LET IT RAIN

Last night I awoke to a strange and surreal sound.

Rain.

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

Wonderful, to have the commonplace become mysterious and alluring.

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

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

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

WHAT WAS I THINKING?!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things change, after all.

PRACTICAL WISDOM FROM ANYWHERE I CAN GET IT

The potentially alarming thing about receiving a higher education is that it could lead you to believe that knowledge, in all its forms, is only accessible at an insitution for which you've willingly handed over thousands and thousands of dollars a year, whereas I take the opposite tack -- that the truest forms of insight come from the people and places you'd least expect, and the wisdom gained costs less than the price of a large-size Coke.

Take Jack Nicholson. He was interviewed by Esquire a year or so ago, and he said something that's been rolling around in my head ever since. (Kind of like what the narrator of The Great Gatsby says in his opening line.) It went something like this:

"I want my kids to know that it's okay to be happy, that you don't have to keep creating imaginary problems for yourself."

A very simple statement. But it seems (to me) to point at something that is rarely discussed in popular culture.

I may have blogged on this before, and if so, my apologizes, but it may be worth reiterating. (Or, it may not. If you're bored by all or part of this latest diatribe, I am once again pleased to redirect you to www.awfulplasticsurgery.com or www.frankstallone.com. Always good times to be found there. )

The western culture, which is the most highly advanced and successful in the history of the known galaxy, giving even Superman's home planet of Krypton a run for its money, is also filled to bursting with the biggest, loudest, most whiniest whiners in the world.

Why is that?

Is it because we're conditioned to think that way? Look at the multiple assortments of TV talk shows that blanket the airwaves; dive into your local bookstore and head on over to the 'self-help' section and check out how many books there are that will tell you that there is something really, really wrong with you, and you better fork over twenty, twenty-five bucks to have the super-slick author on the back-cover tell you the real deal.

Do we have all of these endless neuroses simply because everybody is telling us that we do?

I dunno.

But here in Cambodia, there aren't any self-help books. There aren't any Oprahs. There are, in the entire country, twelve psychiatrist. Twelve. For a country that, within my lifetime, saw upwards of two million people beaten and shot and starved to death in forced labor camps that rival the Nazis for cruelty and human suffering.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, having only twelve psychiatrists; if anything, it's a little scary, the lack of mental-health facilities that exist here, in a place devastated by decades of war and oppression and occupation.

But you know what?

People are living.

They working.

They are getting married.

They are having families.

Life is going on.

I think we do what we're told to do, and our western media and culture tells us that we have a lot of problems, and we have to work through them, and we have to come to a sense of closure, and we have to identify this and that and this and the other thing before we do.

Maybe all true.

But maybe Jack Nicholson, wise old sage that this Joker is, has at least the thread of something more tangible and practical.

It's okay to be happy. It's okay to chill, to live, to move forward. You don't have to navel-gaze and invent reasons for why you should be depressed.

You can sing and dance and crack jokes and not be ashamed. You can shimmer.

If you want to.

HOT OR COLD, HENRY WINKLER, AND WHY YOUR SWEAT-TOLERANCE LEVEL, IF NOT DEFINING YOUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE, AT LEAST ALLUDES TO IT

On a hot day like today, when Cambodia's rainy season still seems like a distant mirage that may (or may not) shimmer into existence at some future but as of yet maddeningly undetermined point in time, the simple pleasures of a cold 7-UP drunk straight from the can should not and cannot be minimized.

Which begs the question, at least from me: Is it better to be too hot or too cold?

(Not quite as dramatic as Chazz Palminteri quoting from Machiavelli's classic text of deception and morality The Prince in A Bronx Tale, true, as Palminteri answers that eternal question "Is it better to be loved, or feared?", but it's still a question that needs to be considered, all things considered.)

In other words, would you rather freeze your butt off or have it burnt off by the broiling sun?

Having lived in climates cold (Canada) and hot (Cambodia), I think my vote would lean towards, well, wait a minute. Take a seat. Hold the phone, Chuck. (That's a line that Michael Keaton says in his debut feature Night Shift, starring Henry Winkler and directed by Ron Howard, and that movie proved a few things, namely a)Howard has a comedic touch as a director, b) that Henry Winkler could play more than just the Fonz, and c) that Michael Keaton is a supreme, massively underrated talent who can deliver lines like the above with a kind of majestic simplicity that allows them to be quoted twenty years later by people like me whenever possible, in blogs and in life.) I was about to answer cold, to say that it's better to be cold, in the snow, on the ice, picking your ass off the driveway you slipped on, but I paused, I hesitated, I reconsidered. I tend to do that.

