HOW I LOST IT, AND WHY; HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I kind of lost it yesterday.

You know the scene in the movie where the guy being yelled at says "Let's talk about this tomorrow," and the other guy, the pissed-off guy, says "No, we're going to talk about this now"? That was me, last night. The pissed-off guy. The one that people are telling to calm down, relax, let's talk this out. Using the words you hear in movies.

Two days ago I was bit by a dog while beginning my run. To go for a run I have to go up a short incline that borders an elementary school on the right, and a house on the left that features two dogs that are always growling and barking, and often roaming around free. The other day was one of those 'roaming-around-free' days, and one of the dogs decided to nick me in the leg. Not a Cujo bite, no, but a bite is a bite, and after fourteen years of running, this is the first time I've been bitten.

I complained to the owners. Or tried to, anyways. The owners were away, in the provinces. Fine. The kid in charge, the one who answered my call at the gate, a teenaged kid, was named Blue. Whatever. I've heard stranger names. He was nice enough, apologizing, telling me that it wouldn't happen again.

The next morning, while trudging up the hill to go to work, the dogs were loose again.

Not fine.

Last night I went to the house again, just as the owners were getting home. I explained who I was. They tried to brush me off. Come back tomorrow, they said. We're tired, they said. This is the Philippines, and things are different here, and you can't blame a dog, yada-yada-yada. I told them I wasn't blaming the dog, I was blaming them. Then I asked if the dog had had any shots. When they said no, I kinda sorta pretty much lost it.

"My girlfriend is dying of cancer," I yelled, the dark mountain night around me doing little to absorb my raised voice. "If she gets bitten, she will get sick, and she will die. Do you understand that?"

It went on and on, as arguments do. A fragile peace was enacted. I left angry, almost enraged. I flashed back to the time in Japan when I was whacked in the stomach with a two-by-four by a homeless nut, while nobody around me helped me.

I've never really lashed out at anybody before like that. I'm not proud of it, but I'm a LITTLE bit proud that they may be worried. Because just this morning I heard from a local fellow that his wife was bitten by that same dog last year. It's not dogs running around loose around here that worries me, because a lot of dogs run around loose; it's the crazy and vicious ones running around that get my blood boiling. It's not me getting bitten that worries me; it's a cancer patient getting bitten, or one of the kids from the school not five metres from their house.

There's a lot of things I don't understand about living in Japan, in Cambodia, and now in the Philippines. But some things are universal. It's not right to yell at somebody, no, but it is right to stand your ground. When you're ticked off, remembering that distinction can be quite different. For the New Year I will ask myself to keep a cooler, more level head. I will try to have access to the better angels of my nature at the necessary time. And I will hope that the stuff I keep deep down inside of me, the passion and feelings and rage and compassion will come out in a better, more humane manner.


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On a lighter note, now that that's all out of my system, Happy New Year!!! Many thanks to the handful of people who read this blog, and all the best for a safe and fulfilling 2006. The best is yet to come.

DOES THE UNIVERSE, IN FACT, HAVE A WHOOPEE CUSHION AT THE READY? OR IS IT JUST YOU AND ME AFTER ALL...

Whenever one of my students complains about a particular assignment or quiz or test being too 'difficult', I always respond the same way, saying: "Life is difficult."

Not a particulary original comeback, somewhat smug and flippant, truth be told, and it's exactly the kind of comment I would have absolutely despised a teacher of mine saying back when I was a student. (If it's true that we all eventually become our parents, perhaps it's inevitable that we become our teachers, too.) I've even been called on it -- when one of my students asked a particular annoying question (meaning, a question I didn't have the answer to, but should have), I muttered "that's difficult," to which he cheerfully responded, sensing his opening: "Life is difficult!"

And yet, it is, isn't it? Life. Difficult. I think when we say (or when I say) that 'life is difficult', we mean 'life isn't fair'.

And yet, what is 'fair'? Does fair mean that we're all born looking like movie-stars, blessed with the intellect of Einstein, granted a lifespan that leads us from year to year with the grace of an angel and the luck of the luckiest penny? If we break our leg, or crash our car, or come down with cancer, does this mean that the universe has it in for us?

