WHY GETTING HOOKED ON SOLVING THE JONBENET RAMSEY MURDER CASE IS REALLY, REALLY NOT A GOOD IDEA SHOULD YOU VALUE SLEEP

I think the mother did it. I honestly do. Or it could have been the brother. I believe that's a possibility, though not as likely. Either way, the father helped cover it up. But that doesn’t explain the motive: why? Why would a family kill its six year old daughter? And the ransom note left on the stairway – there was no fingerprints, no folds, no creases. Pristine. How is that possible? (But how would an intruder know to place it so carefully on the back staircase that Patsy used every morning?) And the unidentified DNA in the child’s panties – whose was it? And that palm print on the cellar door – unknown.

I’m hooked.

See, this is the thing. I could be reasonably happy alone in a room for the rest of my life, provided that I had a supply of good books. If the books happened to be true-crime stuff, I would be in heaven. Usually, this is a genre that gets a bad rap, and deservedly so; exploitive, lurid junk, most of it is. It is a genre, however, that has also given us Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD and Norman Mailer’s THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG – two books that are about as good as books can get.

Mailer’s researcher on THE EXECTUIONER’S SONG, Laurence Schiller, wrote PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN, which I recently read, a 1999 true-fiction account of the JonBenet Ramsey case that gripped the United States back in 1996 and 1997.

You remember it. Probably vaguely. I was in university at the time, and didn’t pay much attention to all the media shenanigans surrounding it. I knew the outlines of the case, roughly: A wealthy family, a beauty-queen child, the girl killed, the parents under suspicion. Whatever.

Oh, but let me let you in on a secret. Come closer. Don’t be shy. This is no ‘whatever’ story. This is one of the most fascinating, infuriating, maddeningly unsolvable cases I’ve ever encountered. I read the 600 page book in two days flat. Couldn’t get enough. No movie could make this up. No case could be more tragic.

In brief: Jon Benet Ramsey and her family went to a Christmas party on December 25th, 1996. They came home, went to bed. The next morning, the police received a phone call: a kidnapping had taken place. They arrived at the home of wealthy Boulder socialites John and Patsy Ramsey. A ransom note had been found by Patsy Ramsey on the back staircase, asking for $118 000 for the safe return of their daughter. The note stated that the kidnappers would call later that morning. They never did. Sometime in the early afternoon, the father, John, searches the house once again. He finds the body of his dead daughter in a wine cellar in the basement. She is wrapped in one of her favorite blankets. A noose is around her neck. A garrote has been fashioned around her neck.

And that’s just the beginning.

What makes this case so fascinating is the physical evidence, and the human evidence, and all the things that should add up but don’t. The fact that the ransom note was the ‘war and peace’ of ransom notes, as the police put it, when most ransom notes are short and to-the-point. The fact that the amount of money asked for in the ransom note is $118 000, which just happens to be the amount of John Ramsey’s Christmas bonus. The fact that the note was written using a Sharpie pen and a pad of paper that were already in the house. The fact that a Bible was found open in the Ramsey’s bedroom to psalm 118, which talks about giving a sacrifice unto God. The fact that the house was so large and so winding that there was no way anyone unfamiliar with the house could have located the wine cellar where the body was found. The fact that a neighbour heard a scream in the night, but the parents didn’t. The fact that the parents said that their son, Burke, was not awakened until after the police had arrived and the body had been found, and yet, on an aural enhancement of the original 911 call placed by the mother, in the distant background, you can hear the son’s voice asking: “What do I do now?” The father, John: “We’re not talking to you.” The son: “What DID you find?” The fact that, despite the ransom note stating that if anyone was notified about JonBenet’s disappearance their daughter would be killed, the family instantly phoned not only the police but their priest and closest friends and invited them over to the house. The fact that, only thirty-five minutes after finding the body of his dead daughter, John Ramsey phoned his private pilot to try and arrange for his family to fly out of state that evening. The fact that some experts declared the sexual abuse evident from examination of the vagina determined that JonBenet had been the long-term victim of abuse, while others stated it had happened for the first time the night of the killing. The fact that a flashlight was found on the kitchen counter that could have been used to knock her unconscious. The fact that it was proven that Patsy Ramsey purchased material from a hardware store the month before that was the same exact price as the rope and duct tape used in the killing. The fact that the role of duct tape was not found at the house. The fact that fabric from the outfit Patsy Ramsey wore the night of the party was found on the duct tape plastered across the daughter’s mouth. The fact that it was proved the duct tape was placed on the girl’s mouth after she was already dead. The fact that she was found wrapped in her favorite blanket and near her Barbie outfit, indicating that the killer wanted her to feel comforted. The fact that the ransom note uses phrases like “and hence”, the same exact phrase that the Ramsey’s themselves used in a thank-you message to their church the following Christmas. The fact that handwriting experts could not exclude the mother from writing the ransom note. The fact that a linguistic expert, after examining various samples of the mother’s writing, determined that she wrote the ransom note. The fact that two experienced investigators, viewing the same evidence, came to opposite conclusions: one determined an intruder had killed the girl; another determined it was the parents.

