Everyone Here Is Jim Dandy

Today's Weather -- Scattered Frogs?

2012-01-26T10:18:00.000+07:00

There are a lot of frogs in Bali. It’s the next thing to a Biblical plague. Not that I have anything against frogs, or any intention of casting insult upon their kind. I employ the Biblical reference only to convey the idea of a great multitude, and also to suggest that they may be falling from the sky. There’s nothing wrong with falling from the sky either, if they prefer it. The point is that there are a lot of them, no matter where they come from -- and there seem to be more than ever during this present rainy season.
I take this coincidence of frogs and rain to be pertinent as well, and both causative and complimentary in some essential way. It may be, in other words, that the rain causes these amphibians to spring forth in abundance at the proper season, like crocuses or chrysanthemums, providing as it does a nurturing soil and a productive earth; or it may also be that they have actually been somehow seeded in the clouds and come pouring down admixed with the island’s famous torrents of rain. In support of the latter theory I advance the notion that a significant portion of what hits my helmet whilst I’m riding in a rain storm seems quite clearly of a heavier composition than mere water. There is the constant tapping sound that we associate with raindrops, and then there is the interspersed THUMP, which cannot be rain, but must be a foreign object of some kind. A frog, perhaps.

Such happenings, though tending toward the extraordinary, are not unheard of. In 1873, for instance, Kansas City, Missouri was deluged by frogs dropping from the heavens during a violent storm. Again, in July of 1901, Minneapolis, Minnesota was pelted with a squall of frogs and toads. After these amphibian rains let up, a variety of frog species littered the earth, three inches deep and covering an area of more than four blocks.

The citizens of Naphlion, a city in southern Greece, were surprised one morning in May, 1981, when they awoke to find small green frogs falling from the sky. Weighing just a few ounces each, the frogs landed in trees and plopped into the streets. The Greek Meteorological Institute surmised they had been picked by a strong wind. It must have been a very strong wind indeed, as the species of frog so fallen was native to North Africa.

As mentioned in the Grecian version of this event, the favourite explanation of science for the phenomenon is that of the freak tornado or typhoon, which, as we are told, whisks up all the frogs in one place and sets them down in quite another (preferring, apparently, to keep the community intact rather than scatter its members far and wide; and preferring also to transport frogs rather than parking meters, trash cans, tricycles or children). That this miraculous accident could have happened numerous times in disparate locales is surely as marvellous as the frogs themselves. Or, as my son, an adolescent at the time, once said, “When people hear about things that don’t make sense, they make up explanations just as dumb, and then straightaway forget it ever happened.” From the mouths of babes? Well, I reckon that’s the ultimate point of science here. When in doubt, blame it on a weather balloon, or some reasonable facsimile.

Perplexing as well is the fact that I often find these frogs, having once by whatever method descended or sprung forth, sitting on my front porch. I cannot for the life of me explain how they got there. Two steps must first be ascended to get from ground level to the front door. The height of the first step is one foot. The height of the second is 7 inches. Each frog that I have found at the door has been no taller than a thimble. I cannot believe, and I do not believe, that such a diminutive creature could have leaped a full foot in the air, nor 7 inches either -- and yet here the critter sits, 19 inches all told from the ground! It is quite impossible, you see, and leads naturally back to the theory of a decent from the sky.

I will say again that I have nothing whatsoever against frogs. Many are the boyhood days I can remember when my friends and I would chase and snatch frogs from the shallow waters of the high mountain lakes we so loved. Buckets of them we would collect, and salamanders and mud-dogs -- just to see how many there were in our world -- and then count them, and release them and watch them go. Strangely, they have all but disappeared from those lakes in the modern day. Scientists say it has something to do with climate change. For my own part, I suspect that they were picked up by a freak storm and deposited here in Bali. So it happens that I am always glad to see these old friends at my door, here on the other side of the world. If you ask me, these unassuming creatures have suffered unfairly ever since the times of scripture, wherein the Lord God Himself is recorded to have said “I will smite your whole territory with frogs.” If He didn’t like them, why’d He make them in the first place? No, as far I can see, they do no harm. I just wish they could be a bit less baffling in their ways.

Is This Really the End?

2012-01-19T10:03:00.000+07:00

Newspaper writers and editors -- and especially copy editors (an inimical breed of their own) -- are a curmudgeonly, bitterly sardonic sort of creature, or at least I found them so during my short stint at newspaper work in the late 1970’s. I think this is simply because they are exposed to entirely too much “news,” and because no news is new news, nor is it very often news at all, but merely regurgitate matter that has already been around the block a few times. In short, it is the same news, re-masticated, re-digested and reproduced. It is like a daily, monthly, yearly diet of rice (something we know about here in Bali). You can throw in some colour, you can add a dash of texture, you can mix in a chicken or a pig or a pineapple, and give it a kick with a dollop of sambal, but ultimately and essentially it is still only rice, and rice, and more rice. It’s there, it happens, we consume and digest it -- and then it’s there all over again.

This is not the fault of the newspaper itself, or of its writers, editors and copy editors. It is the fault of . . . well, of the news. It bears such a strong resemblance to itself, you know? There is nothing new under the sun, Solomon said. What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again.

Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

The young, blissfully callow reporter will take a bit of monotony and think it the most marvellous thing. In a passion, in a fever, he does his research, he writes -- and when he gives his masterpiece of reporting to the editor, the editor sighs and grumbles and asks whether the piece can’t be given a twist of some kind. Can you make it sound like something new?

But of course he can’t, because it’s not. His article has already been written by every reporter who formerly sat at his desk.

It is because of this general malaise then, along with a coexistent hunger that will not relent -- for something fresh, untold, unprecedented -- that we have waited with bated breath on the arrival of 2012 and its promise of bringing along the end of the world as we know it. Now that would be news!

We used to joke at the paper, when someone was ill or gone away on vacation, that the world might end in the meantime, and he will have missed the story of the century. But now it’s no longer a joke -- for we are told by the ancient calendar of the Mayans, surely as wise and noble a source as one can find -- that the heavens and earth will surely pass away by December 21^st of the year.

Of course we have heard similar predictions in the past; most recently, for instance, from Christian broadcaster, Harold Camping, who had slated the end first for May and then for October 2011. In case you weren’t paying attention (or have been sick or on vacation), this did not happen. Nor did it end back in 1989, when aliens were to come, and then Christ as well, and all true believers would rise on clouds of glory in heaven. Presumably, newspaper writers would have been left behind to record the event, collect interviews, and such-like. My girlfriend at the time believed this so fervently that she called me at midnight to say goodbye. Again, you will be aware by now that the prediction was premature.

In fact, there have been numerous predictions of doomsday among Christians, from the apostle Paul to the present day. But here is something different, unused, unworn -- the sacred word of the ancient Mayans. What else could add such authenticity to a prophecy than the mystery of the long-lost, primordial knowledge of a dead and buried civilization? What had they to gain by lying? And what have we to lose in believing?

American author Walker Percy once surmised that modern human beings are psychologically in need of a fairly certain faith in an impending doomsday. Under this condition, life is bearable. The drudgery, the struggle, the sadness and desperation are tempered and softened by the thought that tomorrow it might all end, not only for oneself (that, after all, is guaranteed), but communally and for all existence. The “bomb,” therefore, supplied hope for decades. No matter how hard life became, there was still hope of an escape, for tomorrow might well bring nuclear Armageddon.

Smile though your heart is aching, smile even though it’s breaking.

But then the cold war ended, and we had to look for hope elsewhere; and elsewhere was inward, and inward was spiritual, and spiritual turned extremist and extremist turned savage, so that we found ourselves ultimately in the shoes of mad Colonel Kurtz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

How many times has the world been on the brink of extinction, only ultimately to disappoint? Already there are a number of spoilsports out there doing their best to refute the sacred promise. They say that the Mayans made no such prediction. They say that the hieroglyphics have been misread. They say that it’s all a ridiculous sham.

Well they may be right. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of our mutual demise may prove greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless, I’m going to stick with the Mayans for the time being, and right up to December 21^st. I figure they are as deserving of the chance to be right as anyone else has been. And besides that, it makes me feel safe, somehow.

Looking Back to the Present Day

2012-01-12T08:10:00.001+07:00

In his latest novel, 11/22/63, author Stephen King wonders what might have happened had John F. Kennedy been spared assassination at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald and lived to serve out the term or his Presidency. For myself, I wonder why we always use Oswald’s full name. Is there another Lee Oswald we might confuse him with, such that the middle name, Harvey, must always be included? It’s a small point, but a point of interest to me -- of more interest, actually, than the plot of this tedious novel turned out to be.

Nonetheless, the book got me to thinking. What if there had never been a John Kennedy, or anyone like a John Kennedy? What if Kennedy had never existed, and therefore never stepped forward to lead the nation through those critical times during the early 1960s? What would our society be like now had our government and its leadership been devoid of moral integrity, courage, conviction, and a commensurate will to implement the values of the majority? What if Kennedy had bowed to a small though loud fraction of society out of fear of offending, or of losing votes, or of confrontation, the spectre of trouble? What would America look like now?

It would look like Bogor, in Java. It would look like Ambon, Aceh, Sulawesi. In short, it would look like Indonesia.

In Aceh dozens of “punks” were arrested by regular and Shariah police. They had committed no crime, other than the crime of being different. Their heads were shaved, their clothes were confiscated, and the punks were then taken to the Aceh State police school for “re-education.” Re-education? Hmm. Where did we last hear that sort of thing? From Nazi Germany? The Khmer Rouge?

In Java several members of the Ahmadiyah sect, considered heretical by mainstream believers, were murdered by equally heretical extremists. The perpetrators of this crime received prison sentences of 3 to 6 months, while one Ahmadiyah sect member who sought to defend himself received several years. Why was nothing done? Why was justice not served?

Once upon a time in America, and, as fate would fortunately have it, during Kennedy’s presidency, a man named George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, sought to defy the law of the land and the will of the majority, not to mention the direct order of the President, by barring a black student from registering at the University of Alabama. Wallace said that the people of the State of Alabama expected it of him. And in fact, some of them no doubt did. The white ones, anyway. Wallace himself went to the front steps of the University, inspiring a mob to do the same, all for the purpose of upholding a social convention of intolerance and bigotry sewn deep in the Southern soul, and yet foreign, even despicable to the wide majority of Americans.

Sound familiar? Well it should. For here in Bogor, Java we have a mayor who stubbornly refuses to return to the Yasmin Christian church its house of worship -- this despite a Supreme Court decision ordering him to immediately do so. Here we have a mayor, not unlike Governor Wallace, who proudly discounts the will of the majority, not to mention the central tenants of Pacasila behind the Indonesian government, in favour of the loud but few -- those extremist Muslims who gather every Sunday at the Yasmin site to shout slogans, raise fists and tote placards as if they had nothing better to do with their time and energy. It’s ironic, given that Islam shares many of the same beliefs with Christianity -- the belief in Jesus as a great prophet, that he was born of a virgin, that he did great works, performed healings and miracles, and that he was raised to God’s side in heaven, to return one day. Do they even know the foundations of their faith, these people? Or are they victims merely of the same sort of social intolerance and ignorance that afflicted George Wallace and the people of Alabama?

What would Kennedy do? What did he do? Say a few words of general censure? Express a hope that all would turn out well, while privately wringing inactive hands over the prospect of losing votes or offending special interest groups (as Presidents in certain other lands have been known to do)? No, Kennedy upheld the law, took decisive action, insisted on personal and moral integrity, as well as the duty of every elected official to obey the law. In short, he sent a contingent of the United States Army to Alabama, thereby removing Mr. Wallace and his mob from the scene rather than the lone black man. Moreover he set an unmistakeable precedent -- that the only thing deserving of intolerance, be it racial, religious or cultural, is intolerance itself.

The “silent majority” elects officials for one mission only -- to give them a voice. Now it’s high noon in Indonesia, and therefore high time that those governing the country remember the common people who put them in office, and actually do something that is in accordance with the will of their constituents. In other words, stop hiding, stop running, stop procrastinating -- Speak up! And if you cannot obey the laws of your own country, then move aside for someone who can.

On the Common Bali Flu and the Treatment Thereof

2012-01-05T08:46:00.000+07:00

Having a cold in Bali is not fun. I’m not saying that having a cold anywhere is fun, but it seems, in my limited experience anyway, decidedly less fun in Bali than anywhere else in the world. Maybe this is because a cold seems so out of place in the tropics. And maybe that’s why they don’t call them colds here, but the flu. It is not, after all, cold in Bali but hot, and so they should rather call them “hots“ if anything, but then that would be likely to lead to a further confusion over terms. Can you imagine people going about saying they have the hots? And so they call a cold the flu instead. It is not the flu that we know in western countries, for the flu where we come from is something significantly more than a cold and is attended by pyrexia, myalgias, arthralgias, nausea, emesis, and of course coughing and sniffing and hacking and blowing. Having the flu -- the real thing, that is -- the all American flu, so to speak -- would be immeasurably worse than having a mere cold, which I have already said is not fun in and of itself; and it is on this count alone that we can be thankful for the typical Balinese cold, otherwise wrongly called the flu.

You may have guessed by now that I have a cold. What you probably would not have guessed, however, is that I have had a cold for a long time now. About two years, I reckon. As far as I can place the thing, on a rough timeline, I contracted this cold just after arriving in Bali in February of 2010. I suppose many will accuse me of gross exaggeration in this, but I am convinced that it is so, and as a witness call I my nose and the testimony of a persistent congested cough -- or for that matter my wife, who in all respects is dead sick of the thing. My cold, I mean.

People will say that one catches more colds here in Bali than in America or England or Italy and so on, but I disagree. We catch but one, and that only shortly after our arrival here, but that one on its own is good enough to speak for many. Mine, as I have suggested, has been perfectly long-winded without needing the help of any other cold, and I may as well say prolific and eloquent as well where the common characteristics of a common cold are concerned.

One cold, two years. How is it possible? I’ll tell you how. It’s because the thing settles in, makes a home in the cosy rooms and corridors of your lungs and the various branches of the respiratory system, and then actually rolls over and falls asleep now and again, rather like a noisome beagle who tires of barking for a time, only to awake again when the spirit beckons and start its barking all over again. It sleeps, it rests, it gathers new strength. It burrows in somewhere -- the spleen, the oesophagus -- quite enjoys itself for a period of a week, or even three weeks, or four, and then leaps back to troubling you all over again, and with renewed vigour, like a persistent sprain or an ex-wife -- in no way diminished by its brief vacation, or rather that of its victim.

Over time we come to count on this cold with a sureness exceedingly rare in this life. It will not leave nor forsake you, nor fail ever to be present, especially at the most inopportune times, for which you had, perhaps, other plans.

There are medicines for this cold, available at any drug store or Circle K, each brand being concocted of mysterious ingredients guaranteed overall to make the symptoms of the cold considerably worse. We take these medications religiously during the more active periods of the illness, desperate wretches that we are, and enter thereby a singular state of dull somnolence quite beyond the symptomatic talents of the cold itself. One amazing side effect of these pharmaceutical inventions is the onset of clinical narcolepsy -- an aptitude of medicine not known by any other science to date, though of dubious worth. Nonetheless, it is clear that where medicinal decongestant modalities are concerned, Eastern medicine has far outstripped the feeble preparations available in the West.

Now, if you go to the doctor for this affliction -- not the medicinal one, but the viral -- you will invariably be told that you have “masuk angin,” meaning literally “entered by the wind.” This will make you feel somewhat better for a time, as it is rather poetic, and is certainly preferable, for all concerned, to being exited by the wind. You will come away feeling special somehow, as if you had something with a bit more pride, like consumption for instance, or high functioning autism. Anyone can have a cold, and often does. But this is not a cold. It’s masuk angin!

Enjoy therefore, and relax, don’t hurry. You and your Balinese cold will have the leisure of a lifetime together.

CSI -- The Bali Version

2011-12-20T18:15:00.000+07:00

A reader of this column writes to share the following story. Some money was stolen from a safe in a friend’s Seminyak home. The husband had unfortunately left the key out in plain site (husbands are like that). A number of staff members employed in the house fell under first suspicion. The couple called the Bali police to report the theft and try to discover the culprit. The police arrived, took some notes (as I would imagine it), and prepared to depart. It was at this point that the disinherited home owners asked if the officers couldn’t perhaps take some fingerprints from the staff members. Though we, as mere laymen, are not well versed in the finer points of investigative procedures and techniques, the suggestion would seem a no-brainer. Chances seemed fair to good, after all, that the thief was standing in the very midst. And if not -- if all passed inspection -- the matter would be solved to that point, anyway.

Fingerprints, they were told, could in fact be taken, but this would come at a cost of Rp.4 million.

What? Yes. It seems that here in Bali the victims of a crime must pay for an investigation of the same. You’ll not see that on CSI, folks. Fingerprints, DNA samples, ballistics, interrogation . . . Hmm, let us check our price list first.

Is there a schedule of fees, my reader asks, that the ex-pat can obtain in order to be prepared in advance?

I think not. Because really these things don’t happen at all. Ask any policeman, he’ll tell you.

Well, Rp.4 million seemed excessive, and so the couple fired their entire staff instead.

Now to be fair I must say that, in America anyway, demanding fingerprints on the spot, on the basis of a suspicion, is very likely against the law. I can’t say for sure, because I’m not a cop or a lawyer or a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Nor do I have any useful experience at being a criminal. I just suspect that our all-American fixation on protecting the rights of the individual law-breaker would supersede any such good reasoning, leading, as it might, to the violation of someone’s civil rights.. More than likely the victim’s. And we must be very careful about that, mustn’t we?

But this, after all, is Bali -- a comparatively reasonable country. Here the police have much freer rein to perform in whatever manner they will. Here the police can pull you over on the highway merely on the suspicion that you are a foreigner and may have money. Here the police are perfectly free to circumvent the nuisance of legal procedure and simply pocket your money -- a fee which itself is in accordance not with legal guidelines but with the extent of the motorist’s naiveté -- i.e., if you’re new around here it will be Rp.250.000 or more, if you’re experienced in the game it will be only Rp.50.000.

The driving principal is not law enforcement, but the collection of money. Accordingly, the ex-pat must be careful to follow two simple rules of thumb: 1) Avoid having any kind of trouble, and 2) Don’t call the police if you do have any kind of trouble. That’s the real no-brainer here, and any local will tell you so.

But it’s not all bad news. Here’s the good news. In Bali the police are authorized to detain any vehicle and driver as they please. (Wait for it). They are able to search any vehicle as they please. They do not need a cause, they do not need a warrant, they do not need a Federal Court order or a specialist or a Captain or a General. If they find a bomb in the trunk of a car so detained, they do not need to read the bomber his Miranda rights or summon higher authorities or pussy-foot around in any way -- no, they arrest the man on the spot, cart him off to jail, and maybe even knock him upside the head along the way if it strikes them as a good idea. And that’s only fair, isn’t it? What self-respecting bomber can have any sensible objection to being knocked upside the head?

Still and all, it’s not a perfect system. I discovered this for myself on a recent visit to the Bali Mall Galleria. It was a Sunday, and the Christmas Season, and so the mall parking lot was very crowded. Whereas cars are usually checked by guards as they enter the mall grounds, they were not being checked this day. We were waved straight through. Nonetheless, my wife stopped the car and beckoned to the officer at the gate, despite the blaring horns of frustrated drivers from behind.

“Why are you not checking the cars?” she asked.

“Oh, too crowded, Bu -- not enough time.”

But hold on -- isn‘t that the point in this sort of thing? What better time for a terrorist to strike than during the Christmas season at a crowded mall?

Oh well, like I said . . . it’s not a perfect system.

Once Upon A Lonely Road

2011-12-05T10:59:00.000+07:00

Recently I received an e-mail from a man who lives near the small town of Sandy, Oregon, about 20 miles east of my home town of Portland, where I lived for some 55 years The man, who identified himself as George Porter, and a complete stranger to me, related that he had recently come upon a computer thumb drive lying at the side of an all but unused road behind the plant nursery he owns in Sandy. Thinking at first that it may be his own, and curious in any case, he took the drive home and plugged it into his laptop. Though this revealed the existence of some files, both photo and text, he was unable to open the files on first attempt.

I thought about just giving up and tossing the thing, Mr. Porter wrote, but then something told me to keep on trying.

He did so, and ultimately, after tinkering around with several programs and options, he was able to open one of the text files on the drive. What he found was the entire text of a book I had written some four years ago.

And this is where things begin to get a bit eerie.

In the first place, I have no recollection whatsoever of having put the book on any storage device other than the one I have in my own possession, tucked securely into the pocket of my laptop case. Such was my conviction of the same that I checked the case just to be sure -- and sure enough, there is the thumb drive, and thereon the copy of the book. The book, though three years with an agent, has not been published, and so does not, for all practical purposes, exist at all, other than in my hands and in the hands of the agent. And now in the hands of George Porter as well.

So how in the world could my book have gotten onto another thumb drive, and how could that thumb drive have ended up on a back road in Sandy, Oregon? I have not been in Oregon, or anywhere in the world other than Bali and Singapore, for almost two years. What then has been the career of this mysterious thumb drive? How has it remained intact for at least two years? How long did it lie on that road -- two years? Or have its travels been wider and involved more people in transport?