I tend to think that way, in my most stupid and selfish moments. As if the universe gives a shit what I'm doing. As if the universe plots and pleads against us or with us, hastening our noble moments to fruition while simultaneously getting ready to put the whoopee cushion under our asses when we least expect it. Since the possibility of a supernatural deity guiding and gliding our lives remains somewhat distant and opaque, I tend to view the cosmos as an entity unto itself, its own God, perhaps, or Gods, rather, made up of an infinite number of divine parts, some naughty, some nice, some both at one and the same time. Like a Santa Claus who constantly confuses his two lists of our virtues and vice.

The only way to combat such an indifferent and plotting universe is to rely on our own humanity to combat the unfairness of the battlefield of life. Instead of relying on the Lord, we rely on each other. Instead of looking for clues in the weather, we look for clues within ourselves, and adjust accordingly.

Who knows? There may, in fact, be a God, or there may, in the end, merely be a self-sustaining universe that whips us around according to its own celestial rules. Either way, when life gets difficult, I think it's better, more humane, more comprehensible, to simply step outside and feel the air and take a quick look around to see who is out there that we can help. Or who may be able to help us.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

I've never lived in a place before where clouds touch the sky and the ground at one and the same time, but that's what happens here, in the mountains, in Baguio. Houses are nestled along a winding slope of mountain edge; the clouds, so close you can touch them, smell them, roll around and dwell in them, drift in and out and between the forest green of the tress and shrubs, dirt and rock. There was a moment, my first or second day here, driving down the highway, staring at the dwindling day through the passenger-side window, when I thought spotted fire. There was smoke everywhere, billowing and bragging its wares in drifting streams of off-shade white. Then I realized: Those are clouds, not smoke. The clouds mingle then merge with the land and the roads. They almost share the same space as us. We're neighbours with the infinite. We can live amongst the clouds and pretend that the real world cannot touch us here, that the clouds' mystical vapors can shield us and protect us from our own fragile selves.

BILL MURRAY IS A GOD -- AND SO ARE YOU

Groundhog Day is one of those films that I catch a few minutes of on cable every five or six years, never from the beginning, always in bits and pieces, and I'm reminded, each and every time, what an insightful movie it is. I saw it for the first time when I was in high school, and laughed at it, and enjoyed it, and forgot about it. Over the years it's gained a kind of cult popularity within spiritual and religious circles. It's not a movie that looks like a masterpiece; it looks, in fact, like what it is -- a Harold Ramis movie, directed in that competent comedy style by the guy who brought you Vacation and Club Paradise and Analyze This and Analyze That and Multiplicity and, lest we forget, Caddyshack. It's a mainstream comedy movie, shot as such, with nothing arty or pretentious about it. Given all that, I can also say that it's something close to brilliant.

You probably know the plot. Bill Murray (in a role not unlike the one he portrayed in the underrated Scrooged) plays a grumpy weatherman assigned to wait for the annual coming-of-the-groundhog one cold February morning in Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania. Only problem is, he can't escape the town; he can't leave; he wakes up each and every day and it's the same day, the day he got there, with everybody doing the same things and saying the same things and living out the same actions. He's stuck with them. He's stuck with himself.

Simple. A neat little fantasy twist that would make Richard Matheson or Rod Sterling or Stephen King proud. But it's not the hook that makes the movie; it's the metaphor. Here is a man who is not happy with his life or the people around him. His life is routine, boring, uneventful. The same shit happens, repeatedly. He can't escape it. He tries to escape it. No luck.

So what does he do? Tries to leave. When he can't do that, he tries to use his newfound knowledge about the rhythms of this one particular day to his own advantage; he learns about people's habits and moods and emotions, hoping that by knowing these, by using these, he can get people to love him. Doesn't work. So what happens? Frustrated, he tries to kill himself.

Even that doesn't work. And what's interesting is that the film clearly shows, after one suicide attempt, a few of the other characters commenting on his horrific truck crash. What does this mean? It means that the world does go on, without him; it means that other people can leave, grow, move on. It's himself that he's stuck with, and his own life. We are all the main actors in our own movie. I'm not entirely sure that Ramis had this existential offshoot in mind when filming that particular scene, so sly and subtle it is, but it works.