And all of that is just the beginning.

I’m losing sleep, I’m telling you.

See, I’m the deluded type of guy that actually thinks: I can figure all this out. I can crack the case, given enough time. In high school, I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, reading every book ever written on the subject that I could find, culminating in my Grade 13 History Independent Study that was supposed to be eight pages and ended up being thirty. (I haven’t figured that one out yet, not completely, but I have my theory, more or less, and I’m sticking to it.)

Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? It’s the rule stating that, all things being equal, the simpler explanation for an unexplained event is usually the correct one.

When a child is murdered in the home, it is usually the parents who do it. That’s a fact. All of the circumstantial evidence in this case, and the parents’ behavior, indicates that one or both of them were in on it. (The evidence for an intruder, I think, is quite scant.)

So, bearing that in mind, my two cents:

As one interesting article I read recently on the Internet postulated: If you stop thinking of it as a ‘murder’, and instead think of it as an ‘accidental death’, then things become clearer.

I think either the mother or the brother accidentally killed JonBenet.

If it was the mother: The little girl had a history of wetting her bed, and still wanted to be wiped by others after using the bathroom. Perhaps the mother got angry, wiping too hard, resulting in the vaginal tears that the autopsy found. They later determined that the type of head injury she had was consistent with a fall on a bathtub or the floor. So the mother accidentally kills the daughter, panics, awakens her husband, and the two decide to make it look like a murder to save their own skin. (This could account for why the husband and wife acted completely distant from each other the morning of the murder, never once seeking to console the other.)

Or, if you believe the other experts who insist that the girl had been sexually abused for quite some time…

If it was the brother: The brother sometimes slept in the bed with JonBenet. The fact that the parents did not tell the police that the brother was awake and aware when they made the initial phone call indicates that they did not want to implicate the brother in any way. The anger in the father’s voice audible in the aural enhancement of the phone call – “we’re not talking to you” – indicates he was pissed at the son. Perhaps the parents found out that night that the brother had been molesting JonBenet. (A photo from the crime scene shows a dictionary open to the ‘I’ section, and the page folded so that it points towards the word ‘incest’.) The angry mother takes JonBenet into the bathroom, accidentally whacks her, kills her, and the scenario plays itself out again.

This case, I’m telling you…

It’s not an open and shut case, by any means, and I’ve left out a bunch of evidence, a ton of evidence. It’s almost ten years later, and nobody’s been charged. If you’re at all intrigued by what I’ve written (and if you’re still awake by this point in the post), I recommend the book PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN. It draws you into these people’s lives, their community, their loss. It’s a fair and multifaceted and balanced look at a heartbreaking, tragic story, as the saying goes, and I can’t pretend to have it all figured out.

But I’m working on it.

