Docter Lagi

Back to the doctor today--the neurologist, anyway. I don't care about the blood pressure and the borderline diabetes, but I did need those anti-weird-internal-heat pills. I don't know what they are, but they work fairly well. Usually two a day. In the morning I begin to feel very hot, so take a pill. Feel okay until afternoon, when the hot feeling returns, so I take another. They are fairly expensive, unfortunately. My problems always have expensive taste. And this, he says, is a chronic condition. What else, right? It is a bit difficult to communicate with this neurologist, for he speaks very softly and very quickly, forgetting that 1) Indonesian is a second language for me and 2) that I can't hear very well. 

I also finally broke down and sent a message to the ENT doc, as the infection persists, though not as bad as before. The thing is, the only thing that helps is Afrin spray, and one is not supposed to use this over a long period of time, as the spray itself becomes a problem. But what else to do? If I don't use it, my head is soon stuffed, I can't breathe through my nose, and facial pressure and headache starts in. Vicious circle. 

Makan Siang dan Lain

When I went out to the parking bay this morning, three little boys ran up and asked if I could give the money. Poor little tykes definitely got the wrong guy. Not because I wouldn't give them some money if I had it, but because I don't have it. But there is this persistent myth here in Bali that all westerners are rich. Walking ATMs. Just ask, and they shall receive. I certainly wish it were true, but alas ….

Anyway, later on I had lunch with Louis and my stepson, Sasha, as well a couple of unidentified friends of Louis'. Apparently I know them, but I have no recollection of who they are or why I know them. Nothing new there. 

We went to a restaurant that featured it's own little zoo, with exotic birds roaming about (peacocks and swans and such-like) and tropical fish in a half dozen viewing tanks, and some of the worst food for the stupidest prices I've ever seen. Luckily, I wasn't picking up the bill, which must have been crowing a million Rupiah for the five of us. Those small boys ought to camp outside Louis' gate, I reckon. 

I'm topping off the day with a trip out for coffee in the evening rather than, as is usual, in the morning. In the evening here at the Renon Starbucks there is always a bit of a party atmosphere--lots of young people gathering together for chatting or dating.  Oh, and one old man. 

Cricket

A long time ago, I was sitting on a rock on the shore of a lake when I noticed the dried brown body of a cricket clinging to the side of the rock. This is called the exoskeleton. A cricket slips out of it's shell as it grows and emerges as a rubbery new creature. It slips out of itself and becomes itself and leaves itself behind. The shell left behind is like a sample, a display model. It is a perfect cricket, yet no longer a cricket at all. The shell is perfectly preserved, as if the cricket had taken great care when it climbed out of itself. It is like a ship in a bottle, and also the builder of the ship in the bottle. The old cricket is fragile, papery, yet rigid, tenacious, clinging to itself and to the point from whence it departed. People who  have died, if they were beloved, leave this sort of shell as well, not on a rock or on a blade of grass, but on the minds of those who loved them. Here, those who have died, though absent, are prefect, tenacious, urgent, eternal. One flick of my finger would have removed the reminder the cricket had left behind. A gust of wind would do the same. But I  lifted not a finger. I looked out over the swaying grasses in the shallows and to the ripples beyond and to the green where the water was deep and caught the sun on the furrows made by the wind, and I lifted not a finger either to the tear that made its way down my cheek.

Numb

I heard this morning a news commentator describe the current character of reaction to Donald Trump's ongoing circus of reprehensible remarks as "outrage fatigue". I had said something similar in a previous post. It seems that a person's stomach for outrage can hold just so much. It becomes something else. It becomes numbness. It becomes apathy. Time was when I would respond immediately to a reprehensible statement from Trump, expressing my disgust and disbelief so that I might receive in turn an acknowledgment from others, an agreement, a sharing of the sanity still active in the world. 

It is interesting to me that responses fell away first from my American acquaintances, my fellow countrymen and women, to whom, it seemed, this should have mattered most of all. It was the non-Americans here in Bali who clung longest to outrage--Lithuanian, Australian, British, German, Chinese, Indonesian. How is  it that they cared more than we? Is outrage easier from a great distance? Is outrage easier according to degree of separation? Or is the typical American simply more prone to apathy. It is said that historically in combat American soldiers, though better supplied and equipped than their opponents, have been more likely under pressure to fail in morale, to give up. Is this the trait now on display in the life of our nation? Have we become so feeble?

Or is the problem more that our outrage dies in the air, unreceived? Those whom we have placed in high positions have gone deaf. When even the officers cower and shrink away on the battlefield, is it any wonder that the soldiers throw up their hands in surrender?  

So I rarely comment now on our deplorable leader, for I too have become apathetic, and know now that nothing will be done, nothing will change. This is us. These are the limp and sagging United States of America, tired, listless, anemic, numb. Heartbreaking. 

