That sounds simple. It is simple. But the simple things are often what we humans leave behind in our race towards the more important stuff in life, like flat-screen TVs and the latest version of the I-pod.

And then I was struck by why and how I was struck. She was civil, polite, generous with her answers and her insights. After one caller asked a roundabout question that seemed to take forever, Larry, being 74 and cranky (despite being married to a gorgeous blonde Mormon) was clearly pissed, asking repeatedly: "What's your question, sir?" But Petra (I can call her that cuz we're tight) had alread heard the question, had been listening, and she answered, clearly and sympathetically. Maybe her nonchalantly generous attitude stems from her miraculous survival, or from the fact that she grew up poor in communist Czechoslovakia. I felt a little bit sad to be moved simply at how nice a person was, because it implies that most of the people around us aren't that nice on a daily basis, which I know not to be the case, but sometimes we forget and neglect how commanding sheer and unadorned pleasantness can be.

The tsunami (which Cambodia was thankfully spared the effects of) was a horrendous event that has already seemed to fade from our collective memory after the, um, tsunami-like wave of generosity it generated in the days and weeks following its onslaught. So many people's lives have been eradicated; so many people's fates have been thrown to the wind. We will never know why some lived and others died. What we learn from this is what we choose to, I guess, and supermodel-Petra learned to take each day as it comes -- to live it, with laughter.

Sometimes the things that disarm us are unexpected. Sometimes even beautiful people surprise us. I try to learn something every day, and what I learned from Ms.Petra's attitude yesterday was: It's okay to be polite and friendly and compassionate to strangers (even those on a phone). You don't have to be cynical and cranky and a prick. It's somewhat cleansing to realize that we have the capacity to be good and kind and decent in ordinary situations when we want to. If we want to.

ARBITRARY DISTANCES

"If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience another life, run a marathon."

-- some runner more eloquent than me

I'm thinking September, possibly October. This does not have to be the last and final year that I attempt to run a marathon, no, but I think the time is now, approaching thirty, to give it another shot. To see what I'm made of.

Not that that's important. The first time I came to Cambodia, teaching English to street kids with a Japanese NGO, I stayed at a hotel in Battambang that was showing, God knows how or why, the Canadian Triathalon Championships. Swear to God. Simon Whitfield, the winner, a stellar athelete and inaugural winner of the Gold medal in the sport at the Athens Olympics, talked about how he had had a bad year. And I remember thinking quite clearly: You did not have a bad year. My mind, still reeling from the dirty roads and the dusty air and the sheer, endless squalor of Cambodia, the stink of Cambodia, rejected Whitfield’s plea for sympathy, as innocent as it was. these people have had a bad year, I thought; these people have had a bad life.

But we are who we are. Any long-distance runner (or wannabe one) will eventually come to that point in time where the prospect of running a marathon takes on its own perverse and imminent attraction. I tried to run one three, four (five?) years ago, in Japan, but I blew out my knee a week before the race. It was just as well; I had tried to train in under four months, from a starting weight that was, let’s just say, somewhat immense. (Note to self: Avoid training for a marathon when one’s train station has a Wendy’s, McDonald’s and KFC within walking distance of your employment.) I vowed to tackle the marathon again, someday, and perhaps that day is soon.

We change as we grow (and grow as we change), and so I’m trying to enjoy, if not relish, the challenge of running longer and longer distances. My Sunday run has reached the two hour point, and the thought of running almost double that, which I’ll most likely need to do to complete a marathon, does give me the old Kathy Bates-shaving-James-Caan's-neck-with-a-straight-razor-in-Misery feeling at the base of my stomach every now and then.

The great thing, though, about not worrying about how fast you’re running is that you simply just run; you listen to your body, and sip some water, and watch the traffic and the people glide by you as you glide by them. I’ve actually found that my chest and my arms feel fine by the end; it’s my legs that feel as if somebody has slowly, painfully extracted something essential from their architecture. But that pain has its own rewards, as transitory and slightly sadistic as they may be.

And yet, isn’t life transitory and slightly sadistic, anyway? We age and endure and lose track of our body and ourselves. Running as something as extreme as a marathon is a way to keep track of your body and your self; it’s a means to assess who you are at that particular point in time – well or sick, energetic or sluggish, in pain or content. It’s an arbitrary distance, that 42 some odd kilometers is, but so what? Everything’s arbitrary – where we’re born and where we’ll die, who we love and who we hate, what we admire and what we dismiss. Life is nothing but an acquisition of prejudices and fetishes, and the marathon, perhaps, is a gateway to uncovering a little of both.