It's a matter of sweat, really.

You don't sweat in the winter. (Unless you run in the winter, true, because you are layered in undershirts and t-shirts and sweatshirts and toques, toques being a Canadian word that means 'felt hat', and yes I said 'a Canadian word', which is a really, really wrong thing to say, because I personally hate it, hate it when I hear somebody say "Speak American", because there is no such language as 'American', and to say otherwise is smug and ignorant and condescending, and yet I've just gone and done the same thing, more or less, which proves I have to be more tolerant, more forgiving, more altogether aware of the various and unintentional human foibles that make us, well, human.)

It's true. Sweat is rare from December to April.

The opposite is true in summer, or in Cambodia. I try to go for a run early in the morning, when the sun is absent, when the dark is total, but I still sweat, a lot, constantly. (I'm sure you're happy to hear that and read that. Reading about my sweat may not be the highlight of your day, and I apologize. Unless you're Jacoba, for which it very may well be, and for that I apologize, too. You do need to get out more, kid...)

The thing is, you don't need to move to sweat here. You just have to, like, be. And I'm not talking 'be' in any kind of philosophical sense, or Buddhist sense, or even Fonzie-in-his-coolest-sense, because he really was 'the man', one who could 'be' like no other, and there was even an episode where Chachi, the Fonz's nephew, somehow acquired Fonzie's mysterious powers, his ability to attract women at the snap of his fingers, his ability to simply ooze the essence of cool and all that it represents. Fonzie at his coolest was beyond cool, but even he would sweat in this place.

So choosing hot over cold or cold over hot depends, in no small part, on your own comfort with your own sweat.

The thing is, we forget. When we're hot, we long for the cold; when we're freezing our balls off (so to speak), we miss the heat and forget the heat and wonder if such a heat truly, actually, exists, or whether it's simply a memory of a memory of a dream, like the Ropers from Three's Company having their own sitcom -- did it really happen? (I'm here to report that it did happen, they had a show, and it blew.)

So, I can't give an answer. But I'm expecting you to think about it. I'm hoping that you at least consider it. Because it seems to represent something larger, this longing for hot or cold, either/or, ying or yang, that-which-I-do-not-have-but-so-desperately-seek; it hints at where we feel at home, where we feel comfortable, where we feel complete and ourselves. The answer could be important.

Or it could, in my case, just be an excuse to reach for another 7-UP, but hey, in this heat, I take what I can get.

DISPLACEMENT

Displacement.

In my travels abroad, I first felt it in on the plane from Osaka to Tokyo. Because everybody was Japanese. Everybody. Not only that, the entertainment provided for our viewing pleasure was sumo. I'd never seen sumo before, in person or on TV. And here it was.

Displacement.

It's what I've felt for almost six years now, if not on a daily basis, surely on a weekly one. It's not an altogether nasty feeling; truth be told, I've grown so accustomed to it, so expectant of its insights, that to be denied its jarring nudge would be almost, well, cruel.

Displacement.

The nature of streets -- in Japan, narrow and winding; in Cambodia, dusty and bumpy. The look of people, their shapes and sizes. The smell of the breeze. The varying configuration of buildings large and small. The colour of the sun at night, as it slinks into dusk. The emotional transactions that conversations require.

Displacement.

I apologize for belaboring the point, but I don't think I can underestimate what a powerful, almost liberating force such a condition engenders. Growing up in one place, the same place, you think, as you must: This is the world. This is the way the world works. This is the way that life has chosen to reveal itself.

And then, suddenly, as suddenly as an airplane touching ground, as fast and as jarring, you begin to learn. You realize that everything you know, everything you've been taught, all the ideas about human existence that have been formed and passed down to you are, at best, inadequate. I won't say wrong, or misguided, or intentionally lacking; these terms imply a kind of intent that society does not plan. People are people, and humans are humans, and they raise their children the way that they were raised. This is not a flaw but a necessity.

But it's inadequate. Because even though we are becoming more and more connected, and more and more multi-cultural, the fruits of these alliances are illusory (at best). We can eat ethnic food and marvel over National Geographic's vivid depictions of those who are different than ourselves -- but it's not enough.

Not enough for what? What do I expect?

I cannot speak for you; I'm not sure that I can even speak for myself. Knowledge is hard to attain, and difficult to process, let alone articulate.

