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!

Brat Pig

There is a boy in my neighborhood, a toddler really, who is truly the naughtiest child I have ever met. Or maybe naughty is not the right word. Deranged might fit. My girlfriend calls this boy Brat Pig, I suppose in dubious honor to Brad Pitt. 

Brat Pig's main interest in life seems to be in tormenting the dogs. The boy races up and down the street on one or another of his little tricycles (he seems to have a garage full of the things, bringing out a new model every time I turn around), running over the dogs, or trying to anyway. They are generally pretty good at leaping out of the way. But he pursues them relentlessly, and when they come into the front patio of my house, he dismounts and pursues them on foot. 

For some reason, he is intent upon kicking or hitting the dogs, as if it were they who had been naughty and not him. And when he is not hitting them, he is trying to spit on them instead. It's as if the boy has some kind of demon. 

My great fear is that he is going to get bit, because while the dogs are for the most part heroically tolerant, they are, after all, dogs, and half wild dogs at that, compared to the civilized dogs of America. They are street dogs. They have not a particular home, but go from house to house on the street, seeking food, shelter, companionship, a place to sleep. 

I have tried to teach Brat Pig how to be kind to dogs, how to pet them, how to approach them, when not to approach them (when they are eating, for example). I supervise, and watch him while he pets them for a time, but he soon returns to slugging them again, or yanking a tail, or poking an eye, or pulling on an ear. And the dogs don't really appreciate this. And so off they flee, Brat Pig on their tail like a bat out of hell on a tricycle. 

Sometimes, he just walks up and down the street screaming like a girl. Has something actually upset him, or is this a war cry? Cry havoc! And let loose the dogs of war. Or in this case, the boys.

I keep wondering what's wrong with Brat Pig.. Is there something happening in his home? Is he mirroring a type of behavior that he sees? Is he attention seeking? Or is he just a natural born little fanatic? A budding serial killer perhaps. They say that one thing most serial killers have in common at a young age is cruelty to animals. 

In any case, my patiece, dog-eared, one might say, at the ripe old age of 71, wears thin, and I have taken to merely shutting the door when the Brat is nearby. It's not that I don't care about him. It's just that I care more about the dogs, who indeed often opt for being shut inside with me.

Sleepless in Jakarta

A couple of weeks ago now, I traveled alone from Bali to Jakarta to meet my girl friend there. It was quite the challenging adventure for me (the traveling part, I mean) because I had not traveled alone since 2005. I have been on trips here and there to various locations in Southeast Asia, but these required no more thought on my part than would be required of a suitcase. I just rolled along behind whomever was in charge, first Louis, and then Evelyn. Now, however, it would be necessary for me to navigate the airport alone, pass through the appropriate gates and checkpoints, and to actually arrive at and embark upon the proper flight. 

As it turned out, this went more smoothly than I had expected it would. I discovered that there are actually signs in airports, big, bold lettered signs that tell you where to go and what to do. I had arrived at the airport 3 hours early, just to be on the safe side, and ended up having plenty of time to spare. In short, I arrived in the appropriate city at the appropriate time and met Evelyn waiting for me in the Jakarta airport.

Evelyn herself had been called to Jakarta several days earlier at the request of her youngest daughter, a college student there, who was suffering from some sort of sleep disturbance. I guess separation anxiety might best describe the problem. You see, she is used to being around people all the time, her friends and her boyfriend, and does not sleep alone. But finding herself on her own, her boyfriend and her friends having gone home during the school holiday to visit their families, Monica began having panic attacks. 

So, mom to the rescue. 

Evelyn had rented for us a cheap apartment in a tall building full of equally cheap apartments, not because either of us likes cheap apartments, but because we cannot afford expensive ones. This apartment was very basic, with a small front room, a small kitchen, a smaller bathroom with tiny cockroaches hiding here and there, and two bedrooms, one featuring a horribly uncomfortable bed and the other and even horriblier uncomfortable bed.