Maybe I’ll drop out after Mile One. Perhaps my body will collapse under the pressure. It might even be easier than I think. (Though I doubt it.) Believe me, I’ve considered all options.
No matter. I’ve learned long ago that what we learn from failure is at least as edifying as what we learn from success, if not more so. Failure means you try and you fall. I tried to train for a marathon before, so I know what it’s like to not pull it off. I’ve always found that imagining the worst thing that can possibly happen, and then accepting it, is a sure-fire way to confront and conquer any looming challenge that threatens to unhinge your confidence and cohesion. Once you’ve accepted the worst that can happen (barring death), then the thing itself loses its ability to hamper your dreams.

And it’s good to have dreams. It’s good to try and go after them. It’s good to set your sights on an arbitrary, manmade distance, and see if you can get from here to there and back again, with someone new yet familiar waiting for you at the finish line. Someone who looks a lot like yourself.

(For anyone interested in the hallowed history of my high-school running 'career', you can find it in the link dated 03/02/2005 in the ' archive' section to the right. For anyone interested in fake boobs on real celebrities, you can find them on www.awfulplasticsurgery.com. Can you believe the reading options I give my readers? Can't get variety like this at www.cnn.com, I'm telling you...)

MORE OR LESS

There's a picture of myself that I've always liked.

(Boy, does that sound egotistical or what. But it's a picture from my childhood, not some badly lit, vaguely obscene Polaroid where I'm flexing my butt muscles or anything like that, so I should win some kind of extra-strength-humility brownie points, no?)

The photo crystallizes for some reason some essence of myself that would otherwise remain largely...elusive.

The year is 1983. I'm seven years old, relaxing on a lounge chair beside the pool at the Aladdin Inn in Daytona Beach, Florida. I'm a wearing a Pac-Man visor and intently reading the novelization of SUPERMAN III.

Am I still that kid?

I think so.

Or he's still me.

More or less.

How do we stay true to that seven year old that dwells within us?

Which begs the question: Scott, IS there, in fact, a seven year old version of ourselves dwelling within us?

Um, I don't know.

I'd like to think so. I'd like to hope so.

I don't know why. I guess it has to do with what I like to call 'the continuum of self'. (That's kinda sorta a lie. I don't really like to call it 'the continuum of the self', this idea, because I just made UP the idea, but if I ever DID like to call this idea something, that's what I would call it. So it's not that much of a lie after all. Whew.)

How much can we change our identity? How does our self change along with it? When we say: "Oh, yes, I know ______", what does that truly mean?

You may find this simply an intellectual exercise of splitting hairs, and it most certainly is that, but I think who we are, who we THINK we are, and who OTHERS think we are constitutes some of the fundamental, I don't know, STUFF of existence.

Are you the same person you were yesterday? No, of course not. You might have told your boyfriend to fuck off, or perhaps you lost your job. Something inside of you shifted. And so your own concept of 'self' shifted, too. ("That's not like me," you said.) We confuse ourselves when we do things that don't match up to our own and our peers' conceptions of our authentic being.

An interesting question to pose from lovely, scenic Cambodia, where Buddhism is the national religion, a religion that more less advocates, in its extreme forms, an eradication of the self altogether.

Most of the expats living and working over here are well are on their way to that eradication of the self, because many of them are out and out loonies. (Present company absolutely included.) More than a few are alcoholic, hedonistic drug-users who go completely, irrevocably off the freaking rails. Ten dollar prostitutes. Five dollar cocaine. After two weeks of this, you have either entered heaven or hell, depending on your morality. Whoever these 'fun' lovers were 'back home' doesn't apply to their current manifestation.

Which brings me back to my original point. (And if it doesn't exactly bring me back very logically or eloquently, well, too bad, it's my blog and I can go where I want to! And cry if I want to...)

I don't think the dudes over here who are snorting coke and injecting whatever it is they like to inject are thinking about their nine year old selves opinion of their current selves. Not that they should be. We change and evolve, and we can't hold on to childhood, or who we used to be.

Still.

DO we change? There's a great British documentary series by director Michael Apted that has traced a series of British school children over the past forty years. The first film was called 7-UP, the next 14 UP, the next 21 UP, etc. (I think 49 UP comes out next year.) Every seven years the camera crews come back into these people's lives, and we get to compare who they are to who they were. Revelatory, astonishing, frightening, marvellous stuff. Some people change every seven years completely and totally; others are visibly, unequivocally the same people they were at seven -- more or less.

Maybe that's the only way we can quantify how we age, by judging whether we are 'more' like we were at seven or 'less' like we were at seven. A matter of degrees, I suppose.