SLIM JIM, TUNNELLING THROUGH VIETNAM, AND A CANADIAN TODDLER, DEAD IN CAMBODIA

It was Slim Jim who took us to the tunnels. His real name was Thong, Thong the tour guide, but everyone called him Slim Jim, because he ate like a bird, smoked like chimney, and drank like a fish. That’s what he said. He said lots of funny things, strange things, the things that learners of a foreign language love to say. He freely admitted that he learned much of his English from an Aussie slang book somebody gave him. “I’m as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest!” he said. Or: “I’m sorry to tell you that the air conditioner is no longer active, as it is FUBAR.” Then, later, in an aside to one of the Aussie ladies: “Do you know what FUBAR means? ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Reocognition’!” He laughed, turned around, flashed me a grin. (I knew what it meant because I watched TANGO AND CASH a long time ago.) Earlier we had chatted outside of the Cao Dai temple, whose worshippers combine Daoism, Buddhism and Catholicism into their own religious hybrid, one that features three saints whom they worship: a Vietnamese, a Chinese, and, no shit, Victor ‘Les Miserables’ Hugo. “When I was young, we were so hard done by,” he told me, referring to his life in the South. “Do you know that phrase – ‘hard done by’? I learned it from Elton John! ‘It’s No Sacrifice.’ Good song." Slim Jim began to softly sing the words. In the background, I could hear the worshippers chanting, humming, praying to their Gods. Praying to Victor Hugo.

The Vietcon tunnels at Cu Chi are located near Black Lady mountain, which served as the stopping point for the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam war. The town of Cu Chi sits between Saigon and the mountain; it was an ideal place for the Vietcong to wait, and hide, and attack. They were from the North, the Vietcong were, and they were Communist, trying to overtake the democratic South; the tunnels were dug so that the soldiers could hide underground and withstand the daily onslaught of the American bombs.

On this day, this rainy day, there were no bombs -- only Canadians and Filipinos and Poles and Brits and Chinese and Aussies.

The tunnels were designed for protection. Americans could bomb and bomb and bomb some more, but the Vietcong could hide, underground, in their own, elaborate network of twists and turns.

We were allowed to crawl through a portion of the tunnels. They had been widened a bit for Westerners; they had been readjusted for the tourist dollar. Before we did this we watched in awe as Slim Jim, who leds into the middle of the forest, introduced one of the workers. The ground looked like ground does: brown and leaf-covered and ordinary. Slim Jim kicked aside some dirt, revealing a secret hole. The worker, clad in a military style uniform, cheerfully lowered himself into a whole that looked, from my vantage point, no bigger than a postage stamp. Moments later, behind my back, there he was! Another hole in the ground, and up he came, smiling, alive. The rain began to fall. The air was hot. I thought: I am standing in a jungle in Vietnam.

Then we were all given the chance to crawl 120 metres through a tunnel dug by the Vietcong before I was born.

I used to run track – the 800 and the 1500 and the 3000 metre races; I’m currently (half-heartedly) training for a marathon. 120 metres? Pleeeease. Not. A. Problem.

Note to self: The next time you are told that you are going to crawl through a hole in the ground in former Vietcong territory, you pray to Buddha, God, Victor Hugo, George Burns, whoever. You pray hard, and you pray long.

Because let me tell you. I don’t give a shit if this tunnel has been widened for western dopes like me – 120 metres, on your hands and knees, in three-quarters darkness, in a space no bigger than a matchbox (it seemed) is enough to make a grown man cry. I didn’t cry, but man. I didn’t have a panic attack, but Jesus.

It was one of those moments in life. Impossible to describe. At various points I have been a reader and a runner, a writer and a teacher, a student and a hockey player. We all live various lives within our real lives; we all have moments in time that resonate.

This was one of those moments. At a certain point – five years from now, ten years from – I will be at a desk. I will be paying a bill. I will be changing lanes. And I will remember that moment – crawling through a VC tunnel in the jungles of Vietnam, as the rain fell, as the sweat dripped down my chin. I will remember the darkness. The narrowness. I will remember coming to the end, emerging into the rainy afternoon. I will remember how grateful I felt, how happy. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as happy as I did in that moment.