On the first night, we were stuck with the horriblier one. I awoke at some hour in the middle of the night and realized that Evelyn was gone. Having someone in the next room had proven insufficient medicine for Monica's night terrors.

I went back to sleep, only to awake early in the morning feeling very uncomfortably hot. This, I noted, was due to the fact that suddenly the air conditioning unit in the bedroom was not running. I pointed this out to Evelyn when she awoke, and she said Oh, yeah, Monica turned it off. 

Hah?

Well, you know, she explained, the motor for the AC is right outside of Monica's room and it is very loud. So she turned it off. 

All righty then. 

The plan for the next night was to move Monica into our room with the horriblier bed, while we would take her room with the deafening AC noise.

All seemed well as night fell and slumber overtook us, and yet in the middle of the night, hour unknown, I awoke once again, this time to a whispering noise. (How I had managed to hear this whispering over the purported roaring of the AC motor remains unclear).

It was a whispering, and then a dim shape in the night--someone, or some thing hovering above my girlfriend's head. As my eyes adjusted a bit to the dimness of night, I could make out what looked like long black hair, the shape of a head, the suggestion of a face, all accompanied by this whispering sound. I don't know why, but I was reminded of the Japanese ghost in the movie The Grudge, which is something that always gives me my own sort of night terrors.

Filled with dread, I sank lower into the already sinking mattress, expecting that at any moment the horrifying apparition might take notice of me, head twitching in my direction. With a hiss from its lips, the thing would advance in the air and hover over me before I could react, before I could scream, before I could flee. Whispering, whispering, whispering. 

My God! What did it want?

And yet next I saw Evelyn stir beneath the creature, mutter indistinctly, and then rise from the mattress as noiselessly as air, and float trance-like out of our room behind the dark and ghastly figure, helplessly captive to its every command.

Stated less dramatically, and in the light of day, the plan for night number two had not been successful, and Evelyn had gone again to join Monica, this time in the other room with the horriblier bed. 

One might have thought it would be easiest by this time, on the third night, for Evelyn to simply go to bed with Monica to begin with. But no, Evelyn had come up with plan C. In this arrangement, the overly noisy AC units in the bedrooms would be turned off while the slightly quieter one in the front room would be left on at the coldest setting. The door to our room would be left open, such that the cooling air from the AC could enter, while Monica would sleep with her light on and her own door closed.

Naturally, this attempt also was in vain, and quite naturally so, really, for the problem from the beginning had always been separation anxiety. 

But aside from these restless night adventures, we had an enjoyable week-long stay in the big city. I mean, as far as anyone can enjoy the stifling heat of the place. It is always cloudy, you know, in Jakarta. Or smoggy, I should say. I'm sure the sun is up there somewhere beyond the gray cotton-like barrier of pollution. We were in the Central Park section of the city, which features a sprawling mall many blocks long and several stories high. This is a particularly convenient circumstance, because traveling anywhere else in Jakarta can take hours in the tangled traffic. They say that the city is gradually sinking, which is probably all for the best. But in the meantime, one may as well enjoy the endless shops and eating establishments in the mall complex.

Jakarta, July 2025

K

Cuckoo Indeed

 It was interesting to reread Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest after all these years. Yes, it's a bit dated, with its emphasis on "the establishment" and other popular buzzwords / ideas of the time, but it is still an entertaining and an essential read, an examination of individuality and conformity, of how people are supposed to be, according to the authorities anyway, and how people really are. And I was surprised to realize that McMurphy is actually a Christ figure, which is something I missed when I first read the book many years ago, because I was quite young then and I was not aware of how great writers fold these themes into their narratives. The translation from English to Indonesian was also very well done and provided footnotes for matters or expressions that might be completely foreign to Asiatic readers. I'm going to share this novel around my Indonesian friends. I think they will find it quite enjoyable.

Faceplant

 I've mentioned here before that I have a problem with the right side of my body. A neurologic problem combined with spinal disc problems which has caused muscle atrophy in my arm and leg so that the right side is significantly thinner and weaker than the left. This causes problems with gait of course, which is exacerbated by balance problems arising  from MS in general. My right foot tends to drag while my right calf freezes up. This combination of difficulties sometimes results in a fall. 