Could be useful. Occasionally, when we're questioning our judgement, our worth as a human, to think what our seven year old self would think of our current actions.

Then you'd have a choice: Either tell the seven year old to shut the hell up and go back to reading SUPERMAN III by the pool, or listen to his thoughts on the matter.

What you hear could be...transformative.

More or less.

THANK YOU (YES, YOU), BUT PLEASE REMAIN FULLY CLOTHED

Who are you, anyways?

The strange thing about me writing this blog and you reading this blog is that we are separated by distance and time. If I'm writing this in Cambodia at twelve noon, it's about twelve midnight (the day before) back in Canada. So my midday is your end-of-day. And yet somehow the message skyrockets across the globe and onto your screen. And the ' you' who I'm writing this to remains unknown to me.

But the mystery is deeper than that, isn't it? It has to do with the actual person writing this, and the actual person reading it. This is the 'online' me, as opposed to the 'you' that is online. There's a difference. What I know of you: Nothing. What you know of me: My words. And nothing but. (Unless, of course, you actually know me, in real life.)

That's cool. That's as it should be, in some ways, that mystery. What I like about reading is that it allows you, practically demands you to become co-conspirators with the author; it enables you to agree, disagree, accept or reject anything or everything that he/she writes, and you are using somebody else's words to create mental pictures in your mind. To build castles of ideas that may not have ever been constructed if you had not read the fundamental bricks and mortar of somebody else's ideas. And the author him/herself remains a forceful entity, yes, but completely ethereal. (And it's very bizarre to suddenly meet an author who've you read and absorbed for years and years. I've met John Irving and Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster and David Foster Wallace, and it's very strange to spend a morning reading one of their books, having your head filled with nothing but somebody else's thoughts, and then you find yourself greeting that same person hours later. It's bizarre. Not sure why, but it is. It's also always strange to read the thoughts of someone you know well. There's just such a disconnect between the reality of walking, breathing, spitting person and the eloquence of letters arranged in distinct patterns. Which is one of way saying: Don't be disappointed if you ever run into me, okay? And for those who know me, they know I disappoint them on a regular basis anyways, so they don't have their hopes up.)

Long story short, this is my way of saying that I truly appreciate all of those thousands upon thousands of people who read this blog on a regular basis. (Okay, okay so maybe there's not thousands of people reading this, no, but there are at least hundreds. Well, alright, hundreds might be pushing it, but there are dozens, at least. Fine, a handful, in any event. Ah shit, there's gotta be one?)

I guess you could say that this blog is divided between those people who know me who read it, and those who don't. Sometimes it's a little disconcerting to allow those voices inside of my head an outlet on this page; it's kind of like going to confession on a daily basis, only what I'm confessing is not necessarily sinful, and the people on the other side of the little-sliding-barrier aren't Catholic priests but anonymous cybersurfers.

Sometimes I try to picture whoever is reading this blog. Which means I'm trying to picture you, yes you, at this moment, now, in front of your screen. Perhaps you're sipping a Coke. Maybe you're waiting for the phone to ring, or killing time before C.S.I. starts. Or you could have stumbled onto this site accidentally, and are slowly, gradually nodding off even as I type these words. You might be in a three-piece suit or your jammies. You may be naked, for all I know. (If you are naked, for the love of all things holy, please, put on some clothes. It's nothing personal, it's just that this ain't that kind of blog. Unless I get numerous requests to make it into that kind of blog, of course. ) You may be getting ready to settle in for the night, or about to start your day. You might have just told your spouse 'I know, I know, I get it, you told me already a thousand times'. You could have just decided to get divorced. To get married. To buy the house. To ditch the plant in the living room. To run the bath. To change the diaper. To renew your subscription to Newsweek, but not Cosmo. A million mundane decisions, large and small, are going through your mind as you are reading this sentence -- and I'm privy to none of them.

But somehow we connect, despite the dissonance.

The anonymity of the web allows us to view different lives from alternative, somewhat skewed electronic angles. There is a lot that you don't know about me, and even more that I don't know about you. But for a few moments here and there each and every day I can ramble on about all the random things that I think about, and a few moments (hours, days, weeks) later, you can log on and read about it. (Even if you're nude.)

I'm still not sure what all this means. Does the world get bigger, because we can connect online, or does it contract, because we no longer feel the need to knock on our neighbour's door?

I'm not sure. But connections, however we make them, online or otherwise, are always, well, when you get right down to it, nice. Aren't they?

So:

Thank-you for dropping by.

