I've decided to quit my Wordpress blog (mypracticalparadise) for several reasons. One is that I don't want to pay the fee to renew it. It's a hefty fee, in my mind, and, after all, BlogSpot is free. Another is that it has never worked very well. I have often been unable to get into it, or to save things after typing them. Another is that, really, it was intended to be a cooperative blog with my wife--I would do the writing she would take the photos--but now, while I still have the blog, I no longer have a wife. It was also to be largely concerned with travel, but as it turns out, I ain't goin' nowhere. So, I reckon Jim Dandy can carry whatever I have to say, along with the photos as well.
Visits
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Bridesmaids
Four bridesmaids stand in bare feet before the lip of the incoming surf, young chocolate colored gowns billowing in the breeze, freshly undulating onto the sand as if they had been newly poured from above, jet-black hair flying like pirate flags above their shoulders, four swift, sleek schooners at play in the salty mist. This day a man and a woman will be married. A stiff gust pulls at the women's gowns from behind such that the gowns cling to breasts and hips, presenting four female figureheads to the sea, offerings to an ocean god, and then changes its mind, a thing of whim and trickery, catching the garments and causing them to swell outward as if each maiden had found herself suddenly pregnant and at term. The four women shriek and leap backwards, for the sea has caught them by their toes and then dashed away again, forever longing, according to its nature, both to depart and to arrive.
Friday, July 6, 2018
Myobat
Last night I
happened to try a new medicine for my neuropathic pain. This is called “Myobat”,
and I tried it because the pharmacy had run out of Baclofen and because the
pharmacist told me that, according to new rules, I would need a prescription
for Xanax, although she said she would call a doctor for me and see if she
could get it, thus saving me from an expensive trip to the hospital. I thought
that very kind of her, but didn’t want to trouble her overmuch, and decided I
would prefer not to pay the high cost for Xanax in any case.
“Myobat” is
a mixture of English and Indonesian, literally meaning ‘my medicine’. J Well, I took it last night about a
half hour before bedtime, along with one Tylenol PM, but couldn’t fall asleep
to save my life. Rats! So I got up and took a second Tylenol PM, and then
apparently nodded off shortly afterwards, for I remember nothing else until
about 4:30 in the morning.
Myobat is a
medicine for muscle spasming, and the info said that it might make you sleepy
and it might not. I figured that it was the Tylenol that had put me to sleep,
so, being in a fair bit of pain this morning, I decided to take another of the
Myobat. Why not?
Now, here I
sit at Starbucks, with my laptop before me and coffee in hand, feeling as if I’m
going to conk out on the keyboard! I guess Myobat works after all. Or perhaps
it only works if taken in the daytime. Or maybe I just wasn’t sleepy last night
but I am sleepy now?
Oh well, I’ll
just have a nap later … if the effects of the Myobat hold out.
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Separation
Sad to learn a couple days ago that two of my favorite people here have separated, a delightful young Indonesian couple who have been going together for about a year and had planned to be married in the future. They had even decided how many children they wanted to have!
Well, the young woman went to Jakarta to attend a four month training program with her new employer and ended up in bed with some random guy. Well, I guess he's not random to her, but, honestly, she could not have known him very well after only two months in Jakarta, and, in fact, she has asked her boyfriend to forgive her and resume their relationship, so I guess the outside fling couldn't have been that important to her. Nonetheless, the boyfriend is not inclined to forgive her. Young men rarely are so inclined. He can forgive her eventually, he tells me, but as far as resuming the relationship is concerned, that other guy will always be in his mind, he will always be picturing her with him, and he could never trust her again.
I understand that. And I've been there also, in my younger years. Betrayal is a very hard thing to deal with. And trust is very difficult, if not impossible, to restore once it has been broken.