Vietnam has a way of doing that to you.

Or to me, anyways.

A short trip, only three days, mostly spent in and around Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), but invigorating nevertheless.

Coming by bus from Cambodia. Waiting for a ferry in a small Cambodian town. Watching a little girl knock on my window as we wait, her tiny hand clutching the wrist of her blind father. Begging for food. I go out and give her an apple. I ignore the others begging for help. I watch Britney Spears on the television in the bus watch the six previous ‘making of’ videos she has made. I hand my passport over to the guard at the border, and I’m slightly shocked to discover that I have not left Cambodia since last September. I watch as the day-laborers walk their bikes between the Cambodian and Vietnamese border. Once over the border, I instantly notice the guard rails, the electric power lines, the small, subtle signs of modernity that are completely absent from Cambodia. I listen to the Aussies in the tour van make fun of Kiwis. I spot numerous ‘My Dung’ signs along the highway. (Slim Jim: “It means ‘beautiful’! In Vietnam, the best name for a beauty shop! But if I were to have a restaurant named ‘My Dung’, no foreigners would come! Would you? Ha! Ha! Ha!”) I see the bright, pastel color buildings, crammed together, almost reminiscent of Japan, or old Pez dispensers. I visit the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, and realize once again that history is written by the winners. I read about the ‘imperialist American aggressors’ and then allow my eyes to wander to the window, where I can see, just across the street, the familiar blue and white logo of FORD motors. I surmise that Colonel Sanders lookes a lot like Ho Chi Minh. I spot at least three elderly Vietnamese who sport Ho Chi Minh style beards, reminding me of my North Korean student here in Cambodia who fashioned his hair in the same style as his Dear Leader, Kim Jong. I am reminded of Phnom Penh, of Japan, real places filled with real people, and this makes me glad, to not have everything simply seem like a movie I once watched. I buy a book about Vietnam written a professor from my old university, read it on the bus back to Phnom Penh, and decide that he is full of shit. I finish reading THE CORRECTIONS in my hotel room, come across a clever little bit about a character’s college roommate, and I suddenly recall my own university roommate, Nathan, and how he transferred from my school at the end of first-year, and how I saw him at a restaurant in Toronto the night before I left for Japan. I wander the streets of Saigon and remember Martin Sheen’s words at the beginning of APOCALYPSE NOW: “Saigon – shit.” I wonder how the Cao Dai people came to worship Victor Hugo. I admire the red and yellow and blue robes they wore, each symbolizing a different religion. I realize that I am engaged and comfortable in the real world, in its political machinery, its people and ideas, and yet can still be ill at ease, one on one. I crawl through a Vietcong tunnel as rain falls on the dirt above my head, and I feel grateful to be there, in that place, me, that kid, who once wanted to see PLATOON in the theatres but had to wait for video instead.

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A Canadian kid was killed in an international school in Siem Reap the other day, as you may have seen on the news. A hostage situation gone awry. A group of Cambodians taking a group of rich people hostage. They asked for money – a thousand dollars – and other various weapons, and a van, and perhaps something else. I don’t have all the details. I don’t need all the details. A three year old is dead. Everything else is window dressing.

It’s easy -- living here, working here -- to become superior. To feel superior. Even the amount of money that the hostage takers asked for – one thousand dollars – sounds ridiculous to us. One thousand dollars! Reminds me of the first Austin Powers movie, when Dr.Evil, just revived from thirty years of suspended animation, demands ONE…MILLION…DOLLARS for his scheme, not realizing that that isn’t much money.

Bullshit. One million dollars is an insane amount of money. I saw on the net today that a lottery winner in the States, who won over a hundred million dollars, has decided that he wants to be a billionaire, so that he can "take care of his family, give back what I've received." Right. And one hundred fucking million dollars won't allow you to take care of your family, or give you that kind of security. We in the west have lost all perspective. In Cambodia, one thousand dollars is an insane amount of money. Maybe five years, ten years salary for a lot of people.