Or is this some kind of scam?

That, quite frankly, was my initial suspicion, given that internet scams are so common these days. We’ve all received them in various form -- from the unknown recipient of millions who desires for some reason to share his wealth, to the beautiful woman (photo included) who lives in Africa, has come across your profile somewhere on line, and feels that you and she will make a perfect pair (if only you will send her some money for a plane ticket).

What was the scam in the case at hand? I could not imagine -- but of course that’s the point. A good scam does not betray its nefarious nature, but relies on the human inclination to trust, to be curious, to believe and to bond. I replied therefore to George‘s mail, reticent, guarded, yet captivated by curiosity.

And I found that Mr. Porter wanted nothing at all. He had no plan, no agenda, no rabbit up his sleeve. He offered in addition only that he had seen one of his drivers walking on the back road where the drive had been found, and said that he would do his best to contact this man to try to determine whether it might have been he who dropped the drive.

But there’s more to this story. What I have said so far is skeletal only, without meaningful substance or animation, a mildly curious coincidence.

Here then is the kicker: The book that I wrote, which somehow got onto a thumb drive, which itself somehow ended up on a back road in Sandy, Oregon where it was found two years down the path of time by a man named George Porter, is the story of my life after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the spring of 2007; and the man who found the drive, who brought it home, who plugged it into his laptop and laboured at some length to discover what was on it, had just recent to that very day lost his friend of almost forty years -- Mike by name -- to the contributory effects of multiple sclerosis.

Here is where coincidence becomes cohesion, here is where a fluke becomes a twist of fate -- for the reason that George was writing me at all was to share how meaningful my book had been to him, how comforting my words had been and how informative about the disease that had taken his friend. He had written, in short, to thank me -- and, as it happens, to encourage me as well. One writes, ultimately, to connect, to share; one writes for the ear of an invisible reader with whom he hopes to find a fellowship of living. It may seem sad in some way that this book over which I had expended my heart had ended up in the gravel on a lonely roadside, and yet the miracle that brought it to the hands of this single reader is encouragement beyond the common pale of life, and a a gift of rarest, most rewarding amazement.

Up In Smoke

2011-12-04T16:14:00.000+07:00

Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me! A no smoking law passed in Bali? It can’t be, and yet it is apparently so. Soon hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, government offices, places of worship, and who knows what else -- bars, boats, cars, bikes, malls, the insides of buildings and the outsides of buildings and anywhere within 50 feet of a building -- will all be smoke-free havens for those few people in Bali who actually don’t smoke. Congratulations to the Bali legislative council -- you’ve just become a Western nation. Now big brother is watching you too.

What, I wonder, is the irresistible attraction of this runaway anti-smoking campaign? What causes the leadership of just about every country to want to jump on the bandwagon of legislation that rests not only on bad science but on the dangerous notion that the freedom of an individual to make his own choices can be made subject to government control? Do we really want to join that party? Does Bali -- does Indonesia -- really want to bleed itself dry of all the colour of character by imitating the restrictive, conformist, stodgy, reductive, timid, paranoid social rules of political correctness that plague modern-day Western countries?

I say that if you want to smoke, smoke; if you don’t want to smoke, don’t smoke. But for crying out loud, don’t make a law of every little thing! This is one of the reasons I left America. I was suffocating. Not from cigarette smoke, but from the strangulating grip of countless special interest groups, humourless, lacklustre, anal-retentive biddies and snobs who somehow managed to make law of opinion, and a travesty of the right to personal choice.

Here in Bali I found a different society -- and ironically, a society much like the one I used to know as a young man in America. I rediscovered a society of common agreement, ordered not so much by law as by common sense. I found a freedom of expression and movement and action that made me feel once again like a dog with his head out the window and his ears flapping in the wind. I could breathe again. I could speak my mind. I could jay walk (at my own risk, and yet by choice). And I could smoke a cigarette just about anywhere I wanted to.

What are the real facts about smoking? Well, for one thing it doesn’t cause lung cancer. It may contribute, along with a multitude of other considerations. The process of developing cancer is complex and multifactorial. It involves genetics, the immune system, cellular irritation, DNA alteration, dose and duration of exposure, and much more. It’s not a simple matter -- and don’t let them tell you it is. Every member of my immediate family died of cancer. None of them smoked. How’s that for a statistic?

How about the dreaded second hand smoke, that fairly recent modulation of paranoia that has made pariahs of those who smoke. Well, the fact is that by the time second hand smoke is inhaled by another person it has already been filtered by the cigarette itself, and then by the smoker’s own lungs. What’s left? Not much. A World Health Organization (WHO) study did not show that second hand smoke statistically increased the risk of getting lung cancer. EPA statistics, moreover, show that living with a heavy smoker over a period of 30-40 years will only increase the non-smoker’s chance of getting lung cancer from 0.4% to 0.6%. Want a better chance of getting lung cancer? Try stepping outside your door in any modern industrialized city and taking a good, deep breath.

All cancers combined account for only 13% of all annual deaths, and lung cancer only 2%. Given the actual numbers, one has to wonder what’s really behind the hysteria.

It’s not a question of public health, folks. It’s a question of individual freedom. If I die of lung cancer, that’s on me. If I die from eating too much fried chicken, or from someone sitting near me eating too much fried chicken, that’s on me too.

“Yes, smoking is bad for you,” writes J.P. Siepmann in the Journal of Theoretics, “but so is fast food hamburgers, driving, and so on. We must weight the risk and benefits of the behaviour both as a society and as an individual based on unbiased information. Be warned though, that a society that attempts to remove all risk terminates individual liberty and will ultimately perish.”

For goodness’ sake, smoking is an Indonesian pass-time. It’s part of Indonesian heritage. It’s as Indonesian as bakso and sate (neither of which is probably good for you). What a shame it is that this government of Bali has so bought in to another culture’s propaganda and agenda.

I’m a smoker. I like to smoke. I regret that there are some who do not appreciate smoking, but I will not fault them for it, nor will I seek a law against them. I say in conclusion, with American author Mark Twain, that “if smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go.

Things That Keep Me Up At Night

2011-12-02T09:08:00.000+07:00

“I’m one of those people,” writes Stephen King in his most recent novel, “who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”

I can go a step further than that, because I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks even after he’s got done thinking it. My mind seems to have no sense of informed taste or selection, but jumps instead at every bit of passing information like a fish that can’t see the difference between a tasty fly and a speeding bullet. It seems that the dumbest things strike me as somehow significant or mysterious. They get into my brain and clatter about like marbles in a tin canister, interrupting a focus on matters more worthy of attention, or indeed needful of the same.

Why, by way of example, are most females so fond of the colour pink? The normal answer should be Who cares, right? What difference does it make? But no, I must look the thing up, get to the bottom of the matter, no matter how insipid the question may be.

I learn through the internet that “scientists” believe this female attraction to the colour pink arises from prehistoric times, when the role of the woman was that of a food gatherer. Since berries are sort of pink (so the scientists claim), the colour was ingrained into the woman’s psyche so that she would seek out and gather up things that were pink, and therefore (hopefully) berries. In due time, of course, this berry gathering pastime petered out, and yet the biological, genetic fixation remained.

So next time my wife hankers after that pink purse, or those pink shoes, or that pink Mercedes, I will know what she’s really on about. Berries.

Another thing that strikes me as curious (and keeps me up at night) is this whole idea of global warming. Here we have a shaky theory that has been turned in the space of a decade or so into a matter of popular lore -- and this despite the objection of a number of eminent scientists who say it is no more than a hoax. Norwegian Nobel prize winner Ivar Giaever, for example, states that “Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientic fraud I have seen in my long life.” So why do we continue to believe? How does a falsehood so robustly persist? Who is behind it, and what is the plan, really?

This leads me to the whole question of tobacco use being harmful to ones health. It says so on the package, right? And therefore it must be so. Yet, statistics gathered from around the world would seem to show that very often the rate of lung cancer in heavy smoking populations, such as those in Turkey and Egypt, is far lower than the rate of lung cancer in countries where fewer people smoke. Now what‘s that all about? What’s really going on here? What shadowy, conspiratorial group is out to kill King Tobacco, and why?

Why were forty planes needed to bring Barack Obama to Bali? I mean, when my wife and I moved from America to Bali we brought along thirteen boxes of various stuff, and I thought that was a lot at the time. But forty plane loads? How is it possible? Yes, I realize that some of the planes were burdened with larger sorts of items, such as armoured personnel carriers -- and I understand there was no need for my family to bring along any military vehicles --, but still, if I had known we could have brought forty planes worth of stuff, I might have included a few extra bits and pieces. My piano, for instance. My wife’s Marcos-like collection of shoes. Two or three old girlfriends. My two dogs and my two dog’s dogs. As it turns out, we were really quite Spartan. And I guess that’s something to be proud about.

Another mystery concerns the bug in my motorcycle helmet. I cannot find this bug on careful examination of the helmet, nor does it make its presence known when I am stopped at a traffic light or travelling at low speed. No, this bug only appears -- and always in my ear -- at high speed or in heavy traffic when there is no opportunity for me to free a hand or stop the bike. Naturally I ask myself how this can be. Coincidence is one thing, but this seems beyond coincidence. I reckon it’s some kind of fate or bad karma, a little bit of purgatory on earth.

Lastly I will mention the matter of the gas in my motorbike. Through two years of experience I have found that the bike will run just about forever when the gauge is on empty, and yet when I fill the tank, the gas disappears with alarming rapidity as if through a hole in the bottom. But there is no hole. I’ve checked, many times. I conclude, therefore, that the best course in the future will be to keep the gauge well into the red, thus saving myself from trips to the Pertamina and the needless expense of refilling.

More Fiasco Than Festival

2011-11-25T14:04:00.002+07:00

Another community planning disaster, about 7.5 on the Richter scale, shook the little town of Sanur last week as the Sanur Village Festival, held at Sunrise Beach, played host to five long, hot, unspeakably humid days of frustration, vehicular chaos, roadway gridlock and boiling tempers.

In the past the little festival had been a pleasant enough affair, offering food and drink, local crafts and wares for sale, music and entertainment at night -- a place for tourists and locals alike to meet and meander, take a meal or sip at a tall, cold beer. I had looked forward to returning this year, as had my family, remembering a time when we had enjoyed local flavours, mingled with friends, basked in the cooling breeze off the ocean, and then sat on the grass at night for music and dance presented on a central stage.

But this year was to be different; for we ended up not with a festival, but with a fiasco, long to be remembered, if for anything, as the place one should not have gone.

Why? What had happened between this year and last to turn a pleasant amusement into a nauseating nightmare?

In two words: bad planning.

Or maybe I should say no planning at all.

To begin with, what genius, I wonder -- or what corporate body of genius (since it usually takes more than one person to be this stupid) -- came up with the idea to hold the festival at Sunrise Beach, to which there is only one road of entry and one road of departure? Last year the festival grounds stretched between Grand Bali Beach and Sindhu, an area to which many roads enter, and to which one can easily walk from any avenue of entry. But one road only? To an event that will attract not only the population of Sanur, but of the far flung outlying areas as well?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks. You cannot see the whole picture until you take into account that this single road of entry comes straight off the Bypass. As we all know from daily experience, the Bypass is bad enough when simply left to itself; but funnel all this traffic, bound in both directions, onto a single narrow side way and what you have is the old hopelessly clogged drain effect.

No matter how I try to imagine the decision making process behind this disaster, the thing defies reason.

“Where should we hold the festival this year. It seems to have gone all too smoothly last, don’t you think?”

“Hmm, yes. How about the middle of the Bypass?”

“Oh ya? And what shall we do about traffic control?”

“Well, let me think a second . . . Oh, how about nothing!”

One must consider as well that not all people on the Bypass were bound for the festival. Some were trying to get to work. Some were trying to get home from work. Some were actually in the midst of work, like the truck drivers, the delivery vans, police cars, ambulances and such-like. Ah, but now they were going to the festival, like it or not. There was no place else to go.

Such was my situation on the final Sunday of the disaster. My son had stayed overnight with a friend in Sanur and I was to travel from my house in Biaung to pick him up in the afternoon, a trip which usually takes about 15 minutes one way. This day the round trip required two hours and 15 minutes, most of that passed in increments of half-inches between Padang Galak and Grand Bali Beach. The problem on Sunday was not only the fair. They had added a twist in the form of a parade of marchers and decorated floats. To accommodate this parade, they had closed one side of the Bypass. Not one lane, but one side, you see? Predictably, no contingency plan had been made regarding what must happen with the Bypass traffic.

But the Bali spirit is indomitable. There is always a way. And the way, in this case, was to simply cross the highway divider and head up the road into oncoming traffic. I’ve got to hand it to these Balinese motorists. Nothing will stop them short of debilitating injury or death. And such was the height of my own aggravation by this time that I did in fact join the desperate wrong-way crowd, despite my sober western self, and experienced therefore a period of gleeful schizophrenia wherein I found myself both cursing and congratulating my unlawful actions.

At some point during the ensuing war of opposing traffic, the police awakened, emerged from wherever they had been napping, and began to wave their arms wildly and shout commands at the inventive motorists; with no consequence, however, other than to add a sort of celebration touch to the general clamour.

Come Monday heavy clouds rolled in, rain threatened, and many people, according either to personal experience or word-of-mouth warnings, began to avoid the festival grounds. By mid afternoon the traffic on the Bypass had begun to flow again in its customarily gluey way, and it was clear that the island had survived the trial (although official casualty figures are still pending).

And what about my experience at the festival itself -- aside from the traffic and the heat and the sweat and the honking and the swearing and the sitting and the waiting and the wilting? Well, I really can’t say. I was too exhausted by the time I got there to notice.

Comment on Bogor

2011-11-18T13:27:00.001+07:00

A anonymous (of course) comment is received in response to the previous post regarding a Supreme Court order to reopen the Yasmin church in Bogor. The comment reads "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Although the comment is cryptic, I'm guessing that the author meant to express a sort of "who started it" sentiment. My answer would be that the question is moot. What we deal with in the present are present realities as they coincide not only with an eternal notion of justice but with application of the rule of law. Both the order of the State, handed down by the high law, and the true spirit of Islam are violated in the Bogor mayor's defiance.

Bogor Mayor Called to Account Over Defiance of Court Order

2011-11-17T14:37:00.000+07:00

Encouraging this last week was the news out of Bogor, Java, as reported in the Jakarta Post, the Jakarta Globe and elsewhere, that both private parties and democratic political entities have begun to exert pressure on the mayor of that place to desist in his defiance of a Supreme Court order and reopen the CKI Yasmin church.

Mayor Diani Budiarto has stubbornly disregarded the order since its issuance early this year. Now at long last a formal inquiry has been set in motion by major political parties, including the party that contributed most significantly to Budiarto’s election -- the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) -- wherein the mayor will be called to account for his recalcitrance.

PDI-P Chairman, Untung W. Maryono, accused the mayor of mocking the rule of law by refusing to reopen the church, saying that “In his disobedience of the law, I see indications of defiance on the part of the mayor against keeping religious harmony.”

In a separate statement, Ruhut Sitompul, Lawmaker with the Democratic Party, said that the Bogor Legislative Council would be instructed to join in the effort to uphold the law. “We should work together to eliminate human rights violations,” he said, “especially those against religious freedoms. The mayor must be ousted.”

Start counting, Mr. Mayor.

In the meantime, parishioners at the Yasmin church have continued to hold services on the sidewalk outside their locked-down place of worship, while Muslim extremists have sought to interrupt, menace or expel the Christians, often leading to conflict and necessitating a police presence to keep the two groups separate. It is the latter group (not the rule of law) that has apparently exerted the greatest effect on Mayor Budiarto, convincing him that intolerant demands of the few are of greater importance than the prevailing laws and inclusive religious ideology of the Indonesian Nation.

’I’m just trying to keep the peace,’ the mayor claims, ’to maintain security in a community that doesn’t want the church here anyway.’

Yes? Is the community of Bogor, then, the voice of Indonesia? How about if the tables were turned? What if a mosque were closed, rather than a church? Still merely interested in maintaining security? At all costs? What happened to Pancasila -- Unity in Diversity -- the motto by which the Indonesian nation stands?

There is more here, I think, of the disingenuous than of the defence of the peace.

But it’s nothing new. Similar characters and intolerant factions have kicked against the ideal of justice throughout the ages. Once upon a time in America a man named George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, sought to defy the law of the land and the will of the majority, not to mention the direct order of the President, by barring a black student from registering at the University of Alabama. Wallace said that he felt the people of the State of Alabama expected it of him.

Was that the real reason, then? Or was George Wallace merely offended by the presence of black people on principle, the way some Muslim extremists are offended by the presence of Christians? What threat does this Christian minority pose? Is it to Islam, or the State, or the City; or is it to some weak and empty chamber in the heart of extremist fear and paranoia that can only be filled with blind hatred and violence?

We’ve had enough. This is the phrase that will ever arise in the mouths of the patient, silent majority. We have fought long and hard, through trial and loss, blood and triumph to forge societies that are just and fair, safe and secure, wherein each individual may pursue his inalienable right, as the American Declaration has it, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are slow to act because we had hoped we had arrived; we are patient because we understand that a certain amount of human ignorance is eternal; but when we are tried to the limit and tired at last of the ogre, the bully and the outlaw, we will stand and reaffirm our hard-won vision of government by tolerance, friendship, fairness and equality.

A Night to Remember

2011-11-16T08:23:00.001+07:00

Recently I was the unlikely guest of Rob Peetoom at the gala opening of his new Seminyak salon, along with festivities afterward at the Metis restaurant. I say unlikely because there is nothing I can lay claim to that would recommend my presence at such an auspicious event. On the other hand, my wife is an important person -- just ask her -- and it was she who received the invitation, along with the offer to bring a guest. Given that two of her friends backed out at the last minute, she dressed me up as a guest and took me instead.

Upon arrival we found ourselves instantly swimming in a soup of rapidly wilting expatriates highlighted with a peppering of stunningly beautiful Indonesian women. Designer dresses were the theme of the night, all carefully engineered to be much too stifling for this hot and humid Seminyak night. For some reason everyone was being held outside a single gate, which intermittently peeked open to receive two and three of our enormous company at a time, while the rest, either unlucky or unimportant, pushed forward, gasping and sweating, clawing the unfair, dispassionate air.

I remember someone mentioning once that there are 70,000 expatriates on the island of Bali. I know it now for a fact, for they were all on the sidewalk outside Rob Peetoom‘s salon.

The gate opened again -- just a tad, mind you -- and the ravishing young Italian woman standing next to me (partly on me, actually), resplendent in airy white chenille, stiletto heels and carefully conspicuous jewellery, shoved me deftly against the wall with an unusually powerful left arm and thus made her entry to inner court, along with three friends linked together like sausages fried nearly to perfection.

Eventually all 70,000 of us made it inside. There we commenced to matriculate, shoulder to shoulder, pelvis to rear, and to breast up to the bar where free champagne was being served. People were hot, a bit wet and stringy, and so they gulped the first glass and asked for more. While I waited for seconds, a man stepped up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. Then the hand slipped up to my neck. He said nothing, but just smiled, fingers gently kneading my neck. I decided I wasn’t very thirsty after all.

Why do people always think I’m gay? My second wife said it was because I walk like a giraffe. But what is it about a giraffe, or the way that he walks, that’s gay? And if giraffe’s are all so gay, how do they procreate and make more?

Paris Hilton was to be present at the party afterward. Everyone knew it, and the name was on every tongue, whispered in steady repeated cadence ---- Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Bettlejuice.

Honestly, I don‘t know who Paris Hilton is. I mean, I know the name and the fortune that goes with the name; but who is she otherwise? What has she done? Why is she so famous? Has she ever had her picture on a bubblegum card?

The Rob Peetoom salon is a fine salon. I was able to see it inch by inch, in the finest detail, as we shuffled painstakingly through the premises. At the back of the place we found a patio and some breathing room. People had matriculated back this way in order to light up cigarettes, and my wife and I did the same. Limpid pools shimmering in hues of indigo and magenta breathed contented sighs between polished Dutch colonial pillars in an effortless blend of nature and architecture, gazing onto the rich green tapestry of the abutting rice field. But where was the ashtray? This, rather than Paris Hilton, became the whispered subject of the moment. Ultimately, most people reckoned that that was what the rice field was for.

We headed early to the party at the Metis in order to avoid another frustrating winking gate scenario. And in fact Paris Hilton did show up. How she made her entry -- whether it was through a tunnel, a secret door, or down the chimney -- I do not know.

“Get a picture, get a picture!” my wife urged excitedly.

Raising the camera above several shoulders and heads, I snapped a photo.

“Got it!” I said, handing the camera to my wife.

She stared at the screen, frowning.

“That’s not Paris Hilton.”

“Oh?” Who is it then?”

“I don’t know! It’s nobody.”

It seems I may as well have taken a picture of myself. I tried again, but this time came up with a pair of large breasts. No head, no body; just the breasts.