Even death can't claim him. He wakes, up again, in the same day, repeatedly.

Eventually, possibly out of sheer boredom and hopelessness, he begins to use his knowledge of the town and others to benefit the town and others. He starts doing everything for others instead of everything for himself. Instead of trying to impress the girl he loves, having given up on her ever coming around to his romantic point of view, he simply does good shit for those around him. Stuck in the same day, the same routine, he makes the best of it for those around him. After all, they, too, are entrapped in the same monotony; even so, he can make their lives better. Such selflessness thus causes the woman he loves to fall in love with him. Which causes him to magically, the next day, wake up, in a new day. Life has moved on, and he with it.

A simple story, really. The story of our lives, actually. Doing the same stuff day after day, trapped in routine, going nowhere. Trying to sideswipe such boredom by chasing after our own selfish desires will do nothing to alleviate such pain; only by inserting ourselves into others' lives and others' existences will we be to reach beyond ourselves. That's what the film is saying, in a comedic, Bill Murray-like way. It's utter unpretentiousness, its humor, its understated warmth and generosity-- that's what makes the film work as a better-than-average comedy, and it's also why so many Christians and Buddhists and Muslims have seen the film as embodying and embracing their own particular religious philosophy.

It's one of those movies that may, in fact, upon reflection, simplify and clarify and embody the process of living itself more clearly and succintly and empathetically than any other film I can think of.

"I'm a God," Bill Murray says in the film, "not the God. I don't think."

There it is, the crystalization of the whole film, of human existence, right there.

If there's a more concise philosophy of life and living and how to approach our own roles in an uncertain universe than that, I haven't heard it.

THE SKY ABOVE AND THE GROUND BELOW

Cancer is a lonely word, especially for an agnostic. Sitting in the oncology ward of the Baguio City Medical Centre, chatting with a friend of Helen's, a cancer survivor, a Christian, a believer, I feel shame at my own uncertainty. She is telling me that God saved her, that God healed her, that she was spared despite the doctor's certainty surrounding her supposedly terminal condition, and that Helen can be spared, too -- and who am I to argue with that? She is here. She prayed; she survived. Shit, if that happened to me, I'd be a believer too.

But truth be told, I've never understood prayer. I understand the need for it, yes, the reaching out, the longing to be heard, the hope for redemption and absolution and change. But I've never got it. If God has a plan, then what good is prayer? And if His plan is to give a thirty-five year old mother ovarian cancer, then what kind of a plan is that? That's the best His power can do? There are times when I want to take God outside and confront him in the back alley behind the garbage cans and ask Him just who the hell he thinks he is, fucking around with us mere mortals like this. I can accept free will; fine. Let us humans fend amongst ourselves and screw up our own little lives. But I can't accept cancer, or tornadoes, or malaria. The older I get, the more I realize that the questions kids ask, the dumb questions, the why-is-the-sky-blue questions, the where-do-we-go-when-we-die questions, are really the only questions out there. Everything else is scenery.

And yet these very same basic, maddening inquiries are the ones that linger and fester, that make me feel like Allie Fox in Paul Theroux's brilliant book The Mosquito Coast, which was made into an equally compelling movie (featuring what is probably Harrison Ford's finest performance). Fox ranted and raved about religion and society and the stupidity of man; if I don't catch myself, watch myself, I could end up like that.

Still, cancer attacking someone you care about does that to you. Makes you ask the big questions, and then pisses you off when the answers don't come. And then you realize that cancer's everywhere. I reread the Afterword to Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and am reminded that its original title was Cancer, until his wife wisely told him that that was a bad idea, an invitation to doom. I read an article about the making of Rebel Without A Cause in Vanity Fair and learn that the director's mother died of ovarian cancer. I sit and wait in the oncology ward and watch the sad but patient faces of people with the disease, hoping against hope. Praying.

