Crocodile Rock

Looking across the waters of the gently lapping bay at the Port of Sanur, I can see the skeletal structure of what was once to have been the central meeting house of a theme park, now long ago abandoned before it had properly begun. Apparently the land had been illegally purchased or something. The park had been roughly hewn from the jungle, pathways had been partly lain, a crocodile pond dug and lined with cement and fenced and even, according to legend, stocked with crocodiles. The central house had once had walls and a roof but the materials of those had long since been cannibalized for the wood for use elsewhere. What remains now are mere slats, white as bones, rather miraculously still standing despite wind and weather. See me, for here I forever die, they say.

Through the ensuing years, the jungle has reclaimed the land, broken up the pathways, hidden all the old plans, buried whoever's dream this had been, and yet rumors and tales of crocodiles persist. Some few had survived, it is said, and hide to this day among the crawling roots and reaching vines, living on rodents and smaller lizards and maybe even cats and dogs. (They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!).

I once wrote an article about this place, this old project, for the Bali Times. What had it been called? I don't remember. Sunrise Circus, perhaps. Or Crocodile Carnival. I don't know. 

I wonder why it is still there, despite not being there at all. 

It's windy now and the wind tugs at my thoughts. Black clouds rise like smoke from the far hills across and beyond the bay even as the last rays of the sunlight set dim fire to the horizon. Nearby, nearer than the clouds, nearer then the far shore, nearer than the old carcass of the abandoned park, two girls sit at a table with sweet chocolate colored drinks and I watch them as they do a kind of choreographed dance with their hands and fingers. Something they had seen in a music video, perhaps. They laugh and giggle and do it again and again. It must be perfect, it must be carefully synchronized. I wonder what it means. I wonder what people are saying these days.

Sometimes, as a matter of fact, not rumor at all, real crocodiles are seen in these shallow waters near the shore. It is said that they come down streams during the flood stage. Warnings are issued in the daily press. Swimmers beware. 

Beware of what is real. Beware of what is myth. Beware of things that are only partly seen within the wind and beneath the waves. They could be tangled together like a dance, a song of rhythm and inscrutable signs.

Mati Aki

As I headed out as usual for Sanur a few days ago to have my usual morning coffee and pastry, I noted that the battery light was lit up on my motorbike panel. Damn, I thought, I'd better turn around and head for Honda service. The last thing I want is to be stuck somewhere with a dead bike. So I changed direction and headed up Jalan Buyon toward Renon where the nearest service center is located. 

Straight away, I ran into a ceremony, a long procession of the Hindu faithful parading toward Sanur. Damn, for the second time. Now here I am trapped in the middle of a parade, going just about nowhere, expecting that at any minute my motorbike well choke and cough and die. The red battery light glowed angrily. 

Miraculously (or so I thought at the time, anyway), the bike did not die. I arrived at the Honda service center, parked at the outer edge of a crowded lot full of bikes belonging to people who had arrived long before me, and proceeded into the front office. 

To my surprise, the woman at the desk gave me her immediate attention, rose from her chair, and went to fetch one of the mechanics. I followed the young man out to my bike, handing him my keys. Here we go, I thought. I wonder how much this is going to cost me. 

The mechanic started up the bike, and the light did not go on. Of course it didn't.

It was on, I insisted. It really was! 

Well, as it turned out, and as the mechanic explained to me, it is not unusual for the battery light to shine, and it is not a problem. All I needed to do is drive around and around for a while. That charges the battery. 

So I don't need to buy a new battery? 

Nope. Just drive. 

Drive, he said. 

Happy with this simple solution to what turned out to be nothing, I mounted my bike, began to back up toward the street, and then suddenly everything was going sideways. How can this be, I wondered, as I helplessly watched myself and my bike go down to the pavement. I still don't understand how this happened. It was just like in that old TV commercial. You know, I've fallen and I can't get up! And how about that, it was real all along. I had fallen, and I couldn't get up! What I do know is that I fairly quickly ended up flat on my back, even bonking my head at the end of the fall. Luckily I had already put my helmet on. 

But my goodness, how embarrassing, how humiliating. A half dozen people shrieked, a half dozen others rushed in my direction. 

Aduh aduh, what happened, Pak?

Damned if I know. 

Anyway, they picked up my bike. And then they picked me up, setting me back on my feet. And I went on my way, red-faced, feeling stupid. 

Unbelievable! All of this trouble over a red light that ended up meaning nothing. Sheesh. 

Fingerpainting

My brain cannot communicate without my fingers. My fingers are the actual voice of my brain. It is they that relate my thoughts in full. My brain thinks these thoughts in an amorphous sort of form, the thoughts rattle around for a while, and then proceed to my shoulders and down my arms, thence to the hands and finally to the fingers, which then press the proper keys on a typewriter or a laptop or a piano or whatever medium is required for expression. 

Without my fingers, I cannot think. Without the interpretation that happens in the fingers the result of my cogitation is clunky, homely, half-baked, repulsive. 

Writing is like using a Ouija board. You set your fingers on the disc at the center and you wait for words to appear. 

Writing is like fishing. You cannot generally see what is beneath the surface of the lake, but you know that it is there. Your hands, your fingers do all of the work, for it is they which hold the fishing pole and feed out the line. 

The trouble is, my fingers don't work anymore. The fingers on my right hand are consistently arthritic, curled in toward the palm. They no longer think. They are mere dumb appendages. And my left hand is, in the first place, only a left hand after all, and secondly often numb. I use voice type now. And that's what I'm saying. I am saying that this, that everything, is not what I meant to say. It is a stillborn version of what I meant to say, or rather of what my fingers would have said had I still their use at my disposal.

