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.