Word is that the hostage takers simply wanted some money from some people who had some.

People wonder what leads to crime. To murder. To vengeance. And after living here for two years, I can say, with true conviction, that it does not involve video games, or violent movies, or animated cartoons.

Poverty leads to crime. Living in villages that have no electricity and where the death rate for children is so high that babies die by the week leads to crime.

I’m not justifying what happened. A murdered kid needs no justification. It is what it is, and I hope who did it is punished for years and years and years.

The thing is, you can see it here. You can feel it. When people have nothing, absolutely nothing, they have nothing to lose. You can’t lose what you haven’t got. Criminals here who steal motorbikes are often caught by other moto-drivers. These moto-drivers stomp these criminals to death. Happens all the time. Every week. And yet the thieves take their chances. Why? Because they have nothing to lose.

All this: besides the point. A three year old Canadian kid is dead in Cambodia, and I feel horrible about it, and I know most Cambodians feel horrible about it. This is not supposed to happen, not here, not in a country is, in all honesty, usually quite hospitable to foreigners. Cambodia is a country filled with the nicest people on earth, but the only time it has made headlines in the last twenty years has been when something bad happens to the people, or when the people make something bad happen to others.

The country deserves better. The people deserve better. That three year old Canadian deserves a life. And I’m left. Left wondering why working in this country has given me the opportunity to become bigger than myself, while others, Cambodian and Canadian, have only become smaller, finite, gone.

COMING SOON...

In case anyone's wondering, I survived my Saigon excursion.

Tomorrow I'll write my thoughts on Vietnam, as well as the recent killing of a Canadian child in an international school in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Probably the first and only time I will ever see a headline featuring Cambodia on Canada's www.thestar.com.)

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VIETNAM I LEARNED FROM SYLVESTER STALLONE AND CHUCK NORRIS, or WHY JON STEWART NEEDS A PASSPORT

Watching a little bit of Jon Stewart interviewing Russel Crowe on The Daily Show the other day made me think about my own upcoming jaunt to Vietnam, a country that was once, for me, simply the repository of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone get-em'-back-alive POW movies and has now become, within the blink of an eye, a place I can actually, physically enter.

Let me explain.

Crowe somehow got Stewart to admit that he (Stewart) didn't have a passport. Which I found surprising. And troubling. And not that it should even matter, because Stewart is, after all, just a comedian, yes, absolutely, but he's also a comedian who's a sharp and witty commentator on foreign events and policies and politics; the fact that he's never been out of the country, and that only 14% of Americans actually have passports, troubles me for some reason.

Maybe it's because I often feel that I didn't know anything about the world, anything, until I exited my world, Canada; I often think that everything you read in a newspaper or a magazine has little, if any, resonance unless you've actually been there, done that.

(That's why the idea of foreign policy 'experts' like Condoleeza Rice has always troubled me, too; a Soviet expert she is, supposedly, and yet, how much time has she actually spent there? She's never lived there; she's never worked there. Never hung out in a corner pub and shot the shit with a bunch of drunken Siberians. The same goes with the people who so nonchalantly rearrange geographical history and priorities; call me crazy, but I don't think Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld had ever spent all that much time in the Middle East before deciding to do a little bit of bombing. I'm not saying this is essential, this first hand knowledge; I am saying that it's illuminating, that's all.)

Not that this is an exlusively American issue; I would bet that most Canadians don't have a passport either, and I think, by and large, on the whole, with the understanding that there are always exceptions, the majority of Canadians haven't travelled out of the country all that much.

Don't get me wrong. Travelling abroad, living abroad, doesn't necessarily make a you a saint, or a prophet, or even a good person. You don't have to leave your homeland to have a satisfactory life, a fulfilling life, a generous and useful life. You can be happy and healthy and wise merely by living down the street from where you grew up. I believe this. I do.

