On the Common Bali Flu and the Treatment Thereof

 
Having a cold in Bali is not fun. I’m not saying that having a cold anywhere is fun, but it seems, in my limited experience anyway, decidedly less fun in Bali than anywhere else in the world. Maybe this is because a cold seems so out of place in the tropics. And maybe that’s why they don’t call them colds here, but the flu. It is not, after all, cold in Bali but hot, and so they should rather call them “hots“ if anything, but then that would be likely to lead to a further confusion over terms. Can you imagine people going about saying they have the hots? And so they call a cold the flu instead. It is not the flu that we know in western countries, for the flu where we come from is something significantly more than a cold and is attended by pyrexia, myalgias, arthralgias, nausea, emesis, and of course coughing and sniffing and hacking and blowing. Having the flu -- the real thing, that is -- the all American flu, so to speak -- would be immeasurably worse than having a mere cold, which I have already said is not fun in and of itself; and it is on this count alone that we can be thankful for the typical Balinese cold, otherwise wrongly called the flu.

You may have guessed by now that I have a cold. What you probably would not have guessed, however, is that I have had a cold for a long time now. About two years, I reckon. As far as I can place the thing, on a rough timeline, I contracted this cold just after arriving in Bali in February of 2010. I suppose many will accuse me of gross exaggeration in this, but I am convinced that it is so, and as a witness call I my nose and the testimony of a persistent congested cough -- or for that matter my wife, who in all respects is dead sick of the thing. My cold, I mean.

People will say that one catches more colds here in Bali than in America or England or Italy and so on, but I disagree. We catch but one, and that only shortly after our arrival here, but that one on its own is good enough to speak for many. Mine, as I have suggested, has been perfectly long-winded without needing the help of any other cold, and I may as well say prolific and eloquent as well where the common characteristics of a common cold are concerned.

One cold, two years. How is it possible? I’ll tell you how. It’s because the thing settles in, makes a home in the cosy rooms and corridors of your lungs and the various branches of the respiratory system, and then actually rolls over and falls asleep now and again, rather like a noisome beagle who tires of barking for a time, only to awake again when the spirit beckons and start its barking all over again. It sleeps, it rests, it gathers new strength. It burrows in somewhere -- the spleen, the oesophagus -- quite enjoys itself for a period of a week, or even three weeks, or four, and then leaps back to troubling you all over again, and with renewed vigour, like a persistent sprain or an ex-wife -- in no way diminished by its brief vacation, or rather that of its victim.

Over time we come to count on this cold with a sureness exceedingly rare in this life. It will not leave nor forsake you, nor fail ever to be present, especially at the most inopportune times, for which you had, perhaps, other plans.

There are medicines for this cold, available at any drug store or Circle K, each brand being concocted of mysterious ingredients guaranteed overall to make the symptoms of the cold considerably worse. We take these medications religiously during the more active periods of the illness, desperate wretches that we are, and enter thereby a singular state of dull somnolence quite beyond the symptomatic talents of the cold itself. One amazing side effect of these pharmaceutical inventions is the onset of clinical narcolepsy -- an aptitude of medicine not known by any other science to date, though of dubious worth. Nonetheless, it is clear that where medicinal decongestant modalities are concerned, Eastern medicine has far outstripped the feeble preparations available in the West.

Now, if you go to the doctor for this affliction -- not the medicinal one, but the viral -- you will invariably be told that you have “masuk angin,” meaning literally “entered by the wind.” This will make you feel somewhat better for a time, as it is rather poetic, and is certainly preferable, for all concerned, to being exited by the wind. You will come away feeling special somehow, as if you had something with a bit more pride, like consumption for instance, or high functioning autism. Anyone can have a cold, and often does. But this is not a cold. It’s masuk angin!

Enjoy therefore, and relax, don’t hurry. You and your Balinese cold will have the leisure of a lifetime together.