Which is what happened today. 

I had stopped by the cookie store on Jalan Danau Tamblingan, dismounted from my bike and was stepping up the curbing when my right foot failed to raise itself sufficiently high. The forefoot caught on the curbing and I pitched forward into a fall. A full body fall, you know? A total faceplant. 

Now the interesting thing I want to mention here is not the fall itself but the reaction of the people nearby. The bules, i.e. the white people, the tourists passing by deftly stepped around me, such that they wouldn't step on me, and went on their way, while the nearby Indonesians exclaimed "Oh no!" and rushed over to where I lay. Two motorbikes stopped by the curbing. "Kamu ga apa-apa Pak? (are you okay, sir?).

I experience a combination of embarrassment and amazement--amazed still, even after 15 years here, that people care. Some people care. Certain people care. 

And it strikes me that this is in large part what we have lost in the West--a common sort of civility, a shared concern, a sense of community. They move aside, they turn their eyes away, they don't want to be involved. He shouldn't be so clumsy. Maybe he's drunk. In any case, it's his problem, not ours.

Of course I'm okay. I cut my forearm and a couple of fingers, and it looked worse than it really was, given that the blood thinner I have to take makes me bleed very easily and rather excessively.

Injured, embarrassed, but thankful, and newly appreciative of where I am.

Satu Terbang dari Sarang Burung Kukuk

Often, or I should say usually, a trip to the Gramedia bookstore is frustrating and pointless. I have never seen so many stacks of rotten books that no one would want to read. Well, no one except maybe a teen girl who is into girl meets boy stories. One need not even pick these up and look at the description. It is clear by the picture on the front of the book. Most often one comes away with nothing, or on other occasions he picks up a book that he hopes will be worthwhile, but is disappointed upon actually reading the book. This happened with The Mysterious Island, an old Jules Verne novel. They have a number of these translations of Western titles, you see. I actually read and greatly enjoyed some Jules Verne as a youngster. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But folks, the Mysterious Island is terrible in any language. Not terrible in a good way, but terribly boring. I got only as far as 200 pages or so before I quit the lousy thing and took it for a donation to the used bookstore. 

Nonetheless, on my last few visits I have found some quite worthwhile reading. I found an Indonesian translation of The Grapes of Wrath for instance, which I have already spoken of here. I also found intermezzo, by Sally Rooney. I had previously read Normal People in English by Rooney and was not a fan. But I found Intermezzo engaging, despite it's very dense prose. It can be daunting to look at pages of solid print without interruption, especially in a foreign language, but I forged through and, as I've said, was glad of it. 

Now most recently I have found an Indonesian language version of Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Of course I read this in English many years ago, and, like everyone else, I have seen the movie (several times, like many of us); nonetheless, the novel is fresh and greatly entertaining. It is somewhat difficult to detach oneself the picture of Jack Nicholson in the role of McMurphy, because while his performance in the movie was amazing, the character of McMurphy is a bit different in the novel. For one thing, he has red hair 😉

I also read recently about a novel by Olga Tokarczuk called the Books of Jacob based on the weird life and times of 18th century self-proclaimed messiah Jacob Frank. This interests me because it reminds me of a another self-proclaimed messiah, whose name I have forgotten, that my son, during a certain period in his life, was rather obsessed with. I would like to know more about it, more about what he saw or understood or misunderstood, whatever the case, as this messiah seems to have had many things in common with the other. I find that the PeriPlus bookstore here in Indonesia has this title, and I am tempted to order it; however the price is 500,000 rupiah, which is not cheap. I wonder if anyone out there is familiar with this novel?

Photos 2

 I find in trying to add photos of Hong Kong to my previous post of Hong Kong photos, that once again my blog will not interact with my phone, this time in edit mode. So hell, I'll just make a new post with some more pictures.