But I also know that I loved, absolutely loved all of those 80's Vietnam flicks that dealt with American POWs being held behind enemy lines: Rambo: First Blood Part II, Uncommon Valor (starring Gene Hackman as a dad who goes to Vietnam to find his captive son), the Missing In Action trilogy featuring Chuck Norris. (And I am a firm believer that Missing in Action II: The Beginning, is a rockin' prequel, and that Braddock: Missing In Action III, has its moments, few and far between as they admittedly are, and I will fight to the death anyone who says otherwise, anyone who is judging Chuck Norris firmly on the legacy of Walker: Texas Ranger, without even considering how he once gave Bruce Lee a good cinematic run for his money. Chuck is good people.) These films, in a sense, got me thinking about Vietnam, about foreign countries, about the globe. Not in any kind of intellectual way or even, I guess you could say, sane way, if a nine year old even can be sane, but they did get me thinking about something beyond Canada. But not enough to make me want to explore; not enough to make me want to escape my own childhood comforts. I would have to wait for that.

And, come to think of it, practically everything I knew about Asia pretty much descended from the above mentioned flicks. (Which, also come to think of it, is pretty freakin' scary.) My image of the Vietnamese was basically: somebody who Stallone killed to bring to the Americans home. Which worked perfectly well for me at nine, but at twenty-nine, well, it leaves something to be desired.

And now I've read a lot of books about Vietnam, and I've lived next door to the country in Cambodia going on two years now, but I've never, you know, been there. Never seen the traffic. Never slept in a bed within its borders.

So really, truthfully, in actuality, I don't know diddly-squat about the place.

When we allow our knowledge of the world and all its shades and textures to come from a little box in the corner of the room, something happens, as Joseph Heller might say. We substitute uninformed opinion for direct observation. We become cocooned in rationalizations that we have not discerned for ourselves. We become lesser people. We shrink rather than expand.

So, Wednesday I'll take the bus to Vietnam for a few days. I'll pass through the border. I'll be nervous and scared and wondering what the hell's going to happen. What I once knew only from Hollywood action movies will now, at last, twenty years later, have the weight and ferocity of life. The boy inside of me will hope that Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris will, against all odds, be around to come bail me out should the shit hit the fan -- but I will also be ready, alert and aware and curious, above all, curious to see what will happen to me if their rescue mission fails and I'm left alone (albeit with a friend or two) to try to comprehend this brave new world on my own.

AN AMATEUR ALL OVER AGAIN

I suspect that there's something about living in a city, any city, that leads one to forget about, ignore, and basically take for complete and total granted every car, corner and condominium that may or may not come into urban focus.

You live in a place. You work in a place. Said place has roads and streetlights and a postal box on the corner, shiny and red. You get used to it. It accentuates your life the way a sitcom's laugh track-does: always there, yes, but after awhile you don't even notice it anymore.

Same old story.

My third year Creative Writing teacher, a kind man and even kinder novelist named Richard Teleky, was trying to get at something like that when he assigned my class, for our first assignment no less, the altogether dreary and tedious task of describing a place in Toronto, any place, with as much detail and colour as we could. (I would give the same assignment seven years later, minus the 'Toronto', to my students in Cambodia.)

Me, not yet twenty-one, didn't see much of the point. I wanted to write stories, period, and so for the assignment I tossed off a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of my night at the Toronto Film Festival a few days back, arguing, when it came time to discuss my piece, that this was more than merely a 'physical' space, it was a mental one, a psychological one, this convergence of ordinary fans and legendary filmmakers that collided with angst and awe and raw, human sweat.

I remember him looking at me. Not buying it. Hell, I'd wrote the piece, and I wasn't buying it either. (Is there any feeling in the word like the one when a teacher sees right through you? There should be a word for it.)

The thing was, Teleky was a draft-dodger from the States, thirty years on. He'd come to Toronto from Cleveland; he saw the city, still, well past middle age, as an outsider. I viewed it as a kid from the (relatively) small city of St.Catharines who was in awe of any sort of town that actually had a subway system and more than one McDonald's in a three block radius. That spelled c-u-l-t-u-r-e to me, with a capital 'k'. His voice was the first to point out that, truth be told, downtown Toronto was, is, and probably forever would be, pretty damn ugly.