I find it somewhat ironic that on the same day Terri Schiavo passes away from starvation, the Pope is revealed to be being kept alive by means of a feeding tube. That is a literary image and coincidence that any self-respecting editor would dismiss as being too on-the-point, obvious and over-the-top.

I don't know what these two people, the citizen and the saint, will ulitmately come to represent, but both cases point, with a laser-like intensity, at the sanctity of life, and what we will do, and not do, to preserve it. And our opinions on this issue, on life itself, are nurtured in the towns and provinces and countries and societies that sustain us. All of which lead to conviction, and certainty, and obstinancy.

"I am right," we think. "What I believe is the truth, the path, the way that things should be."

And whether you are a shah in Iran or a dictator in Cambodia or a preacher in Milwaukee or a teacher in Moosejaw, the end result of this line of thinking is the same: inertia.

Life itself has a three-dimensionality that I had never considered before leaving Canada. I was subsequently allowed access, access to views on life that are separate and isolated from those that shaped me.

I was offered, and accepted, displacement.

And, hopefully, this same process will eventually enable me to fit myself back into the puzzle of my own culture with a rudimentary but piercing understanding, however partial, of how complex and mystifying the human condition truly is. How devoid of easy answers and lock-step conclusions, and how better off we all for that ambiguous confusion.

REALLY RANDOM STUFF: IT'S PAT, A COMEDIC INTERLUDE, AND WHY GARY COLEMAN IS A LESSON FOR US ALL

I'm trying really, really hard to keep this blog focused on international and social issues that speak to us all as humans first and nationalities second, and with that in mind I feel it's my duty to point out that Wheel of Fortune's Pat Sajak, a global treasure, has his own blog at www.patsajak.com, where he writes about baseball and his thoughts on being a Republican in Democrat-centred Hollywood and other interesting, essential issues central to our perserverance as a species, and if you're wondering how I came across this information, it's so that you wouldn't have to. Not everyone can handle that much Pat; I can. Enter at your own discretion, and don't blame me for the consequences.

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"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it."

-- Mitch Hedberg

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I was just thinking: At one point, Gary Coleman was the man. He was the dude. You can't get any bigger than Diff'rent Strokes. You can't. He had his ass kissed on a daily basis. People cut his hair for free, brought him sandwiches, secretly rooted for him because their jobs depended on how funny he was.

And then one day the show was cancelled, and he becomes a joke. I know, because I've made jokes about him, and Emmanuel Lewis, too. That's not right. (And for my birthday one year a few years back my friends Eric and Greg took me to Yuk Yuk's comedy club in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where the featured comedians were Marc 'Skippy' Price from Family Ties, along with his special guest, Emmanuel 'Webster' Lewis from Webster, and it was so sad, seeing these two young men who had provided so much entertainment for me as a kid, reduced to groping for laughs from an audience who were more urgently concerned with downing some beer and, potentially, copping a few feels from their dates.)

That's what sucks about success -- it never, ever lasts. Ask Milton Berle. George Burns. Chevy Chase. Gerald Ford. The dude who played handyman Schneider on One Day at a Time. Eventually, it goes, leaves, hikes up its thumb and hits the road. That's what I think about when I watch the Oscars, or listen to music, or cruise the net. We are viewing the next generation of has-beens. It's an illusion, all of it, the whole deal. Instead of thinking of 'celebrity' as something that one goes out and actually aspires to and achieves, it's better to think of it as something that one lives through, and emerges from, scalded but alive (hopefully).

And the great thing about living abroad is that you begin to learn that being famous doesn't, mean, shit. You know why? Because noone's famous. Not really.

You think anybody in Japan or Cambodia knows who Oprah Winfrey is? Ray Romano? Yes, sure, Brad Pitt is huge in Japan, and Tom Cruise, but that's about it. They don't know who the hell Johnny Carson was, and they don't care. The only westerners that Cambodians can recognize are George W. Bush and maybe, if they have a satellite dish, Larry King.

All the things that the western media focus on, the Jerry Springers and Dr.Phils and P.Diddy's and Puff Daddy's and 50 Cents and Madonnas and Jack Nicholsons and whomever, it's all transitory; it's all see-through. They're all the Gary Colemans of the future. We just have to wait.

