THE DICE MAN COMETH

Let us give in to the dictates of the dice, that shakeable plastic mandate of chance. Was it not chance that began my Asia sojurn, and was it not chance that brought me to Cambodia? A newspaper article about trafficked children; a one-week trek to investigate further. What if I had not read that particular page of that particular paper that particular day? What if I had been about to read the page when a knock came on my door -- a student early, a teacher confused? Had that occurred, I would not be in Cambodia, and would not now be writing the words you're reading. Given such odds, surely chance has a fortune and trajectory all its own.

Such are the thoughts one has after completing Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man (which I discussed in the previous post). At first the very concept -- a man deciding to rule his life by the toss of a die -- seems nothing more than a clever gimmick, a post-modern plot device designed to wring a few chuckles out of a conveniently designed narrative hook. Not so. It is, instead, a fundamentally human book, questioning why we are here, where we are going, and what, exactly, is the point of it all.

Consider a scene two-thirds of the way through the book. Rhinehart, about to be banned by the American Medical Association, must defend himself before a committee of his skeptical peers. What follows is a brilliant dissection of modern-day life, of what is expected of us as individuals, people, parents and citizens. Is it ludicrous to number a series of choices from one to six, roll the dice, and choose the option based on the number that has come up? Perhaps. But what has been the alternative, Rhinehart wonders. A world that insists on a fixed identity, that allows no deviation in thought or routine, is a world consumed by greed and envy, war and pestilence. If, indeed, modern psychiatry is such a wonderful, beneficial development, then why is everyone so supremely fucked-up? Has it to do with our stubborn denial of all of our wishes? The fireman who wishes to sail boats; the businessman who longs for a life in the tropics. We do not allow ourselves to do what we want to do, and are restricted by our very conception of who 'we' are. By using the dice, by allowing random chance to dictate our decisions, we enter an immense degree of excitement and unpredictability into existence. We allow ourselves to do things and think things and be things that we would never do otherwise. The rut of life becomes a meandering path whose ultimate destination will and must remain unknown. A life of freedom, it is.

Brilliant, the book is. Not because it endorses the narrator's thesis, but because it plays it out, advances it, allows us to see the marvels it produces and the horrors it depicts. The dice tells us to rape someone; the dice tells us to murder someone. Do we go through with it? The dice tells us to be loving and kind for no reason; the dice tells us to be gentle. Does that change us in any lasting way? Fascinating, the various permutations that result.

It has been a long, long time that I have a read a novel so full of life and so questioning of life. (The irony being, I suppose, that the book was written a good five years before I was born. How fascinating, I always think, that there were people thinking concepts way beyond my comprehension even before I was conceived. Ideas I'm contemplating for the first time were thought of, mulled over, accepted or dismissed decades and centuries ago. It makes me feel connected to a larger stream of humanity, for some reason.) For many of us, life seems to be set on a pattern: we can see what's coming from day to day, and we can be pretty sure of the results. But to allow chance to play a part, to see the means by which our own personalities could change and shift and transform if we allowed chance to become the predominant mode of our existence -- what strange twists and turns would result!

I have to admit, I'm tempted. Not to, you know, use the dice to decide whether I move from Cambodia to Timbuktu. But to choose this book or that, this movie or that movie -- yes, I can see the fun and play that the dice of chance could inflict.

Ah, but where to stop? That is the what the book asks. What would happen if you push chance to its ultimate end point?

LET THE DICE DECIDE

What if your entire life was determined not by degrees or intention but by the roll of a die? That's the premise behind Luke Rhinehart's funny and disturbing 1971 novel The Dice Man, in which a New York City psychoanalyst, bored by his life, profession and patients, decides to let the dice do the talking. Whatever the dice says, he does. Roll a five, be like Jesus for a day; roll a seven, try to seduce everyone. In a world that believes we are all nothing more than bundles of neuroses wrapped inside our own impenetrable egos, why not just let fate, in the form of dice, be our guide? Simplifies things.

And the discoveries it can lead to! Listen:


New places and new roles forced me into acute awareness of how others were responding to me. When a human is being himself, flowing with his inner nature, wearing his natural appropriate masks, integrated with his environment, he is normally unaware of subtleties in another's behavior. Only if the other person breaks a conventional pattern is awareness stimulated. However, breaking my established patterns was threatening to my deeply ingrained selves and pricked me to a level of consciousness which is unusual, unusual since the whole instinct of human behavior is to find environments congenial to the relaxation of consciousness. By creating problems for myself I created thought.