“Never mind,” my wife decided, waving a hand in dismissal. She had lost interest. She might have enjoyed sitting down for a private chat, but if Paris wasn’t receiving private guests, my wife wasn’t receiving Paris.

Two women I had been more or less noticing all evening now caught my eye again as they floated our way in a cloud of admirers lit lightning-like with camera flashes, making the group as a whole seem like a little self-contained storm front. Both of the women were Indonesian, and apparently quite beautiful. One wore a red dress, the other was in green, and both dresses displayed dark sweat marks in all the wrong places. They looked like movie stars to me. Indonesian soap opera movie stars. I couldn’t help wondering if they had made a few internet movies on the side (having read that that sort of thing was going around).

As a general rule, the closer people approach, the better you can see them; but this was not the case with the two movies stars. Rather, the closer they approached, the hazier they became, a disorienting effect of facial makeup which seemed to have been applied with a putty knife. Shadows and highlights became blotches and smears. Who were they really, I wondered, beneath the meticulous disguise? They could have been Lindsey Lohan and Kim Kardashian for all I knew. Given the heat and general drippiness in the atmosphere, I figured I could find out if I waited around long enough for the makeup to kind of slough down to chin and dress front, but my wife had other plans, and escorted me to the dance floor.

The evening gently deteriorated to dancing and mingling amidst a unanimous effusion of auxiliary sweat, and at last we all headed out to our far flung homes -- and Paris to the far flung corners of the earth.

What Do You Do Here?

2011-11-12T17:33:00.000+07:00

“What do you do here?”

This is generally the eighth in line of the questions I am asked during the polite though somewhat unsettling, curiously thorough process of everyday Indonesian interrogation.

Apa kabar (how are you) comes first, as is the case in most languages and cultures. In America this is sufficient, perhaps even excessive. The question itself has taken time for the asking, and thus has been an interruption of schedule. In Indonesia, however, there is much more to come.

How are you, Where do you come from, How long will you stay, Are you married, What does your wife do, How many children do you have, How old are your children?

The first seven inquiries are fairly simply addressed. It is the eighth that I and my interrogators get stuck on. What do you do here? It seems to border on the existential. It’s a philosophical puzzle, a conundrum, like ’What is the meaning of life?’ or ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’

Firstly, one must rightly interpret the question. One must determine exactly what is being asked. Are we talking about a justification for my presence in terms of occupation (gainful employment), or does the question pertain to my existence alone -- why are you here and not elsewhere, or anywhere for that matter?

The most natural conclusion, as well as the one most likely to be accurate, is to presume the first case. The question seeks to determine something specific about my employment, business, financial status, property, possessions and so on. In other words, it is a typically Indonesian question regarding typically Indonesian concerns and seeks a typically predictable answer -- I‘m a doctor, an hotelier, a landowner, a school teacher, an exporter, an architect, a drug dealer -- something by which I may be pinned down and pigeonholed. Only then can the questioner be satisfied, having collected reasonable, albeit abbreviated data regarding my country of origin, marital status, family status and employment status. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if I were actually doing something here. The problem is that I am not. And the trouble, therefore, is with my answer.

“Nothing.”

To which the usual response is:

“Eh?”

“I’m retired.”

“Eh?”

Being retired is clearly unacceptable. The word is not in the Indonesian vocabulary. It is no more than a sound, like “Woof” or “Quack.”

“But my wife works,” I say, throwing out a bone for the perplexed interrogator’s relief.

“Ohhh! So you have business together!”

“Well, it depends on her mood.”

“Eh?”

“Sometimes she has a headache or needs to wash her hair.”

Humour does not help the situation. I have merely become stupid as well as suspicious.

Now this is what gets me. One spends his entire working life waiting for that day to arrive when he can finally say “I’m done, I’ve finished,” and then happily retire to a life of repose in his country manor, or on the island of Bali, or at least in a low-income housing project in Pittsburgh or LA; and yet the expectation of gainful employment persists, not only in the minds of those who ask after the matter, but in one’s own mind as well, perhaps even more acutely so. Little do we know, while working, how soothing it is to be defined. Little do we anticipate that the occupation we had long dreamed off -- specifically, nothing -- will be a matter of personal discomfiture, even shame. Theoretically, we have earned the privilege of rest; realistically, we shall never do so.

What am I doing here? What is my function? Does lying almost perfectly motionless on a chaise lounge count? How about reading the newspaper at Luhtu’s? How about flirting with the waitress in the bar?

“What did you do today?” my wife will ask, in that particular sort of way that sounds more like an accusation than an inquiry.

Rare is the occasion wherein I can think of a satisfactory answer -- for I know, you see, what is really being asked. And so I might say instead:

“I’m retired.”

“Eh?”

My wife is a native speaker of Indonesian. She is fluent in English as well. I offer the two cases as proof that the word ‘retired’ does not exist in the Indonesian vocabulary. It has no meaning for the Indonesian mind.

But wait! I work for this paper, right? I wrote the very words that are being read.

“And what do they pay you for that?” is her barrister-like rejoinder.

The fact is I cannot receive pay in Indonesia because of my status on visa as a retired foreigner. And so the answer to the question is . . . Well, you guessed it.

Nothing.

Blogger Beware

2011-11-04T13:15:00.000+07:00

Those who blog -- as well as many who don’t -- will know that the blogger has a feature available to him wherein he may append various “tags” -- non-hierarchical keywords or terms -- to an entry he has written. Once associated with a particular entry, these tags go into the bottomless pit of the Google database where they wait to be nudged by a user of the search engine, at which point they wake up and convey the user back to the blog.

Let us say that you are writing about Hinduism in Bali. Upon finishing your entry you might add tag words such as “Bali,” “Hinduism,” and “religion,” providing each word as a general guide. It’s really a pretty nifty way of facilitating the web surfer/researcher, streamlining and focusing, cutting corners which would otherwise encumber. Tags may even lead you around lengthy introductions such as this one, or at least save you from getting lodged on a sandbar you had not intended to visit in the first place.

In addition, many bloggers utilize a web tracking program. This allows the blogger to see how many “hits” his blog has received, and where these visits came from. (If you thought you were perfectly anonymous, think again).

Looking recently at the data on my web tracker, I discovered that my blog entry on “sex with cows” (which concerned a Balinese man caught in the act of sexual intercourse with a cow) had placed #5 on the record of Google visits for entries so tagged.

I was surprised, to say the least. Who knew that cow sex would be a subject of such keen interest? Moreover, I felt proud. Surely placing #5 put me toward the top of the bottomless pit, and should therefore be a rare achievement and testimony to my gifts as a writer.

However . . . well, clearly a sober man is inclined to wonder, after the initial glow of fame fades away, how many blog entries, worldwide, there can have been on sex with cows. Perhaps five? Which of course would put mine dead last.

Then again, perhaps I had been merely unaware of a lively interest out there in sex with cows. I began to imagine hundreds, maybe thousands of sleepless men, sitting alone in darkened rooms, laptops open, screens ablaze with graphic, unsettling images of unclothed cows in all manner of position and pose.

One visitor from Pakistan hit this entry in my blog thirty-seven times. In a row. I make no personal judgment either of the man or of Pakistan, but merely mention the occurrence.

Another of my blog entries that has done well, as a Google destination anyway, is one entitled “Mean Spirited Women” (and tagged the same). This placed as high at one point as #1 in Google. Honestly, the actual content of this blog entry does not warrant the attention. It was simply something had I dashed off some three years ago when I happened to be angry at my wife. I wrote, therefore, that she was a mean-spirited woman, and philosophized that most women are.

Of course it’s not true. She is in fact a sweetheart, and t’was I who was in the wrong. Okay, honey?

Nonetheless, what shall we conclude from these statistics? How has it happened that so many people have typed in the words “mean spirited women”? Or can there be a fetish at play here as well?

Wanted: Attractive female

Age: Negotiable

Must be mean spirited

In any case, I merely pose the question, and will allow the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Lastly, I’d like to say something about the “comments” I receive. Entries in my blog have often been associated with multiple sclerosis (which is a disease that I have -- or had, at least, until it was flash-baked out of me by the searing, laser-like Balinese sun). Subjects addressed included such topics as brain damage, neural deterioration, profound fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and so on. They have not been wildly popular entries, where the Google database is concerned, but they have attracted an astounding amount of spam. A good deal of this spam has been of a sexual nature, advertising everything from cheap Viagra to hot Russian blondes. What one has to wonder is whether there is something about MS that has aroused the spammer, or has he been somehow inspired to believe that this sort of thing arouses the MS sufferer in particular?

Frankly, I find it discouraging, and an insult to my efforts and good intentions. But what are you going to do? It’s a sick world, folks. If you want to know more on the subject, just start a blog.

Obstinate Is As Obstinate Does

2011-10-28T10:08:00.001+07:00

People are obstinate. There you have it. The encapsulation, in three words, of human behaviour. I reckon it ought to be the first sentence in every psychology textbook.

Take Saddam Hussein, for instance; a poster boy for obstinacy if ever there was one. Here we have a man who preferred to let the world believe he had weapons of mass destruction to simply allowing inspectors to enter his country and reveal that he did not. What was the result of this obstinate behaviour? Well, ultimately he was hung, wasn’t he? After being pulled, rat-like, from a hole in the ground, dirty, haggard, pitiful, ruined. Of all possible outcomes, Hussein managed to achieve the very worst.

Ring any bells? Of course it does. Moammar Khadafy, Hussein’s mulish compatriot and contender for the throne, refused to heed voice of his people and was of course just recently pried from a grimy drainage ditch, beaten, shot and killed.

Do the obstinate learn from these examples? Of course not. Otherwise they should cease to be obstinate (and thereby disprove my theory). But in fact there are more candidates waiting eagerly in the wings -- in Syria, in Yemen, in Iran and elsewhere -- granting awareness of recent events not so much as a nod, as if they will somehow do stupidity right this time around. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical, is it? But I guess that’s my point. People are obstinate. We are made that way. Hard-wired, helpless, doomed.

Take the Christians in Bogor, for example. What? The Christians in Bogor? You mean those from the Yasmin church who persist in holding services on the sidewalk outside the building from which they’ve been barred? Those who stubbornly wait for the obstinate mayor of the town to obey an order from the highest court to desist in prohibiting them their service in that place? Yep, those are the ones.

We are inclined to rebel against that which seems unfair, to throw out the chest, to lift the proud fist, to proclaim our cause to be right and holy. We don’t like being pushed around, and by God we’re not going to budge an inch.

But hold on a sec. Did not the Lord himself point out that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head? What’s all this fuss then about one street and one block in Bogor? What, other than obstinate pride? Lets think it through. Where is The Church? On this block alone? In this building alone? Does it reside in a legal document, or is it written in the deed to this particular tract of land?

“Where is your kingdom?” Pilate demanded of Jesus.

“My kingdom is not of this world,” he answered.

Where is it then?

“Where two or three are gathered in my name.”

No mention of a building there, or a temple, or a church, but only of human fellowship.

Do I excuse the Muslim hard-liners and their curious, senseless coveting of this same patch of earth? Not at all. One thing about obstinacy is that it is equally available to every race, religion and creed.

“We want this church building to be gone next week,” Ahmad Iman, head of the hard-liners, has said. “If it still stands, we will bring it down.”

Really? Is it that important? Is the foundational coherence of your beliefs so weak that you must fear and dispel a few Jesus freaks? Or are you merely offended by the presence of this sort of infidel trailer trash in your neighbourhood?

Oh well, that’s okay. There are people in America who feel the same way about black folks. They’re called the Ku Klux Klan. They wear white robes with pointy hoods and shout things like God is great and nigger go home. Sound familiar?

We who are not Muslims do not know the Muslim scripture, nor do the Muslims know the Christian. If they did, they would know that Christianity has from its beginning thrived on persecution. What better way then to make many more than to persecute the few?

Do you want that church to go away? Try ignoring it. At the very least peace may be had, and no one need be harmed.

Ah, but that would be less than obstinate, wouldn’t it.

A Trip to the Salon

2011-10-19T23:10:00.000+07:00

The common American man is not in the habit of going to the salon for a pedicure, or a manicure, or any other kind of a cure. That's just the way it is. There are barber shops for men. You go in, you wait your turn, you talk about sports, you get your hair cut, and then you go on about your business.

There are exceptions, I suppose. The Wall Street broker, for instance. The corporate lawyer. The fashion conscious pimp from the hood. But by and large we just don't do the whole salon thing. It is frowned upon. In fact a man may justly fear the censure of his fellows if the news gets around that he’s hanging out in a foo-foo beauty salon getting his toenails and fingernails pampered and snipped, filed and polished, soaked in lavender elixir, and so on.

Well, things are different here in Bali. Men do get pedicures. They do get manicures. They do get cream baths and the occasional facial.

Nonetheless, given the traditions with which I am familiar, I was reticent when my wife demanded that I get a pedicure. It wasn’t just the macho aspect of the thing. It was shame. Yes, shame. My feet, you see, are not normal. For one thing they are old. And some of the toes are crooked. And some of the nails on the toes are as thick and yellow as weathered patio tiles. I’d turn them in for new ones in a hot minute, but one can only imagine the cost of new feet these days.

It was Sun Tzu who sagely recommended that we choose our battles with care; and as this particular issue seemed important beyond common measure to my wife, I ultimately took Sun’s advice, ceased in my struggles to free my elbow, and let myself be led to a chair.

With many apologies in advance, I removed my shoes and exposed my horrifying feet for all to see. And all did see. And then called in others to see as well.

This is where the talent of the professional manicurist truly rises to the surface. Without gasping, without shrinking, without fainting or being ill, the young woman kneeled before me, caressed the two wooden doorstops that have long masqueraded as my feet, and assured me--and with a straight face too--that they were not so very terrible. They simply needed a little help. They needed a little care.

And so she went to work. To my surprise no heavy machinery was needed. No drills or chisels. Rather, with small instruments precisely fashioned for such tasks, accompanied by a studious nibbling of the lower lip and a working of the tongue around the corners of her mouth, the young woman snipped and scraped her way to an artful restoration of something resembling real human feet. My hermit toes peeked from their yellowed blinds and did, as I believe, smile in gratitude and amazement.

Now it was time for a head massage. That sounded pleasant enough. There’s nothing very obviously wrong with my head. It’s not crooked, chipped, discoloured, nor otherwise a source of particular embarrassment to me. I relaxed therefore into a new chair and awaited the soothing touch of a new practitioner, while my wife did the same with her own head.

Who knew that a massage could be so excruciating? Or that the fingers of a masseuse could be so like crowbars? The girl had digits of iron. They were hard, dense, digging digits. Her thumbs were like shovel blades, deftly separating nerve from muscle, muscle from bone, man from boy. Through every digging pass I fought back tears, fought back groans, fought back the desire to bolt from the chair and run out the door.

And yet, glancing to the left upon the face of my wife, I found there an expression of perfect repose--eyes closed, jaw relaxed, lips turned up in sleepy smile.

How was it possible? I had to this moment thought myself a man and able to bear rigors beyond any woman’s endurance. But oh my God, my head, my head!

“Enak?” the girl asked.

“Oh yes . . . Sooo good,“ I managed to whisper in reply.

I cannot say that I enjoyed the pain, nor that my head felt improved in the end. I say merely that I survived. And that I learned one thing.

The beauty salon is definitely not for sissies. It is for the brave, the strong, for those who endure. And even for Americans too.

The Other Side of Paradise

2011-10-19T23:08:00.000+07:00

I was doing a bit of exploring one recent day, following a few of the lesser known ways--thereby knowing less and less where I was---when I happened upon a small bridge spanning a small river. I noted that smoke or mist or steam was rising from beneath the bridge and curling over the railing at the top.

Hmm, what is this, I pondered as I passed on by? Steam from a hot spring such as those we have back home in the Pacific Northwest? Or perhaps the brush on the riverbank has caught fire. That could be bad. Or maybe it’s just a campfire. Maybe people are fishing down there and then cooking their catch.

Well, I turned my bike around after about a city block’s worth of indecision and went back to see what sort of marvel this might be. Bali is a marvellous island, right? Full of beauty, both natural and of man’s own making. You never know what exotic new sight you’re going to stumble upon.

Parking on a gravel siding near the entry to the bridge, I soon found a narrow path which led through brambles to the verge of a bluff above the river. Looking down from there into the shallow river gorge I found not a hot spring, nor a local fisherman’s fire, but a roughly pyramidal mountain of garbage rising from the middle of the stream, and afire. The mound coughed moiling clouds of smoke, from milk cartons, wooden crates, cardboard boxes, palm fronds, beer bottles, diapers, window frames, wheelbarrows, plastic bags, newspapers, bike fenders, grass, dirt, tree branches, stone--you name it. Garbage is limitless. It goes by all names. It has a beginning, and yet no end.

Though interesting in itself, this was distinctly less than I had hoped to see. Or more, rather. And the sight struck me instantly as perfectly emblematic, a poster board picture of the real Bali, the place we live, as opposed to the pristine paradise of the travel brochure and slick magazine; for that latter has long since retreated, to the guarded compound, to the exclusive beach front, to the high hill, cliff, and jungle canopy where it is tended by resident monkeys and birds.

This is the problem, you see--this mountain of garbage in the middle of a stream, burning, smoking, stinking, polluting, and sending little boats of non-biodegradable material on a steady journey to the unhappy sea.

This is the other side of paradise.

How did we get here? That’s the first question. What has inspired people not only to the indiscriminate discharge of trash, but to discarding the same in mountains, and the mountains to the middle of rivers and streams? Is the island without governance, without services, without laws? Is there some strange insensitivity at work in its people that has caused them to despise the very paradise they were born to? Or is it laziness merely, a lackadaisical conviction, or a dream anyway, that the trash will at any moment take care of itself? Or that maybe dogs will carry it away?

Back where I come from we used to have a slogan. It was posted on highways, in parks and in State buildings. Keep Oregon Green. The phrase was encouraging in itself, for the clear implication was that Oregon was clean already, and that we needed only to keep it that way.

But what are we to do about Bali? Sink the island and start again?

I came here to the tropics to see something new. I had certain visions of what that would be. Oceans, jungles, mango trees, mountains; monkeys and monitors; pageants and parades. But the garbage on the beaches, on the roads, in the rivers, and the drooling of refuse to the shores of the sea . . . Well that turned out to be the surprise of my life. I don’t know what more I can say.

Cow Sex

2011-10-11T08:00:00.000+07:00

REGARDING THAT COW

I had other things to write about, really -- in fact a train of things, lined up like boxcars, each packed with its own particular load of goods -- but then along comes this story about sex with cows, as reported in the most recent edition of The Bali Times, and I can’t get the thing out of my mind. Just when the thieving pig, otherwise known as Babi Ngepet, described in the same paper perhaps a year ago, was beginning to lose his novelty, and thus his boorish grip on my daily thoughts, this preposterous bovine tale appears, and my mind lumbers off on the back of the creature, helpless to resume its own way.

But let’s recap first and touch on the salient facts of the matter.

“The incident came to light,” our article tells us, “on September 22^nd, when the daughter of the owner of the cow allegedly caught a married local man having sex with the animal in a field.” This, therefore, was not only perversion, but adultery, and would need to be addressed by a ceremony of purification. I’m not sure if both sins were to be covered in the ceremony, or just the one specific to the cow.

A meeting of local traditional leaders and religious figures was immediately called to discuss the matter.

Attending also was a psychiatrist -- a modern touch for an age-old calamity. What to do?

You see, incidents such as this are not unheard of in Bali. In fact, this sort of human and cow hanky-panky has been a recurring problem on the island. In a similar case last year a young man was forced to marry a cow after having sex with it. Pertaining to the case at hand, however, the guilty man, as assessed by the psychiatrist, was already depressed, and so it was felt that marriage would only make things worse.

Now, there is an extenuating factor at play in this otherwise unacceptable romance of beast and man which should be mentioned, lest we conclude the man to be totally bereft of common decency (although we cannot speak for the cow). To whit, the cow had in all cases, by some magic, managed to turn into a beautiful girl. This is strange not only in itself, but also for the fact that such transformations seem more often to work the other way around. In any case, wonderful in its own way is the fact that in Bali, a land of magic and superstition, one can make a claim such as this and be taken seriously.

There was music the man is rumoured to have said, and beauty, and flowers, and bells, and a peaceful field of green-green grass, where a curvaceous maiden, a new blooming bud, beckoned him to come thence and enter with her to the heart of bliss.

The psychiatrist in the case is noted to have said that the man might have mental problems.

And yet we have heard of the Sirens, have we not? And of mermaids and of witchery and of the beautiful and monstrous Medusa -- those ancient, inhuman seductresses who lured sailors to shipwreck and captivity with enchanting voice and song.

“Well, I think I’m goin’ out of my head.
Yes I think I’m goin’ out of my head,
Over you . . .
Moo, moo, mooo-moooo.”

Well, it’s just not quite the same thing, is it?

How does this happen, one certainly wonders -- and not only in the moral sense, but in the anatomical as well. For the largest of men is still rather small as compared to the enormity in the least of cows Did the cow seem a human girl throughout the entire episode, or did the man at some point become sober and realize his mistake? And are men alone afflicted in this perversion, or are women liable also, and saved merely by impracticability?