(And, before you switch sites, if you remain unclothed, at least put on a housecoat, will you? Or a pair of slippers or something. I'm not saying you don't have a nice body, but still.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: WHY JAMIE FOXX AND DON KNOTTS DESERVE OUR RESPECT AND ADMIRATION

The prostitute played by Elizabeth Berkeley (of SAVED BY THE BELL and SHOWGIRLS fame, or infamy) in Oliver Stone's ANY GIVEN SUNDAY had it right -- there's something about his eyes.

Jamie Foxx's, that is.

The other night I watched ANY GIVEN SUNDAY for the sixth or seventh time, and it gets better with every viewing, denser, and Foxx's performance gets better, too. (You have to understand: I am an Oliver Stone nut. A whole other Stone post awaits, so you've been warned.)

There's a scene near the end of the film, right before the big game, where Al Pacino, playing football coach Tony D'Amato, gives his pre-game speech. And what a speech it is, the end-all, be-all of pre-game speeches. It is not about football, but about life. It is not about his team, but about himself. It is not about Pacino, but about Stone. It is heavy handed and over-the-top and wonderful. And there's a passage in the speech where Pacino talks about teamwork, about being there for one another, and the camera stays on Foxx's face, slowly, slowly tracking into his eyes, and his character, who throughout the film has been a loud-mouth, arrogant prick, changes; his character alters. We see it right before our eyes, and it's nothing magical, nothing tactical; we simply see a level of sudden compassion and understanding and emotion in Foxx's eyes that tells us everything we need to know.

Foxx is the real deal. He was brilliant in ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, and even more so in Will Smith's ALI. I thought he was great in Stone's flick; after seeing him play the middle-aged, overweight, black, Jewish, white-woman loving Bundini Brown in ALI, I thought to myself: My God, this man is an actor. He's not just a comedian, even though I don't really believe there's such a thing as being 'just' a comedian, as I explain below. This may sound ludicrous, but Foxx (real name Eric Bishop, from small town Texas), reminds me a little bit of DeNiro. Foxx does not play a persona; he plays a character, and becomes the character, and we believe it. Completely.

Then came RAY, of course, which I saw most of on DVD. ('Most of' because the film cut out near the end -- did he get his sight back?) The most remarkable thing about that performance was not the mimicry of the real musician, but the fact that Foxx pulled it off without the use of his most powerful asset -- his eyes.

Last night I watched one of Foxx's stand-up comedy specials taped in 2002, and the man is very, very funny. Not Eddie Murphy funny, but funny nevertheless. His impressions are unreal -- Shaq, Prince, Pacino. He is not afraid to diss his fellow black entertainers: Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and LL Cool J all come under fire. (His bit about LL Cool J is particularly funny, talking about how his co-star in ANY GIVEN SUNDAY didn't seem to realize that they were making a movie, not playing a real football game, and that the angry words Foxx was exchanging with him were based on a script, not reality.) Oh, and his rationale for why O.J. is guilty simply based on his body movements is hilarious. (Ask me about it sometime.)

Now, Foxx has very little in common with Don Knotts, but I have to give Knotts his proper props, given that he's been in the news lately, mostly because his home state of West Virginia is about to give him a star on their newly formed walk of fame. And if getting a star on the West Virginia Walk of Fame is not prime material for a blog, then what the hell is?

The thing is, both Foxx and Knotts are comedians. And understand me here: I love Don Knotts. I think his work on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, not to mention THREE'S COMPANY, is classic. It's real. It's honest and it's human.

Comedians like Foxx often become great dramatic actors because comedy is all about finding the truth of a situation. If something's real, we laugh. If it isn't, silence rules the room. But I don't think comedians should be relegated to the back room of actingdom. I think somebody like Don Knotts is sincerely, genuinely worthy of our admiration because when we laugh at his antics, at his eye-rolls, out his sheer ridiculous, we are laughing because he has struck something authentic within ourselves. When we laugh, we are connected to something outside of ourselves, and great comedians can provide that link. (Not to mention how much of my childhood was spent imitating Don Knotts as Mr.Furley doing his karate chops. As Jim Carrey once said: 'Imitation is the sincerest form of copying.' But it always brought a good laugh...)

So here's to Jamie Foxx and Don Knotts, unlikely partners in crime, separated by two comedic generations, but deserving of all the accolades that are coming their way. (You can debate amongst yourselves what's worth more: An Oscar or a West Virginian star.)

We look to comedians to provide a respite from the realities of, um, reality. And I have to say this: Whenever I see these two guys in action, I laugh. (And when I see Foxx do drama, I empathize.) I relate. When I see Knotts do his schtick, I'm reminded of the silliness inside of ourselves we so rarely allow out.

