SEATBELTS AND TAXIS IN THE PHILIPPINES

The thing about the taxis in Baguio is that, quite often, the passenger seat doesn't have a working seatbelt. It's bent, or twisted, or not there altogether. And whenever I make noises about this, annoyed noises, the driver smiles and says: "It's okay, it's okay."

I think what's happening is, my complaint about the seatbelts is taken as some sort of insult by the driver, as if I'm criticizing his driving, as if I'm implying that he's the sort of shady character and reckless cretin that would purposely get us into an accident. But I'm not worried about him. I'm worried about the other drivers, the ones that might hit us. And the drivers always wear their seatbelts, so why should they take my wanting to have seatbelt in the wrong way?

These are the little things you think about, living in a foreign country. Add them up, all the little things, and you have a new way of looking at life.

With or without a seatbelt on.

WHY BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II RULES THE EARTH

Is it possible for someone to love a movie as much as I once loved Back To The Future Part II?

I'm sure it is, of course; film lovers are, by definition, film geeks, and geeks, by definition, feel a warmth and a passion for their possessive favorites that makes them believe that such works of art were created for they and they alone. Add to the equation the fact that one cannot love a movie more than one does at fourteen, and there you have it: My love for the flick is equal, if not surpassing, the energy required to ignite the universe itself.

This is the thing. When you're nine years old, almost ten, and the movie you choose to see on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon in the heart of summer happens to be Back To The Future, the first one, your life cannot be the same afterwards. It simply can't. Sure, I didn't understand the ending, but that was part of the allure; here was this crazy story about a kid travelling back in time, only to have his mother, his mother, fall in love with him, and it ended with a science-fiction twist that is, in retrospect, rather simplistic, but is also, in retrospect, fucking genius, if only because everything is simplistic to a nine-year old. The movie ends on a cliff-hanger, Marty and Jennifer and Doc soaring into the future. How could they do that? I wondered. How could they leave me suspended like that?

The consolation prize as a child was the fact that there was never any doubt that there would be a sequel. Of course there would be. The first film didn't end, it stopped, which meant that it had to continue. The question was when. When, goddamnit.

Four years is a fuck of a long time for a kid, so by the time I finally saw the teaser poster at a small cinema in Brockville, Ontario, I couldn't believe it. I mean that literally: I could, not, believe it. It was coming. It was real. if this agnostic were to see Jesus himself riding on the Four Horseman Of the Apocalypse next Saturday night, it would not equal the awe and wonder I felt upon seeing that simple poster of the Delorean, and the twin tracks of fire, and the title: Back To the Future Part II.

It was back.

In my life, in the real world, four years had come and gone, four years of hockey and comics and movies and classes, always classes, but in Marty's world, time stood still. So much had happened had changed with me, but he was still there, in the Delorean, heading towards the future.

It's that continuity, I think, that drew me in. The realization that, within that cinematic world, time could stand still, be manipulated, be bent backwards and forwards like sticky taffy. While the rest of the world remained distinctly underwhelmed by the first sequel, I was floored, overjoyed, almost crying with glee.

Why do people like sequels, anyways? Because they love the first film so much. They love it so much that they say: Do it again, please. Give me those feelings I felt the first time. Make me love that film again and again, but in a new way.

Back To the Future II ingeniously has its characters actually return to the events of the first film; we get to see it all, again, in a new way. Not to mention the fact that we saw the future, and a parallel 1985 erected out of the misdeeds of the misguided villian, Biff. And flying skateboards, I mean, c'mon -- how cool is that? Back To The Future II showed me the first film, again; it continued a love affair that had begun four years before. It allowed me to believe, if only for an hour or two, that some things never change, that we can, if we want, and are able, go back to the sights of our strongest glories, our greatest loves. We can fuck-up and fix it. We can bring the dead back to life. We can resurrect others, and ourselves.