So many questions, so few answers -- and that’s the hell of the thing. It besieges the mind, tormenting through a repellent dissonance of imagery and inquiry. It’s a puzzle that resists its own picture. We struggle to know, yet can hardly guess; and so we are lost in the redundant folds of the enigma -- until the next interesting animal comes along, anyway.

Words from the Less Than Wise

2011-09-16T08:14:00.000+07:00

Concurrent with the worldwide outpouring of sober remembrance and renewed sympathy on the recent ten year anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks on America came also some rather zany viewpoints from various corners of the globe.

From Malaysia, for instance, comes the notion that the collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center could not possibly have been caused by the explosive collision of two enormous, fuel-filled jetliners. No. There must have been something else, something more reliably destructive behind the actual event.

Now whether this Malaysian source has some intimate experience with the effect caused by fuel-filled jetliners colliding with tall buildings, I do not know. He did not mention any such knowledge, but I suppose this could have been a personal oversight, or perhaps a copy-reading or printing error. Suffice it to say that the man has been convinced, ever since that fateful day (or so he says), that two enormous jetliners filled almost to the top with jet fuel could not have quite the destructive effect that we saw on 9/11.

There must have been something else.

His theory? Why, that the building had been previously set up for demolition, just as you see when old buildings are demolished to make way for new ones. Of course, for this to happen certain appropriate authorities had to have been aware beforehand so that the thing would go off well, and moreover would appear to be the result of two jetliners flying into the buildings. Who were these authorities? Well, shadowy people for sure, dishonest, manipulative, quite necessarily evil people who wanted to manufacture a reason for the United States to attack Afghanistan, and later Iraq. Obviously this could not possibly have been accomplished without a preceding terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. And on the Pentagon. And on farmland in Pennsylvania.

Golly, even former President George W. Bush could have been involved. Very likely was. And our Malaysian source says as much.

For my own part, I must admit to being unclear on a few points of this theory. Why, for instance, was it deemed necessary (by the President and his co-conspirators) for the towers to be all the way flat? Would not the death and destruction caused by the planes have been sufficient? And what about the multiple truck-sized bundles of explosives and miles of fusing and wiring that attend demotions such as these? How were these kept from the view of janitors, engineers, electricians, policemen, firemen, and pedestrians, not to mention the thousands of employees in the World Trade Center?

Oh, and if it was really President Bush who was behind this terrorist attack, why did Osama bin Laden take credit for the thing?

I just don’t get it.

Frankly, I suspect that a more revealing investigation, and one that might arrive at more useful conclusions, would be an inquiry into the psychology of the fanciful notions we so often see applied to real life events. What is behind it? Is it misplaced guilt? Is it selective blindness? Is it an aversion, either willful or pathologic, to the simple truth?

Moving on.

It has been suggested from other quarters that God Himself was behind the destruction on 9/11 and meant it as a punishment for the imperialist, morally bankrupt American nation. That’ll show ‘em. But again, I would have to wonder why God would choose those particular 3000 for the death sentence. Was there something about that collection of 3000 individuals that was particularly indicative of American imperialism and moral bankruptcy? The method seems kind of random and unfair--two qualities that I find hard to ascribe to God.

Let us finish then with a piece of humour from Al-Qaeda itself. In a message on September 11^th, Al-Qaeda’s new leader sought to claim credit for the recent events of the Arab Spring. This was accomplished by “striking the head of the world criminal,” he said, forcing America to press Arab countries to rise up against tyranny and godlessness.

This of course is so convoluted, so obtuse, and so insincere that’s its not only meaningless, it’s laughable.

The Arab Spring has been the work of young peaceful protestors seeking democratic freedoms. In this they have risen, and continue to rise; whereas Al-Qaeda is all but flat on the ground.

Some Curious Observations About Some Curious Creatures

2011-09-14T10:52:00.001+07:00

Dogs in Bali are different from other dogs. You may say that the statement is obtuse. You may even say that the difference is merely due to the fact that Bali dogs are dirty, smelly, flea-bitten, scrawny, generally unkempt and occasionally rabid. Of course, that is all true, and I do concede the point. Nevertheless, it is not the dirty, smelly, rabidness of these dogs that is my intended focus here.

By the same token, I will not address the habits of careful grooming, clean hygiene and sophisticated lifestyle that are the purview of the American of the animal. It may be that American dogs in the near course of evolution will be smoking pipes and reading the morning newspaper instead of bringing it in from the doorstep. But I will leave such matters to another writer.

What interests me about these Bali dogs, and what truly bears comparison with the American, is the matter of community.

Let us say something first, however, about the natural history of the Bali dog.

Approximately 800,000 primary feral dogs live on the island of Bali. As far as can be discerned by those who ought to know, the Bali dog travelled from Africa through Indonesia and thence to Australia some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and is related most closely to the Chou and the Dingo. In addition it is known that this peculiar community of dogs became isolated some 10,000 years ago, when sea levels drastically rose and continents drifted apart. So it happened that the Bali dogs found themselves in Bali to stay, like it or not.

Now whether these dogs, isolated as such and thus stuck with each other, have grown throughout their generations an unusually close sense of community, or whether there was from the beginning some poverty of affection for them in the coexisting community of humankind, I know not. What can be readily seen in any case, at this late stage of evolutionary progress, is a persisting segregation of the breeds--human and canine, that is.

In America, for better or worse, the dog is a family member, a coddled child--walked by leash, fed by hand, caged or tied according to law--each member kept apart from “those other dogs,” except of course for the purpose of breeding, wherein the male and female of the species are allowed to interact for . . . well, for as long as it takes.

In Bali, the dog is a dog, has always been a dog, and will ever remain a dog. They are not pampered and spoiled by an owner, and in fact they often have no owner in particular, but belong more often to an area, members of a satellite community consisting of other tertiary communities such as cats, rats, birds, lizards, cockroaches, and so on.

What these dogs have then is each other. They are a race, a people, a social group, a religion, living separately and yet in harmony with all other creatures. In short, you have your Hindu, your Muslim, your Buddhist, your Christian, your Republican, your Democrat, your apple, your orange, and your Bali dog.

Because of this continued autonomy of community, what is most keenly noted is a vitality in interaction, which the civilized dog no longer possesses. In short, the dogs recognize their fellows and care for one another. They seldom go out alone, but prefer to take a friend along (or three, or four). They are aware of one another, and place a certain value on one another, whereas the American dog will see his erstwhile fellows as aliens and foes. Just watch the Bali dog at play! Like children, they know their kind and cavort the day long at their timeless amusements.

Is the American dog, in his family mansion, not poor by comparison? What game has he to play, at this far end of domestication, other than to stand behind his fence and bark?

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-10T19:30:00.002+07:00

It seemed a day like any other day. I woke as always to the buzzing of the bedside alarm, hit the snooze button, woke again five minutes later, rolled out of bed, made my way sleepy-eyed down the hallway, tripped over the dog in the usual way, let the dog out to the patio, went to the kitchen, put a pot of water on the stove to boil for coffee.

It was a Tuesday.

I sat down in the living room to wait for the water, picked up the remote, turned on the TV.

And learned that the world had changed.

The date was September 11, 2001, and the images that came to the TV screen were from another universe, another dimension. They were science fiction, scenes from a nightmare, lurid, hysterical, inexplicable.

It seemed that a jetliner had somehow crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. But how was this possible? The newscasters seemed, for once, as much in the dark as their morning viewers. Billowing clouds of black smoke were rising from the fractured tower. Sirens were wailing, red lights flashing, policemen and firemen rushing this way and that like frantic insects suddenly kicked from a nest, unsure of which way to run. How many had already perished in the flaming tower? And what of the passengers on the plane?

But then, of course, it got worse.

A second plane appeared impossibly from the blue, altogether out of place, grotesque. The second plane impacted the second tower. The tongue of hell slashed the veneer of heaven and the open mouth of evil belched fire and smoke and choking soot, sending flaming shards to the earth--of metal, of glass, of flesh and blood.

Disbelief.

Perhaps 90 percent of the people who watched these events on their television screens, or witnessed their unfolding in person, would later describe their initial reaction of one of disbelief. It had happened right before our eyes, and yet it could not have happened. We had missed something, something was wrong, and if we would but hold our breaths for a half minute longer, it would all come clear.

And it did.

A third jetliner ploughed into the Pentagon in Virginia. A bit later a fourth would plummet to the earth in Pennsylvania.

These were not terrible accidents. This was premeditated murder. And war.

I remember going back to the bedroom to wake my wife. Something had to be done, and surely she would have some idea of what. As yet I had only sat and watched. What now? What now? A sadness was upon me, black as smoke, heavy as stone. I was falling from high in a tower. All of us were falling at once.

Every generation has at least one defining moment. In 1941 it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. In 1963 it was the killing by assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ours happened on a Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

One will hear people say that innocence, as a defining characteristic of society, died long ago. But I do not believe that is true. Rather, innocence throughout this sad mortal life dies over and over again, at every age and in every people. It dies new on each occasion. What cannot be comes about nonetheless, and our fear is suddenly upon us--because someone somewhere, once again, has mistaken individual human beings for cardboard tokens, pieces in a game, political ideas, and has from the blindness of an alien and bankrupt soul plunged the real world into misery. Again, again, and once again.

If innocence dies always and forever, simplicity is the breath that brings life again. “All we want is to be left alone,” Jefferson Davis said. It is simple, it is naïve, and it will never happen. And yet it is the eternal anthem of the common man.

A Masquerade of Madness in the Land of Amity

2011-09-04T08:27:00.003+07:00

By and large, my impression of the Indonesian people in general, and of the Balinese people in particular, as imparted after two years of residence here, is of a people friendly almost to a fault--although only a Westerner, jaded and cranky as we are, could find fault in such a happy circumstance, seeming as it does not altogether prudent or quite adult.

But here are a people--though again in my somewhat limited, short-term experience--ever willing toward kindness and tolerance, intensely polite, simply agreeable. Here is a people who love to smile, even in the face of less than perfect circumstances--the near “accident” on the Bypass, for instance, when one is passed on the right while himself actually, and legally, and cautiously trying to turn right. This of course would be in the West, at the very least, sufficient cause for a lashing of carefully chosen curses.

It happens, and by old habit, that the words are already on the uncivil tongue, rising to that member volcanically with the heat of instant anger. It’s a knee-jerk response, and it’s easy. Strangely, it seems almost natural.

But what is this? The offender has flashed a toothy smile! His eyes are actually sparkling!

“Sorry, sorry,” he calls out cheerfully as he proceeds on his way.

What can you do? Kindness, like music, soothes the savage beast.

It may be, and sadly so, that we in the West have lost something of the communal spirit, and that simple tolerance, for all the pseudo-enlightened lip service given to lofty notions of political correctness, has long since slipped our archetypal grip.

Nonetheless, I am convinced that common people the world over--me and you and them as well--are inclined on the most basic level to be friendly and kind. It is when you transition from the general to the particular that you begin to get into trouble--when you enter the land of the special cause, the religious extremist, the political slogan, the shrill alarm. Here is where you find the haters. These are the folks who get into print, who hold the megaphones, who carry the signs. Here is the person, as Mark Twain said, who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

And yet we listen. Or some of us do. And why? Is it only because of the volume? Is it because hatefulness in its own way, at some sad and degraded level of the human psyche, is simpler yet than simplicity itself?

We read in the Jakarta Post, for instance, that the vast nation of America is merely a puppet of the miniscule state of Israel. Is this not manifestly incredible? We read in another paper that Osama bin Laden “supposedly instigated and funded” terrorism. Supposedly? Really? We read of a 17 year old girl in Denpasar who has been found “partly responsible” for her rape at the hands of a tenant in the house because she forgot to lock her bedroom door. From Aceh comes the news that lesbians will henceforth be beheaded if caught in their transgression. “We are actually allowed by our religion to kill them,” said a district police chief. Good God.

Does this not bring for the better part of us an acute feeling of disbelief and disorientation--rather as if one had fallen off a skyscraper and landed on his head?

What? Where am I? What happened?

When something sounds wrong, sounds foolish, sounds unbelievable, it’s because it is.

These are the things that are truly aberrant--this masquerade of madness disguised as reason. This is where the unfeigned smile fails and compassion falls to the totems of fanatic prejudice and ignorance. In truth, one only needs meet a man to befriend a man. It is, as I said and still believe, the most natural thing in the world. And it is, despite those few shrill voices, the natural treasure of Indonesia.

Searching for Paradise

2011-08-26T16:23:00.002+07:00

Familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes (to which Mark Twain added “and children”). I don’t know about contempt. But certainly it brings a dulling of the edge, both of ones own perceptions and attitudes, and of the “character” of the place one finds oneself in--yes, that same place that had at first seemed endlessly exotic and new. In short, the longer one is in paradise, the more it begins to seem like Dayton, Ohio. Nothing against you Daytonians or your community intended. I could just as easily have said Phoenix, Arizona or Boise, Idaho, or indeed Portland, Oregon, my own home town. Dayton just sounded funnier--an evocation of that Midwest sort of sleepy-sameness that infects the familiar in general--where, as Paul Simon songfully said:

“Everyday is an endless dream of cigarettes and magazines,

And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories,

And every stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be

Homeward bound . . . .”

I remember a time when my younger daughter was just graduating from high school, and was sick to death of “boring ass” Portland, Oregon. There was a big, wonderful world to be discovered outside our dreary city limits--sights and sounds and people and places, Emerald Cities which beckoned with promise.

Philosophically, I counselled that essentially “All the world is a stage,” and “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” I told her that every day is an endless dream of cigarettes and magazines. And so on.

What a fun dad, right?

Well, she decided forthwith on Seattle, Washington--that soggy yet luminous jewel of the West. And then on Atlanta, Georgia. Then on Washington DC. Then on Los Angeles, California. Then on New York City.

She lives now in boring-ass San Francisco, where the golden sun will shine on her (on those rare occasions when it breaks through the fog). She is older now, she is married, and will likely soon produce a brood of children.

Ah brave new world.

And so I tempt her in my old age with Bali--with the idea that paradise really did, and still does exist--knowing full well that this in the end is as much a lie as Los Angeles (the city of angels) or Philadelphia (the city of brotherly love). Why? Because she herself is paradise. She, my children, my wife, my friends. And so I use her old dreams for trickery. Because I am selfish. Because I want to see her again, to touch her, to hear her voice. E-mail and text messages just don’t cut it.

I admit it. I revel is glowing portrayals of what appears to be my happy circumstance--writing home, posting pictures on Facebook--the swaying palms, the silver surf, royal feasts, costume festivals, girls in bikinis, sexy dancers! The responses I receive fortify my glad delusions. “So beautiful! So exciting! You’re really living the life!”

I can’t bear for them to learn that it’s just Dayton, after all.

The fact is, paradise comes in small doses--which are yet large for their momentary savour. Moreover, it is sprinkled liberally throughout the earth--from Bali to Singapore, Congo to Paris. And Dayton, Ohio as well.

This is paradise: A Friday afternoon. They are launching kites at Padang Galak. They come in trucks. They spill out on the sand, setting it alight with their kites, their clothing, their laughter. And down by the sea some young men make a sculpture, their amazing artfulness producing a shapely black woman, every inch of her winking back at the sun, round buttocks raised in lush love-making to an invisible male just beneath the carpet of the endless sand. Three girls pass by, and look back as they pass, and say Hi!, and giggle, and say Hi again.

There is it, just going by. Paradise after all. Catch it if you can.

The News in the News

2011-08-09T18:31:00.001+07:00

In the old Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau classic, The Odd Couple, there is a scene where Felix Unger (played to perfection by Lemmon), newly separated from his wife and uncomfortable in his new role as a bachelor, is left in the living room by his buddy, Oscar (Matthau), to entertain two women, the Pigeon sisters--their “dates” for evening--while Oscar departs to mix drinks in the kitchen.
After enduring a painful period of silence, one of the Pigeon sisters tries to break the ice by posing a question to the fidgety, slightly sweaty-browed Felix.

“What do you do for a living?” she asks, uncrossing her legs, sitting forward in a properly anticipant attitude.

“I write the news,” Felix answers.

“Ooooo,” the Pigeon sister returns, appropriately impressed. “How interesting! Where do you get your ideas?”

“My ideas?” Felix begins, obviously nonplussed. “I get my ideas . . . Well, from the news.”

Silly, isn’t it? But I understand what the Pigeon sister meant, just as I understand Felix Unger’s unavoidable reply.

This then is the news in the news. It’s right before your eyes, by the day, by the week, and it tells its own story. One hardly needs lift a finger. It’s just there.

Take the story of the disappearing pig, for instance, as reported in a past issue of the Bali Times (as well as elsewhere). Babi Ngepet is the pig’s name and as is well known throughout the islands he comes to steal your money when you are asleep, out of the house, or otherwise unaware. The pig has been spied and pursued on occasion, but always disappears before he can be apprehended--not into a field or a forest, but into thin air. The delightful thing about this story is that it is reported as news, right alongside the rest of the news--foreign affairs, economic forecasts, disappearing pigs. I infer from this that the aforementioned pig is a fact, and I remain, therefore, watchful.

Does it seem unworldly, too strange to be true?

Well then how about the story of “The Obedient Wives Club,” a Muslim organization which advocates its members become like “first class prostitutes” in the marital bed in order to discourage their husbands from cheating? Maybe one has to be a westerner to appreciate the fullness of the hilarity here. Talk about a cultural divide. Can you imagine the existence of such a club in America, or in England? Get out of town! It might strike a man as funny, but for the western woman it is heresy most foul!

Hypocrisy seems big in the islands; so big, in fact, that we haven’t space here to do more than scratch the surface.

Consider, for instance, the story of the “Islamic Scholars” and their reaction to worldwide criticism of the light sentences (a couple months in most cases, minus time already served) handed down to Islamic extremists who killed members of the “heretical” Ahmadiyah sect in recent religious violence. What was the answer given by the Council of Ulema? Why, a counter-criticism of course (if they weren’t inclined to face the facts--and the videotape--in the first place, why would they be so inclined in the aftermath?).

“Western countries must respect another country’s judiciary system,” the Council said, and then went on to cite the case of Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivic, as if he had provided some kind of legal or moral groundwork. The Council noted that Breivic will face a maximum sentence of 21 years, while in Indonesia a terror suspect would be facing a death sentence.

Ah, shame on us. We had obviously mistaken a time period of 21 years as something essentially different than a period of two months.

Being a body of fair-minded men, the Council concluded with the following:

“It’s okay if they (the western countries) want to have a say, as long as they are not applying any pressure.”

And that’s the news in the news folks. Goodnight.

Chaos on Wheels

2011-08-05T14:57:00.002+07:00

I'm on a bit of a roll these days about two-wheeled and four-wheeled vehicles, and the half-witted drivers who operate many of these on the roads of Bali. Now don't get me wrong. One can find half-witted drivers anywhere and everywhere in the world. The difference is that they will often be found (and stopped, and corrected, or even arrested) elsewhere in the world, whereas on the island of Bali they are for all appearances free to go their merry and all-too-often deadly way without interference from the police, who are much too busy collecting roadside fines from bule motorists whom (they hope) do not have a proper local license or a vehicle registration or are otherwise lacking in some less than pertinent way. Pertinent to what? Well, pertinent to the actual ability to safely operate a motor vehicle within the parameters of good reason.

Where enforcement of the law does not exist, neither will adherence to the law. This is also the same in every country, state and province over the whole of the wide world, for the mass of men do not obey laws by choice or through some innate sense of moral or communal responsibility, but through fear only along with the experiential effect of negative reinforcement--i.e. the application of a sufficiently unpleasant penalty in the form of the traffic ticket, the court summons, the license suspension or the impounded vehicle. Take away the penalty, take away the threat of consequence, and every man becomes a loose cannon, and therefore a reckless driver.

People’s thoughts and actions are bent toward evil from childhood.

There you have it, from the big book itself. I didn’t say it, God did.

So what are the choices of men in the absence of meaningful application of law?

I will offer a few examples by way of illustration.

The two-lane road becomes a four-lane road, the four-lane road an eight-lane road--despite the visible presence of those funny white lines on the tarmac. Vehicles travelling within the confines of the white lines are not longer in the right, they are merely in the way. And so you go between them, elbowing through like the jammer on a roller derby team. Maybe you clip a couple of side mirrors as you squirt on through, but oh well. Catch me if you can, right?

The driver of the car now betrays his secret dream--that his car has somehow become a motorbike. Darting in and out, from far right lane to curbing strip and beyond, at speeds generally unavailable to the smaller two-wheeled impediment, the driver of the car employs the ever popular nyelip-nyelip tactics of his erstwhile nemesis. Ah freedom! Which in due time very likely ends in serious injury or death to the motorbike driver and whatever passengers, men, women or children, he might be conveying.

Walking on Legian street the other night, my friend and I were suddenly confronted by a motorbike--not because we were walking in the street, but because he was driving straight toward us (and almost through us) on the sidewalk. My friend informed him, with a yet unlearned English sense of propriety, that streets are for bikes and sidewalks for pedestrians.