And I thought about it.

And I thought: He's right.

Every since, I've tried not to take a 'place', any place, for granted.

I still do, because I'm human, and that's we humans do with our lives, take things for granted. It's part custom, part ritual, part, I don't know, habitual. It's what we do.

Even the poverty of Phnom Penh, which awed me, I mean fucking AWED me when I first came here on a short trip, almost three years ago, has become familiar. The stink and the crowds and the street kids. I've allowed myself to become accustomed. Shame on me.

And I mean that.

I should know better.

There's always a building I haven't seen before. A street I haven't been down. A restaurant I haven't tried. (Jesus, I still haven't even been inside the National Museum or the King's Palace for Christ's sake, which is what most tourists pop off in a single afternoon, and here I am, two years later, still wondering when I'm going to set a date for these admittedly damn-close excursions.)

Maybe it's a good thing, though, this accustomization, I guess you'd call it. (Or I guess I'd call it -- not sure about you.) It's proof, of some silly sort, that we can adapt. We can lodge ourselves onto things and into things. We can take the obtuse and make it bla-bla-bla, whatever. We can find ourselves in something foreign and impenetrable. We can inhabit.

I'm used to the heat and the motos and the streetlights and chaos. I've seen it all here, yes, but there's still so much more to see. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

And what about you?

At some point in the really-recent future -- tonight, tomorrow morning -- you will leave your house and trod down familiar streets. You will see what you have always seen, or see what you expect to see.

But I implore you, as you get the keys out for the car, or do the laces up on your shoes:

Look closer. Before it's too late and you're too old.

Watch, linger, inspect.

You may find something new.

Something layered.

And you know that feeling, the feeling you get when you move into a new neighbourhood? The one that signals a comple and utter absence of any sort of first-hand knowledge of sushi joints, cinemas, laundromats and video shops?

It may, it might, it could come back.

Just think.

If you're aware, and alert, and try hard enough, you can become an amateur all over again.

EVERYTHING THE COUNTRIES THEMSELVES ARE NOT

The following is an excerpt from THE CORRECTIONS by National Book Award Winner Jonathan Franzen, in which the archetypal Middle American Mother, frustrated by her own elderly husband's lack of ambition, lack of mobility, compares him to a friend of theirs in a similar position who retains the zest and pep of life:


...He can't write anymore but he sent us an 'audio letter' on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don't speak any English and Gene wants to talk to them a little.



It's a funny little passage, don't get me wrong. Provides some nice insight into the mind of the mother. It's clever and rings true.

(You can sense the 'but' coming can't you? Get ready for it...)

But here's the deal.

From a North American perspective, the word 'Cambodia' probably conjures up little more than vague, slightly cloudy and refracted images of THE KILLING FIELDS and Richard Nixon on TV announcing that he's going to bomb the hell out of it, and little else. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of countries in the world that I know jacksquat about (Bhutan, anyone?), and we can't expect everyone to know everything about every little place on the planet.

When you live in a place for a long time, though, that vague and unknown place becomes real. It exists. It has a tangible reality to it, defined by roads and weather and the greeter at the Wal-Mart who seems not to realize that she has a moustache, and a full one, too. If you live in the small town of Dildo, Newfoundland, then that poorly-named place is not just the butt of a million jokes -- it's real, with roads and schools and undertakers and children dying young and elders dying old and letter carriers carrying their letters.

(That's a real place, by the way -- Dildo, Newfoundland. I swear. You think I could make that up? Google it and prove me wrong.)

Cambodia is a place, too. A real place. The people here have their own language. They have a history. A civilization.

So the rational part of my brain applauds Franzen for constructing a witty little conversation. He chose Cambodia, I'm sure, because it's relatively obscure, Cambodia is, and so the fact that this particular character in Indiana is learning the Cambodian language acquires an even more potent comic charge.

