Daily Diners

There are two little dogs who live just around the corner from my house, and every day now, having discovered that I often have treats, they come to visit. Every morning upon waking I find these two dogs on my front patio, for they are small enough to squirm under the gate. There they wait for me to open the door and, hopefully, produce some chicken or some beef jerky or some milk or what have you. Again they will show up in the evening, as again I may have something for them. The little white dog, a female who looks a bit like a frayed dust rag, is quite friendly, while the black dog, an erratic, distracted, hyperactive male, is seemingly under the permanent impression that his white companion does not deserve to eat. Luckily for her, he is also kind of stupid and cannot help himself from running around in circles while she grabs her portion, and perhaps more. Often, there will be a brief fight, which the white dog swiftly loses. But then they run off eventually, side by side, no hard feelings.

The Institute

Stephen King does well with children. Always has. Think of IT. Think of The Body (more widely known from the movie version title, Stand By Me). King again does well with children in his recent novel The Institute, which I've just finished reading. The problem with the novel is that it feels like a regurgitation of relationships and themes that he has already explored in novels and stories that were fresh at the time he wrote them and much better than this current rerun.

To be honest, I don't know why King continues to write. He certainly does not need to do so, not like Jack London, for instance, or Mark Twain, who not only lived beyond their means, but in a time when novel writing was not nearly as lucrative as it is now, even for widely popular authors, and when pirated publications stole an author's profits and even the original publishers conspired to limit the authors' rights to his own efforts (something which Twain energetically fought to correct in his final years).

But King is rich many times over, and does not appear to live a life of great excess. With more than fifty popular novels (most of them best sellers) behind him, as well as film proceeds, King is perfectly free to rest on his laurels, having no need to produce pale imitations of himself. And this is what The Institute feels like--a practiced, premeditated reproduction, admirable for its likeness to the original, yet itself not original. It's kind of like taking the kids (and of course the dog) from Scooby Doo and dropping them into a new, but very similar situation every week.

Perhaps King simply has to write, like a compulsion. Or perhaps he is seeking the sort of literary acceptance that will never come, for Stephen King is quite solidly enshrined in the robes of popular fiction, in the halls of formula narrative, wherein King is indeed the king (although his garments, even in his own palace, are becoming worn, their style antiquated).

Like most of his previous novels, the Institute is also a page turner--another thing that King is good at. And yet again, in The Institute, the machinery is showing through, the magician's tricks have worn thin with repetition. Moreover, as in many of his novels, the carefully fashioned tension of his story collapses on itself in the end--and, ironically, the end of the Institute features a collapsing, imploding building, as if King himself, deep down, is recognizing his own trademark weakness.

Still, I don't want to be too hard on The Institute. It is classic King, and guaranteed to gratify the King readership. It delivers what is anticipated. The Institute is delicious candy, and a delicious candy, say a peppermint stick, as long as you don't expect it to be a pork chop, is delicious every time around.  

Trash

The old man who takes away my trash very seldom speaks. He very seldom looks at me, or at anyone else, as if it is something that is forbidden. This man's skin is as brown as burned toast, his legs thin and spindly, knees crooked slightly inward. He does not take the plastic bag in my bin, and will not take it. He opens the bin and fishes with his hand, scooping the contents into his voluminous burlap bag. He comes every day, does not speak, shovels the trash into his burlap bag. On July first, after collecting the trash, he paused in the driveway and hesitantly stretched an open hand toward me. Uang, he said, nearly in a whisper. Money. Ah yes, we had agreed on payment at the first of each month. I brought my wallet, deciding that ten thousand rupiah per week would be a fair amount. It is a normal fee for such service here, though the service usually comes in a more official form and involves a truck and strong young collectors. Accordingly, I gave the old man forty thousand rupiah for the month, a bit less than three dollars. The man received this money, stared at it for a moment, looked up, met my eyes briefly, and smiled. It felt as if this man had rarely seen this much money all at one time. Terima kasih, he said. Terima kasih, tuan. Thank you. Thank you. The old man comes every day. He transfers my trash to his bag. He tidies up the driveway where scraps may have fallen. And now, sometimes, he smiles.