That may not sound like much to you, but in this short life of ours, a little bit of laughter, a little bit of empathy, can go a long, long way.

THE EVIL OF TWO LESSERS

It's just so complicated, is what I'm saying. The whole thing. All of its aspects.

(For those that came late, I'm not talking about the theory of relativity or the two Darrens on BEWITCHED, although those two things right there are pretty complicated in and of themselves, and both concepts, the relativity one and the two Darrens one, screwed me up big time as a kid. I mean, you can't just switch the lead actor like that -- you can't. It's not fair. )

It's a very strange feeling indeed to wake up one day and take a look around and realize that you have not only gotten used to the idea of child labor, but you expect it, too.

The kids in front of the supermarket hawking papers. The children toiling behind their mother's cart as she goes round the city collecting garbage and tins, metal and refuse. The little tykes who diligently scrounge alongside their siblings through the endless black garbage bags that litter Phnom Penh's streets like wretched treasure chests torn asunder.

These are child laborers. They exist. They're authentic. It was an electric shock to my system to learn that these poor and desperate kids are not just random, flickering images of guilt designed for Jack Nicholson's epiphany in ABOUT SCHIMDT, or convenient emotional scapegoats broadcast every few months on PRIMETIME LIVE, or holograms of tsunami-like degradation glimpsed between brilliant, snow-white flashes of Katie Couric's Joker-like grin on the TODAY show. They are all around (if you care to look, know where to look), sleeping on the streets, shitting in the sewers, sniffing up glue. They are small and stunted, dirty and smelly, smiling and honest, these kids are, and I've seen them so much, so often over the last few years that I wonder if I truly recognize how absurdly tragic their endless situation truly is.

The realness of these kids and their plight are what make the concept of sweatshops such a difficult one to reconcile. Of course no rational human being wants children working ten hours a day in a factory designed to keep Kathie Lee Gifford in designer duds the rest of her life. (Then again, no rational supreme being would knowingly construct Kathie Lee Gifford in the first place, but that's a whole other post.) No sensible, sensitive adult could possibly advocate kids stuck inside in dark and gloomy factories that make Dickens'darkened hovels look like Romper Room.

And yet...

As I mentioned previously (for those who were taking a leak during the last few posts, or watching AMERICAN IDOL, or contemplating Proust, or ignoring your mother-in-law), Cambodia has recently had the supreme honor of being voted the 10th worst country to live in for children and women. Why? No drinkable water. No employment. Early death. You name it, Cambodia's got it.

Cambodian families are big. Lots of people. Lots of mouths to feed.

All too often, kids no older than five or six have to go off and earn some coin for their siblings and parents. If they don't, no one will eat. If they don't, terrible medicine can't be bought. It's sad and unfair, and it happens every day.

I have no answers. The great travel writer Pico Iyer said that the purpose of travel is not to find answers, but to find better questions.

I ask myself a lot of questions here. Some are random and silly, others are profound (to me, anyway). Most are in between.

Seeing kids work, out of school, selling you stuff, collecting trash, makes your heart break and your mind whirl. (They are also nicer kids than any you would ever want to meet back home. Cue the breaking heart; cue the whirling mind...) The kids I see outside the shops begging and working should, instead, be relaxing at home, should, instead, be kids -- playing video games, watching cartoons, farting on their little brothers' faces while holding their heads down with oversized cushions.

They shouldn't be outside, under the sun, wasting their lives away.

But they are. And their families prosper because of it. And a sweatshop, hideous as they are, would actually be a step up for most of these kids, and their families.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's good. But living here has taught me that not only is it not a perfect world, it's not necessarily even a good one, let alone a fair one. Nine, ten hours a day under the hot sun, selling newspapers, or nine, ten hours a day in a sultry sweatshop, stitching clothes, is not much of a choice -- the evil of two lessers, I guess you could say.

The tragic thing is, in Cambodia, there usually isn't any choice at all.

REGRETS, WE (MEANING HUMANS)'VE HAD A FEW, BUT TOO FEW TO MENTION (IN THE WORDS OF SINATRA)

Imagine that!

An entire walkway, road, overpass or avenue devoted to you and you alone, but not to your charitable works, no, nor to that oh-so-memorable time you escorted not one, not two, but an entire cavalcade of little old ladies across the street (at rush hour no less), but, instead, these series of streets and landmarks would zero in on the occasions in life when you plain and simple messed up. Big time. Royally.