CSI -- The Bali Version

A reader of this column writes to share the following story. Some money was stolen from a safe in a friend’s Seminyak home. The husband had unfortunately left the key out in plain site (husbands are like that). A number of staff members employed in the house fell under first suspicion. The couple called the Bali police to report the theft and try to discover the culprit. The police arrived, took some notes (as I would imagine it), and prepared to depart. It was at this point that the disinherited home owners asked if the officers couldn’t perhaps take some fingerprints from the staff members. Though we, as mere laymen, are not well versed in the finer points of investigative procedures and techniques, the suggestion would seem a no-brainer. Chances seemed fair to good, after all, that the thief was standing in the very midst. And if not -- if all passed inspection -- the matter would be solved to that point, anyway.

Fingerprints, they were told, could in fact be taken, but this would come at a cost of Rp.4 million.

What? Yes. It seems that here in Bali the victims of a crime must pay for an investigation of the same. You’ll not see that on CSI, folks. Fingerprints, DNA samples, ballistics, interrogation . . . Hmm, let us check our price list first.

Is there a schedule of fees, my reader asks, that the ex-pat can obtain in order to be prepared in advance?

I think not. Because really these things don’t happen at all. Ask any policeman, he’ll tell you.

Well, Rp.4 million seemed excessive, and so the couple fired their entire staff instead.

Now to be fair I must say that, in America anyway, demanding fingerprints on the spot, on the basis of a suspicion, is very likely against the law. I can’t say for sure, because I’m not a cop or a lawyer or a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Nor do I have any useful experience at being a criminal. I just suspect that our all-American fixation on protecting the rights of the individual law-breaker would supersede any such good reasoning, leading, as it might, to the violation of someone’s civil rights.. More than likely the victim’s. And we must be very careful about that, mustn’t we?

But this, after all, is Bali -- a comparatively reasonable country. Here the police have much freer rein to perform in whatever manner they will. Here the police can pull you over on the highway merely on the suspicion that you are a foreigner and may have money. Here the police are perfectly free to circumvent the nuisance of legal procedure and simply pocket your money -- a fee which itself is in accordance not with legal guidelines but with the extent of the motorist’s naiveté -- i.e., if you’re new around here it will be Rp.250.000 or more, if you’re experienced in the game it will be only Rp.50.000.

The driving principal is not law enforcement, but the collection of money. Accordingly, the ex-pat must be careful to follow two simple rules of thumb: 1) Avoid having any kind of trouble, and 2) Don’t call the police if you do have any kind of trouble. That’s the real no-brainer here, and any local will tell you so.

But it’s not all bad news. Here’s the good news. In Bali the police are authorized to detain any vehicle and driver as they please. (Wait for it). They are able to search any vehicle as they please. They do not need a cause, they do not need a warrant, they do not need a Federal Court order or a specialist or a Captain or a General. If they find a bomb in the trunk of a car so detained, they do not need to read the bomber his Miranda rights or summon higher authorities or pussy-foot around in any way -- no, they arrest the man on the spot, cart him off to jail, and maybe even knock him upside the head along the way if it strikes them as a good idea. And that’s only fair, isn’t it? What self-respecting bomber can have any sensible objection to being knocked upside the head?

Still and all, it’s not a perfect system. I discovered this for myself on a recent visit to the Bali Mall Galleria. It was a Sunday, and the Christmas Season, and so the mall parking lot was very crowded. Whereas cars are usually checked by guards as they enter the mall grounds, they were not being checked this day. We were waved straight through. Nonetheless, my wife stopped the car and beckoned to the officer at the gate, despite the blaring horns of frustrated drivers from behind.

“Why are you not checking the cars?” she asked.

“Oh, too crowded, Bu -- not enough time.”

But hold on -- isn‘t that the point in this sort of thing? What better time for a terrorist to strike than during the Christmas season at a crowded mall?

Oh well, like I said . . . it’s not a perfect system.