“Well this is my shop,” the man objected, pointing to the warung just beyond our legally and reasonably positioned feet.

We just happened, you see, to be blocking his way, and the pertinent point has nothing to do with walkways or streets, but with the fact that a motorbike is bigger and more powerful than a person, and so you’d better get out of the way.

Why not? Where law is absent, might is right. It’s the survival of the fittest (or the fastest and fleetest).

Overcrowding on the roadways is a problem. Traffic congestion is a problem. The uneducated driver is a problem. The hotdog youth is a problem. But the root of the evil is man himself, unbridled by the civil responsibility that only law, and the officer of the law, can enforce.

The Bad Side of Bali Sports

2011-07-25T17:58:00.002+07:00

On Saturday, July 23^rd, at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I had the not so rare privilege of becoming a Bali highway and byway statistic. I reckon it’s about time, after having lived on the island more than a year and a half now without collecting any distinguishing ordeals or injuries. While others I know have managed to gather various honours of long-time residence--the rabid dog bite, the petty theft, the wily scam--I myself had so far remained nothing more than an anonymous bystander, warming the bench, so to speak, for those more heroic players on the actual field of experience.

But no more.

For at 2 o’clock on that fateful Saturday I joined the ranks of the more fortunate when I found myself suddenly airborne, catapulted over the handlebars of my motorbike by the force of impact caused when another bike rammed full speed into mine from behind.

It’s not an experience one can enjoy or savour at the time, for it happens too fast. It’s rather like when your feet fly out from under you on a wet surface (a particularly popular feature of the common Balinese terrace). The next thing you know you’re on your back, probably groaning, wondering how you got there. It is only afterward that the experience can be appreciated, filled out and fleshed in, reconstructed in detail.

How did I do that, you wonder? I had not realized that I was so agile. How is it that a man who has enough trouble just standing to his feet from his bedside in the morning manages in this miraculous moment of accidental vehicular interaction to actually fly through the air, defy the law of gravity, do a back flip in the sky and alight again upon the unkind pavement (no net, folks!), skidding to a halt on his elbows, back, and rear end, while his bike--that mode of conveyance to which he had a split second earlier been master--screeches to a halt in a shower of sparks like a derailed locomotive, just short of amputating ankle and knee?

“What did you do?” the young girl who had rammed me said, launching into the familiar attempt to cloud the waters (for she has no money, you see; no insurance, no helmet, probably no driver’s license either).

Perhaps 53 Indonesians emerge from nowhere to minister to the now weeping girl, while bule tourists turn and walk the other way, or slip into something more comfortable, like a nearby shop.

It has become a bit of a Bali sport, hasn’t it? Wind surfing. Jet skiing. Handlebar vaulting.

But I do not intend in any of the above to make sport of the serious problems that exist on the streets and thoroughfares of Bali. One has either to laugh, cry, or do both.

“Roads of Death” was the term used in a recent edition of The Bali Times, which reported a mind-boggling total of 758 deaths during the months of March, April and May 2011--eight fatal accidents a day. It is a matter of overcrowding, we are told, a matter of increasing tourism and therefore increasing vehicular congestion, stagnant to nonexistent plans to ameliorate the situation, a toxic mix of ignorance and carelessness on the part of many motorists where the rules of safe driving, or indeed the value of human life are concerned, along with the crowning shame of disinterest and inaction that typifies the non-responsive attitude of the local police force, whose officers seem clearly more interested in lining their pockets with the proceeds of easy roadside bribes than in bothering those who daily circumvent not only the law but the most basic precepts of common sense.

In my case, I escaped with a few scrapes and bruises. I picked myself up, retrieved my battered yet functional bike, and was on about my business of the day. Not all have been so lucky. In fact most recently seven hundred fifty-eight souls have not.

Dragonfly

2011-07-22T19:20:00.000+07:00

DRAGONFLY

“…and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
--Friedrich Neitzsche
　

Three times in a handful of mornings I have been visited by a dragonfly at my table in the yard. It is a black dragonfly, of medium size as dragonflies go, and seems, just as I am, a creature of habit, for he comes to visit just as soon as I sit down and take my first sip of coffee and light my first cigarette of the day.

Do I appear to imply in the above that this is the same dragonfly on each occasion? Well, I intend to imply no such thing. Rather, I state the matter as a fact. He is the same. He is black, as I have stated, he is of medium size, and he comes as if by appointment, or perhaps as somehow appointed.

Moreover, he possesses a certain character that cannot escape notice, nor allow him to be judged as an anonymous sort of creature. He sits always, for instance, at the top of the chair opposite mine. On the top right, in fact, facing me. Not on the side, not on the seat, not in the middle or on the left. He sits on the top right, as if returning to a personal notch in space and time. Nor does he sit only (and herein lies further proof of his authenticity). Rather, he sits facing me for some minutes, then rises to hover perhaps a foot above the chair top, then returns to his seat (same notch, same groove) to examine me anon with the same carefulness, ever so focused and yet so perfectly serene.

He is devoted, this fellow, a reliable bug. He inspires me, and conveys in his simple presence something of magic, a hypnotic effect, so that my own mind falls back in repose on the stillness of fragile wings, resting, rising, moving gracefully in space and by a will not my own, as if attentive to a conductor’s baton or a wizard’s wand. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags . . . .

How long like this are we silent together? I know not the duration, but seem lost (and yet found) in a shapeless parcel of time, a lotus tree moment. I think at once that the dragonfly is my brother, dead these 27 years and 4 months, returning now not in the splendour one might expect, but as this homely creature all dressed in black. But this, you see, is just how he was, and what he would do. Much of beauty is no more than pretence. Earth laughs in flowers, Emerson says; but I say that most of the world only comes around in full force when the rest of it goes away for a time.

People are continually given over to the notion that in order to seek something, they must do something. They must move their arms, move their legs, struggle through strenuous courses, as if revelation were a cliff to climb or peace of mind a set of rapids to cross. We go on treks--the river trek, the jungle trek, the mountain trek--and come away with the reward of a passing flush of hormones, sticky with an effusion of sweat.

And all the while this black dragonfly waits, as placid as the Sphinx, in-filling the whole world through the medium of silence from his humble throne in my yard, and echoes for the edification of he who will simply stop and see, the words that once rested on another mortal’s tongue--

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

A Few Tips for the Newcomer

2011-07-12T18:28:00.002+07:00

Recently an Englishman arrived in my neighbourhood in Biaung. He moved into a house just a couple doors away from my good friend Vick’s house. Vick is also an Englishman, and so there are two of them now. This makes for far too many Englishman in the neighbourhood, if you ask me.

But in any case, this Englishman’s first questions, naturally enough, centred on matters of general etiquette and law here in Bali. What exactly, he wanted to know, was the speed limit on the roadways? Curiously (in his mind anyway), he had observed no posted signs.

“Speed limit, you say?” Vick answered. “Well . . . how fast does your car go? It really depends on that, and on how many cars are in your way.”

“Ah, I see. Well, what about drinking? I had a couple beers the other night, and I just wondered--how many beers do you reckon one could get away with?”

“How many beers can you drink?” was Vick’s reply.

The man, you see, was still swimming on the falling crest of the strange warp between West and East, and just about to hit the sand with a resounding thump. One may know well enough that he is not in Kansas anymore, but just exactly where in the world has he landed? That is the question.

And so I thought I’d do my part by offering a few tips to help orient the newcomer

The white lines, for instance, which in the West serve to divide traffic lanes or designate pedestrian crosswalks mean nothing in Bali. For all practical purposes, it was a waste of white paint, which might otherwise have been used for graffiti, and more meaningfully so at that.

“You want woman?” is not an offer of a housemaid. Similarly, “You want very young woman, maybe 17?” is also not an offer of a housemaid.

It will take approximately 3 weeks and 7 phone calls to get your Indovision hooked up and working. An Indovision crew (two guys on a motorbike) will come to your house within two weeks, but on this initial visit they will bring no tools or cables or dishes. They have either forgotten these common tools of the trade, or it is ‘simply not done.’

You will find that every other day is a Hindu ceremony of some sort, and that the days in between are Muslim holidays. These are of varying size and commotion and you will need to anticipate unusually snarled traffic, or even becoming, unintentionally yet inextricably, a part of the procession.

Expect to be stopped by the police on a regular basis. It’s nothing you did. It’s simply your skin colour. Don’t take it personally. Ignore the whistle and the pointing finger. Everyone else does, and so it will make you seem more of a “local.” If you go out of your way to pull over to the side of the road, you have merely shown yourself to be as callow as they were hoping you would be. Once stopped, in any case, don’t bother asking what you did wrong. It doesn’t matter. Just cut to the chase and give the man Rp.50.000.

When the woman on the beach says “Come look my shop, just looking-looking, very cheap,” she does not really want you to just look at the shop, and the things in the shop are not really very cheap at all.

If you paid Rp.200.000 for your ubiquitous Bintang tank top, you paid too much. If you paid 100.000, or 70.000, or even 50.000, this was also too much. But in some sense this is okay, for you have made your contribution to that which keeps the island of Bali in business--to whit, the Bintang tank-top, along with the Bintang itself at its own exorbitant price.

Lastly I will mention the honking of horns. In the western world the horn is a shout, an explicative. Here the horn says “Hi! I’m Ketut, and I’m coming through on your left. Hati-hati, ya!”

A Journey in Time

2011-07-05T08:20:00.002+07:00

Sitting at the patio table at the front of my yard I watch two boys ride by the open gate on bicycles. One boy is bigger, one is smaller, but both bikes are the same height. They are simple bikes--no gears, just handlebars, a frame, and wheels. I think that the boys are brothers. One boy--the bigger boy--pedals along easily, long legs pumping in even stroke, like a swimmer in air, while the other reaches with his tiptoes for an elusive grip on the twirling stirrups, ever redoubling his efforts to catch the long shadow of his companion.

And at once I am transported to another time--a different time, and yet somehow the same. I am the smaller boy, my brother the bigger, separated by two years, and yet separable by nothing short of death. My bike is a Cadillac, his a Ferrari, or so we say. My father had bought them somewhere--a garage sale, a second-hand shop. We didn’t have much money. No one did back then. On my block, in my town, everyone was equal. And seemed happy enough at that.

What Proustian cake is this that my soul has suddenly imbibed, extracting such a magic of transport from a moment? Two boys, two bikes, two score and ten years in the balance?

It is the magic of the Third World, it is the magic of Bali, an island arisen from a warp in time. It is the magic of standing still, or at least seeming to, and then catching up long after I’m gone.

In the dark of evening a woman passes by alone She turns her head to look my way. Her eyes meet mine and she smiles. She is not fearful, not worried. She is merely walking, going somewhere, going home, as any free man or woman ought to be free to do--and yet would not be in my time, in my place, in my country. Not now, and not ever again.

I know the street--I know it suddenly once again--removed now from a place five decades in the past to reappear outside my gate on the far side of the world, on an island which, as foreign as it is, may as well be my life and my home.

And I marvel at this miracle of regression, this device of displacement; marvel yes, and also inwardly wince at the sadness of an old world lost. I lament, as once the poet, William Carlos Williams lamented. We have to get back to the beginning and do it over again.

In the dark of night I take a walk, down the street to the alley, down the alley to the Bypass. Up ahead a group of young men becomes apparent in the darkness, standing by motor bikes parked by the wall. I wonder whether I should continue or turn back, when one of the men sees me, beckons, speaks.

“Where are you going? Where are you from? How long will you stay?

What, no knives? What, no guns? What, no threat to life and limb?

Where am I now, other than where I came from? A kinder time, a world and an eon away.

I was one evening on the beach at Ketewel, just to watch the waves. One other man there was on that beach. I might have thought from all I had learned in a life lived in another place that we would turn our backs, that we would walk away, and yet it seems we are metal and magnet and must therefore attract. It seems we have something in common after all.

It happened then as we conversed that two other men walked by. They were speaking together, discussing the day, and I noted that they were holding hands in simple, brotherly way. One might have been my father, one might have been his bosom friend--but for all the years in between and the decease of such innocent things.

Down to the Sea

2011-06-16T15:43:00.000+07:00

In olden day I used to occasionally hear it said that one who lives at the beach never actually goes to the beach. This was in the U.S., by the way, where beaches are generally far away from the lion’s share of the nation’s populace. These are the domain of the few who happen to live on the edge (geographically speaking), while the rest find themselves separated from surf and sand by amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty (as the old anthem has it).

Nonetheless, I found this notion suspicious at best, very possibly wholly fallacious. What, to live by the sea and the fresh salty air, the foamy whispering of the tide, the awesome crash of white topped breakers and yet not set foot upon the sand? It cannot be!

Why then have these people lied, I wondered? Do they seek to devalue the thing in order to keep it all to themselves, to protect, with premeditated greed, their purchase on the pleasant shore, their place in the sun, so that more will not come and altogether spoil what must surely be Eden?

Bastards!

I reckoned this was the case, anyway. Until I came to live in Bali, that is.

At the outset, I must say, I did take full advantage of my new proximity to the beach and the sea, and it seemed for a time to be all that I had imagined it would be--proof, moreover, that those lucky folks back home had been either bald-faced liars or simply dull of spirit. Not a day did I spend in my house or in the town without making a special point of going down to the sea, to bask in the sun, to lie back on Sanur’s calm, buoyant, salt leavened water-bed and, floating face up, gaze at the tropical heavens and the coming and going of all their pillow-like dreams, chariots and dragons and sails and sheep.

“I must down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship, and a start to steer her by . . . “

And then two things happened, more or less at once.

The one was that I was told I could not sit (much less lie) in any of the fifty-two generally unoccupied chaise lounges on the beach front without paying Rp30,000 to the restaurant that owned them. This despite the fact that I had already paid for coffee, and sometimes breakfast (albeit, admittedly, the cheap continental one). Highway robbery! What avarice is this? Clearly there is a matter of principal at hand. All I want, after all, is a tall ship, and etcetera.

The other development was that I began, little by little, and then by ever increasing degree, to prefer the dry and comfy path-side table to the gritty sand, the gritty towel, the sticky surf, the beating sun.

Oh, I still go down to the beach, but the salt surf and the downy white puppet shows in the sky have somehow been left behind; for more often than not I will be found sitting at a table at Luhtu’s café, sipping a coffee, reading the Jakarta Post or the Bali Times, my back to the breakers and the bubbling tide, watching instead the passers-by on the foot path, the tourists and the locals, the sellers and their children, the health-nut Europeans who jog by in Nike Gear, dripping and huffing, dripping and huffing, teeth clenched in bitter determination, little knowing where they are. I ask you, how many Balinese folk do you see jogging under the dripping son, Nike Gear or no Nike Gear? I mean really, get a clue.

What is more interesting, after all--the march of the surf or the march of humankind.

And . . . Hmm . . . I wonder if these couch potato fat cats in America already knew all this.

Alligators

2011-06-08T16:50:00.000+07:00

“Alligators, you say? Abandoned alligators? Starving alligators? Where?”

I’m not the world’s greatest cynic, nor even the islands greatest one, but I’m not callow either. I’m more like St. Thomas, the disciple who doubted, and these alligators sounded like myths to me.

Show me the marks of the nails in your hands. Show me the wound where the spear pierced through. Show me the alligators.

So we headed, me and Vick, for the beach at Padang Galak, otherwise known as Taman Festival Beach after the sprawling tourist park that had once graced its shores. And yet the Festival opened and closed within a handful of years, victim, as is so often told here in Bali, of an imperfect permit. So it stands, or rather slumps, fallow now, deserted.

What better attraction for two friends without wives to tell them what they ought to be doing instead? For mine has gone to LA, and his to Java--equally, by practical measure, far away.

At Padang Galak a wide footpath and a breakwater barrier of enormous black rocks separates the surf from the tangled green of terra firma. Tall breakers roll in at high tide to batter the face of the barrier wall like tireless, grey-knuckled fists. It’s a working man’s beach, is Padang Galak. A sober beach. A relentless beach. No tourists here; no sellers, no shops; no sunny chaise lounges or plump sunbathers. Fishermen, teetering like reeds on the mountainous rocks, ply the chaotic crevasse where sea meets land for the meagre sustenance of the day. Driftwood lean-tos dot the carpet of gritty black sand to the surf, and here the fishermen, their wives, and their children kindle their fires, cook their catch, and lie in the shade during the height of the day.

But we have come to see alligators, and therefore turn from sea to land. Here we find a huge barn-like structure, dilapidated, half eaten by weather and wind, arising from the jungle like a castle in a mist to loom above outlying huts and outbuildings, all sinking as one to the eternally ravenous appetite of the island, for lumbar, for stone, for buildings, for men.

A high-walled concrete canal defines the outer edge of the Festival grounds.

. “This is where they used to swim,” Vick says.

Further in through the knee deep green are the Java huts, where food and art and souvenirs were once sold. Pathways, grown over with vines and brambles lead to signposts now bereft of messages. And here is where the swimming pool once had been--or rather still is, and yet is not. For what is a pool without water, without swimmers? An open mouth, a parched tongue.

One envisions brightly clad clumps of humanity, Bermuda shorts, Panama hats, blond haired girls, shouting boys. One tries, I should say, but it is quite impossible, for the land, the trees, the flora, the fungi have reclaimed time itself and cast a palling hush on the place. Whatever this was, or was meant to be, has now become ethereal Stonehenge.

In the past ten minutes we have whispered but three words apiece.

We stand now above a flat green lake, the very colour of the monster which ate the park--silent, still, patient as a predator. This is where the alligators live and thrive. And so we wait, gazing forward, standing back. And the green water returns not so much as a ripple.

“They’re in there,” Vick says.

We wait. We wait. And the ocean and the wind and the sky and the dusk begin to creep stealthily upon us from behind.

Hush, my darling, don’t fear, my darling, the lion sleeps tonight.

I will say not that I saw an alligator, for indeed I did not. And yet I came away a believer. It’s more than the testimony of circumstantial evidence. I know by faith they are there.

A Little Less Than Rapture

2011-05-31T07:05:00.000+07:00

It seems that the Rapture--that increasingly well known and ever more gross misunderstanding of Christian scripture--has once again come and gone without appreciable effect on the world as we know it, although this latter is of course because the event did not, as usual, actually occur.

What event?

Well, that same that has been predicted at regular intervals throughout the last couple centuries of our soul-starved times. It is that great beginning of the end, proclaimed on the poster boards of the crackpots of old, in the shrill sermons of the charismatic periphery, and more lately through the buzz of the worldwide web.

REPENT, FOR THE END IS NEAR!

There will be troubles and trials, wars and rumours of war. And then the Lord Jesus Himself will pop in briefly to collect his true sheep before the s--t really hit’s the fan in a period of universal tribulation preceding His more ceremonious second coming and the final judgement.

“Listen, I tell you a mystery,“ says the Apostle Paul in the epistle to the Corinthians. “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”

In the wildly popular series of “Left Behind” books by authors Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins, this scripture (along with others) is lifted from scripture on the wings of extravagant fancy as we are told that one day soon the truly chosen will suddenly disappear from the face of the earth. Beds will be empty, towns will be deserted (except for Las Vegas); cars, suddenly driver-less, will careen into walls, planes will fall from the sky due to the unlucky subtraction of their Christian pilots (making travel with non-Christian airlines the safest bet in the short-term).

This is The Rapture, in modern lore. Sound fun? Well, in our day of magicians and magic wands, of dark powers and enchanted solutions (Just use the Force, Luke), I guess it does. Swords and sorcery, Jihads and Crusades have always been more interesting, as well as more personally accessible, to the common folk of the world than lives lived with charity, compassion and sacrifice.

But is the term “rapture” actually in the Bible? No, it’s not. Is there a Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek word that can be translated reliably as “rapture?” Well, no.

Rapture itself is of course a real word in English. In fact, I can attest to moments of rapture that I have experienced for myself (as understand the word), but these moments have generally been connected with the intimate proximity of a beautiful woman. So that is obviously something different from the coming of the Lord in blazing clouds of glory. I believe.

I don’t mean to be sacrilegious. God forbid. But I am angry. I am angry at people like Harold Camping, the author of the most recent silliness involving the most recent magic date of May 21st. I’m angry at charismatic pastors who prefer tickling parishioners’ ears to to conveying in real-life terms the precious word of God. I am angry at the insult inflicted on that same holy word, or on any holy body of any holy scripture, by the application of worldly ignorance, superimposed like a blindfold on the truth.

“Listen!” Paul says. Don’t speak, just listen. The word of God is a whisper of love, not a call to arms.

"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

So says Jesus in Matthew 24. Did you miss this, Harold? Or do you merely discard what does not fit with fancy?

COP STOP

2011-05-23T18:02:00.000+07:00

Here’s something we never get tired of hearing about. The weekly, twice weekly, or thrice weekly “cop stop.” We’ve all been there, right? We bules, I mean. In fact, the activity soon becomes so familiar that we begin to miss the experience if too much time passes between incidents. An essential ingredient seems missing from life in Bali as we know it.