So we could have a little plaque on the swingsets at the park detailing how you, at age seven, pushed little Tommy Burns off of his ass and onto the ground just because you could. Just because it felt awesome to do so. Or we might be able to arrange for a water fountain to bear your name, inscribed in gold, because that was the place where you used to chuck your Budweiser cans and cigarette butts late at night after making out with your high school girlfriend behind the shrubbery. Or in the shrubbery. (Or even, god forbid, with the shrubbery?)

We always dedicate significant civil landmarks to those who have made a difference in the life of the city, the community, by god the world. Why not have little plaques simply to act as placeholders and reminders of how all too often we fuck things up?

The reason I suggest this suggestion, the reason why I bring it up, is because I'm steadily, intermittently polishing off a book by Ian Buruma called Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. (The title makes it sound somewhat hideously boring, but it's not.) It's a serious of essays that chronicle how and in what fashion both Germany and Japan have dealt with their wartime legacies. Very interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two cultures. Especially interesting because Cambodia is very much a country that is still grappling with the Khmer Rouge era, still waiting for a trial that may (or may not, I fear) eventually arrive, while Canada is still trying to deal with trading Wayne Gretzky from the Oilers to the L.A. Kings back in '88.

But why should we put all the blame on countries? Countries are not independent of the citizens who compose their censuses. You can't just label this building over here as being 'bad', and that place over there as being the spot where such-and-such atrocity took place.

Let's bring it down to the human level and start with those ignorant folks who always chuck their rubbish where it shouldn't be chucked. We wouldn't have to wait twenty or forty years to collectively feel our guilt; we could subsidize a couple of off-duty security guards to patrol the streets, looking for rubbishers. (And hey, I was a security guard for awhile, and believe me, those boys love being in uniform -- they'd leap at the chance.) Let's grab a five year old who spits his wad of gum onto the crosswalk in front of his school, rub his face in it, draw up a reasonable facsimile of said face, and then post it right on the street. Instant shame and humiliation.

Japan and Germany, China and Cambodia have all contributed hideous atrocities; Canada, too, shoulders much of the blame for the world's ills. (Need I mention Celine Dion, Anne Murray or Alan Thicke?) But at a certain point one has to say: Yes, yes, I fucked up, we fucked up, we're sorry. Let's move on.

It's not easy to move on -- to forgive others their sins, and to forgive ourselves. But we can't walk through life looking back over our shoulder every five minutes, remembering and wallowing in the internal dread of days gone by. We have to tuck it away and refer to it every now and then to keep us humble and aware of our own frailty, rather than keep it looming before us week after week, a constant billboard advertising only our own unspeakable, yet human, regrets.

START THE MOVIE, ALREADY! or, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING OF THE WESTERN SOUL

For some reason or another I always seem to be restlessly scanning the Internet and devouring the newspapers for interesting or enlightening or even absurd topics to write about and think about, so my mind is always making arbitrary connections that I unreasonably demand achieve some sort of thematic synthesis. This week I found two interesting (?) tidbits:

1) Cambodia is now the tenth worst country in the entire world for women and children to live in. It made the bottom ten. Woo-hoo!

2) Some newspapers in New York are now showing the actual start times of movies, instead of the nominal times, meaning they will tell you that the flick starts at 9:00, yes, but it really starts at 9:23, when you subtract the multiple commercials and trailers that they usually require you to sit through. (Full disclosure: I'm not sure if I used the word 'nominal' correctly in the above sentence. Just had to let you know that.)

What strikes me is simply the, I don't know, gap that exists between those two factoids of information.

In Cambodia, the majority of people don't even have healthy drinking water. They don't have proper medicine. They don't have jacksquat. Most folks here live in tiny villages where the infant mortality rate is disgustingly, astonishingly high. (And, as someone much smarter than me pointed out, think about what that does to a small community, to have a significant portion of newborns die on a regular basis. Think what that ambience of death adds to a neighbourhood. Think of the hope and dread intertwined on a weekly basis.)

And then we can contrast that with the western world, where people are so pissed off at sitting through stupid previews and idiotic commercials that they've got fed up with it all and demanded that they know when the actual movie starts, goddamnit it all.

Now, don't get me wrong. (Wow, what a weird phrase that is -- ' don't get me wrong'. We never say 'get me right', do we? So, I'll try and stop saying it in the future.) I think it's a good idea to list the real show-times in the paper; I'm all for it. It's convenient and considerate for all consumers.

It's just...