But of course, Cambodia isn't obscure at all. Cambodia's been around for thousands and thousands of years -- longer than America, or Canada, or even EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. Because of its poverty and relative isolation from the world community, Cambodia has a culture that is as rich and as dense as any I've ever come across.

To see the country I've lived in for two years reduced to a punch-line in a book doesn't really offend me, or sadden me; I felt the same way after watching LOST IN TRANSLATION, admiring the writing and directing and acting, completely and totally empathizing with the main character because I, too, had felt her exact same emotions in those exact same places in Tokyo, but frustrated, nevertheless, because it reduced Japanese culture to this kitschy, cutesy, incomprehensible glob whose whole purpose was simply to accentuate how lonely and distant these two overseas Americans felt.

For cultures as fascinating and multifaceted as Japan and Cambodia are, to see them serve only as glittery comedic backdrops for Bill Murray's mopy face (as much as I love that face)or Franzen's jab at America's zest for obscure hobbies, well, it simply makes me even more aware of how bizarre and cloistered humans can sometimes behave, thinking 'this' place, the one we're in now, the one we're born into, is the barometer by which humanity (and empathy, and comedy) should be judged.

It's a funny feeling, that's all, to be sitting in a car in Cambodia, reading the quintessential modern American novel, and find this reference to Cambodia used so sparsely and humorously. It definitely works, that reference, in that context. It's funny. It's slight. It's somewhat absurd.

Everything the country itself is not.

WORD OF MOUTH

It's not every day that you see an attempted robbery.

This one didn't involve gunfire or banks or men-in-black suits wearing Richard Nixon masks. (There wasn't a befuddled, elderly security guard in sight.)

And even though I know, rationally, that Phnom Penh is not exactly Barry's Bay, Ontario, in terms of its safety, I often forget. Strike that, counsellor -- I ALWAYS forget.

Typical story: Me, on the back of a moto, heading for lunch.

(An aside: Living in Japan for four years, I took the train, literally, every day. Living in Cambodia for two years, I have not taken a train once, but I've taken a moto, literally, every day. That means something. I'm not sure what, but it means something.)

In front of me was a motorized tuk-tuk -- basically a comfy little couch, with a roof, on the back of a moto. Two foreigners, a man and a woman, were sitting in the back, travellers, tourists, the woman clutching her enormous knapsack, the kind that must be handed out automatically at the airport upon arrival.

Good thing she was clutching it, too.

Two young Khmers on a moto, both male, pulled up beside the tuk-tuk. The passenger reached out his arms and grabbed the woman's knapsack. (It's an open space, so it's easy to do.) He tugged once. The woman looked confused. He tugged twice. The woman started to get that look, the one that says: "Wait a minute -- I'm being fucking ROBBED here." The kid tugged one last time, and the woman held tight.

And that was it.

The moto with the two young punks sped off. The woman turned to her male companion with a "can you freakin' BELIEVE this?" look. My motodriver smiled and shook his head.

Once again, I'm faced with how clumsy and mundane and bewildering true crime is, the real stuff, not the Hollywood fiction, the stories we've been told for so long that we rarely, at any level, even recognize as stories.

Real crime is awkward and direct and out-of-the-blue.

And it always, always has repercussions.

You can bet your ass that that woman's view of Cambodia has forever been altered by that simple, brief encounter. Here she is, probably her first day in town, and wouldn't you know it -- somebody tries to rob her. She will fly back to Canada or America or England or Australia and that will be the centrepiece of her story, how Phnom Penh is a dangerous place, how even in broad daylight she was a victim of an attack, how she wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a place for women travellers to chill out.

And that's how countries get the reputations they get. (And people, too.)

One person does something to another person. The other person reacts, resists, survives. Lives to tell the tale. And that tale is passed on to others, mouth to mouth, word to word.

I don't know where the two dudes on the bike scurried off to. Don't know where the undoubtedly-frightened tourists ended up either, for that matter. Back to their hotel, maybe. Or a bar for a stiff drink, perhaps.

Me? I went to lunch.

We move on, all of us, the perpetrators and the victims and the spectators.

What else can we do?