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."

God Knows

 For those trumpers who are gleefully claiming that God saved Trump from an assassin's bullet by directing it into an innocent, decent family man sitting behind Trump -- Think it through. Such a God could have and would have saved everyone from injury, given that this same God is said to love all equally. So stop the bullshit, folks. No one is buying it, least of all God.

Explain This to Me

 Let me get this straight ... Trump wants to deport brown illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and yet he has pardoned nearly all of the white American citizens who committed violent crimes at the capital on January 6th? 

And speaking of crimes, isn't Trump himself a convicted felon? And wasn't he found liable for sexual assault by a jury of his peers?

Almost Malaysia

 So my girlfriend and I were about to head for a 6 day vacation together in Malaysia. We arrived at the airport, went through baggage check, and then queued up to go through the check-in for the flight. She scanned her passport and headed through the automatic doors. I scanned mine and was taken to the immigration office. As it turned out, I had neglected to extend my exit permit. I had no idea I was supposed to do this. When I purchased the 5-year foreign residency here, I had no intention of ever leaving the country, and so I paid no attention to the rules for a possible exit at that time. As far as I knew, the 5-year foreign residency permit included a permit to leave and come back anytime I wanted. But no, it appears that I have both to pay to stay here and to pay to leave here. Lol. And so I am very depressed this evening, as my girlfriend continued on to Malaysia, as she should have done, and I returned ignominiously to my house in Sanur. I don't get to see my girlfriend often, as she lives in Central Java and can only visit me once every two to three months, and so this is especially painful to have ruined the opportunity to spend a week with her. But this is just one in a series of catastrophic brain failures for me. It seems that my cognitive abilities are swiftly deteriorating. I pay for things that I am not supposed to pay for, and I forget to pay for things that I should have paid for. I often have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing without seeking help, as if I were a child again. The only consolation is in the thought that she will probably have a better time without me in Malaysia, as I would always just slow her down and require assistance. I feel sad and angry and imbecilic and  and hollow. When immigration got done with me at the airport, an officer came to me and said "You must leave the airport immediately." As if I am some kind of criminal. And maybe I am. Criminally stupid, anyway.

The Sympathizer

I am reminded in reading the block-like, densely packed pages of Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel, The Sympathizer, of Conrad or Melville, not only for the complexity and precision of the prose but for the monster and the enigma lurking between and beneath the lines, the heart of darkness, the white whale: the Vietnam War, the meaning of which is forever both brutally present and bitterly elusive. 

The novel concerns the testimony/confession of a communist sympathizer, long embedded in the staff of a South Vietnamese general; half white, half asian; half Eastern, half Western, a living dichotomy of cultures, ideologies, sensitivities and, yes, sympathies.

Here I present a rather long segment of the narrative as an example of the sheer deliciousness of Nguyen's voice, for this is a novel chock full of such shimmering passages and well deserving of the literary acclaim it has received.

 Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend's guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewey lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the working men who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one's shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one's lover by the end of love making, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother's hands; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.