Reality TV has made the everyman a celebrity, which means nobody is a celebrity. Maybe it's better to focus on the people who live next door to us, or across the street, rather than the ones on a supermarket tabloid while we buy out Ben and Jerry's. (Which, incidentally, I don't think I've ever tried, given that that particular ice cream brand isn't available in Canada, I don't think, but I'm reaching for a colourful image. And yes, I spelled 'colourful' with a 'u', because that's how Canadians spell it. I need to hang on to my Canadian heritage and language usage in order to maintain my citizenship. If you don't believe me, just see bylaw 056479-03321-A section three, paragraph two, line four, right under the picture of Pamela Anderson, who, true story, at the time of her birth, was somehow chosen as Canada's Centennial Baby because she was born on July 1, 1967, which was Canada's one hundredth birthday, and nobody knew at the time that she would grow up to be a bona-fide representative of California bimbodom because she was a) a baby, and b) a Canadian, but there you go. And she recently received American citizenship, as did Jim Carrey, as did Michael J.Fox, as did Peter Jennings, and it's not that I'm against them doing it, as they still maintain their Canadian citizenship, but I can't help but feeling a lit bit, as a Canadian, deflated because of it. Which shows you how celebrity has wrecked my world, because I know all of the above facts, when I really should know more about the pythagorean theorem and the Versailles treaty. Don't know shit about either.)

The people on the floor us below might not be as interesting as Rosie O'Donnell or Kirstie Alley, no, but, assuming you stay in the same place, I'm betting you that they, unlike insert-celebrity-name-here will still be around and relevant in twenty, thirty years time.

And they'll probably have something to say.

WESLEY SNIPES AND THE POTENTIAL RESCUE OF ALL OUR LOST AND NEGLECTED MOMENTS IN TIME

Yesterday I was scanning the selection at my local DVD shop here in Phnom Penh when I spotted Boiling Point, an early nineties Wesley Snipe/Dennis Hopper police thriller that I saw sometime in high school, forgot had ever existed, only to have it reappear in my life here, now, in Cambodia.

Not that this is rare. There are always movies that you've forgotten you've seen, or aren't sure that you've seen, or are pretty sure that you've seen, but you could be wrong.

I guess I didn't like the movie all that much, as I can only remember a few stray images. I like Wesley Snipes more as an actor than an action star; he was great in Mo' Better Blues and Jungle Fever and The Waterdance and One Night Stand. (Shameless name dropping moment: I actually got Snipes' autograph at the Toronto Film Festival Screening of One Night Stand in the mid-nineties. Snipes was sitting a few rows back from me during the screening at the now sadly defunct Uptown Theatre, and as soon as the lights went up I high-tailed it over to his row and asked for his John Hancock. At that same moment, Roger Ebert said hello to Snipes, asked if he was still living in Chicago, congratulated him on the movie. So Ebert stole my moment with Snipes, is what I'm getting at...)

And yet, seeing that DVD cover last night, of a movie I can scarcely recall, brought about a brief, almost crystalline moment of sadness into being.

Why? Because it reminds me of how much we forget; sometimes I think we forget most of our lives, if not all of them.

I probably saw that movie in Grade 11, 12. (I seem to have vague memories of me watching it in the Pendale Cinemas; I almost always remember which theatre I saw which movie in, a weird quirk of mine.) Me and my friends used to go to the movies every Friday night, usually catching a 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock show. I would have seen the ad for Boiling Point in the newspaper, chatted with my friends, decided to catch it as either the first feature of the night, or the last. I probably went for a run after school. I might have been the one to drive that night, or maybe my friend Eric, or Greg; we usually took turns. We probably went to Mickey Dee's, or grabbed a pizza. It might have been a cold night in February, or a warm spring evening in late April. I probably had to work the next day, stacking books at the downtown library. I might have jotted a few thoughts about the movie somewhere in a journal of mine.

I don't know.

This is all speculation.

That night is lost. I know I saw the movie; I know that, for a few hours at least, my life intersected with the life of the movie. That movie dictated, to a small extent, a night in my life. Just one night, true, but still. The only thing I can recollect from that point in time is this movie, the fact that I saw it.

Everything else from that night is gone.

That's the way it has to be, I guess. We can't hold on to everything, right?

But still. Sometimes I like to think that the memories of that night, the details of that night, are hidden elsewhere, in some neighboring dimension, like stubborn, abandoned children that refuse to believe that they are orphans. Stored away by some unseen God from the indifferent, prying fingers of time and age and distance. Waiting for the perfect chance to discard their celestial camoflauge and reveal themselves in one shining, almost blinding blast of concentrated, enduring nostalgia.