I also created problems...



And so it goes. Why live a life predetermined by who we think we are or by what others think we are? If our personalities are so rigid and dormant, simply give the dice the power to dictate change. Roll a seven, tell my boss to fuck off; roll a two, buy the first ticket to Acapulco. The dice rules. Where it leads, our psyches follow.

It's a funny, startling book, and I'm only a hundred pages into it. It postulates a kind of wacky approach to life that is also, somehow, the flip-side of transcendent, a philosophical argument for human nature that is as daring as it is frightening. It simultaneously removes the concept of personal responsibility while endorsing a random approach to decisions that could very well lead to madness or enlightenment.

What should I do tonight? Make a list, roll the dice. Should I grow a moustache or shave my head? Roll the dice. Roll a six, quit my job; roll a seven, demand a promotion. The audacity it would require to follow through on such a philsophy is a little bit more than I can handle.

And yet...

Tempting, isn't it? To just let the dice do the talking. What changes would ensue! The cover of the tattered paperback states: "Few novels can change your life. This one will." Ha! Publishing hyperbole, right? Right? I mean, who could seriously decide to do such a thing, no matter how absurdly enticing it sounds. Culturual suicide, it would be. Why, if you gave in to the dice, you would become another person. (Or the person you were meant to be?) You would do things you never dreamed of. (The things you always wanted to?) You would go to strange and exotic lands for no reason at all. (To fulfill an innate longing for adventure and exile?) Man is, at heart, a rational, sympathetic creature. (Roll a seven, stab a cat.) Man is kind. (Roll a four, insult a stranger on the street.)

Let the dice decide? Let fate and chance be intertwined forever more by a plastic green sage?

Maybe I'll roll the dice and find out. If it's a two, the dice will dictate my decisions; if it's a four, I will proceed along the orderly, mundane path of my own insecure obligations.

Maybe that's where we all are in life -- holding the dice, wondering if and when we'll give it a toss. And desperate to see if our number turns up.

PAKISTAN: A TOUCH OF THE HAND ON THE EDGE OF A SHOULDER

Out of a clear blue sky the walls came tumbling down. I'm assuming they tumbled. It looks like most of the homes were made from stone, and stone hurts. Stone is hard. Stone falling out of a sunny day, warm and bright, is harder. The pain is the same. Buildings made like that, from stone, could do nothing but tumble. The buildings themselves and the stones that sustain them. But something eased the fall. I feel it.

To lose one's life like that! So quickly! A fall on the head from a rock. Simple. Almost clean. And yet only moments before a mother and a daughter and a son and a husband were eating a meal, making love, preparing for work, getting ready to farm, ending an argument, trying to think of something to say, something. Anything. All of the above and none of the above. The entire range of human experiences and emotions from time past and time future were encapsulated into those few seconds. I am sure of it. Everything we have ever done, everything we will ever do, was there. Present. Within the space between their hands and their head existed all that we as humans can and should be. It was there, I say -- our pain and our hope and our fear and our love. Almost tangible. In the background, a rumble may have been heard. Yes, quite possible -- this harbinger of doom. Perhaps they knew, instantly, all of them, across the land, that death was here. It had come for them. Melodramatic, yes, but from my limited perspective, in conditions such as that, in a life such as that, melodrama would be the order of the day. In houses made of stone, melodrama is not even melodrama any longer. So the sound of an earthquake, while distant, almost instaneous, would have to have been heard. A familiar sound, I'm sure.

But part of me insists otherwise. I would like to believe that in their final moments on this earth something else was going on, taking place, coming to fruition, something other than a heart beating faster and a snap, grim realization that prayer was necessary, now, immediately. They knew they would be dead, or maimed, or injured. They knew that. But in that moment, when the land started to rumble, when the stones started to fall, I imagine a touch of a hand on the edge of a shoulder. That's all. A tiny, almost imperceptible gesture from mother to son, father to daugther, wife to husband, grandfather to stranger. Somebody was touched in that final moment. The gap that exists from you to me and they to them was breached in a final, futile attempt at eternity. Each knew what the other meant. They may have even been looking at each other, directly, without judgement. That would have been nice. And yet the touch is what matters. When the earth opened up all was lost, yes, forever, certainly, but one would like to imagine an exit from this realm that left the lingering remnant of contact, however brief. To think: that some were able to take that touch with them. Amidst the dust and the shrieks and the rocks stained red, no trace of such a touch remains, true, but how could it? There are some things eternity claims for itself.