Once Upon A Lonely Road

Recently I received an e-mail from a man who lives near the small town of Sandy, Oregon, about 20 miles east of my home town of Portland, where I lived for some 55 years The man, who identified himself as George Porter, and a complete stranger to me, related that he had recently come upon a computer thumb drive lying at the side of an all but unused road behind the plant nursery he owns in Sandy. Thinking at first that it may be his own, and curious in any case, he took the drive home and plugged it into his laptop. Though this revealed the existence of some files, both photo and text, he was unable to open the files on first attempt.

I thought about just giving up and tossing the thing, Mr. Porter wrote, but then something told me to keep on trying.

He did so, and ultimately, after tinkering around with several programs and options, he was able to open one of the text files on the drive. What he found was the entire text of a book I had written some four years ago.

And this is where things begin to get a bit eerie.

In the first place, I have no recollection whatsoever of having put the book on any storage device other than the one I have in my own possession, tucked securely into the pocket of my laptop case. Such was my conviction of the same that I checked the case just to be sure -- and sure enough, there is the thumb drive, and thereon the copy of the book. The book, though three years with an agent, has not been published, and so does not, for all practical purposes, exist at all, other than in my hands and in the hands of the agent. And now in the hands of George Porter as well.

So how in the world could my book have gotten onto another thumb drive, and how could that thumb drive have ended up on a back road in Sandy, Oregon? I have not been in Oregon, or anywhere in the world other than Bali and Singapore, for almost two years. What then has been the career of this mysterious thumb drive? How has it remained intact for at least two years? How long did it lie on that road -- two years? Or have its travels been wider and involved more people in transport?

Or is this some kind of scam?

That, quite frankly, was my initial suspicion, given that internet scams are so common these days. We’ve all received them in various form -- from the unknown recipient of millions who desires for some reason to share his wealth, to the beautiful woman (photo included) who lives in Africa, has come across your profile somewhere on line, and feels that you and she will make a perfect pair (if only you will send her some money for a plane ticket).

What was the scam in the case at hand? I could not imagine -- but of course that’s the point. A good scam does not betray its nefarious nature, but relies on the human inclination to trust, to be curious, to believe and to bond. I replied therefore to George‘s mail, reticent, guarded, yet captivated by curiosity.

And I found that Mr. Porter wanted nothing at all. He had no plan, no agenda, no rabbit up his sleeve. He offered in addition only that he had seen one of his drivers walking on the back road where the drive had been found, and said that he would do his best to contact this man to try to determine whether it might have been he who dropped the drive.

But there’s more to this story. What I have said so far is skeletal only, without meaningful substance or animation, a mildly curious coincidence.

Here then is the kicker: The book that I wrote, which somehow got onto a thumb drive, which itself somehow ended up on a back road in Sandy, Oregon where it was found two years down the path of time by a man named George Porter, is the story of my life after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the spring of 2007; and the man who found the drive, who brought it home, who plugged it into his laptop and laboured at some length to discover what was on it, had just recent to that very day lost his friend of almost forty years -- Mike by name -- to the contributory effects of multiple sclerosis.

Here is where coincidence becomes cohesion, here is where a fluke becomes a twist of fate -- for the reason that George was writing me at all was to share how meaningful my book had been to him, how comforting my words had been and how informative about the disease that had taken his friend. He had written, in short, to thank me -- and, as it happens, to encourage me as well. One writes, ultimately, to connect, to share; one writes for the ear of an invisible reader with whom he hopes to find a fellowship of living. It may seem sad in some way that this book over which I had expended my heart had ended up in the gravel on a lonely roadside, and yet the miracle that brought it to the hands of this single reader is encouragement beyond the common pale of life, and a a gift of rarest, most rewarding amazement.

Up In Smoke

Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me! A no smoking law passed in Bali? It can’t be, and yet it is apparently so. Soon hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, government offices, places of worship, and who knows what else -- bars, boats, cars, bikes, malls, the insides of buildings and the outsides of buildings and anywhere within 50 feet of a building -- will all be smoke-free havens for those few people in Bali who actually don’t smoke. Congratulations to the Bali legislative council -- you’ve just become a Western nation. Now big brother is watching you too.

