The Grapes of Wrath for Our Times.

 "I need to think," the tenant said. "We all need to think. Surely there is a way to stop this. It's not like lightning or an earthquake. Terrible things are being done by men, and by God, we can stop it."

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (my translation from the Indonesian) 

Here is an excerpt from the past which rings a sad bell in our own time, I reckon. As with the farmers in Steinbeck's novel, we too, we common citizens, are being bulldozed by relentless events, by a government, in our case,  overwhelmingly empowered by control of the presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and even the highest court in the nation. And what do we do? We have squandered our power, which was our vote, and much of what we voted for, both Democrat and Republican, is not what is being done. Instead, our hard won benefits, our privileges, our freedoms, our pride as a nation is being overrun, ground under the wheels of this impervious machine that we call our government. It is lightning, contrary to what the farmer said. It is an earthquake. Or it might as well be. We stand and watch, not knowing which foot to move. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, institutions enacted by Congress in our name are being dismantled, the stock market is crashing, the economy is on the verge of recession, and, yes, the price of eggs is going up. And what do we do other than stand in place and say this cannot happen? And why do we say so? It is because the truth, the reality is unbearable. But here we are for the next 4 years at the very least. So cover your heads, folks. The sky is indeed falling.

 

Plastic Bottles

 There is an old, old toothless woman here everyday on Pantai Karang, and for everyone she meets, she flashes a big toothless smile and offers a greeting. She never asks for anything. She goes about collecting plastic bottles from garbage cans and from the beach side cafes, where the employees have saved the bottles for her. Whence comes her joy, I wonder?

In the meantime, grim, decrepitant, determined bules go grudgingly under the grueling sun and wonder gladly about where in the world they will gayly vacation next year. 

Hah! Alliteration is fun! 

I Am Unique

 How can there be water coming out of the fountain? What can we possibly be celebrating?

--Han Kang, Hunan Acts

As we wait at the long traffic light on Jalan Buyon, a little girl, cosily squashed between her two heavy-set parents, turns her head to steal glances at me, smiling, giggling, covering her mouth. She tugs at her mother's shoulder and says "bule!" A foreigner. A white person. Her mother takes a look and nods. The little girl, still delighted, taps on her father's back. He turns as well. Acknowledges the child's observation in the affirmative. 

I am unique. I am uncommon. I am a sight to see. 

Every time I smile, the girl giggles and buries her face shyly in the plush back of her father's coat.

I've decided to go to the beach this evening to get a little exercise. I'm not moving around enough lately. My body is turning to stone. It is very crowded at the beach this evening. People are coming from Java to celebrate and to dine in style before the beginning of the upcoming fasting month. Ramadan. 

I keep wondering these days, over and over, why no one is saying anything. I think back to how Donald Trump kept running his mouth during the four years of Biden's presidency. He never went away. He was always talking. And what I wonder in light of this is why aren't Joe Biden and Kamala Harris talking. I feel like they should be out there. They should be saying, See, we told you so. Of course it has been traditional in the past for defeated candidates and former presidents to fade into the background, to resist interfering with the new presidents work. But this is not the past. This is an emergency. This is a catastrophe. 

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? 

Gone too soon.

While everything is changing, nothing changes. It's just like normal daily life. How can there be water coming out of the fountain? What can we possibly be celebrating?

At the upscale beach cafe, I take a rest, order a coffee. My legs hurt and are weak and they wobble like rubber when I walk too far, which is not far at all. There is music playing mildly over speakers somewhere. Liberace-style Chopin and Debussy and Beethoven. The temperature has actually risen since the afternoon and is now at 32° c. We are all dining on the outdoor patio in the pressing humid airless air. Dining and suffocating. White people from every imaginable country, suffocating as one. 

Bules!

Heat

 When I first came here to Bali, some 15 years ago, I didn't mind the heat. In fact, still soggy after 55 years in Oregon, I found the heat astounding, exotic, incomparable. Every day I would swim in the ocean and then lie under the searing sun. I became quite brown and the girls at Angels bar said I was not interesting anymore because I didn't look like a bule anymore. Who would have thought that a rich brown tan would be a drawback? 

Today I quicken my pace on Karang Beach as black clouds are forming to the north and the humidity is thickening in the air. It's like walking through soup. Both of my legs hurt from the short distance I have walked. I quickly step aside to avoid a bicycle, trip, and miraculously, albeit comically, regain my balance eventually.

I was strong once and heavy, yet fit. Girls always asked if I had been a Marine. No? A police then. Surely a police. 

Indonesians think that all Americans are either Marines or polisi. 

I am old now, and chronically unwell, and I hide in the house beneath the AC unit and watch TV. A product of the process of entropy, formed so by life.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said.