It is what it is. I will keep asking the questions and waiting for the answers. The consolation comes with the realization that, afterlife or not, master-plan or not, prayers or not, there is still today. Today is real and present. I can feel it, however fleeting. There is still the here and the now, the people around me and the times we share, the essential solidity of the sky above and the ground below, which may, in the end, by its sheer emotional, tactile, resonance, render any kind of heaven null and void.

WHEREUPON A TINY PORTION OF A DICTIONARY FINDS THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NECESSARY TO VALIDATE A LONG AND PATIENT LIFE

Entering a new country, living in a new country, I'm always struck by one simple, somewhat stupid observation: This has been here all along! All of this! The people and the cars and the mountains and the malls! While I was over there, all of this was over here! Going on! Ongoing!

We tend to think that where we are is where it's at. And it is. But there's all this other shit going on that exists on a simultaneous plane of existence, next door, close, but accessed rarely, if at all.

The same goes for words.

There's a lot of words I don't know. English words, that is. I'm not talking about Icelandic or Ukranian or Welsh or Finnish -- I don't know any of those words. It's one of my pet theories, the one about everybody being almost completely illiterate, because most people only know one, two, languages, but there's hundreds and hundreds of languages, so almost everybody is illiterate in most of them.

But let's focus on English. It's what you and I know best. But every now and then I come across a word that I've never heard before. Just the other day I ran into 'chiliastic'. This professor was using this word to compliment a book explaining why Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and all I could think was: You blowhard twit.

I mean, 'chiliastic'. Come on. I consider myself fairly well-read; I went to school. But I've never, ever come across the word 'chiliastic' in any kind of book, and it's one of those words that academics use to prove that they're smart and erudite. (That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Or 'pulchritude'. This one I found in Jane Smiley's novel Horse Heaven. She's a graceful, elegant storyteller who, every and now then, throws in a word like this. I'm reading along, thinking I'm smart, thinking I'm sophisticated, and then I come across 'pulchritude', and I'm reminded once again that I'm a hick from St.Catharines.

Ah, but here's the thing. Here's the thing, goddamnit.

They're real, those words. They exist. I found them, whole and complete. They were there, in an old dictionary on the shelf where I'm living, the beat-up kind, the kind your grandfather keeps on the shelf in his den, way up top, above the stack of National Geographics. I flipped through the pages, and sure enough, there they were: 'chiliastic' and 'pulchritude.'

How long had they been waiting there, those words? Decades, I'm thinking. I would bet that nobody in the house I'm staying at had opened those books to find those words. Somebody, years ago, had proofread those words, and they had been inserted into the dictionary, and that dictionary had been typset, had been bound, had been released for sale, and there they sat. Those words. For years and years, nobody had looked for them. Nobody had asked how they were, or sent them cookies. They just sat there, in black and white. Waiting. Patient.

Until the day I liberated them. I flipped through those pages, and suddenly there they were, and their function in life, their purpose in life, had been validated. They were not meant to be forgotten in a dusty book on a rackety shelf. They flew up from the page and into my mind. They acquired a new life.

I felt proud of those words. They had attained the kind of glory they must have been seeking all along. They could now die a dignified death. They had been used.

I put the dictionary back on the shelf and looked at it for awhile. So many other words, waiting to be read. A parallel world that had existed next to my own for so long, invisible only because of my ignorance. Those words, all of them, page after page, weren't asking for much, really -- just a bit of time and attention. And yet, how could I validate them all?

I can't; there's not enough time. I had to turn away from that shelf and go back to my life.

There the book sat, and I could feel those words staring at my back as I walked away. We all just want to be acknowledged.

SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS...

Two different signs at two different points in the road:

Sign #1:

Welcome to Bagiuo City! The Cleanest City In The Philippines...

Sign #2:

Welcome to Baguio City! Smoke Belchers Will Be Prosecuted...


Now, this is what I'm thinking.

Is Baguio City the cleanest city in the Philippines simply because all the smoke belchers have been prosecuted? Are all these smoke belchers, felons that they are, crowded together in some dingy, needless to say smoky cell at the bottom of the police station somewhere?

Because goddamnit, if there's one thing I could never, ever stand, it was smoke-belchers. Don't know about you.