It has something to do with our ever-rising scale of expectations. (And by 'our' I'm referring to humans, although I'm sure it's probably the same for Vulcans, Klingons, possibly even hobbits.) We get water, and then want something sweeter, so we make Coke. We get Coke, and then we realize that all that sugar is not that good for us, so we make Diet Coke. We get grain and rice, and then we realize that that's not all that delicious, so we invent pizza and hot fudge sundaes. We get movie theatres, and then we get pissed off that we actually have to sit through an entire fifteen minutes of product placement.

I don't know if it's healthy or scary to want more, more, more. It's a human instinct, of that I'm sure, but this escalation of desire can become somewhat startling if you ponder it too much.

Last week I was at my old school, talking to one of my old students, one of my first students, a monk. Nice guy. About to graduate with his degree. Will probably stay on as a monk, though, because he likes it, likes the spiritual discipline, even though it's hard. Two meals a day, both before the advent of the afternoon. No alcohol. This dude has nothing but the robes on his back and the knowledge and his head, but he seems happy and content. He's learning. I jokingly said to him that I'm feeling old, being almost thirty, and he smiled and remarked that he was older than me, almost thirty-four, I think he said. And then I remembered that the life expectancy for Cambodians is only, like, 52 or something. So, theoretically, if he follows the norm, he would be eighteen years from death. (It's like me being already sixty or something.)

So, I don't know. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing things. Perhaps my tangents are remaining unconnected.

But it seems that we worry about the small things too much -- the movie times and the start time and which Idol judge is sleeping with which contestant. (I think Paula is probably guilty, by the way.) We sometimes allow those minor slices of life to all too often become the content of life. We let them add up to something that is even smaller than the sum of its parts. And I think we become somehow smaller, too.

THE OLD I'M-A-MEMBER-OF-CONDOLEEZA-RICE'S-SECURITY-TEAM-AND-THEN-I'M-RESEMBLING-A-GEORGE-ROMERO-ZOMBIE DREAM, THE KIND WE ALL HAVE (UM, RIGHT?)

I had a dream the other night that was probably similar to one you all have had before. I was Condeleeza Rice's assistant, following her through the cobblestone streets of some unknown European capital, and suddenly ten, fifteen, twenty secret service agents popped out of nowhere, shrouding her body and protecting her from a series of skyrocketing bombs that had erupted seemingly at once from air, land and sea. It was all a drill, of course, and I knew that, understood that, but still, I felt that, as a member of her security detail (albeit a novice member and a Canadian member to boot, true, I understand that, but still), I should have been at least notified in advance as to the logisitics of this particular security demonstration. Then the scene shifted, as dreams tend to do, and I was standing in front of my mirror, and my right eye was puffed up the same way it's been the two times I've been bitten by a bug here in Cambodia. And my left eye was completely white -- there was no pupil, and it looked like my eyeball was composed of white chocolate with pin-prick sized holes dotting its ablino landscape. Then I woke up.

I'm sure you've all had that same dream before.

It can't be just me, can it?

WRITING AND READING: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

I like having written, not writing.

-- Anonymous


Writers write to read what they've written.

-- Susan Sontag,
novelist, literary critic


The more I read and the more I write the more I realize that reading and writing have very little, if anything, in common.

Let me be more precise. They have everything in common, of course, but that commonality masks the fundamental dichotomy that exists between what we read and what we write. The two acts are not mutually exclusive, no, but neither are they long-term bed-buddies. At best, they're good friends who occasionally sleep with each other.

Or I'll put it like this: The sentence I'm currently typing, the one that you're presently reading, for me, is an organic, developing thing, the end of which I'm only discovering right about now. For you, that previous sentence (and this one) is an existing artifact; it is there, and it is finite, and it has a beginning and an end that you can trace and delineate. For me, that sentence was alive as I wrote it. As soon as I finished typing it, the words became inert. Not lifeless, no, because whatever life they had was resuscitated by you, the reader. Myself, as writer, was the one who gave it birth, while you, as reader, were the one who performed electroshock therapy on the sentence. There's a difference -- a subtle one, but people who read a lot and write a lot may be able to recognize it.

Writing is electric and kinetic. The words come out of your brain and into your fingertips, and you are forced to control the sentence in a such a way that its ultimate destination somehow matches what you originally had in mind when you began the journey. Writing is impulsive and somewhat unwieldy; even revision, that process of making sure your thoughts and concepts make some kind of sensible sense, has its own somewhat skewed logic. We backspace and delete and erase and start again; we kill our darlings again and again, as per Hemingway's advice.

Reading, though, is an altogether tamer beast. The words and sentences are there before us, in neat, ordered columns, in paragraphs that are discrete and diligently austere. The writer has done his work and called it a day, and now we, the reader, have to complete the circle of conception. If the editor is a midwife, then the reader is the expectant father pacing the lobby who finally gets to hold the kid in his arms. (Even if said kid is not his own, we can still love the child nevertheless.)

