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

Imagine that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's just...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It can't be just me, can it?

WRITING AND READING: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

I like having written, not writing.

-- Anonymous


Writers write to read what they've written.

-- Susan Sontag,
novelist, literary critic


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So:

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

I'm down with that.

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

WHAT YOU FIND

The interesting thing about writing a blog (or a novel or a poem or a screenplay or a play) is that it forces you to look at the life around you as part of something bigger than itself, or even yourself; it enables you to view everday life through a lens that is not necessarily rose-coloured, no, but it can be, if you want it to be, and if you describe it that way.

I'm not saying that this is a good thing, a noble thing, or even a sane thing. Most people in life go THROUGH life with blinders on, which is not a value judgement or a criticism; if anything, it's almost a compliment, because to do the opposite, to see life as something worthy of a blog (or a novel, or a yada-yada-yada) is to somehow glorify and demean the human experience.

Glorify, because when (or if) you DO happen to slip on those rose-coloured glasses as you perch over your notebook, pen in hand, or slump over the keyboard in a carpal-tunnel tornado of typing, you can point out to others exactly what you find worthy about life. What you find worthy of mentioning, highlighting, stressing. Maybe it's the little kid who drops his ice-cream cone on the ground, looks at it, looks at his mum, and decides not to cry. That is heroism writ small, a lad learning how to not give in to the cruelty of gravity and the malicious whims of all those Emperors of Ice Creams. So you see it, write it down, and it brings a smile (or a sigh, or even a snort) from those who read it. You feel good about life, the reader feels good about life, and that kid, the instigator of it all, was left totally out of the loop, unaware of the charm he unwittingly inspired and inflicted.

Oh, but there's also something demeaning about the whole thing, the whole charade of words-on-paper, and it's hard for me to put my finger on why writing about anything at all is sometimes unseemly and rank. (That's code for: I'm stuck, damnit.)

Perhaps it has something to do with the essential arbirtrariness of words in the first place. Living in Japan, trying to learn Japanese, I learned a number of valuable lessons, one of which was: Words are human constructs. Sounds simple, right? (Nobody ever accused me of being a rocket scientist.) But we tend to forget that. We tend to think that all of our human experiences, all our emotions and impulses, can be summed up by a combination of twenty-six letters arranged just so. It's only when you experience one kind of feeling, and then find yourself unable to express what you're feeling in another language, that you slowly start to realize: Hey, we can FEEL stuff and yet not know how to articulate it!

Or maybe it has something to do with the immensity and density of the unknown, whether that unknown is the legacy of genocide or the Khmer word for 'toothpaste'. The human and cosmic are continually intertwined, and the best we have to offer is our weak and futile words, hoping that the sounds that are emitted from our lips and the code that emerges from our typing (or scribbling fingers) contextualizes that unknown in a way that makes sense. In a way that approximates reality.

The best writing reminds us who we are and what we are capable of doing. (The great and the horrific.) The worst writing is untrue, meaning, it does reality a disservice. It boils life down to truisms and caricatures. It simplifies the human heart and the water in the river.

I guess, though, stuck with our language, at home with our language, we don't have much of a choice, do we?

We use the words as best as we can, then exit -- putting down the pen, turning off the computer. And then there's nothing left to do, if we're lucky, but to watch the sunset, notice its redness, and wish that we had within us the means to somehow capture and express accurately and majestically its fullness, its mystery.

LOST BOY

It happened a week or so ago, but I still find myself thinking of it at odd hours of the day, like now, in front of the computer, or yesterday, walking across the street, wondering if I would bump into the kid and knowing that that wouldn't happen, because he was elsewhere. Wherever that is.

Not that it was a major incident, or even a minor one; there was nothing special about it, because there was nothing special about the kid himself. I was in the company van, headed to work, and he walked across the street, dazed but purposeful. His eyes were blank, his clothes ratty, his hair a mess. (Okay, that could describe me, too, but.) He stepped out in front of the van, stopped, and reached out his hand, as if he were Obi-Wan Kenobi and had decided to use his masterful mastery of the Force to stop traffic in Phnom Penh.

The driver of the van wasn't fazed. (In Cambodia, you expect, and usually are rewarded, with various forms of traffic hurtling into your path at any and all times.) He simply honked the horn, and the kid stared at the driver for a moment or too longer. He then lowered his hand and continued on his way across the street, ready for more cars, more honks, more resigned indifference to his powers and his fate.

A lot of street kids here get off on sniffing glue from plastic bags. They sniff and they sniff and they huff and they puff, and they don't blow any houses down, no, but the slowly, methodically snuff themselves out.

I don't know if the kid I saw wandering into the morning rush was high on glue or yaba (the other drug of choice here) or his own unique illusions of life, the ones that told him that cars are anxious, if not eager for him to block and stop oncoming traffic. I do know that there are a lot of lost boys (and girls) in this town that remain hidden much of the time, not lurking, no, because their intent is not necessarily sinister, but stuck in the shadows nevertheless.

Every so often they come out of those same shadows, into the bright light of day. They make their presence felt, they are acknowledged, and then they go on their meandering way. Somewhere.

I'm not sure if I will see that same kid again, or if I'd even recognize him, but there are others to take his place. Other misplaced, displaced youths with deadened stares and outstretched hands. I don't know if those hands are reaching out to smack someone or caress someone.

But I do know that they're reaching.