CARPE DIEM

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

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

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

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

OFF TO THAILAND

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

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

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

___________ ONLY HAPPENS IN ___________

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIMPLE

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

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

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

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

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

The only ones worth remembering, really.

THE DICE MAN COMETH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET THE DICE DECIDE

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

And the discoveries it can lead to! Listen:


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

I also created problems...



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

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

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

And yet...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEATING THE RAIN

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

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

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

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

Or this:

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

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

For example:

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

Me: “Where are you from?”

Her: “Canada.”

“Me too. Where in Canada?”

“Ontario.”

“Where in Ontario?”

“Near Niagara Falls.”

“Where?”

“St.Catharines.”

“Fuck off! I’m from St.Catharines!”

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

“Pine Grove.”

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

“Did you live near there?”

“I lived on _________ street.”

“ _________ street. Do you know Rick Denham?”

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

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

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

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

LIFE WILL FIND A WAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vancouver, Canada.

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

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

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

Let me back up.

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

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

"Chachi, yeah, but Winkler..."

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

And so on.

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

Back to the present.

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

Which proves, you ask?

I mean, do you really need to ask?

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

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

Don't believe me?

Just think.

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

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

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

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

NO NEED FOR SUBTLETY

A few years back when I first came to Cambodia I was chilling at Steve's Steakhouse, seated at the bar, munching on one of his homemade burgers made from his own grain-fed cows that he keeps in a pasture outside of town. Sports was on the TV. Jim Croce was on the stereo. Life was good.

"I used to listen to Croce back in Philly in the seventies," the man next to me at the bar said. He was middle-aged, stocky, solid. American, no doubt.

"Were you working in Philadelphia?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I was in the veterans hospital they had there for a year."

And so began an interesting conversation, the kind of conversation and the kind of person you can only meet when you are in a place like Cambodia. I remember because yesterday I watched again Oliver Stone's Born On The Fourth Of July, and this particular gentleman had had both of his legs blown off in Vietnam, knew both Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, the subject of the biographical film, and now worked all over the world for the Vietnam Veterans Association of America, helping people with no limbs get limbs. He lived in Colombia, strangely enough. There was plenty to do here; thousands upon thousands of people still get limbs blown off every day, scrounging for scrap metal in the fields while ending up being blown up by the remnants of the literally millions of land mines that still litter this country.

Is there a better movie than Born On The Fourth of July? I know there is, somewhere, but boy is that a film. It is not just a mind-blowingly heart-wrenching exploration of what the Vietnam war does to one's psyche, a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a boy raised in the small-town, mom and apple pie ethos of America who gradually, gradually realizes that he has been sold a bill of goods that he paid a terrible, terrible price for. It is all of this, yes, but it is also, quite frankly, the most emotional film I've ever seen. Each scene operates on a number of different levels, and as the movie progresses so much anger and hope and fear and confusion escalates and accumulates. It is a film about growing up and leaving home and realizing that the world is a harsh and fucked-up place. It features the best performance that Tom Cruise will ever give. It is designed to make you feel, and how many movies really, really make us feel, well, anything?

For Stone's detractors, it is chock-full of things to criticize: overblown, overdramatic, didactic. Yes, yes, yes. Give me more. Give me it all in equal measure, than pour me a bit more for the ride home. Stone makes films that are pulsing with life. In Cambodia I sat beside a guy who had both legs blown off in the war, who was a dumb kid from West Virginia who signed up for 'Nam because his government told him to, and his lucky reward was a year spent in a veterans hospital and a lifetime's worth of rage that eventually found an altruistic channel helping other people in foreign countries who had also been wounded by war's lack of mercy. Born On The Fourth Of July makes me feel for that man at the bar; it makes me understand, as much as is possible for a schmuck like me, what he went through. It is unapologetic, that film is, and because of that, the human experience is widened, and so am I.

It also contains what are quite possibly two of the greatest scenes ever put on film: 1) Ron Kovic, played by Cruise, returns to his childhood home after two tours in Nam and one year in a veterans hospital in the Bronx. He and his father are in Ron's old bedroom, trapped in time, the room and them. The father is explaining how he's fixed up the bathroom. Ron is looking at a framed photo of himself as a high-school wrestler. The father sees him looking at the photo. The father embraces Ron, tightly, breaks down, then stands up and starts to walk out of the room, in tears, talking about more home renovation as Ron puts the photo down, face-down. That scene says it all, about everything. The pain of time lost. The pain of Ron's injury. The past that is gone. The love between the father and son. It's all there, and it lasts less than a minute. I've seen that scene a dozen times, and it gets me every time. 2) Near the end of the film, Ron and Willem Dafoe are stuck on a highway somewhere in Mexico, thrown out of a taxi for arguing with the driver. Both Vietnam vets, both in wheelchairs, the two begin to argue about who did worse in Vietnam, who did the most harm, who killed the most babies. They yell and spit and scream and grapple with each other, before toppling down the side of a hill, bouncing out of their wheelchairs, lying helpless under the hot Mexican sun. The anger, the confusion, the sheer symbolic potency of this scene is something close to perfection.