BEATING THE RAIN

I have yet to decide whether the world is as large as our own imaginations or small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of a child’s hand. Somewhere in between, I would think, but frequently, daily, events occur that threaten to swing the pendulum one way or the other for good.

Today I was walking along the street, reading a book, feeling terribly sorry about the fact that a Khmer kid on his bike had almost been bumped by me into a tree only moments before. When I felt his bike hit my shoulder, I looked up from the book and turned back around to chart the progress of his descent, expecting him to fall, dreading his fall – but no, he was still streaming along at quite a good little clip; my accidental nudge had sent him careening towards a tree. He applied his brakes just in time, but for a moment or two the outcome was in doubt. I pictured him slamming head-on into the tree, his neck broken, his eyes alert but empty. Would I be to blame? How could anyone know? You would think that I wouldn’t read as I walk, given that I got the shit whacked out of me by a crazy Japanese homeless man a few years back while strolling along with a book in tow, but I tend not to learn from my mistakes. In any event, I saw that the kid was alright – death was not coming for him today, at least not by my invitation. I went on my way. And yes, I kept on reading. (And now I'm feeling really, really guilty about the fact that I did...)

I suppose I’ve gotten completely sidetracked off of my original point, but only peripherally, because I had meant to say, before I so rudely interrupted myself, how frequently we think of things for no reason whatsoever. Right after the kid-almost-hitting-the-tree-due-to
my-accidental-nudge incident, I suddenly remembered that the fellow who picked me up from the airport on my first night in Japan was a teacher who was leaving the land of the rising sun in another week to take over a position at a school in Singapore; five years later, my boss at the University of Cambodia turned out to be another fellow who had left that same job in Singapore, his position to be filled by the teacher who picked me up at the airport. Got that?

How many countries are there in Asia, how many teaching positions, and yet by some weird quirk of fate I can find a link between these two associates of mine, neither of whom have met the other, but both of whom have met me.

Or this:

While waiting in line for my return visa at the Cambodia-Vietnamese border, I chat up the Cambodian man next to me. Turns out he owns the busline I’m taking. Turns out that he works part of the year in Japan. Turns out he lives in the same city in Japan that I lived in – Sagamihara, in Kanagawa prefecture. Had we once shared a train in Japan? Entirely possible. Probable, even. And there we were, one foot in Vietnam, one foot in Cambodia. What a world.

There is nothing necessarily remarkable about such occurrences, which makes it all the more remarkable, in my book. I’m quite certain that the kid who I almost banged into a tree earlier today has crossed paths with other Cambodians I’ve met in town, or other foreigners who I’ve worked with in the city. And who knows? Perhaps he will encounter a relative of mine two, three years down the line, who knows where. Not I. The world shrinks. Then expands.

For example:

I’ve met people in Japan who not only grew up in my hometown but hung around the same friends that I once had. I was once even able to determine inside of thirty seconds exactly which house a girl lived in. Like so:

Me: “Where are you from?”

Her: “Canada.”

“Me too. Where in Canada?”

“Ontario.”

“Where in Ontario?”

“Near Niagara Falls.”

“Where?”

“St.Catharines.”

“Fuck off! I’m from St.Catharines!”

“Really? Where’d you go to elementary school?”

“Pine Grove.”

“No way! I went to Michael J.Brennan.” (The Catholic school that was physically connected to my public school.:

“Did you live near there?”

“I lived on _________ street.”

“ _________ street. Do you know Rick Denham?”

“My family lives right across the street from Rick Denham.”

And so it goes. Within a minute of meeting a stranger in a bar in downtown Tokyo, I’m able to ascertain what her childhood home looks like. At a certain point in time when we were both ten, eleven years old, I may have even bumped into her while playing street hockey in front of her house. A cold November wind may have been blowing that day. The sky would have been dark, of that I’m sure. Threatening rain. I would have gone home early, the pick-up game of street hockey over and done, and she would have rushed inside, both of us beating the rain, neither knowing that our paths would cross again thousands of miles from home and miles removed from youth.

If I were to step out of my apartment in Phnom Penh and bump into my high school history teacher, would I be surprised? Yes. Shocked? No. The world is smaller than I once believed. Small enough to fit in my hand? Of that I know not.

But ask me tomorrow what I think. Who knows? By that time, the world may prove itself once again to be borne anew: as small as a perfect blue pearl, with a mystery and rhythm that once again confounds me.