What happened? Where are all my buddies? Gone? Those long lines of crisply uniformed, whistle blowing, machinegun packing officers of the law, custodians of the traffic jam; those princes of petty larceny; those smiling faces; the snappy salute; the unfolding of our wallets for the exchange of money. What sort of bargain can we strike this time? Fifty thousand, or maybe even thirty?

Sure, it’s not the cheapest entertainment in town, but still it is part of the overall ambience of the island. Moreover, we get to meet a lot of new people and exchange niceties. “Where you from? How long you stay? Oh I have a cousin in San Francisco!” And so on. Recently one officer saluted me so many times that I felt like a retired five star general.

Maybe we see an officer we already know. What’s his name again? Chan? Fife? And so we ask the officer who has made the actual stop whether we can receive the fine from our friend instead.

Now don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the gist of what’s being done here. Given the recent renewal of threats from people who just can’t stop playing with matches, the Bali police force has been put on full alert, and the officers have been given the authority to stop any and every car or motorbike without specific cause in order to prevent the aforementioned pyromaniacs from bringing another bomb to our paradise. It’s a good idea, I think. Even if it is a bit bothersome, it is still worth the bother (ostensibly), just the same as security checks and the resulting long lines in American airports is worth the bother, for the alternative to a lack of vigilance is unthinkable.

During one recent stop I mentioned to the officer that I had just been stopped two hours earlier while travelling in the opposite direction. Yes, yes, it’s okay, he said. Nothing wrong for you, but we look for the bomb. Terrorists have declared war on the police.

So they have. And so they have done on whole human race.

But hold on a sec. Something’s wrong here. The aim is not quite level with the barrel. For I see, as I stop my bike, remove my helmet, take my license from my wallet with a certain slight of hand (in order to hide the money therein), that quite a few cars and bikes are slithering through the blockade unfettered. Suspicious looking cars and bikes, if you ask me. Here goes a black pickup with no front bumper. There goes another with no license plates and no rear window. And what about those cyclists who are sneaking along the outer sides of the big trucks like pilot fish?

In fact, as I notice in a politically incorrect albeit factual sort of way, that they are stopping all cars and bikes driven by the unlikeliest appearing terror suspects--white people, bules, wealthy Indonesians in big silver cruisers.

I have to wonder, statistically speaking, how likely it is that potential terrorists are being detained? How likely is it that wealthy people, of any nationality, otherwise busy at enjoying the better things in life, would decide ‘for no particular reason’ (as Forrest Gump might put it) to blow themselves up?

But of course I’m not serious. It’s a question of money, that’s all. It is business as usual, regardless of responsible intentions at the top. On a practical level, the thing is a charade, and not something terrorists need worry too much about.

bin Laden

2011-05-06T08:44:00.001+07:00

I suppose that everyone must have something to say about the recent demise of Osama bin Laden. I say must have, for it seems a moral obligation. Here is a man who had an effect on the whole world. Not like Gandhi, mind you. Not like Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed. No, more like Adolph Hitler, more like Joseph Stalin, more like Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot. Here is a man who started out by betraying God, anyone’s God, along with all things decent when he conceived and ordered the murder of more than 3000 innocent men, women and children in New York City, and now he has ended up dead, his own victim, nothing more.

Is there a question here? Is there a decent person who, possessing the most fundamental ingredient of moral sense, would object to this self-inflicted death, or call it unfair, or call it (God forbid) unfortunate?

No, there is no pathos here, no martyrdom. There is only one sad little man who went astray from the community of man and the house of God.

Human beings possess an innate sense of right and wrong, just the same as they possess a nose and a navel. If later in life we murder our fellow man in the name of religion or politics or greed or power, we have departed from the moral sense with which we were born. If we reduce another human being to an idea, to an object, to a target, we insult God Himself, in whose image that human being had been made.

Was Osama bin Laden a Muslim? No. I know Muslims--many of them--and I find them to be much like myself. They are people--fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters--partaking together in the joy and in the struggle that is life on planet earth. We want to love and be loved, to thrive, to eat, to seek friendship and community. We are simply doing our best. We are just trying to get through life. Who then is the man who decides to murder his fellow--that same fellow who is helping to row the same communal ark of this journey through life? How far away has this man had to remove himself from reality to arrive at the point where he can conceive of individual human beings as nothing more than pawns in an ideological and altogether inhuman warfare?

There is no question. Right is right, wrong is wrong. Love breeds understanding. Hate breeds death.

An infected part has been removed for the benefit of the integrity and health of the whole body.

And now some of us are worried about a proper burial for this cancerous tissue. You’re kidding, right?

No.

Once upon a time there was a man named William Calley. He was a lieutenant in the United States army during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant Calley decided one day to massacre scores of innocent men, women and children at a place called My Lai. In his mind he had reduced them to lumps of mud. Without compassion, without pity, without humanity, he ordered the murder of these people. Men, women, brothers, sisters, children, toddlers, teens, infants. They were the enemy.

I ask you now, does anyone care over-much about the procedure that will attend Lieutenant Calley’s burial? Does anyone care about the manner in which Adolph Hitler was buried?

How about the burial of 3000 people in the State of New York? Does anyone care?

If you type in the name William Calley on Google, you will come up with the story of the My Lai massacre. If you type in Hitler, you will come up with the murder of 6 million Jews. If you type in bin Laden, you will come up with the cold blooded murders of 9/11. History tells the story in the end, and the extremist hype of the day cannot hide long from the essential truths that peaceful men and women will always share.

An Elemental Home

2011-05-02T17:02:00.000+07:00

I do some writing here off an on for a certain magazine. I guess you would call it a tourism magazine. You know, one of those glossy little packets with slippery pages, slippier prose, and full colour photography featuring white washed villas, green garden paths, verandas and pools and beach front vistas overlooking the azure sea. Jimbaran stuff, right? Nusa Dua destinations.

I make no money in this venture--my services being purely gratis--but it gives me a chance to see some of the island, as well as to meet some of the island’s people, though not many, mind you, as most of the people I meet live in castles that may as well be somewhere else. In fact, for all practical purposes, they are somewhere else.

And so I began to think one day, during a staff meeting concerning what sort of story we could do for a German home appliance supplier that had just bought a full page advertisement, about the sort of real world story we could do instead. One about Bali--the actual place as opposed to the brochure dreamland.

And so, dear reader, I make a bit of a departure below. No Villas here, no Ming Dynasty “vawses,“ no gazebos or gardens or gothic towers--none of the usual glitz and glimmer. Rather, we shall visit the island of Bali, and hope, if only for a moment, to impart a new, more down to earth taste for the palate of our typical reader.

Here then is the classic Balinese homestead. This simple one room dwelling is made completely of stone on the outside. It is also made of stone on the inside. In fact the stone on the inside is the backside of the stone on the outside. It is, in short, the same stone, inside and out.

Within these understated walls we find furniture in the well-loved antique style, cleverly constructed from aged planks of pre-used lumbar found in the pristine field out back (which is where the pre-used nails were found as well). On the armoire, brightly nostalgic in the classic red and yellow hues of 1950’s plastic ware, sits grandma’s unfinished bowl of mie goring, although grandma herself has not been seen for several months’ time, and may, it is thought, have succumbed to Dengue Fever.

From the square eco-friendly front window (for it has no glass or other impediment to the cooling breeze), we turn and take three steps to the far side of the house, careful not to stir the dust along the way. There in the corner sits a tiny crutch, propped just so, waiting for its tiny owner to return. And a chicken. Beside the crutch and the chicken are a few pellets of chicken dung, as well as one dog turd.

Lighting throughout this classic style home is unobtrusive, as indirect as a tongue in cheek comment--none of these glaring overhead globes, which do, after all, require electricity, not to mention money for payment of the electric bill. Therefore, we are inclined to call the interior lighting here a suggestion rather than a shout, a rumor rather than an actual fact.

Mother’s bed is on the eastern wall, nestled beneath several rather artistically imperfect stones that jut from the wall and serve as convenient natural nightstands. Or handholds if need be. Father’s bed is there too. As are the beds of junior and his two brothers.

A short distance further into the interior of the home (and I do mean short), we find we are actually in the backyard. In fact, we find ourselves standing in the bathroom. It is a sharing of space, a dialogue with nature, a marriage of the elements inside and out--air, greenery, light, earth and stone. Again, the accent is on simplicity, on an intimate relationship with the land.

And the evidence of this relationship is all about,

What I Dislike About America

2011-04-29T16:22:00.000+07:00

Last week I wrote an article for this column entitled “What I dislike about Indonesia.” In the article, I listed some particular failings of the country, some being amenable to change (like corruption), and some (like the shortness of people) being quite unpremeditated, and therefore certainly no fault of the country itself.

Lest I be found prejudicial, or accused of harbouring some favouritism toward any Country in particular, I will now offer a few words about America, the Country of my birth. I am impartial, you see, merely a reporter, so it’s the facts and only the facts.

And the fact is--a sad one, I think--I have lived in only two countries during my lifetime, which extends at this point to 57 years (another sad fact, that).

Oh, and Canada. I forgot about Canada. It’s easy enough to do.

There are 195 countries in the world. That leaves 192 yet to be explored. And so I am hopeful. And then after that there may be the possibility of visiting Mars--given the proper advances on the part of science, along with an incredibly long lifespan on mine.

So what do I dislike about America?

OMG, don’t even get me started!

I’m going to pass over the small points here--the high cost of living, the rampant incidence of violent crime, the inner-city gang wars, the soaring national deficit (now in the trillions), the collapse of the housing market, the more than 250,000 foreclosures in the year 2010, the political imperialism so cleverly disguised as compassionate nation building--and address instead a few points of character, or rather the demise of character.

America has become a giant corporation, a machine of meshing pistons and gears in the form of human beings. It is a single sprawling company, and everyone is on the roster, from the chairman of the board to the janitor in the basement. It is a name-brand. It is an info-mercial.

Character in the vast expanse of America has been superseded by conformity, driven by an infection of ‘political correctness.’ Everyone knows the same things, says the same things, covets the same clothes, the same cars, the same condos. Everyone wears the same blindfold and gag

What is the difference nowadays between the person who lives in Los Angeles and the New Yorker--some 2400 miles apart? Just that. Two thousand four hundred miles and odd change. It’s a matter of space, not of culture or spirit. In kinder times one could find something quaint, according to the region he happened to visit. Krispy Kreme in the South, for instance. Waffle House. Seattle’s Best in--where else--Seattle. Oh, they are still there, make no mistake. In fact they are now everywhere, as prolific as MacDonald’s. So much for regional flavour.

It’s a franchise, folks. There is no difference to be found from Maine to Arizona. We are overtaken, suffocated, captivated by the banality of big money and name recognition, strip malls and sound bytes.

The American dream is a dream of abundance, but it has become an abundance adding up to nothing more than tedium. The American dream--now more illusive than ever--has its own dependent society in a firm death grip.

Give me land lots of land under starry skies above . . . Don’t fence me in.

So went the old song. Now we have the catchy commercial jingle. We sing these songs in our sleep.

In America, one can go without ever meeting his next door neighbour other than to exchange a wave or a scowl. I cannot imagine this happening in Indonesia. You wouldn’t get two feet from your front gate without a greeting. Mau ke mana? Dari Mana? Where are you going? Where have you been?“

In America we try not to look at each other. In America it’s none of your business.

Am I too harsh? Am I unfair? Well, my apologies then. But you know it’s true.

What I Dislike About Indonesia

2011-04-26T07:46:00.000+07:00

What do I dislike about Indonesia? Well, short people, for one thing. Oh, I’m not saying that I have anything against short people on the whole as a creature type. I’m sure they are all very nice. Or that many of them are, anyway. And I am also sure that there are a number of short people here who are actually fairly tall.

The problem is not with the short people themselves, but with the inconveniences they cause me to suffer.

What do I mean by this? Well, take kitchen counters, for instance. Throughout Indonesia, kitchen counters have been fashioned to suit the height of the common Indonesia kitchen user--who, moreover, is most probably a woman, and thus shorter yet. Now, I myself am not an overly tall person by American standards, and yet I find that these countertops are impossibly low--really more like cobbler’s benches than kitchen counters.

Can you imagine how difficult it is for me to perform the multiple kitchen tasks I find daily before me--washing, slicing, cooking, cleaning--when I must hobble from one end of the counter to the other bent over at a 90 degree angle? Can this be good for the spine? I think not. In fact, it does seem to me that I am a little more stooped in stature every day. It happens only by tiny increments of course, but it all adds up. For all I know the Hunchback of Notre Dame started out as a perfectly upright man, and it was just all those years of pulling on a rope to ring a bell that led in due time to a serious case of poor posture.

And then there are the common housecleaning implements which, here in Indonesia, are uncommonly abbreviated. Take the 3 foot long broom handle, for instance. It’s the same with the mop handle, the same with the outdoor rake. One of my height--which, as I have said, is no more than a regular height after all--cannot possibly stoop and bend and contort the day long without ending up like a little old man in need of a cane. Even so, I suppose the cane would be much too short as well.

That’s another thing I don’t care for, by the way. Little old men. Despite the fact that I’m a little bit old myself. But that’s a separate matter altogether, involving inconveniences its own.

I do have a proactive idea, however. I am not content to simply complain. A handle extension is what I have in mind. A handy device fashioned in such a way that it may be slipped over the handle of any existing household tool, thus extending the length of said handle to suit the Western deficit. So to speak.

What else? Oh, the humidity. I dislike the humidity in Indonesia. It seems excessive. I think the problem should be well up on the list of things that need to be addressed in this country--corruption, poverty, religious extremism, wobbly infrastructure, rising prices, decreasing pay, traffic congestion, untreated sewage. And humidity.

Oh, and then there’s the trash on the beaches of Kuta. Even though this is not really our trash per se, as one official has already made clear, it still needs to be addressed, regardless of where it came from. Unless we can convince that country to which it originally belonged to take it back again.

But aside from what I’ve mentioned above, I’m cool. There are only these few things that I dislike. The rest is all good. Wonderful, really. To tell the truth, my wife is much worse than I. She dislikes, she says, the people in general, the pollution in the air, the Bypass traffic, the motorbike drivers, the greedy sellers, the gossipy women, the rabid dogs, the rivers of garbage, the curb-side scammers. And that’s only the beginning.

My wife is an Indonesian, by the way.

She is also short.

Bummer of a Birthmark

2011-04-24T09:11:00.001+07:00

According to the Bali Times (9/3-9/2010), "Bali Police Chief, Hadiatmoko, acted this week to stop police unfairly targeting foreigners (i.e. white people)--especially those on motorbikes . . . following complaints of harassment." And etc.

It's about time, right?

We all have our stories to tell--which of course is something that makes the case all the more apparent. In my first four months in Bali I was stopped four times in traffic and paid some 500,000 Rupiah for the infraction of . . . well, being white. The first time around you pay whatever the officer suggests, as you don’t know the game (the scam, that is). After that you learn to argue ever more forcefully, you learn to negotiate, you learn to dicker. You learn to carry no more than 30,000 Rupiah in your wallet, hiding the larger money elsewhere. You learn to speak more Indonesian. You learn to say "Hell no!"

The last time I was stopped, my wife happened to be riding on the back of my scooter. As soon as she took her helmet off, and the officer noted she was Indonesian, he said "Oh, okay," and went on his way.
One hardly needs strain at conclusions here.
I know something about this. I can sympathize. One never knows what to say these days, when to say it, or who to say it to. It’s a slippery slope is common conversation, a veritable minefield--for I well remember sliding down this selfsame slope not so very long ago when I mentioned to my stepdaughter, after receiving my fourth traffic ticket here, that now I knew what it was like to be a nigger.

Yes, I used the “N” word, and given that my daughter is half black in skin colour and all black in
allegiance, this was a mistake, a gaff, an affront of the first order.

“I can’t believe you said that to me,” she complained bitterly via Instant Messenger. “You of all people should have known better.”

I should have known better? Shouldn’t it have been she who should have known? She whom I had raised since the time she was in grade school?

How is it that a child can grow and yet so completely forget? How can it happen that our efforts are so easily slain by mere slogans?

Well, I had made an assumption--and we all know the old joke about assumptions, right? I had assumed that the spirit of my words would be automatically conveyed on that invisible, that mythical belt of relationship, that tale of the years, of love, of sacrifice. Yes, that selfsame tale told ultimately by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What matters is skin colour.

But wait . . . That’s exactly what I’m saying.

The officer here in Bali had made a series of assumption as well--that I was an easy target, a stranger in a strange land, and that it was likely, being a foreigner, that I could afford a substantial penalty for these unavoidable errors.
I can’t help but be reminded here of a Far Side cartoon I once saw. In the cartoon two deer are pictured conversing in the forest. One has a circular red and white target on his chest. The caption above his companion’s head reads “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”

We Westerners wear our own targets here in Indonesia, just as glaring, just as irremovable as that deer’s unfortunate birthmark.

Black or white or yellow or brown, being a target based on skin colour is creepy. It's disheartening, maddening, frightening, and insulting. You are reduced for the personal use of the man who misuses authority in his own greedy version of racial and cultural profiling--most especially because no ticket is ever actually contemplated nor given, for the only point is the transfer of the money in your wallet to his.

Column

2011-04-24T09:00:00.000+07:00

Dear Devoted Readers (yes, the both of you)--Just want to let you know that much of what I write here in Jim Dandy will also appear weekly in The Bali Times newspaper, in a column entitled Practical Paradise. Cheers.

Grasshopper

2011-04-15T20:04:00.002+07:00

So, how do you feel about grasshoppers? That’s right, those little green bugs that hide in the yard and then jump away when you walk through the grass. The kind that kittens and children like to chase, hopping along behind like grasshoppers themselves, snatching them in a paw, cupping them in hands, collecting them for a time in an old glass jar, or maybe feeding them to a pet snake or rat, for the more zoologically inclined.

Fun, right? Child’s play. A backyard game on a day in May.

But what about the Balinese grasshopper? How do you feel about him? That grotesque exaggeration, that seeming freak of nature (if all you’re used to is Western nature, that is). Yes, that hopping, flying, menacing insect about the size of a crescent wrench. Or a Smith and Wesson revolver.  A green Smith and Wesson revolver.

He’s bad enough when you find him in the yard, though easy enough to deal with. He hops one way, you hop the other. But what if he has invaded your house? Yes, your personal living space?

Well, this is the situation I found before me last night. I was happily doing the dishes, in that happy spirit that always attends the task, when out of the corner of my otherwise undisturbed eye I spied this thing on the wall.

What in God’s Holy name!

This was the first question to enter my mind. Was it a gy-normous spider? Was it a blotch-like trick of sunlight? Was it a cat that had walked halfway up the wall between counter and ceiling?

I had stepped back a bit on first sight of the thing. Actually to the adjoining room. Now I crept forward again for a closer examination.

By God, it’s a grasshopper. An unusual one, to be sure; an incredibly large one; a completely inappropriate one; but a grasshopper nonetheless. It was not a fun sort of grasshopper, nor was it a harmless appearing sort of grasshopper. On the contrary, its general shape and attitude were more reminiscent of the Alien in the Sigourney Weaver movie by the same name than of a simple backyard bug.

So what now? We could not live together. This, in my mind, was crystal clear. But how to explain this same to the creature?

Perhaps if I nudge it, it will fly out the open door. The doors letting to the yard are always open in Bali, and of course that is how it had made entry to begin with. A mistake pure and simple, a wrong turn, no more. Surely he would be just as happy to depart as I would be to see him do so.

So I nudged. Not with my bare hand, mind you. God forbid. I nudged him with a spatula, which of course was handy on the counter from my recent happy pastime.

Now, I cannot say whether it was being nudged that the monster took exception to, or whether it was being nudged specifically by a spatula, but it was swiftly apparent that the creature did not in the least take kindly to this nudging. Straightaway bat-like wings were spread and the creature flew directly into my face, got entangled for some time in my eyeglasses, then headed through the air toward other rooms, while I myself, screaming like a girl, fled in the opposite direction.

Where to now? Where had it hidden? Behind what door, under what counter, into what cupboard, under what bed?

Ah! There it is! Clinging now to the bedroom door, still as death, thinking. Or maybe planning? That is what these things do. They think. Then they fly. Then they sit and think a long time once again. Just now, sitting there on the door, dwarfing the doorknob, the grasshopper was thinking. Here was my chance then, whilst motionless the critter lay.

What was needed was a weapon of some sort. But what?

As it happened, the nearest weapon-like object at hand was a can of air freshener. It was the strong sort of air freshener, the industrial sort, the kind of stuff that would surely be deadly to an insect, and probably to a man as well. The scent was Strawberry and Cream.

And so I took the weapon in hand, crept another step forward, drew in a breath and aimed the nozzle . . . .

Ah, but no! I cannot do it. Chemical warfare is a horrifying thing. And also banned by the Geneva Convention. I could not morally employ such measures, even against a creature as terrifying as this.

I dropped the aerosol can and searched about for something more humane.

Here, for instance, was a floor mat. A pretty thick floor mat at that. This, I reasoned, could be rolled several times, made club-like, and then wielded in one swift blow to put an end to the thing, freeing us both from this unwanted episode (though admittedly not the better for him).