Those who accuse Stone of being obvious and lacking subtlety are missing the point. Life is not subtle, and life is far too obvious. Pain is real and rage is real and so are the deeper, stronger, more humane emotions. Stone's films rejoice in the ferocity of such human expressions. They understand that in a world where it is possible for people to have their legs blown off in foreign lands, there is sometimes no need for subtlety.

YOU NEVER GET A SECOND CHANCE...

We were talking about first impressions, my class and me. A textbook unit, an ESL unit, one of many. "You never get a second chance to make a first impression": trying to explain what that meant, watching their young faces puzzle out the strange and melodious logic of American expressions. It's not just people, I was saying. You can have first impressions of buildings, cities, even countries.

"So what was your first impression of Cambodia?"

Good question. Interesting question. When you live in a foreign country, you get asked all the time, daily, sometimes hourly: "What do you think of (insert country name here)?" You are a guest in the country, so you have to say good things, positive things. Nobody wants to hear you slag their homeland, and I wouldn't want to do so. There's a time and place for everything, and a classroom full of teenagers do not want to hear that their country is majestically fucked up.

So. First impressions? Like, first first impressions?

When one lands in Cambodia for the first time, excitement is tempered by anxiety, bordering on panic. At Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh, a seated line of grim-faced workers in grim-green suits sit behind a counter that greets you after stepping off the plane. They want your passport. They need your passport. You hand them your ten, twenty bucks for a visa, along with a passport-sized photo for the visa, and then they make you wait. The passport is passed along from soldier to soldier, while you wait and wonder just what the hell you are doing in Cambodia in the first place. (Okay, they're not soldier soldiers, but they sure as hell look like it.) After they've deemed that your money is valid and your purpose is valid you are allowed to pass through customs. After that, well, you are on your own. You are in Cambodia. Holy fuck, you think. (Or I think, anyways. I'm from St.Catharines, Ontario, after all. They didn't cover this kind of shit in my Geography classes. Sputtering, skipping, newsreel-like films about the Russian economy from the 1970's, shown to the class while the Soviet Union was in the midst of falling apart, rendering all the information moot and void, introduced by my apologetic-but-not-really teacher? Check. How to survive in a third world country on your own? Um, no. Missed that class. Maybe had a race that day or something.)

Three years ago, when I first came here for a week of English teaching, there was no taxi service run by the airport itself. There were taxis, yes, but they were outside. Problem was, not only were there taxis, there were also taxi drivers.

Why was this a problem? Because the moment you stepped out of the aiport ten, fifteen taxi drivers descended on you like crows on carrion. They all shouted "Sir! Sir!", grabbing you, trying to lead you towards their car, their taxi, their meal ticket for the day. They were short and thin and chubby and tall and male and female. They were poor and you were not.

What to do, what to do, what to do. I sure as shit didn't know what to do. What if I picked one and the others got royally pissed? What if they ripped my arms off and gnawed them like chicken wings? (Such are the thoughts of an ignorant traveller.)

So I did what I had to do, which was pick a taxi-driver, and he looked happy, and the others looked pissed. But that was it. As soon as I chose one driver with the magic-wand of my outstretched finger, the others let out a small moan of disappointment, then dispersed. Instantly. They didn't give me a sour look. They didn't fight with each other. There was some kind of code at work which I did not understand, but I did recognize, instantly, that perhaps this place, this land, was more civil than I expected. (Crazy, yes, fuck yeah, but civil. In its own, outrageous fashion.)

My first impression, then? That out of some kind of chaos came a small and precise form of civility.

Now, it's different. Now, at the airport, taxi drivers no longer linger to grab you and pull you and beg you to feed them for a day. There's a tidy little desk with a tidy little man who will book a car for you, arrange a driver for you, handle all the details.

That's nice. It's easier.

But still. I remember that first hot day, those initial surreal moments in Cambodia. Those tugging, insistent drivers. Their dejected but calm acceptance of my disoriented rejection. Looking back, it was, in the end, a good first impression, all things considered. It was very strange and real and indicative of what would follow in the following two years. Madness tempered by grace.