In retrospect, after watching the trilogy again for the first time in a long time about six, seven months ago, I can see that the first film is the best film. It created the world I fell in love with; it had a heart, and a theme, and a pulse. The second and third films are designed to continue the love we felt from the first one; in a sense, they feed off the goodwill of the first flick.

And yet, I always love the flicks others disparage. The more people diss Back To The Future II, the more I stick up for it, if only in my own head. And then there are those times when I think that the third one is the best one, the most silly and lightweight and heartfelt and mysterious. And then I think no, no, the first is the best. My thoughts change, again, to the essential freneticness of the second one. To jump backwards and forwards in time, to see oneself as the agent of one's own undoing, and the world's, to be able to go back and watch yourself, then redeem yourself, to realize, in the end, that the future is what we make of it, the theme of the whole trilogy and Doc's advice to Marty in the final scene of the final film -- to watch the second film is to reconnect with who I once was and what I once expected out of life. It was a film I knew was coming, someday, but was astonished to see arrive. It was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. It was my favorite story, continued and extended and embellished.

But maybe, just maybe, I love it so much because, after four years of waiting, it didn't let me down. I was expecting greatness, and it was better than I expected.

It didn't let me down.

Funny, how important that is to me now.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE

Steve Martin said something in the history-of-Saturday Night Live coffee-table book Live From New York that I always found interesting. Something to the effect of, when comedians are young, they don't have as many taboo topics to talk about as when they are older, since as you age, you begin to lose people to things like cancer, and you realize that some topics really aren't all that funny, and that boundaries, even in humor, do, in fact, exist.

Yesterday I was watching a Saturday Night Live rerun from earlier this year. On the 'Weekend Update' part of the show, Horatio Sanz did a little piece about a clown that was going around to local hospitals in New York, cheering up children, making them laugh, leading experts to prompt that laughter really was the best form of medicine.

"Unless, of course, you have cancer," he said. "For that, you need chemo."

Big laugh from the audience.

I sat there next to a person with no hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows, the two of us, only moments before, trying to figure out the logistics of dates and times and prices of her sixth chemo session, her last chemo session, after four months, set to begin Tuesday.

We listened to the joke. I looked at her. She looked at me. We didn't say anything.

HEMINGWAY

Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises makes me just want to put down the pen, pull myself back from the keyboard, and go to bed, groggy. What he did eighty years ago seems so simple and clean and perceptive in comparison to a lot of modern writing, which goes on and on and on without having much of a point, let alone precision. (Kind of like my blog entries, come to think of it.)

Hemingway leaves so much out that I could never get into him when I was young(er); I always felt that something was missing, a point of entry, a means by which I could figure out, with ease, what it was that he was trying to articulate. Give me Thomas Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oates, I used to think; give me writers that vomit their emotions onto the page. (Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Wolfe and Oates are great, great writers, and Norman Mailer, a personal favorite, is nothing if not Hemingway's modern heir, and he's written more than a few doorstoppers in his time.)

His clarity and seeming simplicity are the same reasons I could never get into crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Robert B.Parker when I was a teenager, but now gobble them up like gobstoppers. Both of them studied Hemingway's clean, delicate prose. Both of them understand that, yes, sometimes more is more, as John Irving states, and I firmly believe, but also that, you know what? Less can be more, too. Sometimes brevity can fill volumes.

Now I've come to believe that the good art is all about what's left out, the spaces between the sentences, the gaps between the punctuation. It's why Stanley Kubrick continues to perplex and astound his supporters and detractors; he doesn't provide the kind of cinematic indentations that would lead you to any kind of quick, emotional understanding.