Popcorn

I actually got popcorn today to watch the massive protests across the country along with Trump's deserted birthday parade 😅

Photos

I finally figured out how to upload photos from my phone to my blog. Here are some from my trip to Hong kong. But I still don't know know how to change or add pictures on the sidebars, because my phone is not communicating with my laptop.

Medical Report

 I was trying to keep track the other day of all the health problems I have had in the last couple years, for posterity, ya know, and I came up with this list: 

1. Lacunar stroke

2. Sinus infection

3. Eye infection

4. Eye virus

5. Hernia surgery

6. Stomach virus

7. Multiple herniated discs in back and neck

Impressive, isn't it? I reckon bad health is the one thing I've done well in life. 

I'm doing physical therapy for the back problem, but it's a real drag. Not the physical therapy, but the back and neck pain. The physical therapy is mostly pleasant, but I don't know that it is helping much. 

Okies

They say the damn Okies are filthy and stupid. They have no morals. They are sexual maniacs. They are thieves. They will steal anything. They don't understand the concept of possession.

--The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Remind you of anything? Does a word come to mind which might replace Okies in our present day conversation? 

How about this: 

They are killers and rapists. They are lunatics, released from jails and asylums, criminals, the the worst of the worst.

Bad hombres.

Most of all, they are not us. 

Hungry, desperate, ragged, pitiful, and hopeful, they came in the early 1930s from the dust bowl, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi and elsewhere, out of financial ruin, looking for a better life, looking for honest work, dreaming modest dreams, only to be rejected by those who already possessed the dreams, for greed knows no greater foe then the want of others.

They came a thousand miles over their own trail of tears to find that the doors of bounty were locked against them and that the green paradise of California and all of its fruits were not to be had by the likes of them.

Killers, rapists, thieves, criminals.

Farmers, harvesters, mechanics, laborers.

Men, women, children, babies.

Suffering, hoping, dreaming, starving, dying. 

Go back where you came from, they were told. Or by God we will send you back by force.

Because you are not us.

 

James

 My only reaction, really, to Percival Everett's novel James, a retelling of the Huckleberry Finn story through the viewpoint of Jim the slave, has been to revisit Twain's inimitable masterpiece. And dat's all I'm gwynna say 'bout dat.

Crime

 I was talking to a random guy on Facebook this morning who was upset about immigrants coming here and committing violent crimes. I pointed out that statistically American citizens have a higher violent crime rate than immigrants. 

Well of course! he exclaimed. There are a lot more American citizens. 

No, no, you don't understand, I said. These are per capita statistics. It means that taking three groups of equal number, legal immigrants commit significantly fewer violent crimes than American citizens. Illegal immigrants commit fewer yet. 

Well I don't care, he said. We don't need illegal immigrants coming here and committing violent crimes. 

Yes, I said, legal violent crimes are much preferable, aren't they?

With this, comically, he enthusiastically agreed, failing to catch the irony.

Hong Kong

 There are very many people in the world. Most of them are in Hong Kong. This, anyway, was my takeaway from my first experience of the place. Moreover, one finds that most of them are walking in the opposing direction from oneself on any given outing. 

All kidding aside ... I found the city quite engaging and pleasant.

But wait, let me start from the beginning. 

A couple weeks ago, we (Evelyn and I) departed from Denpasar, Bali, bound for Hong Kong by way of Singapore. It seems that a direct flight is very expensive, so we had to stop in Singapore, stay the night in the airport, and then catch a morning flight to Hong Kong. 

Evelyn arranged all the details of our trip, while I just did what I was told. To the best of my ability. We immediately faced a glitch in the plan. It was her understanding that there are sleeping chairs at the Singapore airport (not chairs that sleep, mind you, but chairs in which a person can sleep). And there are. Trouble was, they were all occupied by sleeping people. 

So we slept on the floor. Evelyn made a little bed for me (bless her well-intentioned heart) with a thin blanket and some balled up clothes for a pillow, but sleep, for the most part, eluded me. I remember sleeping on the ground as a young man, out camping for instance, but an old man's broken body does not do so well on a hard surface. I spent much of the night wandering about, ordering coffee, smoking in the suffocating smoking lounge, returning from time to time to the nest to give it another try. I did finally go to sleep some time in the middle of the night, only to be awakened by a security  guard who for some reason needed to see my passport and airline ticket at 4 a.m. 