I think I would take exception to the quotes that began this post, because I prefer writing something to reading what I've written. I prefer the act of creating itself, when everything is still possible, when anything is still possible, to the inevitably dispiriting aftermath, when what we meant to say, needed to say, longed to say, has been inadequately translated into words.

Writers write, I think, to engage in the torturous, wondrous process of conception. I think Michael Jordan would rather have played a hard-fought and bitterly contested game of basketball than to have reveled in the score afterwards, and as much as I enjoy that glorious moment of a run when I can finally stop and my feet can stop moving, I have to admit that it is the process itself, the pain itself, that is the ultimate attraction.

The afterglow may be sweeter, yes, but who said sweet things were, in the end, more fulfilling or nutritious?

It's the doing that counts; it's the doing that tells us who we are, for better or for worse. Writing may not be as fun as reading, no, but neither is attaining your bachelor's degree as fun as shooting down a waterslide. I think part of growing up is recognizing that the tough stuff, the real stuff, is the stuff that endures, molds and allows us to become greater than ourselves.

MICHAEL KEATON AS THE DARK KNIGHT MAY VERY WELL HAVE BEEN ON TO SOMETHING, GIVEN THAT OUR FUTURE SELVES UNDERSTAND THE CONFUSION WE CONTINUALLY FEEL

Everything around me and within me has suddenly taken on a heightened clarity, as if the normal sunshine, the usual heat, my everday thoughts, have become fuller and stranger and equipped with their own special form of almost supernatural logic and grace. Perhaps it's because I feel change in the air, almost literally, as the heat gets stronger, more confident, and the dark clouds continue to tantalizingly hint at rain. Or it may because so much is changing (possibly), and stability is fragile (potentially). Where I will be two months from now is not altogether clear: possibly here, perhaps there. Where I will go is open.

It's that openness that is scary, isn't it? Frightening and necessary, somehow -- at least for me, and maybe sometimes for you, too. When things are open you can go any which way but loose, to quote an old Clint Eastwood movie. You can drift somewhere and come ashore on a strange or familiar beach, depending on the wind.

Or maybe it's like that scene in the original BATMAN flick, where Michael Keaton is trying to find the words to explain to Kim Basinger that he is, in fact, the Dark Knight.

"You know how other people have jobs, and they get up in the morning and brush their tooth and come downstairs and have something to eat and kiss somebody goodbye," he says, realizing that words are failing him. He's trying to describe what a normal life is compared to his abnormal one.

Sometimes I feel that way. (And sometimes you do, too, I'm sure.) Even if you DO have a life that includes getting up and coming downstairs and grabbing something to eat and kissing somebody goodbye before you carpool to work, there is always a nagging feeling within us that wants to go another octave beyond a nag and into a roar. The source and content of its ferocious message isn't always clear, but I have my suspicions.

Assuming that life is not a random series of unfortunate events (and that's a big assumption), then perhaps not only the 'me' of now is the captain of my ship but the 'me' of later, too. The 'me' who is forty, fifty, even sixty could be calling the shots. Incarnations of my later self (selves?) could be sending back through time appropriate psychic messages that help me make the big decisions, the tough decisions.

Or perhaps these later selves of mine also have some sway in the temporal and logistic shifting of reality itself; perhaps they are nudging people this way and that way, making room for me, allowing me to find the path that is meant for me and me alone. (These later selves know how hard it is, because they, of course, went through the same experiences.)

In other words, our lives are a loop -- the past selves inform our present selves, we know that, Dr.Phil told us so, and so who's to say that our future selves can't exist in a parallel dimension of time and space? Who's to say that our future isn't as prominent and potent as our present? If time is an illusion, a concept I suspect and endorse as being true, then it makes sense that the loop of life will be bookended by our later selves, who, of course, will want to make our rides as comfortable as possible.

So:

The stability of life and the constant things in life are constantly being upended. Check. Got that. But this is all part of a larger process, a cyclical process, whereby who we are decades hence somehow cosmically influences who we are at the present moment in time. The heat and the wind and the feelings in my gut are mysteriously coded signals, all of them, from future versions of Scott, hopefully wiser versions of Scott.

I'm down with that.

Such notions, bizarre as they seem, may not seem credible, no, but they allow the morning sun, the drifting clouds, the instincts we dismiss and discard to have a rhythm and a pattern and a balance that approach something almost musical in their serenity and intent.