I have to dive into Hemingway further. I tried to read a lot of his stuff back before there was such a thing as the Internet or email; now I have to investigate more fully what I've missed. Teaching a few of his short stories to my classes at the University of Cambodia a few years back made me realize how dense he was in his insight. Now I'm steadily realizing, on the cusp of thirty, that I don't really know much about writing at all. But I'm eager to learn.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Right now I'm teaching Koreans, and the powers that be have decided that in the school the kids need English names, not Korean names. I'm not sure why this is the case. I taught Japanese for four years in Japan calling students by their Japanese names, and Cambodians in Cambodia for two years calling them by their Cambodian names. It's a little difficult, yes, remembering names that are somewhat foreign, sometimes odd, but not impossible. Now, though, I find myself calling on teenage kids whose names have been picked by themselves and other teachers, resulting in cries of "Ceasar, pay attention", or "Ulysses, be quiet", or "Adelaide, what's the answer?"

Which makes me feel, I don't know, odd. Like a kid being stuck with a foreign name. I mean, they're already in a foreign land -- do we have to change their names, too?

SOME SECRET ROOM

Maybe it's all those hours I spent watching Rocky IV and Red Dawn as a kid. Watching Rocky ultimately convert the rotten Commies over to his side. Or viewing the Russkies as the ultimate enemy who needed to be vanquished by a group of armed American teens. What's so bad about these guys? I wondered. What separates me from them?

I don't know. But something about Russia, the former Soviet Union, Communism itself, has fascinated me for a long, long time. Even now, today, I scan the net, searching for articles about China and Russia and Vietnam, wondering how these countries are going to reconcile their socialist aims with their capitalist desires and realities.

Before I lived in Japan, my knowledge of history, politics, the world, was virtually nil. I had spent the last two years reading fiction and watching movies. But slowly, day by day, newspaper page by newspaper page, I started to learn about the world. I watched the people around me, and wondered who they were, and what they did, and why. I travelled to Cambodia, then lived in Cambodia. I read the papers. I asked questions. I tried to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. The world is a big place, and there's so, so much that I don't know.

What fascinates me about Communism is that it purports, or pretends, to be concerned with the ultimate human aspirations -- working together, forgoing selfishness, striving for a common good where all are equal. And yet the grim reality of its execution in the last hundred years proves that a monumental hypocrisy is at work.

You can look at China, the old Soviet Union, Burma, Vietnam -- doesn't matter. The bottom line is: the leaders live like kings. A black market of monumental proportions undercuts their own socialist aims. Everybody is trying to get rich, the platitudes they espouse are lip-service only, and it's every man for himself.

Why is this so, I wonder. The obvious answers are, well, obvious: humans are strivers. They want to improve life for themselves. They want rewards for their own initiative. They don't want to be controlled a faceless state.

As with everything, something deeper is going on, though. I wonder if the needs of Communism and the needs of democracy are not so very different after all. On a base, subsistence level, everybody just wants enough to eat, food for their family, a roof over their heads, a fun time on the weekends. Then we want more. And more. Until we develop ideologies that seek to encompass what is good, and best, not only for me, but for you, too.

Maybe that's what intrigues me about Communism, how misguided and futile its aims ultimately prove to be. This notion that somewhere, in some secret room, a group of individuals have decided that they, in fact, have figured out society's needs. That those individuals have names like Stalin and Pol Pot and Kim Jong Ill is the ultimate tragedy. Something inside of us longs for an answer, fulfilled by others, which will satsify what we most need out of life.

Does that room exist? The evidence suggests, well, no. Stalin was a tyrant. Pol Pot was a lunatic. Kim Jong Ill is who he is, which is plain to see. And the masses, the majority, even those under Communism's mandates, know this. They sense it and smell it and live it. Even in a pseudo-democracy like Cambodia, the educated ones know what is a pose and what is authentic. They know that, in all of those back rooms, there exist people very much like themselves, people that want to be fed and clothed, loved and protected. People that will, if necessary, cheat and steal to acheive those aims. People that may or may not be able to be trusted.