What, I wonder, is the irresistible attraction of this runaway anti-smoking campaign? What causes the leadership of just about every country to want to jump on the bandwagon of legislation that rests not only on bad science but on the dangerous notion that the freedom of an individual to make his own choices can be made subject to government control? Do we really want to join that party? Does Bali -- does Indonesia -- really want to bleed itself dry of all the colour of character by imitating the restrictive, conformist, stodgy, reductive, timid, paranoid social rules of political correctness that plague modern-day Western countries?

I say that if you want to smoke, smoke; if you don’t want to smoke, don’t smoke. But for crying out loud, don’t make a law of every little thing! This is one of the reasons I left America. I was suffocating. Not from cigarette smoke, but from the strangulating grip of countless special interest groups, humourless, lacklustre, anal-retentive biddies and snobs who somehow managed to make law of opinion, and a travesty of the right to personal choice.

Here in Bali I found a different society -- and ironically, a society much like the one I used to know as a young man in America. I rediscovered a society of common agreement, ordered not so much by law as by common sense. I found a freedom of expression and movement and action that made me feel once again like a dog with his head out the window and his ears flapping in the wind. I could breathe again. I could speak my mind. I could jay walk (at my own risk, and yet by choice). And I could smoke a cigarette just about anywhere I wanted to.

What are the real facts about smoking? Well, for one thing it doesn’t cause lung cancer. It may contribute, along with a multitude of other considerations. The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. It’s not a simple matter -- and don’t let them tell you it is. Every member of my immediate family died of cancer. None of them smoked. How’s that for a statistic?

How about the dreaded second hand smoke, that fairly recent modulation of paranoia that has made pariahs of those who smoke. Well, the fact is that by the time second hand smoke is inhaled by another person it has already been filtered by the cigarette itself, and then by the smoker’s own lungs. What’s left? Not much. A World Health Organization (WHO) study did not show that second hand smoke statistically increased the risk of getting lung cancer. EPA statistics, moreover, show that living with a heavy smoker over a period of 30-40 years will only increase the non-smoker’s chance of getting lung cancer from 0.4% to 0.6%. Want a better chance of getting lung cancer? Try stepping outside your door in any modern industrialized city and taking a good, deep breath.

All cancers combined account for only 13% of all annual deaths, and lung cancer only 2%. Given the actual numbers, one has to wonder what’s really behind the hysteria.

It’s not a question of public health, folks. It’s a question of individual freedom. If I die of lung cancer, that’s on me. If I die from eating too much fried chicken, or from someone sitting near me eating too much fried chicken, that’s on me too.

“Yes, smoking is bad for you,” writes J.P. Siepmann in the Journal of Theoretics, “but so is fast food hamburgers, driving, and so on. We must weight the risk and benefits of the behaviour both as a society and as an individual based on unbiased information. Be warned though, that a society that attempts to remove all risk terminates individual liberty and will ultimately perish.”

For goodness’ sake, smoking is an Indonesian pass-time. It’s part of Indonesian heritage. It’s as Indonesian as bakso and sate (neither of which is probably good for you). What a shame it is that this government of Bali has so bought in to another culture’s propaganda and agenda.

I’m a smoker. I like to smoke. I regret that there are some who do not appreciate smoking, but I will not fault them for it, nor will I seek a law against them. I say in conclusion, with American author Mark Twain, that “if smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go.

Things That Keep Me Up At Night

 “I’m one of those people,” writes Stephen King in his most recent novel, “who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”

I can go a step further than that, because I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks even after he’s got done thinking it. My mind seems to have no sense of informed taste or selection, but jumps instead at every bit of passing information like a fish that can’t see the difference between a tasty fly and a speeding bullet. It seems that the dumbest things strike me as somehow significant or mysterious. They get into my brain and clatter about like marbles in a tin canister, interrupting a focus on matters more worthy of attention, or indeed needful of the same.