Rejoice

I suddenly realized this morning that I have been waiting nearly four years to breathe freely again, waiting for the time to come when this great American error would be expelled from our highest office and removed from our national conversation. Like many others, I had believed that this would happen long before the advent of another election. I did not think it possible that such an obvious cancer, more obvious by the week, would be allowed to persist, and I have been saddened along the way to find that we did not have a national body sufficiently healthy to reject this illness. We approach the time now, just a few months away, when the man will at last be expelled and we may take a deep, free breath again. We come to a time when a great burden will be lifted and we can move forward again, resume our journey on the road to progress. I had always known that there was light at the end of the tunnel. I just thought we would get there sooner. But now we are near and the light is clear. Rejoice and be thankful.   

Un-American

Every so often I will get a comment on something I've posted, in the way either of a comment to someone else's post or a post of my own, that I really have no right as an American living abroad to express any opinion whatsoever on events in America.

The most recent instance of this came from an Indonesian immigrant to America.

'Sure', he wrote, 'maybe you were born in America, and maybe you lived here for 55 years, but you don't live here now and you have no idea of what's going on. You say that you have family and friends here and you talk to them all the time, but that's still not the same as being here. It's easy for you to spread your libtard views online while you live in comfort and wealth in your villa and lie around on the beach. Just enjoy your retirement in the sun and leave America to those who live here, okay?'

This is not a direct quote, of course, but my translation of the gist of it from his poor English.

Generally, I am quite patient and sober in my replies to people online, especially with immigrants whom, as is understandable, may lack in knowledge of American law and government, history, culture, racial issues, and so on.

But in response to this particular comment, as you may or may not be able to imagine, I kind of tore this guy a new asshole. Figuratively, of course.

The fact is, in my nine years away from America, my interest in American politics and social issues has become much more lively than it was when I lived there. I seem to care more than ever, for some reason. Moreover, I was born more than a half century ago and have an experience of America that is much fuller than this young immigrant's. I lived through the years of racial segregation, I lived in a time when black people could not use the same toilet as whites, when black people lived in their own part town and whites lived in theirs. I lived through the riots of the 60s, through the civil rights marches, through a time when cities burned and people lived in fear. I lived in a time of multiple assassinations and more riots, and integration of schools and universities enforced by the military. The 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, right up to 2011, I was there.

And no, I don't lounge in a villa enjoying my wealth. I scrape by even here on Social Security. I live in a one room apartment. I cook my own food to save money. I have as transportation a motorbike, because there is no way in the world I could afford to buy a car. I live, in short, just as the common people around me live.  

And I can tell you that there is nothing that is happening now in America that has not happened before. In every case, throughout the years, these painful spasms in society, these fearful shakings of the status quo, have been the birth pangs of a better society to come. As Solomon puts it, That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been. Sometimes things need to be torn down so that they can be either improved or totally rebuilt.

One's mere presence in a society is no asset whatsoever to the society if one insists on being part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
 

Anybody Home?

This is difficult to explain. I'm losing track of myself. I'm falling out of contact with myself. The words I have are hidden in impenetrable ennui. I know they are there and that they want to be uttered, but my lips cannot form them, my fingers cannot find them. They are in me like an ache that has no remedy. The nature of the words cannot be determined. The only certain thing is that they are there and cannot be reached. The phone just rings and rings.  

Starlight

For the past few nights, I've been sitting on my front patio under the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, and noticing vaguely that something seemed wrong. Something was missing. I realized last night that it is a star that is missing. There is said to be seven bright stars in Ursa Major, but I cannot help but notice that one has fallen away. It seems like so many of the lights are going out these days, in the world, in the heavens. Of course, the light that I am not now seeing is light that was travelling to the earth many years ago, and if the star is gone, it has been gone for many more years than that. It would have been gone before I was born. I am seeing now, or was seeing, light from a time before I existed. I am witness therefore to the existence of the universe with or without me. But where does light go after one sees it? Surely, it continues on across the universe, with likely no one to see it, barring the existence of aliens (but let them see it too, then; it doesn't matter). Does the light end because I have seen it? No, because I know that it was there even before I saw it because I am seeing the light that was there before I was born. Where does it go? Does starlight not exist unless the individual sees it? And then where does it stop? Does it stop? Does it reach the edge of the universe and enter some kind of realm of nonexistence? But how could there be a realm outside of the universe? That would merely make the realm part of the universe and thus no longer a realm of nonexistence. Does the universe wrap around and begin all over again. As it turns out, the starlight did not need the star, did it, except for in that instance wherein it began. Thereafter, the life of the star became its light. And the light is not really gone. It is merely traveling and will surely be back again, just where it was to begin with.