Long ago, in my first couple years of college, I was a music major and my instrument was the piano. I was never very good at reading music. Its translation from the printed notes on the sheet of music to the keys of the piano was painstakingly slow. And yet once the information had traveled in full from my head to my fingers, it was thereafter imprinted in the memory of my fingers. They would play the piece automatically, no longer requiring my eyes upon the page of music. In fact, I did not look at the printed page at all once the information had been stored in my fingertips.

At the end of every term, we would have to perform a piece on our chosen instrument for the department head. I remember approaching the piano on these occasions with nervous trepidation, thinking I don't know this piece, I cannot read the music if I get stuck in the middle. And yet, my fingers had no need of my brain, or of my eyes. Astoundingly, they performed the piece without me. Empty-headed, I merely watched, and thought My goodness, how marvelous. 

Gosh I miss my fingers. I miss the things they used to say.

Caterpillar Season

It's caterpillar season here in South Bali. Or centipede season, or whatever these multi-legged crawley creatures are. They are brown critters, or black with yellow stripes, and they are all over the place, outside and inside. Every day I sweep a number of them out of my house in the middle of their explorations. It's hard to tell just what they are up to. Their travels appear aimless, round and round the front patio, in and out of the house beneath the doorways. Searching for meaning, perhaps. Them and me both. But they're not really bothersome. They don't bite nor do they sting. They merely wander. 

I drove this morning to Pantai Matahari Terbit, the closest beach to my house, needing merely 5 minutes or so to get there. The beachfront has been totally changed from what it used to be, the long line of ticket seller booths gone (tickets for the boat trips to nearby Islands), replaced by a row of small cafes with oceanfront sitting areas. Rather pleasant, really, although a bit hot in the morning, facing as it does the rising sun. But that, after all, is what Matahari Terbit means. Sunrise Beach. Nonetheless, it is easy to find a table in the shade, where you can enjoy a morning coffee and the novel you brought, and maybe even a cookie or a pastry as well. And there you have the sound of the ocean waves crashing into the rocky shore, a sound rather reminiscent of the Oregon coast. The rest of Sanur lies on a quiet bay. It's nice to hear the sea lifting its voice a bit higher for a change. 

The Dry Season

Sometimes one looks up and takes note of where he is. In the span of my immediate vision is the open paperback book I am reading, the God of the Woods, a tabletop, a coffee cup, an ashtray and a lit cigarette, the sand at my feet. My eyes tire at the end of a chapter. I glance up and find, somewhat to my surprise, the vast blue shoreline of the ocean as it inhales the last of the sunlight this day, the white waves rolling in, a freighter ship just beyond the reef, its orangish flank catching the sun from bow to stern. A woman walks by on the beach path pushing a baby carriage, white blouse, black swimsuit bottoms, black hair fluttering in the breeze like a pirate flag, pretty still, but not a girl any longer. A woman now. The green leaves on the low branches of the short trees watch over the brown leaves as they fall. The dry season will soon tear up and turn to rain, and everything will grow again.

Dragnet

Recently, the Indonesian police did sort of a nationwide dragnet for traffic law enforcement. In Bali, a total of 783 motorists were caught in the net, having broken some kind of traffic rule, from no helmet, to no license, to no registration and so on. Of this number, 221, or less than one-third, were committed by foreigners. Curiously, however, only 107 Indonesians received a ticket, many merely receiving a warning, while almost all of the foreigners were ticketed. Put another way, roughly 70% of all traffic tickets during the operation in Bali were issued to foreigners.

Hmm.

Well, it's kind of an old story, I guess. Leniency for locals, severity for foreigners. But hey, it's their country and I guess they have more of a right to break their own laws then we have. I mean, they are the ones who came up with the laws in the first place, right? That should count for something.

Name Games

The Banjar in my area of South Sanur--Banjar translating to something like Balinese neighborhood association--has decided that it will be fun, culturally relevant, and also required, to change the name of my little street from Blok A to something more descriptive, more exotic, more Balinese and, in my mind anyway, more trouble than it is worth, for this is bound to further confound our already confounded postal system and mail carriers. As it is, the streets of Sanur defy any logic of pattern, scrawled as they are across the terrain like a 5-year-old's finger painting project--and an incompetent 5-year-old at that. And now you want to give him new paint?

A number of street names have been suggested, which I am sure would be lovely were they pronounceable, and the residents of the street have also been invited to submit their own suggestions. 

I think that Blok Goblok would be fitting. 

That's a joke, by the way, because Goblok is Indonesian slang for stupid.

Furthermore, the Banjar decided last month that they would begin requiring a monthly fee from every household in their jurisdiction. The amount of the fee, as outlined in the proclamation they sent around to each house, depends upon the type of residence and the category that best describes the residents. You may be a single person in a single dwelling, or you may be a family, you may be renting by the month, or you may be renting longer term under contract. Each category has a different fee. 

The fee for a single person living in a single dwelling was stated as 10,000 rupiah per month. This comes to about 61 cents USD. Not bad. 

However, the rules proved not so simple as written on their own paper when the Banjar representative came to collect. We argued back and forth for the longest time, I continually pointing at the pertinent paragraph regarding single occupancy, and he pointing everywhere else. Finally, it occurred to the pleasant though persistent official that he could not win an argument against his own document. So he compromised, and changed the document. 

Oh sorry, sorry, he said. That's a mistake. Haha. It is supposed to say 20,000, not 10,000.

Upon which he withdrew a pen from his pocket and substituted a 2 for the 1 in 10,000. Presto, 20,000. See how that works? 

Ah well, it's still next to nothing. But it's the principle of the thing, man! The principle!