Diet Plan

I was trying to map out an eating plan this morning suitable to my three major health problems--or let's not say problems (we don't say 'problems' these days)--let's say challenges--suitable, I say, to my three major health challenges (not counting old age)--high  blood pressure, borderline diabetes, and incurable fungal infection, and it quickly became apparent that I am to avoid pretty much all foods except lettuce. Well, lettuce and a few other non-nutritious additives, such as pepper and paprika. Although this seems a prescription for a less than mouth watering diet, it can be said, on the positive side, that it would definitely be a money saver, and moreover a labor saver as far as food preparation and clean-up are concerned. Really, one need not even use a plate or utensils, but just hold the head of lettuce in one hand and the pepper shaker in the other. No muss, no fuss. 

On the other hand, I have always found the view of a friend here compelling--to whit, that one should freely eat what one feels inclined at the moment to eat, trusting the advice of his own body on the matter. In other words, what it wants, it wants for a reason. If it is saying I need meat, eat meat. If it is saying I need a chocolate éclair, eat a chocolate éclair. It is a pleasing view to be certain, and a stress reliever, too. Nonetheless, I have to admit that, given my past experience in life, whenever I see a box of Fruit Loops, my body says it wants Fruit Loops. I cannot honestly suppose that a steady diet of Fruit Loops would be very healthy, despite whatever claims my body might make. 

The curious thing about this array of challenges, you see, is that what is allowed for the first is not allowed for the second, and what is allowed for the second is not allowed by the third. And so on, a vicious circle. And that is how we end up with lettuce. It seems that if my body has made any plan at all, it is to lay clever traps and, in this manner, eventually assassinate me. It is my own worst enemy.. 

So I guess the solution is to eat a balanced diet of everything that is not good for me (which, after all, is everything). Balanced, I mean, in the sense that an equality should be maintained between the various bad food substances, avoiding a lot of one bad substance at the expense of another. Along with as much lettuce as possible, or, rather, palatable. All of which means, as it turns out, that I won't need to change my present diet at all. 

Problem, I mean challenge, solved.  

A Discussion

I had the pleasure of conversing with my stepson, Sasha, for a few hours yesterday. He's a pensive, philosophically minded young man who speaks his mind on social issues with unapologetic fairness (which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but stand by).  It is his view (and mine) that social and professional intercourse in America in our times has been sadly corrupted by an invasive spirit of  political correctness, in school, in politics, in social interaction, in gender dynamics, in racial discourse, such that one must stay between the proper lines or risk instant and harsh censure.  This leads to a reductionism across the board such that thoughtful discussion is rendered feeble, confined as it is to certain predetermined boundaries and positions. Sasha described English teachers who impose feminist ideology, history professors who timidly teach Readers' Digest versions of complex historical periods and conflicts, social interactions that have been crippled by a sort of universal fear of stepping over the line, or of not knowing securely where exactly the line is. I would not want to be a young person having to operate  in this atmosphere, and neither does Sasha especially. He has a mind that is ready to test boundaries, to openly interrogate issues and attitudes, but of course he also wants to succeed academically and socially. To insist that literature and history conform to the brittle paranoia of present-day standards and sensibilities is the very best way to learn nothing about literature and history. And yet if you want to get those grades and move up the ladder, academically, professionally, socially, you'd better tow the line.

Old Times in Black and White

In an early 1950s episode of Ozzie and Harriett various people are coming down with a head cold, first Ozzie's son, Ricky, and then his neighbor, Thorny. David, Ricky's brother, is also given an injection of antibiotics (yes, injection) just in case. Of course, this is good for a laugh in hindsight because, no, antibiotics did not cure common colds in that time any more than they can in the present day. But it's interesting to see this take on a medication that was then quite new--a miracle drug. As Harriett tells Ozzie, who also seems to be coming down with the cold, "You'd better get to the doc right away and have an injection." Ozzie declines, swearing his undying allegiance to an amazing elixir used throughout his childhood by his own mother and drinks two bottles to prove his point. This turns out to be a mixture of ginger, sassafras and 20 percent alcohol, so that Ozzie is indeed perfectly happy with the treatment. It is little bits like this that make the show really more entertaining than it was in its own time (and, as I watch the episodes, especially the earlier ones, it was quite an entertaining show on its own merits). Aside from references to miracle cures and astounding new technologies (like the amazing new Hotpoint oven and range, for instance), there are countless chuckle worthy snippets of behaviors and beliefs that are now perfectly archaic--conventions of proper dress and etiquette, of the place of the woman, and of the man too for that matter, of overtly religious material, of expectations in courtship, and so on. Maybe that's why I like watching these old shows so much, for the layered dimensions of nostalgia, of a time and a way now as dim and grainy in memory as the screen on the black and white TV set. They are, in their own way, a record of the past that is more immediate, more accessible than that which one finds in the history book.