What's the next phase for Communism? Where can Cuba and Burma and China go to? At what point will these massive organizational systems collapse under their own illogical weight, or else give in, fully and completely, to democracy's unstoppable necessity? (As Churchill said, democracy's probably the worst system of government invented, except for all the others.)

No answers to these questions, at least not from me. What's certain is that people, the masses, the peasants, the Burmese and North Koreans and Cubans and Vietnamese, are smarter than we think. They are ourselves, amalgamated into another, ulterior form of containment, but slowly and steadily poking and prodding their way out of the box.

DREAMS

I had a dream last night. You know the kind. You're friends with Samuel L.Jackson, and Jackson is pissed off because he got fired from an acting gig for no particular reason that he can figure out, and you're upset and anxious and more than a little worried by the fact that you can't remember where you've been or what you've been doing for the past few weeks. There's a blank spot in your memory. Then the dream shifts, and you're meeting Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. You're happy. He looks happy. You wake up, thankful for the fact that you know who you are and where you are. The dream world fades away, replaced by sunshine through drapes, and Gatorade, the Blue Bolt kind, and a run waiting to be fulfilled.

UNEXPECTED THINGS

When someone goes through chemotherapy, it's common knowledge that they will lose their hair. It's expected that gradually, then rapidly, bits and clumps will fall, then descend. And yet to see eyelashes drop, one by one. To see eyebrows dwindle, then disappear.

MY ATTEMPT AT UNDERSTANDING FILIPINO POLITICS, CULTURE, SOCIETY...

Last week Filipino president Gloria Arroyo declared a state of emergency in the country after a group of disgruntled military officers tried, then failed, to mount a coup that would have toppled their leader and brought 'people power' back to the streets, twenty years after a similar spontaneous movement ousted the disgraced leader Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-lovin' wife, Imelda.

If you find much, if not all of the preceding sentence somewhat incomprehensible, join the club.

Living in a new country forces you to assimilate, then comprehend, an astonishing array of information, most of it coming at you at a dizzying rate of speed, in a language you don't understand, featuring a cast of characters who whose parts you haven't quite figured out yet. Kind of life watching a foreign movie without the subtitles. Everything looks exotic and tilted, the mannerisms and interactions between the participants odd and unintelligible, the developments of the story odd, if not completely suspect. But everyone around you seems to get what's going on. So all you can do is nod and say right, right, sure...

Here, what happened, as best as I can understand it, is that the president, fearing both military and civil unrest, called a state of emergency in a concerted, determined attempt to stifle any rising momentum. She shut down the schools, scolded the instigators, and advised (or ordered) the media to be quite careful in what they say or do. There is much television and newspaper debate now, after the fact, especially since the state of emergency was lifted just the other day, as to whether or not what Arroyo did was even legal within the bounds of the Philippines' constitution. As of now, the raucous story continues...

And what a story it is. The Filipinos are poor, fed up, and tired of Ms.Arroyo, who earlier last year was caught in a vote-rigging election scandal. Twenty years ago, with Marcos given the boot, there was hope that the Philippines would rise to a more prominent, developed position within the Asian economy, but little of that promise has materialized or been fulfilled. Their last leader, Estrada, a former action-movie star, was kicked out of office after only two years for stealing a shitload of cash. It seems like the people desperately want a functioning, humane government here, but nobody is quite sure how to go about getting it put in place.

Hence, the recent, aborted coup. The military was hoping the people would follow their lead and march in the streets. Didn't happen.

Why? Maybe because you can't orchestrate spontaneity; you can't instigate a sudden uprising. People are frustrated, yes, and aggravated, most certainly, but whether those feelings will collectively explode into a civil call for action is not somethign that armed forces can control.

For now, things seem to have settled down a little bit. The plotters are in the process of being arrested; the pundits are castigating the government for putting them under suspicion and ordering their mouths to remain shut. Everyone's wondering what kind of a country they live in, and whether it's ultimately going to change anytime soon.

Me? I'm looking out the window, watching the streets, searching for clues.