An End And A Beginning

 Seems like there's been a spate of suicides hereabouts lately. I've not kept count, but they seem them pop up pretty regularly, just short clips of news about this or that person discovered in their home or apartment or hotel room, evidently dead by their own hand. 

The latest of these, about which I read yesterday, concerned, interestingly, an American national with MS who had hung himself from a tree in the Monkey Forest of Ubud with a plastic rope. The man left behind a couple of notes, discovered in his hotel room, describing an unwillingness to continue to live with MS. In one note, he asked that his ashes be spread in the Monkey Forest. By the way, he had hung there for two days before being discovered.

I find myself asking what it might have been about MS that he could no longer live with. Sometimes I think that a complete lack of mobility would do the trick for me, but this could not have been the case here, as a seriously immobilized man could not have managed to hang himself from a tree. So what then? Well, of course, there are no details in the printed news, so who knows? 

On a lighter note, I ran into my old friend Bhaskara down at the beach this morning. He was with his little daughter, whose dream, says Bhas, is to one day move to America and attend university there (about 15 years or so from now). Bhas therefore happily introduced me as a 'real live American', which had the effect of striking the little girl speechless. He tells me that she actually speaks English more often than Indonesian, and I take his word for that. They were on a swimming date, as it were, followed by breakfast at the cafe (which, incidentally, Bhaskara owns). She is also taking tennis lessons at the new indoor sports facility nearby. Looks like a damn nice lifestyle to me. Why the heck would she want to go to America? But oh well, exotic places are always faraway, aren't they, unseen and untouched, pure in the mind. 

Bhas tells me that a new, wider walkway is slated to be constructed all along the Sanur beach front, and for this reason he will need to clear the entire beach front portion of his cafe, which is basically where any and all customers would be sitting. He was to have done so by today, actually, but foresaw, as one who lives here is wont to do, that nothing happened, no workers had arrived, no constructions had begun. Wisely, he decided to stay open for the time being.

He described as well a very crowded town of Canggu--just like the old days--and he remembered the times before COVID when he had complained about the crowds and the traffic jams, and yet now feels thankful to see it all return, rising again from the ghost down days. Bali bangkit.