Why, by way of example, are most females so fond of the colour pink? The normal answer should be Who cares, right? What difference does it make? But no, I must look the thing up, get to the bottom of the matter, no matter how insipid the question may be.

I learn through the internet that “scientists” believe this female attraction to the colour pink arises from prehistoric times, when the role of the woman was that of a food gatherer. Since berries are sort of pink (so the scientists claim), the colour was ingrained into the woman’s psyche so that she would seek out and gather up things that were pink, and therefore (hopefully) berries. In due time, of course, this berry gathering pastime petered out, and yet the biological, genetic fixation remained.

So next time my wife hankers after that pink purse, or those pink shoes, or that pink Mercedes, I will know what she’s really on about. Berries.

Another thing that strikes me as curious (and keeps me up at night) is this whole idea of global warming. Here we have a shaky theory that has been turned in the space of a decade or so into a matter of popular lore -- and this despite the objection of a number of eminent scientists who say it is no more than a hoax. Norwegian Nobel prize winner Ivar Giaever, for example, states that “Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientic fraud I have seen in my long life.” So why do we continue to believe? How does a falsehood so robustly persist? Who is behind it, and what is the plan, really?

This leads me to the whole question of tobacco use being harmful to ones health. It says so on the package, right? And therefore it must be so. Yet, statistics gathered from around the world would seem to show that very often the rate of lung cancer in heavy smoking populations, such as those in Turkey and Egypt, is far lower than the rate of lung cancer in countries where fewer people smoke. Now what‘s that all about? What’s really going on here? What shadowy, conspiratorial group is out to kill King Tobacco, and why?

Why were forty planes needed to bring Barack Obama to Bali? I mean, when my wife and I moved from America to Bali we brought along thirteen boxes of various stuff, and I thought that was a lot at the time. But forty plane loads? How is it possible? Yes, I realize that some of the planes were burdened with larger sorts of items, such as armoured personnel carriers -- and I understand there was no need for my family to bring along any military vehicles --, but still, if I had known we could have brought forty planes worth of stuff, I might have included a few extra bits and pieces. My piano, for instance. My wife’s Marcos-like collection of shoes. Two or three old girlfriends. My two dogs and my two dog’s dogs. As it turns out, we were really quite Spartan. And I guess that’s something to be proud about.

Another mystery concerns the bug in my motorcycle helmet. I cannot find this bug on careful examination of the helmet, nor does it make its presence known when I am stopped at a traffic light or travelling at low speed. No, this bug only appears -- and always in my ear -- at high speed or in heavy traffic when there is no opportunity for me to free a hand or stop the bike. Naturally I ask myself how this can be. Coincidence is one thing, but this seems beyond coincidence. I reckon it’s some kind of fate or bad karma, a little bit of purgatory on earth.

Lastly I will mention the matter of the gas in my motorbike. Through two years of experience I have found that the bike will run just about forever when the gauge is on empty, and yet when I fill the tank, the gas disappears with alarming rapidity as if through a hole in the bottom. But there is no hole. I’ve checked, many times. I conclude, therefore, that the best course in the future will be to keep the gauge well into the red, thus saving myself from trips to the Pertamina and the needless expense of refilling.

More Fiasco Than Festival

Another community planning disaster, about 7.5 on the Richter scale, shook the little town of Sanur last week as the Sanur Village Festival, held at Sunrise Beach, played host to five long, hot, unspeakably humid days of frustration, vehicular chaos, roadway gridlock and boiling tempers.

In the past the little festival had been a pleasant enough affair, offering food and drink, local crafts and wares for sale, music and entertainment at night -- a place for tourists and locals alike to meet and meander, take a meal or sip at a tall, cold beer. I had looked forward to returning this year, as had my family, remembering a time when we had enjoyed local flavours, mingled with friends, basked in the cooling breeze off the ocean, and then sat on the grass at night for music and dance presented on a central stage.