LIFE WILL FIND A WAY

Phnom Penh continues to get its props from the rest of the world, as today's edition of The Cambodia Daily informs me that The Economist Intelligence Unit, affiliated with The Economist magazine, has ranked this fair city as one of the least liveable cities in the world, achieving a position of 122 out of 127, behind the capital of Zimbabwe and ahead of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. (Ah, but Baghdad and Kabul were not included in the list; surely this town is better than those towns.) The cities were assessed on stability, health care, culture, environment, education and infrastructure. Apparently, well, Phnom Penh blows.

But this is the thing friends and neighbours, ladies and germs: What are we to make of this distinction? If I was safe and sound back home in the St.Catharines of my childhood, I would take one look at a list like this and imagine Phnom Penh to be a place of perpetual destruction: explosions, rapes, murders and lawlessness. (The kind of place I imagined Beirut to be as a kid.)

It's not. It's a desperate place, yes, poor and decrepit, certainly, but there are most definitely a lot of rich folks in this town, and more than a fair share of interesting sights and sounds. None of which is relevant to the report, I realize, which focuses more on the standard of living, but the aftereffects of the report will linger in people's minds around the world. Phnom Penh equals danger, despair, a place one would not want to endure for any extended period of time.

And yet, life is more resilient than that. For the poor of this town, Phnom Penh is, indeed, an inhospitable place; good luck finding any help from the police or the hospitals if you are absent from cash. Having said that, quoting the great Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, life will find a way. People will live, and keep on living, and keep on reproducing. The schools will be shit, the hospitals abominable, the safety questionable, but life will hop and skip ahead, regardless.

Which is not to say that the report is wrong; I tend to agree with its conclusions, formulaic as they are, stastical as they are. There is just more to it. There is always more to it.

Oh, and what city was the best city in the world to live in, you ask?

Vancouver, Canada.

And yet I would bet my bottom dollar (or just my bottom) that if I were to walk around Vancouver and Phnom Penh on an average day and count the number of smiles I see, there would be no contest -- Cambodia's capital would top that survey, for what it's worth.

CHACHI AND WINKLER AND THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)

I've just read that Scott Baio has replaced Henry Winkler as the lawyer on the television comedy Arrested Development, a show I've sporadically caught a time or two here in Cambodia, and this decision, this changing of the comedic guard, has me convinced that some kind of shift in the basic fabric of the space-time continuum has just taken place.

Let me back up.

The single funniest comedic bit I've ever seen features pint-sized, bug-eyed comedian Gilbert Gottfriend musing to himself about why, exactly, Scott Baio from Happy Days got his own sitcom spin-off, Joanie Loves Chachi, but Henry Winkler didn't. He imagines a group of TV executives pondering the possibilities:

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

"Chachi, yeah, but Winkler..."

"Chachi, sure, but Winkler...not so much."

And so on.

(To find this funny, life-changingly funny, you have to a) think Gilbert Gottfried is, quite possibly, Christ returned, or b) just be, like, really, really weird. I am both of the above, and just remember -- if the above bit wasn't funny at all to you, it's because he does it on stage so much better than I do it in words, and, like I said, I'm kind of weird.

Back to the present.

What I'm thinking is: What are the odds that Scott Baio would once again bump Winkler out of the spotlight? I know, I know -- apparently Winkler left for another gig, a new gig, on a new sitcom. But still. Arrested Development is apparently getting all the critical props, if not the viewers. Baio will be back in at the forefront of our collective human consciousness. Chachi will be on everybody's lips, not the Fonz. And, even more than the above reasons, the really odd thing is that Gottfried's timeless, legendary joke still works in this new situation. Just imagine a bunch of studio execs rationalizing their decision to hire Chachi over the departing Winkler, and you can use the same damn lines.

Which proves, you ask?

I mean, do you really need to ask?

It proves that Gottfried was on to something, that's what. It proves that he, Baio and Winkler are part of some unholy cosmic alliance that somehow is able to not only influence the comedic mindset of an entire generation, but are also incredibly, painstakingly patient. The gap between Gottfried's initial Baio/Winkler joke and the latest news is well over a decade and a half. It's all adding up. The signs are here. The Bible Code is in place.

I'm telling you, this is equivalent to Indiana Jones finding the lost ark of the covenant, or Charlie's grasping of the golden ticket that led to the chocolate factory, or Steve Guttenberg deciding to do that fourth Police Academy flick, the one with the Citizens on Patrol. It's that earth shattering, is what it is.

Don't believe me?

Just think.

When was the last time you heard of this kind of close connection between a comedian and two stars of a seventies sitcom beloved by millions?

Never, that's when. It hasn't happened. Until now.