After that, I was done. Rough and ready to catch my flight to Hong Kong. In only five hours.

Arriving there, and emerging at last from the maze-like airport, we found ourselves emersed in chilly air, 13 c, and oh how pleasant this was for me, after fifteen years in the sweltering tropics. Just like home! And by that, I mean Portland. And as for my companion, she had never in her life felt anything like 13 c. Talk about exotic! 

She had scheduled the first part of our stay in a little travel hotel operated by the Salvation Army (for some reason). The room was cozy, up on the 9th floor, and free breakfast was available, but the curious thing was that although the room had air-conditioning, it had no heat. And the bed arrangement was two separate single beds, one on each side of the room, so there was no body heat to be had either, other than one's own. Nonetheless, it was fine anyway, at least for me. I'm already used to sleeping with the AC on the lowest temperate setting back in Bali. 

My first challenge--everything else having been done for me, to include hotel arrangements, bus schedules, train schedules, scheduled destinations and activities--was to find a place where one could smoke. Smoking, you see, is not popular in Hong Kong and is pretty tightly restricted to designated locations, as is the case in Singapore as well. So I walked down the street in that wonderful bracing chilly air (now 12 c) and happened upon a fellow smoker lurking in an alleyway. It's not that you can't smoke, he told me. You can smoke pretty much anywhere, as long as it is outside and nowhere near a no smoking sign. The only thing is that the habit is frowned upon and so people tend to slip into alleys or behind walls or whatever. And so we had our little smoker's conversation in broken English, no Chinese of course. As with Bali, many of the people in Hong Kong are able to speak a simple form of English.

Over the next few days, we visited the city center, the "Peak" above the city, which in the evening is colorfully lit all along the riverside and features parades of brilliantly lit boats. We travelled to Hong Kong island, took a cable car over the hills in order to see "the Big Buddha" (well, Evelyn saw it, not I, given that you need to climb about a hundred stairs to get there). I just hung around in "the traditional village, which is just kind of like an outdoor mall really, had a coffee, ate some caramel corn and looked for official smoking places. Smoking is especially prohibited at tourist sites, but there is always a wall somewhere to hide behind, which I found along with a half dozen Russians. 

Next we went to another traditional village, this one actually authentically traditional. It was called Tai O, a little fishing village with narrow little streets lined with (what else) fish products of all sorts. I found it quite charming, picturesque. 

In the evening, we roamed the city again, or a very small part of it, actually, and came upon a dessert restaurant selling only pudding. But delicious pudding it was! I had the warm egg pudding and have been looking for another like ever since, although to no avail. Evelyn had some kind of black bean pudding. 

On the last day, we had to change hotels, as ours at the Salvation Army was booked. Our room at this new hotel was tiny indeed, and the bathroom, including shower, was about the size of a closet. A small closet. Really brought home the meaning of "water closet". 

"How can it be?" I asked Evelyn. 

"Why? What? What's wrong with it?"

"You mean, aside from everything?" 

Ah well, but we made do. Millions of people are starving in China, my parents used to say when we did not like our food. Millions, apparently, are also showering in closets. 

Our trip ended with another stopover, this time in Vietnam. Once again, Evelyn said there were to have been little sleeping rooms. Once again, there weren't, and we slept on the floor. Well, not on the floor, but on the row of plastic chairs, on which Evelyn prepared for me a bed of bundled up clothes and a makeshift pillow. I should say that Evelyn slept, while I, for the most part, explored the hushed hallways of the rather decrepit Ho Chi Minh City airport. And drank coffee. Time enough to sleep on the plane home anyway. 

(Naturally, we took a whole lot of photos on our trip and I wish I could post some here, but my laptop has stopped cooperating with my phone. No clue why. It used to work just fine).

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.