I remember seeing a movie not long ago where a husband had betrayed his wife and immediately regretted his unwise fling, for it had destroyed what was truly most precious and permanent in his life--not only his wife's trust and love, but his own sense of his best self. The man spent the rest of the movie trying to restore what he had broken, trying to regain his wife's love. She told him, at one point, after several attempts and failures, that it wasn't that she did not love him. That, in fact, was why it hurt so much. It wasn't that she could not forgive him, either. She could. But forgiving, as the old saying goes, is not forgetting. It's not about love or forgiveness, she told him. It's just that I am so, so very disappointed. You were mine--especially, only, mine. That's what you took away.
It was always such a pleasure to sit and talk with my young friends. They laughed so much, and teased, and made goo-goo eyes at each other, and smooched when they thought no one was looking. They talked about the future and invited me to their unscheduled wedding, whenever that might occur. And, now, it is painful to see the young man looking so pale and broken hearted--and somewhat embarrassed, I think, because they had spoken so openly about their love and their future.
Down the drain.
So, time will tell, I guess. Perhaps they will get back together. That is up to her, I reckon. It depends on how hard she wants to try, and whether she is strong enough to live with the lasting doubt that she herself has created. Or perhaps they will move on, start from scratch, on a fresh foundation. The trouble is, the older they get, the fewer will be the stable foundations they can find.
Sometimes one envies the young--their energy, their strength, their vigor, their health. And sometimes one has to say, 'My God, I could never do all that over again!'
Well, the young woman went to Jakarta to attend a four month training program with her new employer and ended up in bed with some random guy. Well, I guess he's not random to her, but, honestly, she could not have known him very well after only two months in Jakarta, and, in fact, she has asked her boyfriend to forgive her and resume their relationship, so I guess the outside fling couldn't have been that important to her. Nonetheless, the boyfriend is not inclined to forgive her. Young men rarely are so inclined. He can forgive her eventually, he tells me, but as far as resuming the relationship is concerned, that other guy will always be in his mind, he will always be picturing her with him, and he could never trust her again.
I understand that. And I've been there also, in my younger years. Betrayal is a very hard thing to deal with. And trust is very difficult, if not impossible, to restore once it has been broken.
I remember seeing a movie not long ago where a husband had betrayed his wife and immediately regretted his unwise fling, for it had destroyed what was truly most precious and permanent in his life--not only his wife's trust and love, but his own sense of his best self. The man spent the rest of the movie trying to restore what he had broken, trying to regain his wife's love. She told him, at one point, after several attempts and failures, that it wasn't that she did not love him. That, in fact, was why it hurt so much. It wasn't that she could not forgive him, either. She could. But forgiving, as the old saying goes, is not forgetting. It's not about love or forgiveness, she told him. It's just that I am so, so very disappointed. You were mine--especially, only, mine. That's what you took away.
It was always such a pleasure to sit and talk with my young friends. They laughed so much, and teased, and made goo-goo eyes at each other, and smooched when they thought no one was looking. They talked about the future and invited me to their unscheduled wedding, whenever that might occur. And, now, it is painful to see the young man looking so pale and broken hearted--and somewhat embarrassed, I think, because they had spoken so openly about their love and their future.
Down the drain.
So, time will tell, I guess. Perhaps they will get back together. That is up to her, I reckon. It depends on how hard she wants to try, and whether she is strong enough to live with the lasting doubt that she herself has created. Or perhaps they will move on, start from scratch, on a fresh foundation. The trouble is, the older they get, the fewer will be the stable foundations they can find.
Sometimes one envies the young--their energy, their strength, their vigor, their health. And sometimes one has to say, 'My God, I could never do all that over again!'
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
July 4th
Today is July 4th (tomorrow in America) and I think that the fireworks must surely be drowned out this year by the earth rattling rumble made by the forefathers as they turn in their graves. Which is fine with me. Better to take a serious look at ourselves than to light matches to any noise makers right now. How very far we have wandered from the vision of our founders! How far we have strayed from out roots, a nation of immigrants devoted to the notion of liberty and justice for all, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We find ourselves now embroiled in a counter revolution, a rebellion against our own better angels, are we are both enemy and victim.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Habit
I am a creature of habit. Always have been. I will find a routine that is comfortable to me, and then I will repeat the same routine pretty much every day (if left to myself) until some catastrophe strikes--getting married, for instance, or getting divorced, or getting ill, or having to move, and so on--at which point the old routine will go into the dustbin of history and a new one will eventually take its place. It must be this reliable predictability that throws people a jarring curve when I suddenly do something outside my nature, like move to the other side of the world, for example.