But this year was to be different; for we ended up not with a festival, but with a fiasco, long to be remembered, if for anything, as the place one should not have gone.

Why? What had happened between this year and last to turn a pleasant amusement into a nauseating nightmare?

In two words: bad planning.

Or maybe I should say no planning at all.

To begin with, what genius, I wonder -- or what corporate body of genius (since it usually takes more than one person to be this stupid) -- came up with the idea to hold the festival at Sunrise Beach, to which there is only one road of entry and one road of departure? Last year the festival grounds stretched between Grand Bali Beach and Sindhu, an area to which many roads enter, and to which one can easily walk from any avenue of entry. But one road only? To an event that will attract not only the population of Sanur, but of the far flung outlying areas as well?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks. You cannot see the whole picture until you take into account that this single road of entry comes straight off the Bypass. As we all know from daily experience, the Bypass is bad enough when simply left to itself; but funnel all this traffic, bound in both directions, onto a single narrow side way and what you have is the old hopelessly clogged drain effect.

No matter how I try to imagine the decision making process behind this disaster, the thing defies reason.

“Where should we hold the festival this year. It seems to have gone all too smoothly last, don’t you think?”

“Hmm, yes. How about the middle of the Bypass?”

“Oh ya? And what shall we do about traffic control?”

“Well, let me think a second . . . Oh, how about nothing!”

One must consider as well that not all people on the Bypass were bound for the festival. Some were trying to get to work. Some were trying to get home from work. Some were actually in the midst of work, like the truck drivers, the delivery vans, police cars, ambulances and such-like. Ah, but now they were going to the festival, like it or not. There was no place else to go.

Such was my situation on the final Sunday of the disaster. My son had stayed overnight with a friend in Sanur and I was to travel from my house in Biaung to pick him up in the afternoon, a trip which usually takes about 15 minutes one way. This day the round trip required two hours and 15 minutes, most of that passed in increments of half-inches between Padang Galak and Grand Bali Beach. The problem on Sunday was not only the fair. They had added a twist in the form of a parade of marchers and decorated floats. To accommodate this parade, they had closed one side of the Bypass. Not one lane, but one side, you see? Predictably, no contingency plan had been made regarding what must happen with the Bypass traffic.

But the Bali spirit is indomitable. There is always a way. And the way, in this case, was to simply cross the highway divider and head up the road into oncoming traffic. I’ve got to hand it to these Balinese motorists. Nothing will stop them short of debilitating injury or death. And such was the height of my own aggravation by this time that I did in fact join the desperate wrong-way crowd, despite my sober western self, and experienced therefore a period of gleeful schizophrenia wherein I found myself both cursing and congratulating my unlawful actions.

At some point during the ensuing war of opposing traffic, the police awakened, emerged from wherever they had been napping, and began to wave their arms wildly and shout commands at the inventive motorists; with no consequence, however, other than to add a sort of celebration touch to the general clamour.

Come Monday heavy clouds rolled in, rain threatened, and many people, according either to personal experience or word-of-mouth warnings, began to avoid the festival grounds. By mid afternoon the traffic on the Bypass had begun to flow again in its customarily gluey way, and it was clear that the island had survived the trial (although official casualty figures are still pending).

And what about my experience at the festival itself -- aside from the traffic and the heat and the sweat and the honking and the swearing and the sitting and the waiting and the wilting? Well, I really can’t say. I was too exhausted by the time I got there to notice.

Comment on Bogor

A anonymous (of course) comment is received in response to the previous post regarding a Supreme Court order to reopen the Yasmin church in Bogor.  The comment reads "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"  Although the comment is cryptic, I'm guessing that the author meant to express a sort of "who started it" sentiment.  My answer would be that the question is moot.  What we deal with in the present are present realities as they coincide not only with an eternal notion of justice but with application of the rule of law.  Both the order of the State, handed down by the high law, and the true spirit of Islam are violated in the Bogor mayor's defiance.