The Apocalypse is upon us, folks. Lock the doors and put the kids to bed. Say your prayers and count your blessings.

As for me, I'll be pondering the eternal question that man has grappled with for millenia: Does Joanie really love Chachi?

NO NEED FOR SUBTLETY

A few years back when I first came to Cambodia I was chilling at Steve's Steakhouse, seated at the bar, munching on one of his homemade burgers made from his own grain-fed cows that he keeps in a pasture outside of town. Sports was on the TV. Jim Croce was on the stereo. Life was good.

"I used to listen to Croce back in Philly in the seventies," the man next to me at the bar said. He was middle-aged, stocky, solid. American, no doubt.

"Were you working in Philadelphia?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I was in the veterans hospital they had there for a year."

And so began an interesting conversation, the kind of conversation and the kind of person you can only meet when you are in a place like Cambodia. I remember because yesterday I watched again Oliver Stone's Born On The Fourth Of July, and this particular gentleman had had both of his legs blown off in Vietnam, knew both Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, the subject of the biographical film, and now worked all over the world for the Vietnam Veterans Association of America, helping people with no limbs get limbs. He lived in Colombia, strangely enough. There was plenty to do here; thousands upon thousands of people still get limbs blown off every day, scrounging for scrap metal in the fields while ending up being blown up by the remnants of the literally millions of land mines that still litter this country.

Is there a better movie than Born On The Fourth of July? I know there is, somewhere, but boy is that a film. It is not just a mind-blowingly heart-wrenching exploration of what the Vietnam war does to one's psyche, a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a boy raised in the small-town, mom and apple pie ethos of America who gradually, gradually realizes that he has been sold a bill of goods that he paid a terrible, terrible price for. It is all of this, yes, but it is also, quite frankly, the most emotional film I've ever seen. Each scene operates on a number of different levels, and as the movie progresses so much anger and hope and fear and confusion escalates and accumulates. It is a film about growing up and leaving home and realizing that the world is a harsh and fucked-up place. It features the best performance that Tom Cruise will ever give. It is designed to make you feel, and how many movies really, really make us feel, well, anything?

For Stone's detractors, it is chock-full of things to criticize: overblown, overdramatic, didactic. Yes, yes, yes. Give me more. Give me it all in equal measure, than pour me a bit more for the ride home. Stone makes films that are pulsing with life. In Cambodia I sat beside a guy who had both legs blown off in the war, who was a dumb kid from West Virginia who signed up for 'Nam because his government told him to, and his lucky reward was a year spent in a veterans hospital and a lifetime's worth of rage that eventually found an altruistic channel helping other people in foreign countries who had also been wounded by war's lack of mercy. Born On The Fourth Of July makes me feel for that man at the bar; it makes me understand, as much as is possible for a schmuck like me, what he went through. It is unapologetic, that film is, and because of that, the human experience is widened, and so am I.

It also contains what are quite possibly two of the greatest scenes ever put on film: 1) Ron Kovic, played by Cruise, returns to his childhood home after two tours in Nam and one year in a veterans hospital in the Bronx. He and his father are in Ron's old bedroom, trapped in time, the room and them. The father is explaining how he's fixed up the bathroom. Ron is looking at a framed photo of himself as a high-school wrestler. The father sees him looking at the photo. The father embraces Ron, tightly, breaks down, then stands up and starts to walk out of the room, in tears, talking about more home renovation as Ron puts the photo down, face-down. That scene says it all, about everything. The pain of time lost. The pain of Ron's injury. The past that is gone. The love between the father and son. It's all there, and it lasts less than a minute. I've seen that scene a dozen times, and it gets me every time. 2) Near the end of the film, Ron and Willem Dafoe are stuck on a highway somewhere in Mexico, thrown out of a taxi for arguing with the driver. Both Vietnam vets, both in wheelchairs, the two begin to argue about who did worse in Vietnam, who did the most harm, who killed the most babies. They yell and spit and scream and grapple with each other, before toppling down the side of a hill, bouncing out of their wheelchairs, lying helpless under the hot Mexican sun. The anger, the confusion, the sheer symbolic potency of this scene is something close to perfection.

Those who accuse Stone of being obvious and lacking subtlety are missing the point. Life is not subtle, and life is far too obvious. Pain is real and rage is real and so are the deeper, stronger, more humane emotions. Stone's films rejoice in the ferocity of such human expressions. They understand that in a world where it is possible for people to have their legs blown off in foreign lands, there is sometimes no need for subtlety.