In staying with my baseline character, I always take the same route on my morning walk and much the same route on my evening walk (in as far as I choose to walk on the beach in the evening, although the particular beach may change, within a range of a couple miles, anyway).
But I had one of those 'let's do something new' moments yesterday evening and decided to walk not on the beach, but in a different part of my neighborhood. In short, I turned left instead of right, and went up instead of down to the next street.
And my goodness, the things you don't see when you take the same route every day!
The surprising thing about this alternate route, one street north of my house rather than one street south, is that you find yourself walking through areas that are as different as day and night. Who knew?
The street to the north is a very thin one, yet a very heavily traveled one, making walking at the edge (there is no sidewalk) a bit of a sketchy idea. Motorbikes blast by close enough to where you can feel a gust of wind on your cheek, and when a car comes, you have to just damn well move! The farther you travel, however, the lighter the traffic becomes, ultimately trickling away like water in a spent streambed.
Little businesses and homes and apartments are crowded onto both sides of the street--laundries and warungs and little shops and little food stands--and as the traffic thins, the ambulating people thicken--children and parents and aunts and uncles and grammas and grampas and, of course, dogs (although how the latter have managed to survive this street, I do not know).
Upon turning back toward home, I managed to take the wrong street, finding myself in a maze of gravel roads and alleys leading first this way, then that, and it becomes clear that this is a very poor neighborhood indeed--again, like night and day next to the route through my rather well off neighborhood just one street away. The homes and small apartments are in a general state of dissolution, a few having fallen down altogether. Moreover, in my own neighborhood, one will see only a handful of people on the usual walking route, while here the streets are full of children running about and adults sitting outside their humble dwellings, shootin' da breeze.
A certain group of children, playing a running game of badminton, decide to tag along with me, singing "Hello, hello, hello!", this being apparently the only English word they know, although it is rather like the Indonesian 'Halo' (pronounced hollow).
I ask whether I can join their game for a minute, to which they gleefully agree.
"I used to play badminton in college," I tell them, a fun fact which fails to significantly impress. Less impressive yet is my attempt to serve the birdie, wherein the racket has completely missed its target. Eye-hand coordination suffers with age, I guess. So much for badminton.
Leaving the children, I come upon a little roadside conference between two older men and two older women (though none is quite so old as I). "Hello! Hello!" they sing.
And so we hobnob a little bit, and then I'm on my way again, pretending that I know exactly where I am and where I am going. I do know where I'm going--home. I'm just not sure at this point where it's at.
As it turns out, I get fed back onto the main street from which I had come--the thin, traffic-filled street--and so retrace the original route back home, and find the big fat brown dog with her nose out of joint for getting left behind--but that's all for the best, because I'm afraid that little street with its rushing traffic would have spelled the end for her.
In staying with my baseline character, I always take the same route on my morning walk and much the same route on my evening walk (in as far as I choose to walk on the beach in the evening, although the particular beach may change, within a range of a couple miles, anyway).
But I had one of those 'let's do something new' moments yesterday evening and decided to walk not on the beach, but in a different part of my neighborhood. In short, I turned left instead of right, and went up instead of down to the next street.
And my goodness, the things you don't see when you take the same route every day!
The surprising thing about this alternate route, one street north of my house rather than one street south, is that you find yourself walking through areas that are as different as day and night. Who knew?