Oh well, for goodness sake, it’s a bug after all--no matter whether it’s as large as a puppy. It’s only a bug, whose grave error had been to invade my house, and there are a million more bugs like him anyway (which is something I realize with horror just now, even as I plot his demise).

And so I roll my 99 percent pure cotton club with care, draw back my arm like David with his sling, and then with one mighty lurch forward I bash the thing!

And the thing flies again straight into my face! My club has simply bounced off, has glanced harmlessly away as if it were made of nothing other than . . . well, other than 99 percent cotton. Worse yet, after this second entanglement with my face, the thing has now disappeared. It is not on the wall, not on the door, not on the floor nor the cupboard nor the chair. Where, oh where?

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of death . . .

I hunt the creature pace by pace, room by room, door by door, carrying now a broom in one hand and a small stool in the other. Bug-like myself, I slide stealthily along walls, creep around corners. Where are you, Grasshopper; in what secret cove do you hide and think and wait?

There! Yes there! There on the table. Aha, my foe has made the fatal mistake! Dropping my spear and shield and leaping with great agility to the kitchen counter, I grab the plastic juice container so recently cleansed and placed thereupon, then leap back again to the table to clap the container over my prey.

Trapped, finished, defeated. The thing flies in a dozen furious circles, butts its head against the imprisoning walls, and then sits down to think again.

Carefully, I slip a magazine beneath the juice container, then transport the little prison to the yard and place it on the grass. One deft movement remains, the tipping of the container to release the insect to its proper environ. And there is sits. Huge. Spindly. Majestic. Green.  There it sits, and thinks.

It’s an amazing creature really, as I myself ponder from behind the parted back door curtain.  Perhaps I should have paused to appreciate this odd creation in a little more detail. Perhaps, after all, he meant no harm.

But the whole truth is--and I’ll be honest with you here--that like the fabled purple cow of American rhyme, I never wished to see him in the first place, and I never want to see him again.

A Three Hour Tour

2011-04-10T10:21:00.000+07:00

So get this. Recently, in the pitch black hours of a stormy midnight, a tourist boat transporting passengers to Komodo Island (yes, that’s the one with the dragons), crashed into rocks off the coast of that island and swiftly began to sink.

As the passengers scrambled in panic to grab lifejackets from the hold, they found that these and the mesh containing them were inextricably tangled together, rendering the jackets quite useless. It was then discovered that the rubber lifeboat was also useless, as there was a gaping hole in it.

As the boat listed to the starboard and slipped ever more completely into the sea, the passengers were told to gather at the side and jump into the water.

“Swim for the shore,” they were told.

One of them was a 10 month old baby.

And so they jumped. And so they swam.

Miraculously, all survived the swim and all reached the rocks. None had other than minor injuries, although a few went briefly into shock.

Later, all agreed that only one young man among the boat’s crew had tried to do anything to help them throughout the course of their experience.

Everyone for himself! It’s the way of the road here, and also, apparently, the way of the sea.

Soon enough they were all picked up by another boat and taken to the nearby island of Flores; it being thought by those in charge, no doubt, that a night spent with Komodo dragons would not be quite appropriate at this juncture.

In recompense for this unfortunate accident the passengers were given a night of free lodging on Flores. And a meal. They were told, however, that the tour boat company could not afford to fly them back to Bali, or to replace property that had been lost in the incident. Such as one woman’s laptop computer.

Now what kind of tour boat company operates a ship with useless lifejackets and a lifeboat with a hole in it? That is the question.

One often hears people here say that the Balinese are lazy. Personally I cannot believe it. They all seen no nice.

What then to make of the evidence above?

Across the River and Into the Trees

2011-04-09T17:08:00.001+07:00

I don’t like to drive a car in Bali. For one thing, the steering wheel is on the wrong side, which means that everything else is flipped the wrong way. This is continually confusing to me. Aside from that, fully 90 percent of the people on the road here are lunatics, escapees from the asylum. Oh wait, they don’t have an asylum here, and therefore they need not have escaped. They are driving test flunk-outs, unlicensed operators, maniacs, NASCAR racers, Evil Knievil wannabees, brainless zombies. What can I say? This is the way it is, folks. I wouldn’t lie. Speed is everything. Life and limb mean nothing.

Nonetheless, sometimes one simply has to drive. Such was the case last night when I was called upon to take my wife to the airport for a sightseeing trip to America. Rather, I should say I had to drive the car back home after she drove us to the airport.

Oh well, it’s just this once, right? Just this once maybe twice a year. Damn the USA. I wish it would sink to the bottom of the sea.

I have two problems with driving really--aside from the wrong-sided steering wheel issue, that is. One is that my MS, generally sleeping or sunbathing here, rolls suddenly awake at the reality of a challenge. I don’t mean that it opens its eyes, blinks and few times, rubs the sleep out, and proceeds. I mean it bolts straightaway upright as if suddenly drenched under a bucket of cold water--tense, trembling, eyes as wide as saucers and darting to and fro like frightened ravens. Yes, I’m still here! What, did you think I was gone?

The other problem I have, especially at night time, is that I can’t see worth a damn anymore. A recent visit to the eyeglasses store revealed that even the maximum adjustment fell woefully short of correcting the problem.

On the way into the airport area my wife carefully pointed out landmarks and detailed the methods by which I should return to the main road, and thenceforth to our home. And it all seemed pretty straightforward at the time. You just turn around and go the opposite direction, right?

So I put her luggage on the curbing, we exchanged kisses and goodbyes, and then we were off--she on a 38 hour journey to America, I on a ten mile return trip to Biaung.

But wait! In the brief time it took for us to park the car, set out the luggage and exchange farewells, someone had changed the entire network of roads by which we had come! Suddenly the big white statue my wife had pointed out on the way in had moved to another spot altogether, and had sprouted multiple roads like the spokes of a wheel whereas previously there had been only two. Was this even the same statue as the one she had shown me not ten minutes ago?

Without any trouble at all, I took the wrong turn at the white statue. The road I took did not lead back to the traffic light and the Bypass (which is what they call the main road here, strangely enough). No, this road, starting out wide and then shrinking down to the width of a broccoli stalk, conveyed me into a maze of motor bikes, countless Circle K stores, and small roadside bars featuring blaring music.

With considerable trouble, then, I turned the car around and headed back toward the big white statue, straining my eyes for the sight of the thing like a sea captain searching the horizon for a light house.

Imagine my relief upon finding that it had moved back to its old spot smack dab in the middle of the entryway to the airport. Thank God for small miracles. And large, unusual ones too.

One mistake, one stutter of cognition, one stumble in the dark--not too bad, really, for one stricken with this combination of MS and blindness. Here was the Bypass after all--Bali’s own version of the freeway, where there is no speed limit, no lanes as far as practice goes (despite those strange white lines that someone has painted on the pavement), and no holds barred. My next destination--the next landmark on my mental roadmap to home, was to be the next big statue--this one bigger, wider, taller than the first, radiating roads to Kuta, to Seminyak, to Sunset Highway, and to Sanur (and thence to Biaung).

And it showed up just like it was supposed to do--looming, brooding, unspeakably grand in the night, like a sudden ship-smashing rock in a stormy sea.

Now at all hours of the day and night cars and motorbikes swim fretfully around this rock, pushing and shoving, shifting and accelerating, drifting swiftly from left to right and back again as if pulled quite against their will by some drastic current. It seems to attract motorists like a strange magnet. In fact, I do believe that not a few people come out from the comfort of their homes just to go round and round this statue. Is a terrifying thing to navigate--both reassuring landmark and treacherous obstacle..

You pass one road, you pass two, you pass three--and then you take the fourth. Remember? Simple, is it not?

Well, I passed four and took the fifth. The fifth road, as it happens, is the one that goes back to the airport. And yet, as far as I was concerned, I was surely on my way back to Sanur. Until, that is, I passed the Surf Shop once again with its tall red lettering--very familiar, that--strange, are there two of them? Next I found myself ducking as an incoming 747 skimmed the top of my wife’s little black car.

So back again to the statue, the Rock, the Gibraltar of Southern Bali. One road, two, three . . . four . . . and yes five--again, five--and I was once again on my way back to the airport!

This is where MS becomes really annoying, folks. Suddenly it doesn’t seem interesting or strange . . . It seems only acutely, maddeningly, infuriatingly annoying.

Back to the statue, that demon of night. Back to the jostling bikes and cars, pushing, elbowing, dashing and darting. Back to the search, the increasingly desperate search for a single road, the one that leads home.

Use the force, Luke.

I could tell you that I had no further trouble on my way--but that would be a lie. I could tell you that I had been cured of MS by the sun and simple life of the tropics, as I have often enough told myself. But that would be a lie too. It’s there. It never goes away, and never intends to. It just rests while you rest, and wakes when its host is called upon to function like a normal person.

What’s the solution?

Next time take a taxi!

Apathy or Age?

2011-04-06T15:04:00.001+07:00

I find that as I grow older I become much less inclined to argue with people or to defend myself against unfair accusations--and I am wondering now whether this is because I have matured or simply because I’ve grown lazy or apathetic.

I’ll give you an example (as obviously something has caused this to be on my mind, right?).

I have a friend here named Victor. Originally from Stoke, England, he has lived now in Bali for 5 years or so--ever since he married a Balinese woman by the name of Iluh. Victor is a short, aggressive, scrappy sort of guy who had previously lived a rather hard life--in and out of trouble, in and out of bars, in and out of strange women’s beds.

Now Victor has slowed down (at 63), but he still likes to drink, and he still likes his freedom. In the past year I would see Vick perhaps once a week, when he would call and ask if I “fancied a pint.” This, of course, would turn into well more than “a pint,” but then he would go home and that would be the end of it for another week.

However, we have now moved to a house just a few houses up the street from Vick, and so he is now inclined to show up every day, very often wondering if I fancy a pint.

The trouble is, Victor’s rather proper, tea-tottling wife has decided that I am responsible for the beers he drinks and for the cigarettes he smokes, neither of which substances she can abide.

Okay, so I smoke--in fact much more than I or anyone else should smoke--but I’m not much of a beer drinker. The fact is, in the absence of Victor, I generally do not drink at all. I’ve nothing against it, mind you. It’s just not all that tasty, and it’s way too expensive here in Bali with the alcohol tax that is attached.

So yesterday I received a long text message from Iluh in which I was accused of corrupting poor Vick, forcing him to smoke and drink, and so on.

This is where old age comes in--for in the past I would most certainly have been inclined to immediately shoot back a better, harder, ruder message, whereas now I seem more inclined to shrug a shoulder and dismiss the matter.

And yet, it does in some way eat at me, for I wonder if silence is tantamount to agreement. By refusing to speak, do I justify the attack? Do I foster the impression that this sort of thing is appropriate?

On the other hand, I wonder what could be gained were I to join the fray. Would I not then find myself having to bust on Victor? Would I not, out of personal pride, end up merely a tattletale?

And then again I think, well perhaps it’s just better to leave things this way--for Victor will likely show up for fewer pints and fewer cigarettes, which altogether saves me time and money. Right?

It remains therefore a bit of a quandary. In Iluh’s mind, I force Vick to smoke and encourage him to drink. I am not a friend to him, she says. In my mind I am his friend, but not his mother. I somehow just cannot picture myself snatching a cigarette from Victor’s hand or refusing to share a pint, even when I might fancy one myself. He is, after all, a grown man--and an older one than I at that!

Rebecca

2011-04-02T12:32:00.000+07:00

Today, via Facebook, I relocated a great friend from my college days, Rebecca Podvent. We were together in the school of music, used to hang out together between classes, and for many years sent Christmas cards back and forth. Then at some point we lost track of one another. Ah, but by the magic of Facebook, here she is again. Moreover, it turns out that we have as a friend in common (according to Facebook's records) CathyTrueb, who is the wife of my best friend from Kindergarten (and still my best friend), Marc. Goodness the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Run-Ons

2011-03-30T17:56:00.003+07:00

Why Blogspot is failing to retain the formatting I tell it to retain, I do not know. Really I do not write in run-on paragraphs like this on purpose. It's just that when I click on post, the damn thing bunches all the paragraphs together, turning them into one long entry. Go figure. If anyone knows why this is happening, please share.

Motorist Beware

2011-03-30T16:00:00.004+07:00

Today while we were headed into Sanur for a couple of simple errands, my wife’s car was rear-ended by another car. Now, in America that’s not a huge problem, right? You just grumble a bit, get out of the car, exchange insurance information, and you’re on your way.

Not so in Bali, my friends. To begin with, almost no one here carries car insurance. I don’t blame them for this. They would be insane to do so. The insurance is shit and pretty much the only guarantee they make is that they will not pay so much as a single cent under any circumstance.

So then, what is the method of procedure? Well, although I do not understand the thinking, it seems that you must first go to the dealership for your make of car. There some men come out and mark the dents and/or scratches with a stick of chalk, some paperwork is filled out, and the driver is sent to an insurance office. Yes, even though the offending party has no insurance. It seems, as far as I can figure the thing, that insurance companies here will give loans to drivers who have no insurance. So you go to the aforementioned insurance office and the people there fill out some paperwork, examine the dents and/or scratches on your car, and then send you forthwith to the car repair shop--not to have your car repaired, mind you, but so that the people there can also fill out paperwork and study the dents and scratches.

Now considering the distances between these places, and the bumper to bumper Bali traffic, you can pretty much kiss the rest of your day goodbye. This is why it is always best to get into your accident early in the morning if at all possible.

The actual repair of your car may take place in anywhere from one week to one month, depending upon the availability of a replacement for the injured, dented, or scratched part. A bumper, for instance, a fender, a taillight. Rare creatures indeed are these.

Two Things

2011-03-28T10:01:00.006+07:00

Two things I am aware of on a daily basis. The one is that I am likely living the best days of my life here in Bali. The other is that this likely cannot last, for I am running out of money. Obviously these are mutually contradictive sorts of reality, and yet neither seems able to exist on its own without having always the other in mind. It is keenly disappointing, after having worked all my life since the age of 16 or so--working, moreover, the last 20 years for a single company--that I am left with a retirement income not sufficient even for five years in one of the world's weakest economies. I had set out to live on my savings until the time came when I began to collect Social Security. It's not working out that way. Thirty thousand dollars I have to my name. It will last perhaps two more years, at which time I will be 59 (still young, yes?). Native people here believe with all their heart that, being a Westerner, I have money. Would that their convictions were true. But the fact is I have less money than many of them. That's why they will not see me often in MacDonalds, KFC, or any of the other Bule restaurants. That's why they will not see me at Water Boom or Discovery Mall. That's why they will not see me in the shopping district at Seminyak or the cliff-side hotels in Jimbaran. I love my life here. I hate that it must seemingly end. I love being able to do all the I used to dream of doing while I had instead to work 40 hours a week collecting those riches I and my family now live on. I hate the thought of going back to work at my age. I did believe for some time, and with some conviction, that the books I had written over the last couple years must soon find homes at publishing houses, thus augmenting my poor income--but I despair of this now. My agent, not himself to be blamed, given the quality of his own dogged, nearly tireless efforts, explains that the economy is simply very bad, and the publishing business worse. Damn the American economy! Damn the Indonesian economy too. (Btw, why is this damn blog not retaining my formatting when I post?).

Critters

2011-03-28T09:50:00.003+07:00

The mornings here in Biaung are pleasantly cool, a world of difference from Sanur. I wrap a sarong around my waist and sit at the table outside and feel perfectly comfortable--not cold, not hot, just perfect. As I begin to type, hundreds of the tiniest sort of ants emerge from beneath the keys and scurry in panic between all the letters of the alphabet. They had apparently imagined that the innards of my laptop might make a good, safe home. To some extent they are correct, for if I try to brush them away, I end up with gibberish, like this: rdtfygjklhfvsdcZ. There do seem to be more ants inside my laptop than people in China. Another community, as I noted while making coffee, had found the honey jar on the kitchen counter. Microscopic droplets must have been available just around the edge of the screw-on lid, and they were carrying these droplets away, in the thousands, in the millions, to God knows where. There are a lot of ants in Bali. In fact, there are a lot of critters of every sort in Bali. Mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, flies, bees, crickets, beetles both crawling and flying. There are lizards--the cicak, the tokek, the buaya. There are snakes, frogs, mice, rats, along with other nameless creatures. And there are dogs, both domestic and feral. Where we lived in Sanur, five dogs made permanent residence in our little housing complex, while scores of others came and went like visiting aunts and uncles and cousins. Here in Biaung, however, there are not many dogs, and most of the dogs that do live here have owners who lead them about on leashes--an arrangement which, I am sure, would be perfectly unacceptable to the free, unfettered lifestyle of the Sanur dogs. There is a cat, however, who appears to have set up home inside the roof of our house and had kittens there. When the mother is gone, out looking for food or new mates, the kittens can be heard meowing and roaming about behind the walls or above the ceiling. When they are old enough, I’m sure they will climb down as well and roam about the outdoors with their mother. I hope so, anyway.

Rumah Kami Yang Baru di Biaung

2011-03-17T10:22:00.003+07:00

FINALLY, we found a house to move to, and have just finished doing so. The house is in Biaung, where it is cooler, quieter, greener, and only half as expensive to boot. Maybe now I can get back to work, or at least to relaxation.

Body Heat

2011-03-09T10:22:00.003+07:00

People who have MS run a higher body temperature than is normal, especially when under stress of any sort, be it physical stress, emotional stress, or the stress that comes with a common illness, such as a cold or the flu.

Given the general proclivity toward running a higher body temperature, people with MS are also unusually sensitive to hot climates, such as the one we 'enjoy' here in Bali.

Now take MS, the flu, the overwhelming humidity of Bali during the rainy season, roll them all together, and you get a pretty miserable outcome.

That's where I'm at right now, folks.

Nyepi

2011-03-01T09:41:00.003+07:00

Nyepi Day -- that well beloved Hindu celebration of silence and meditation -- is upon us; and this year we will try to escape the better part of the consequent boredom by driving up to Kintamani and staying two nights in a hotel there -- for outside this bastion (or various other bastions) of Western recalcitrance, no lights are allowed, no TV, no movies, no music-- no nothing, other than meditation and silence. In fact, one is not even allowed to leave his own house, for squads of Hindus, duly deputized by the local Banjar, will chase you down and deliver you to confinement in the jail. No kidding. To be a member of one of these squads is likely a cherished position, for at least they have something to do, and may walk about like free men (although very quiet ones).

But the hotel in Kintamani is exempt, you see; as are a handful of other tourist hotels. Of course, you may not go outside the hotel grounds, but you may at least go outside therein, and you may have lights, and you may watch movies, and even talk. Within the hotel grounds, that is. Moreover, it is said to be a beautiful place, built on the shore of a lake, offering excellent meals and such-like, so I look forward to the experience.

Last year I did stay in Sanur for Nyepi, and honestly it wasn't so bad. I'm a pretty sedate and sedentary person anyway. I read, I slept, I basked in the silence, and I watched the stars fall at night. But for my son, and for my wife, it is quite unbearable (and I'm sure that they would make it unbearable for me in turn). So Kintamani, here we come.

I hope they have WIFI.

Mau Ke Mana?

2011-02-28T09:38:00.003+07:00

Whenever an Indonesian sits down to eat, he will announce "makan" to everyone who is nearby ("eat") in a gesture of offering his own food for all. This is a bit confusing the first few times you hear it, as they really seem to be asking you to share their food. Of course they're not really. It's a custom. Nonetheless, should one accept the offer, the person eating would be constrained to actually share. In a like manner, whenever an Indonesia person is about to go somewhere, he will announce that he is about to do so, almost as if asking permission. An answer is also expected, for the sense is that he may not depart until given leave. "Pulang dulu," he will say (or something similar) -- I'm going home now. At that point you must say "See you later," or "be careful," or give some other form of acknowledgement. The person simply will not leave until he receives the acknowledgement. If you yourself are walking somewhere, or preparing to go somewhere on your bike or in your car, you will invariably be asked "Mau ke mana?" -- Where are you going? If you are coming back from somewhere, they will ask "Dari mana?" -- Where have you been? To a Westerner it seems almost nosy; but, again, it is a custom. And, again, you must answer, or appear quite rude.

Mister Richard

2011-02-23T09:41:00.003+07:00

People here in Indonesia commonly misuse the word "mister." They want to use it in the sense that they themselves use the word "Bapak," which is a respectful way of addressing a male. So while it would be common for them to say "Bapak Richard," it is of course weird to say "Mister Richard." There is a politeness and respect in this culture that just doesn't really exist in America anymore. When I was young, for instance, we would pretty commonly use the term "Sir" if addressing someone older or someone in authority, but even this is uncommon these days. Nonetheless, Indonesian people are just very reticent to use first names unless they know someone intimately. In the case of women, it is either Ibu or Mbak (for a married or older woman, or a single or younger woman respectively). So I am either Bapak or Tuan (the latter being used only for a foreigner), but almost never Richard.

And The Beat Goes On

2011-02-18T10:24:00.001+07:00

It seems at present quite certain that we will soon move to one or the other of two houses. Certainty, however, is most certainly a matter of general uncertainty on the island of Bali.