The Vegetarian

 As I began to read into Han Kang's The Vegetarian, I was instantly reminded of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, two stories about two people who say "No", the only difference being in the mantra--Bartleby's mantra, "I prefer not", and Young-hye's, "I won't eat it." Kang's novel begins with a woman who decides that she will no longer eat meat and from that point on spirals down to increasingly extreme measures, ending in her refusal to eat anything at all. As in Bartley, there are those who plead with the woman in their various ways, approaching her with anger, with reason, with compassion, and of course with frustration, all to no avail. There is a grotesque-ness in Young-hye's adamance and ultimately in her dissolution, but I don't think that Han has inspired the same helpless sympathy that we find ourselves feeling for Bartleby. Nonetheless, Han's short novel is engaging, a bit weird (South Korean writers seem to have the corner on weird these days), and overall worth reading. But Booker prize material, Nobel prize work? Well, she received both, so I guess I disagree somewhat with the enthusiasm of the judges. I will give her another chance, and have moved on to another of her novels, Human Acts.

Sad Coffee

 You notice it because of the bright yellow paint on the wall at one side of the doorway. SAD Coffee, a small hole-in-the-wall cafe tucked shoulder-to-shoulder alongside a steamy motorbike rental joint just before the intersection of Jalan Tamblingan and the highway. It is a spot people pass through quickly on their way to somewhere else. That's the first sad thing about SAD coffee that is sad. It is a wallflower. The second thing is the name itself, although I personally find it intriguing somehow. It brings to mind Hemingway's A Clean Well-Lighted Place. The little cafe, the lone man, the shadows of the leaves on the deserted sidewalk. Some sort of quiet pathos. But that's just me. 

It's dark inside, a single shaded light on the ceiling, and the walls are covered with thin strips of rusted metal, giving it a tin shack sort of appearance, which was either an artful choice on the part of the proprietor or the very cheapest possible option. Offsetting the rusticity, and yet somehow complimenting it, are two round tables of rich brown wood as well as a burgundy two-person sofa behind a long glass-topped table. One wall, also of brown wood, displays framed photos and paintings. 

The place serves only Vietnamese coffee. And of course fried rice. 

 I order a coffee and I ask the waitress why the coffee is sad. She does not answer. The place is new and she is new and seems a bit flustered. Or perhaps she is confused by my American accent that seems to muddle even the simplest of words.

I sit at one of the little tables. The seat of the chair is leather, which feels nice. I scroll through my phone briefly, but then as there is no one else here, I decide to move to the sofa against the wall at the back of the small room. How cozy this would be were there other people here. Or merely crowded? I guess it would depend on the quality of the people. To tell the truth, I'm generally happiest on my own.

"Boleh merokok, nggak?" I ask the waitress. Can I smoke? She says that I can. My goodness, a clean, not-so-well-lighted-place where one can smoke inside. I'm liking it more all the time. 

The waitress brings out my Vietnamese coffee, sort of a little tower, glass globe topped with the little metal cup from which the coffee drains onto the condensed milk below. The tower totters as she lowers it toward the table and finally crashes altogether to the glass tabletop. 

"That is sad," I say. "I guess that's why they call it sad coffee." 

This remark was meant to humor, but she answers nothing, rushing away to the kitchen for a towel.  

I sip the second effort casually, taking my time, enjoying the plush cushion of the sofa, which is infinitely more comfortable than the sofa I have at home. I am in no hurry, after all; and in this case, unlike that in the Hemingway story, there is no waiter impatient for me to go home. I have all the time in the world. At this moment, anyway, all the time in the world. 

Just As We Are

 I've been out of touch lately. Silent. A bit stunned. Lost for words. Discouraged and depressed. Disillusioned. 

But you know, I spent the last week with my stepson who is here from the US, and what I have taken away from our discussions in general, the political ones, I mean, is that people of his generation feel that once they have voted, they have done what they could do. It is their only power, and after it has been expended, there is nothing left. And so they kind of just roll with things. They are living busy lives, working careers, trying to build a tolerable situation for themselves, hanging out with their friends, dating. Life goes on. Much of their private lives is spent online in  venues and entertainments and pursuits that I can barely begin to understand.

And so what? It seems that there is even less that I can do over here on the other side of the world. I am affected, to be sure, especially where social security is concerned. And so I hope and pray for a democratic overturn of Congress in 2026. And that's about it. What else is there? I can write, here in the blog for example, but who cares? 

We did not dwell, therefore, on politics. Instead we laughed and shared stories and talked about our aspirations. Especially his. What aspirations after all does a 71-year-old man have? The aspiration to somehow avoid feeling like he has been run over by a truck when he wakes up in the morning? 

We talked about what we love. We talked about friends and also enemies. We talked about girlfriends and ex-girlfriends. We talked about the things for which he is striving and we talked about the things in life that are important, and the things that are not so important. 

We philosophized. We talked about culture, American culture and Indonesian culture. 

We are friends, I and my stepson. We agree, we disagree, but we do both without losing our grip on our mutual affection. He is himself, and I am me, and that is all okay and as it should be.

"Don't die before I come back next year," he texted before he got on his plane. "I still have lots of stories I want to tell you."