The street to the north is a very thin one, yet a very heavily traveled one, making walking at the edge (there is no sidewalk) a bit of a sketchy idea. Motorbikes blast by close enough to where you can feel a gust of wind on your cheek, and when a car comes, you have to just damn well move! The farther you travel, however, the lighter the traffic becomes, ultimately trickling away like water in a spent streambed.
Little businesses and homes and apartments are crowded onto both sides of the street--laundries and warungs and little shops and little food stands--and as the traffic thins, the ambulating people thicken--children and parents and aunts and uncles and grammas and grampas and, of course, dogs (although how the latter have managed to survive this street, I do not know).
Upon turning back toward home, I managed to take the wrong street, finding myself in a maze of gravel roads and alleys leading first this way, then that, and it becomes clear that this is a very poor neighborhood indeed--again, like night and day next to the route through my rather well off neighborhood just one street away. The homes and small apartments are in a general state of dissolution, a few having fallen down altogether. Moreover, in my own neighborhood, one will see only a handful of people on the usual walking route, while here the streets are full of children running about and adults sitting outside their humble dwellings, shootin' da breeze.
A certain group of children, playing a running game of badminton, decide to tag along with me, singing "Hello, hello, hello!", this being apparently the only English word they know, although it is rather like the Indonesian 'Halo' (pronounced hollow).
I ask whether I can join their game for a minute, to which they gleefully agree.
"I used to play badminton in college," I tell them, a fun fact which fails to significantly impress. Less impressive yet is my attempt to serve the birdie, wherein the racket has completely missed its target. Eye-hand coordination suffers with age, I guess. So much for badminton.
Leaving the children, I come upon a little roadside conference between two older men and two older women (though none is quite so old as I). "Hello! Hello!" they sing.
And so we hobnob a little bit, and then I'm on my way again, pretending that I know exactly where I am and where I am going. I do know where I'm going--home. I'm just not sure at this point where it's at.
As it turns out, I get fed back onto the main street from which I had come--the thin, traffic-filled street--and so retrace the original route back home, and find the big fat brown dog with her nose out of joint for getting left behind--but that's all for the best, because I'm afraid that little street with its rushing traffic would have spelled the end for her.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
The Morning News
I really must find a way to stop reading the morning news when I get up. So depressing, so frustrating, so sad, so maddening. Really not a good way of starting the day. It's just that I'm so accustomed to doing so in the morning with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Hard to teach old dogs new tricks.
Moreover, the stuff is infected now with so many avoidable errors, bad spelling, bad grammar, errors in fact. This stuff never would have flown in my younger days. And it's really hard to understand how these errors can occur in a day when everything gets spell checked for you!
I see a story this morning regarding the renaming of a Virginia school, discarding the name of Jefferson Davis and replacing it with Barack Obama. That's fine, but the article tells us that Jefferson Davis was a Confederate General. He wasn't. He was the President of the Confederate States. So poor Davis not only got his name removed from a school, but got demoted from President to General to boot! Is this important? Well, probably so, given that we are talking about a school where, no matter who it is named for, children are supposed to be taught the facts of history.
We hear a lot about fake news these days. But this ain't fake news. This is news written by people who are just not very bright.
Maybe I could buy a bunch of comic books for my morning reading. At least they're supposed to be funny.
Moreover, the stuff is infected now with so many avoidable errors, bad spelling, bad grammar, errors in fact. This stuff never would have flown in my younger days. And it's really hard to understand how these errors can occur in a day when everything gets spell checked for you!
I see a story this morning regarding the renaming of a Virginia school, discarding the name of Jefferson Davis and replacing it with Barack Obama. That's fine, but the article tells us that Jefferson Davis was a Confederate General. He wasn't. He was the President of the Confederate States. So poor Davis not only got his name removed from a school, but got demoted from President to General to boot! Is this important? Well, probably so, given that we are talking about a school where, no matter who it is named for, children are supposed to be taught the facts of history.
We hear a lot about fake news these days. But this ain't fake news. This is news written by people who are just not very bright.
Maybe I could buy a bunch of comic books for my morning reading. At least they're supposed to be funny.
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