SOME SECRET ROOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DREAMS

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

UNEXPECTED THINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORGE ON

Seeing someone make their way through the caverns of cancer and chemotherapy is an astonishing sight. Marvellous, because it reinforces how fragile our lives are; terrifying, because it illuminates the corridors of bullshit and trivialities that we routinely consider oh so important. To think of what we worry about, fret about, concern ourselves with! Does this person like us, or that person hate us; does this shirt go with that hat; does who I am correspond to what I need to be. These are the questions of life, the daily questions, and we could not live without them. I understand this. I ask the same questions. (Except the ones about the shirt and the hat. I usually don't give a shit. As my wardrobe choices attest.) But cancer is the great equalizer. It filters out the nonsense quite simply. I find myself responding to problems at work with an almost startling degree of detachment. It's not that I'm numb, or indifferent; it's just that nothing anybody can say or do or threaten seems all that important. I find myself looking at my own problems and the problems of others and thinking: Those aren't problems -- cancer is a problem.

I think the human brain is designed to worry itself to death, and I wonder why this is so, or why this has to be. If we could all live for a day like the sick live, the homeless live, the forgotten live, then perhaps we would return to our regular lives with a more balanced degree of proportion.

I don't know. Perhaps not. Perhaps we are made to allow the minutiae of life to overwhelm us. This is what I think sometimes. But then there are other times, nobler times, when I see the relentless way that humans move on and forge on in spite of their monumental difficulties, their monstrous diseases, and I realize that we, if we want to, can choose to hold ourselves to a higher standard of expectation, can fight and endure and simply make our way through life with greater and greater degrees of compassion and energy and laughter, can decide, can decide, to not allow our limits to limit us.

A SHORT GUIDE TO SPIT

Every so often the thoughts of yourself and the thoughts of others inevitably, simultanously intersect, if not collide. For me, yesterday was one of those days. The common intellectual conception shared by both myself and my old high school running buddy, Tim Ames, inexplicably, but somehow appropriately, centred upon of the most treasured common links that conjoin all runners, amateur or professional, past or current: spit.

Tim mentioned, via email, appropos of nothing at all, that there must be some weird kind of shit to be extracted from the DNA of the passing spit hocked by runners. And just yesterday, while doing some laps around the park that circles Baguio General Hospital (an incline a little too hilly for my present condition), I thought to myself, appropos of nothing at all, before reading Tim's email, that runners surea s hell hork a lot of salive on a regular basis. Symmetry at work in the human mind, I say.

(On an extended side note, I hold young Tim at least partly responsible for the only attempt, failed as it was, that I've ever made at sleeping in a hotel bathtub. Or any bathtub, come to think of it. For in the spring of 1991, while competing in the Ontario track and field championships, myself and Tim and Darren Deguire happened to share a hotel room for a few days. Fine. Hunky-dory. No prob-lemo. Except for the fact that both Tim and Darrin happened to be steeplechase runners, which meant that they finished their races a day before I did, which meant that while I tried to rest my weary legs from the preliminary round Tim and Darrin were able to stay up late and cackle their asses off while watching a particularly ridiculous movie-of-the-week that centred around teenage drug users, while I lay in bed only a few feet away, pleading with them to turn it down just a little bit, until, around two a.m., I had finally had enough, deciding that the bathroom bathtub would offer me a better chance of rest than spending the night amongst two relieved, exhausted runners laughing their fatigue away. That's right -- I tried, to sleep, in a bathtub. Lasted about fifteen minutes, if that, but still. I've said it before: runners, especially high school runners, are fucking crazy, the proof being that I seriously tried to catch some zees in a freaking bathtub, and by the fact that both Tim and Darrin chose, intentionally, to race an event called the steeplechase, which involves running around the oval track while jumping over obstacles and trying not to land in deep, glorified, puddles. But I've forgiven them both in the passing years, the bathtub incident having been long forgotten until, well, yesterday. Good times, good times.)

But back to the spit. Saliva. Hocking a monster loogie. These are topics related to running, not to mention life, that are vitally important yet eternally shunned. We don't talk about these things in our polite,
please-pass-the-butter times of ease. I feel it's damn well time to liberate salive from the intellectual cess-pool it's been relegated to in the past.

So, with that in mind, here's my purely personal, concise, highly subjective survey of spitting etiquette that may prove to be useful to runners and those who walk by them.

VOLUME -- If you run a lot you will spit a lot, and the longer you run, the more you spit. Add some GATORADE or water into the mix, and your spit will be frequent and thick. You will spit a lot, and if you don't let it out, you'll swallow it. Which is fine in the beginning, but swallowing spit is not even an acquired taste, so it's better to let it out.

AIM -- When you spit, avoid hitting other people, and avoid hitting yourself. When I was a novice runner running races, spit was new to me; spit was a novelty. I didn't realize that the spit I was unleashing upon the world was somehow, via wind or my own inverted trajectory, ending up on my face. So I would finish my race
with a weary heart and a very gross face. You have to spit outward, away from your chin and your chest; and try not to spit too far behind or in front of somebody. Wait until your alone.

RACES -- When racing, you will still have to spit, and so will all the other runners packed beside you, so be alert and aware of what might come hurtling your way. If you're doing cross-country, you'll have a lot of open space to shoot at. If you're running track, you're even more confined, possibly even boxed in, so be extra careful not to land a loogie on someone's back or neck or even ear, Something About Mary style.

And that's that. I've written enough in this space about the highs of running, but sometimes the lows are in order, too. Spit is a part of life, and you won't read about it in Runner's World, but you'll read about it here.

I mean, after all, I'm university educated, internationally experienced, but I still once spent the night, or part of it, in a bathtub, so high culture you ain't going to find in this space.

LAUGHING AT CHILDREN

There is nothing that does not amaze someone who is less than two. You can peek behind a couch, or a corner, and reappear, and disappear, and reappear once more, and the look of astonishment on the face of said child is something approaching the divine. You were gone! You were back! Now you're gone again! Now you're back again! Will wonders never cease.

Having recently been around a child of less than two for the first time in, well, ever, I guess, it made me remember all that I've forgotten. Or not even remember, because, technically, who can remember anything below the age of four? (Except Ray Bradbury, who claims to remember his own birth, which I sincerely doubt, but given how great a writer he is, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, who am I to question the man who wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine?) The attention span of such a toddler is basically nonexistent. The embarrassment factor of such an infant is also basically 'nil'. They will throw up their panties and show the world their patootie with unabashed joy. They will burp and fart and walk around naked without blinking an eye. Nobody's told them yet that there are some things that some people consider distinctly wrong, or impolite, so they will growl at you and cry at you and poke at you and attempt to wrench your glasses off of your face and chuck them to the ground. And laugh while doing it.

This particularly child speaks two words that I have heard: 'mama' and 'baby'. 'Mama' because she has, well, a mama, and 'baby' because there is another, even newer baby in the house, less than two months old. Problem is, the child's new vocabulary is not limited to the intended recipients of such vocabulary. Everything is 'mama' and 'baby' -- me, the couch, the TV, the empty beer bottle. No limits exist. Other words emanate from the child's mouth, but they might be Klingon, or Venusian, for all I know.

But the child knows. That's the important thing. The child knows that this world is her world, and soon, later, eventually she will learn that she must share it, more or less equally, with others. In the meantime, though, the world is her oyster. Which is kind of a riot to watch.