The first of these two abodes is one we had looked at from the outset of our search. Located in Biaung, 15 minutes north of Sanur, it is larger than our present home and also has a yard and patios. This goes for 2000 USD a year (as compared to the 4000 we would be paying otherwise). The catch on this one is that the landlord’s daughter may or may not decide to move to Bali from Java. This we will know (as is said anyway) by the end of this month.

The second house is also located in Biaung, actually on the same street, and it is smaller, with only one bathroom, but goes for 1500 a year. The catch here is that the man who is living in the house doesn’t want to move, nor does he want to pay rent. He has been told (as is said) that he must vacate by June 1st.

So there you have it.

The beat goes on.

A Happy Marriage

2011-02-17T08:46:00.003+07:00

On the laptop this morning an ad popped up which read "Find a Muslim Husband," and pictured a happy, hopeful looking young woman in traditional garb. Hmm. I should have thought that finding a Muslim husband would be more a matter of ill fortune, to be avoided if at all possible.

Okay, so that's not very nice of me, but it is the impression we are left with after any kind of exposure to news of wife abuse and religious control freaks. So many rules, so few perks (or so it seems to the Westerner). Perhaps we are just not hearing the whole story. After all, why shouldn't a woman be compelled to walk behind her husband at all times? It simply shows due respect, right? Or why should a woman have the same rights as a man? Why shouldn't the man alone have the the right to divorce? He is the man, right? What does a woman's marriage have to do with the woman? It's all about the man. Right? Or why should the woman have any legal recourse if beaten or abused? She is just a woman, right?

Sheesh.

Just One Cup of Coffee, Please

2011-02-10T11:31:00.002+07:00

The poorer a people are, the more greedy they become. A scarcity of money adds all the more to the value of the same. Greed is good, right? Well, greed is at least necessary in conditions of continual poverty. Every penny counts.

I had become accostumed for a time to visiting a particular restaurant on the beach, where I would order a cappuccino and take my laptop along to do some writing. Just as I had been accostumed to doing back in Portland, I would nurse down my cup of coffee while I worked on a story. It's a relaxing sort of situation for me and always seemed much preferable to an over-quiet room or my own desk at home. John Cheever once said that he would dress everyday as if for work, drive to an office he had rented, and then write there, as this gave the pursuit a greater sense of purpose, becoming something that was habitual, just like a job, and not open to the hundreds of altnernative options one might otherwise entertain.

So I would go down to the beach and sit at my table and order my coffee, and this seemed both familiar and also condusive to a good couple hours of work. However, I began to understand at some point that the management at this particular restaurant would much prefer me to order more than one cup of coffee. "Just coffee?" they would say. Nothing else? Maybe breakfast? How about a pastry?" I realized by and by that as far as they were concerned, I was not doing my part. They had much to offer, for a much greater price, and I ought to be ordering much more than a cup of coffee--especially considering the inexhaustible riches I possess as an American.

And so it became uncomfortable. Given that money was so much needed, I could not justify my presence for a single cup of coffee; and given that I have no money to speak of (despite nonnegotiable beliefs to the contrary), I could not justify spending funds I did not have just to try to make myself more comfortable.

Therefore, I no longer go to that restaurant.

In America we have Starbucks. People go to Starbucks every day for a single cup of coffee. They sit as long as they like with their single cup of coffee and are never begged nor badgered into ordering more. This, of course, is because Starbucks, in their great bounty, does not need to scrape and scrabble for nickels and dimes. For the restaurant or warung on the beach, however, the competition is stiff, for there is another next door, and next door to that, and so on all the way from Sindhu to Kuta. To order no more than a single cup of coffee seems to them unkind, even careless.

They need the money. It is a personal thing for each and every employee, from waitress to cook to cashier. They are not being paid by the regional office--no, their money is coming straight from the individual customer. If the customer is from America, or from Europe, or from Japan, he must surely have money, and the very reason he is here in Bali can only be in order to share his wealth. He is therefore a rude, incalcitrant, unfeeling man who will order but one cappuccino and believe he has done well.

Disewa 3

2011-02-06T10:52:00.002+07:00

Well, as my grampa, whom I never met, used to say, "Never count your chickens before they're hatched." Or at least I suspect he used to say so. And this appears to be the byword as far as rentals in Bali are concerned. In other words, we may not have found a house afterall. First the owner said Yeah, it's for rent, and you can move in by the end of February. Then she called back the next day and said it was for rent but also for sale, and wouldn't we like to buy it? (Fat chance). At that time she said that we could tour the house on Saturday. However, the next day she called and said the house could not be toured until the 16th. Now WTF is going on? It's really so typical. Perhaps they found out somehow that I am a bule, and so decided the house was for sale. Who knows. But the long and short is that we are still up in the air and still looking. Damn!

Disewa 2

2011-02-04T12:16:00.002+07:00

Good news, potentially ... we may have found a house. This is in Biaung, some 15 minutes away from where we are right now in Sanur. It is a larger house for half the price, and is in a much quieter area. So we're keeping our fingers crossed. Another plus is that it is right down the street from our friends, Victor and Iluh. In the meantime, anyone wanting to donate money to the poor, unemployed, and retired fund (PURF), may feel free to do so.

Disewa

2011-02-03T10:16:00.002+07:00

Ok, so the standards are different here in Indonesia. As far as house rentals go, I mean. You're not going to find something that's been cleaned top to bottom or deodorized or newly painted or swept or mopped. No. Most places are going to appear pretty grimy, not altogether inviting. This is not something that my wife--an Indonesian--accepts. So will we ever find a place to move to? Stay tuned.

The Sunshine Cure, 1

2011-02-01T09:52:00.002+07:00

There is so much that leads up to every little thing in life. No one thing stands wholly apart from the rest. It is never so simple as that. The line is continuous, like the line you see on a heart monitor, and although the spikes and the dips, the peaks and the valleys seem to stand out--and do stand out in their own way--they remain part of the same line, and their meaning lies within the context of the entire line.

Where do we begin, therefore, when we set out to talk about a single event? We like the notion of suddenness in life, whether the subject be negative or positive. I was just sitting here doing nothing, we say, when suddenly the heavens opened and blessings descended upon me. I had given up on love, I was no longer even looking, when suddenly this woman, this man, appeared. I was minding my own business, just the same as ever, when suddenly my heart stopped, when suddenly the cancer appeared, when suddenly the aneurysm exploded in my brain.

I will say therefore, knowing the same to be essentially untrue, that I awoke one morning in the spring of 2007 to find that suddenly my left foot had died. I had done nothing to cause my foot’s demise, or so it seemed to me at the time. I had not so much as stubbed a toe or stepped on glass or twisted an ankle, or even clipped a nail in the recent past. Why then had my foot died?

This I wondered as I sat on the edge of my bed. My side of the bed, that is. My wife was yet sleeping on her own side. Had my foot had some unfortunate adventure of its own whilst I slept. Had the dead foot itself now awakened me? But how can the dead wake the living? Lazarus in reverse? From the grave my foot said Come forth?

Maybe you have slept on your own arm in the past, and awakened to find the thing quite absent. You pick up the arm with your living hand from the other side, marvel at the sensation of having lifted the arm of someone else altogether. But of course you know it is your own arm, as familiar and well beloved as any other part of your body; and you also know that this is a temporary anomaly, for it is something that happens, and has happened before, and will no doubt happen again in the future.

You marvel, as I say, at the sensation of death in a member of your body, and yet remain comforted by the full confidence that the feeling in your arm will soon return. You are 99 percent certain of the thing. The only thing that is interesting, really--the only thing that is marvelous about the thing--is that one percent which lies in doubt.

I wonder if this might be the seed from which Mark Twain’s well known story of the Golden Arm arose.

Once 'pon a time, Twain says, dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm -- all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean -- pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

There is no doubt that we want that golden arm back--the precious one, the one of value, the one that lies temporarily dead on the bed sheets.

Who took my golden arm!

And so we wiggle the fingers, difficult at first, but sure enough sensation begins to return. Using then the good arm and hand, we shake the slowly awakening, temporarily foreign appendage. Feeling crawls up from wrist to forearm, forearm to elbow, elbow to shoulder, and by and by the old arm returns, able straightaway to do all the old arm things it had done before.

But this, in my case, was a foot, not an arm, and feet are not generally known, or commonly known anyway, to fall asleep at night. One does not sleep on his foot. How would he? Rather, if one wakes to find his foot missing, it seems clear that something rather more unusual has occurred.

Paresthesia--a loss of sensation or a sense of tingling in the skin of some part of the body--is a symptom found in a number of disparate problems. Hyperventilation syndrome, for instance (or the panic attack), may temporarily result in a lack of feeling in the hands or the feet. But you breathe into a paper sack and it passes, right?

Of a more serious, intransient nature is chronic paresthesia--a problem with the functioning of neurons. Peripheral vascular disease, or narrowing of the arteries, results in an inability of the blood to supply sufficient nutrients to the nerve cells in the extremities, which causes in turn--what else--a numbness and tingling in the feet and hands.

Ah, but the possibilities go on, marching to ever more obscure tunes. Allow me to hum a few.

There are the inflammatory diseases, for instance--rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis. There is clinical anxiety, excessive mental distress, bone disease, poor posture, whiplash, frostbite, Lyme disease, transient ischemic attack, lupus erythematosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, Fabry disease, herpes zoster, sphingolipidosis, alcoholism, hyperglycemia, hypothyroidism mercury poisoning, rabies, sarcoidosis, decompression syndrome. Oh, and menopause.

My occupation for the last twenty odd years had been as a Health Information Specialist for a large medical center in Portland, Oregon, where I, and notably my foot, had lived the 53 years to this point without experiencing a serious health problem--in fact without suffering so much as a broken bone. I was aware, therefore, of all of the maladies mentioned above--as well as many more which surely could have nothing whatsoever to do with feet, sensation, or the lack of sensation. I felt no pressing need, for instance, of a paper sack to breathe into. I had no pain in the chest, no headache, no shortness of breath. And of course there were some things that could be fairly certainly ruled out according to odds that were simply too long. Menopause, for instance.

What I did note however, as the minutes passed, and as I cataloged and interrogated the various conditions which might have been and yet could not be applicable, was that my right foot had now begun to reduplicate the troubles in the left.

What? Is this happening? It can’t be! But it is.

First the big toe, then all the toes, then the forefoot, the heel, the ankle. It felt for all the world as if an invisible stocking, thick, tight, had been pulled over each foot in turn, cutting off circulation, smothering all familiar sensation. I sat there staring at the things--my feet--so suddenly mindless, foreign, seemingly detached--two lumps sitting side by side on the carpet, just below the bed skirt, as if they were no more part of me than a pair of buckskin slippers yet unworn.

And my wife slept along on her side of the bed, and the dog at the foot, curled snout to tail, snoring.

On the one hand, I’m thinking Hey, you guys are missing the most amazing thing here.

And on the other, I’m finally beginning to panic a bit.

We Interrupt this Broadcast for the Following Announcement:

2011-01-24T11:26:00.002+07:00

Well shut my mouth. Various pursuits, mostly unwelcome, take me away from entries here for the time being. Finalizing the latest issue of Bali Style, for instance. Chances are one could just leave the thing the same from issue to issue and no one would notice, but of course that's not my decision to make.

House hunting also is taking up time--but we are hot on the tracks of one today, so will keep my fingers crossed. Of course, after that it will be moving that keeps me busy.

So many details, so little time.

The Sunshine Cure, 1

2011-01-18T13:16:00.003+07:00

Of this at least I am certain, that no one
has ever died who was not destined to die
some time.
--St. Augustine, The City of God

There is so much that leads up to every little thing in life. No one thing stands wholly apart from the rest. It is never so simple as that. The line is continuous, like the line you see on a heart monitor, and although the spikes and the dips, the peaks and the valleys seem to stand out--and do stand out in their own way--they remain part of the same line, and their meaning lies within the context of the entire line.

Where do we begin, therefore, when we set out to talk about a single event? We like the notion of suddenness in life, whether the subject be negative or positive. I was just sitting here doing nothing, we say, when suddenly the heavens opened and blessings descended upon me. I had given up on love, I was no longer even looking, when suddenly this woman, this man, appeared. I was minding my own business, just the same as ever, when suddenly my heart stopped, when suddenly the cancer appeared, when suddenly the aneurysm exploded in my brain.

I will say therefore, knowing the same to be essentially untrue, that I awoke one morning in the spring of 2007 to find that suddenly my left foot had died. I had done nothing to cause my foot’s demise, or so it seemed to me at the time. I had not so much as stubbed a toe or stepped on glass or twisted an ankle, or even clipped a nail in the recent past. Why then had my foot died?

This I wondered as I sat on the edge of my bed. My side of the bed, that is. My wife was yet sleeping on her own side. Had the dead foot itself awakened me? But how can the dead wake the living? Lazarus in reverse? From the grave my foot said Come forth?

Maybe you have slept on your own arm in the past, and awakened to find the thing quite absent. You pick the arm up with your living hand from the other side, marvel at the sensation of having lifted the arm of someone else altogether. But of course you know it is your own arm, as familiar and well beloved as any other part of your body; and you also know that this is a temporary anomaly, for it is something that happens, and has happened before, and will no doubt happen again in the future.

You marvel, as I say, at the sensation of death in a member of your body, and yet remain comforted by the full confidence that the feeling in your arm will soon return. You are 99 percent certain of the thing.

I wonder if this might be the seed from which Mark Twain’s well known story of the Golden Arm arose.

Once 'pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live 'way out in de prairie all 'lone by hisself, 'cep'n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm -- all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow'ful mean -- pow'ful; en dat night he couldn't sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

There is no doubt that we want that golden arm back--the precious one, the one of value, the one that lies temporarily dead on the bed sheets.

Who took my golden arm!

And so we wiggle the fingers, difficult at first, but sure enough sensation begins to return. Using then the good arm and hand, we shake the slowly awakening, temporarily foreign appendage. Feeling crawls up from wrist to forearm, forearm to elbow, elbow to shoulder, and by and by the old arm returns, able straightaway to do all the old arm things it had done before.

Christmas in Sanur, 6

2011-01-10T14:55:00.003+07:00

Later on we went to the Carrefour shopping mall, the French franchise in Indonesia. We looked at an artificial Christmas tree with an open umbrella as a stand--this in order to catch artificial snowflakes shot from small tubes at the top of the tree.

And I’m losing it now--minute by minute. Whatever happened to sleigh bells and mistletoe?
Whatever happened to the snow outside and the warmth of a crackling fire within. To the manger on the mantle, Jack Frost on the lawn, and the hoofs of tiny reindeer on the rooftop? This seemed a decidedly un-Christmassy sort of thing, the beating of one churchgoer, the stabbing of another. This story, and that also from Sumatra of Christian community members forcefully expelled from their homes because they were using these as places of prayer. God forbid!

And yet was it really so unlike Christmas, or had I merely misplaced Christmas in my search?

At Carrefour we looked at food--Christmas breads, sliced cheeses, crackers, pastries. Sugar plums and figgy puddings.

Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods . . .

“They have persecuted me,” said the Christ, “they will persecute you also. They will treat you this way because of my name.”

Whatever happened to the singing, the songs we used to know?
Whatever happened to Christmas, and when did it disappear?

*

On Christmas night a dinner was hosted at our housing complex by our neighbor, an expatriate Brit, and his Indonesian wife. Generally the man is drunk--and there was in fact no departure from this condition that night--and generally the couple scream and fight their way through their life together, but this night, Christmas night, was different. All was peace and joy. This is not to say, again in general, that the food was good, for there was much more of rice, and noodles, and suspicious looking snaky green vegetables than I had seen in Christmas feasts past. And yet the spirit seemed present, and willing, and the feast was enjoyed above all others--a true picture of Christmas cheer--by Pierre.

Now Pierre is a stout, burly yellow dog with a pink nose, who belongs to the owner of the housing complex where I live--a fact I feel compelled to mention by way of indicating that most of the dogs populating the immediate area belong to no one in particular. The relationship rather is of a communal nature, each animal being known unanimously by name--Jakey, White Dog, Suki, et al--yet neither by family nor rights. But Pierre as I say, of the ample body and pink nose--an ill tempered, rude, unpredictable sort of dog--finding himself in possession of a family and a house his own, and lording his good fortune over his lessers--had found himself in possession also, this night of night’s, of a large black plastic garbage bag containing all the discards of culinary opulence--a thing that was a joy to watch, for someone at least had received his fondest holiday wish.

Some drank from bottles, some picked at noodles and pigs feet on paper plates, but one alone--and that one Pierre--dug in with ravenous, well satisfied passion, minding not the mie goring that hung from his snout nor the rice that snowed his jowls like a beard--saving these only for later, a nightcap to cap the memory of it all.

Was this it then--as simple as this--a meeting of hunger and consumption? Is it possible for Christmas to be got from the bowels of a black garbage bag?

Or had Pierre merely misplaced the thing--a thing already misplaced--and this with perfection I could not myself have so devised?

Do we see, ultimately, best what is by the witness of what is not?

Or did it happen, or does it still, alone in this wise:

Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Christmas in Sanur, 5

2011-01-10T10:17:00.002+07:00

In any case, Dewa spoke one day of her experience as a Hindu, and as a young woman beginning to struggle with what she sees as the limiting effects of her religion and of her culture. Hinduism itself is, as a matter of fact, scarcely divisible from culture, the one informing the other and vice versa. Nonetheless, modern notions of freedom and of personal autonomy have swum ashore even on the island of Bali, and so Dewa spoke of the constraints of her society, the chains lain upon her by the traditions of her parents, from the duty of ritual to the expectations surrounding the nature and quality of her own love life.

Moreover, it was her professed opinion that the lion’s share of Hindu people really don’t know what they are doing when they perform their daily rituals and attend to their almost countless ceremonies and temple observances. They are simply acting out of habit, she said--not religiously, in the proper sense, but, if anything, superstitiously. The feast that celebrates the triumph of Dharma becomes no more than an occasion upon which one eats more than is usual--something very like the Christmas dinner. There is more of rice than ritual here, more of potato than of the Prince of Peace.

We are all alike, there is no difference. We all suffer the same poverty, and hide it within a feast.

Ah well.

Foods for the stomach, and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them.

*

We do not find it in the tree or the turkey. We do not find it in the department store window case or the glasswork ball or the twinkling of lights or a reindeer’s red nose.

Where is it then? And where particularly on Bali?

Whatever happened to Christmas?

Had I left it in America, clinging, like a child at its mother’s side, to familiar scenes and habits? Is it a place? Is it a song? Is it in the drive-by light show--mere electricity, winking on eaves and gables, strung about the shoulders of plastic snowmen and elves, Grinches and Cherubs?

Whatever happened to Christmas? It’s gone and left no traces.

Can it be so? Well, I decided to find out. I decided to find the thing myself--and to conduct my search, having no other option, amidst the sun scorched sands, the traffic choked streets, the dingy warungs, the sellers booths, the stonework icons, the raucous beer bars, all under the blaring, blazing sun that shines by day on my little town, the town of Sanur, on the sleepy side of the southern coast of Bali.

Remember the sight and the smell and the sound,
And remember hearing the call . . .

Ah, but give me something to remember. Give me something new, something to become. That seemed to be the key.

But memories have to start somewhere. If you are new to a place, an alien from afar, a stranger in a strange land, then you must build from square one.

I decided to start with a traditional cappuccino at Luhtu’s beachside café.

“Traditional cappuccino?” my wife objected. “What’s traditional about that? You have one every day.”

“Well, not every day.”

“Almost every day.”

“But this is not just any day. This is Christmas Eve day. And that’s what traditional is all about, right? Something familiar, something. Something you remember from year to year.”

“But you’ve not yet been here one year.”

“That’s just the point. It will be our first traditional Christmas Eve cappuccino.”

She told me I was full of it, but came along nonetheless.

And the first annual Christmas Eve cappuccino turned out to be pretty Christmassy, I thought. It helped immensely that the waitresses at Luhtu’s were wearing red Santa hats, and wished us merry Christmas as well--and several times at that. The sky was blue, the heat pleasant at just less than a broil, and there was a breeze whispering through the leaves on the trees, just enough to cool the brow every five to ten minutes or so. It was less, I’ll admit, that a Currier and Ives scene, less than the silence of a morning snow, but it would do for starters, and it was better than nothing.

After finishing our Christmas cappuccino (oh, and there was a cookie for each of us as well, about the size of a quarter--which I thought was a nice touch), we then embarked upon a traditional walk on the beach.

Now waves are not drifting flakes of snow, but there seemed something just very slightly reminiscent nonetheless, as they rolled peacefully onto the tranquil Sanur shore, kept time with our pace, spilled their white froth at our sandy toes.

It was the same every day, my wife commented.

Ah, but this was not any old day. This was Christmas Eve day.

“Merry Christmas!” called a couple passing by in the opposite direction, in a decidedly German tone of voice.

“And to you as well!” I returned. “Merry Christmas!”

“Selamat Hari Natal!” an Indonesian woman, also passing, chimed in. “Maybe you want massage, yes? One hour massage. Balinese massage. You like very much, yes?”

But in my mind I subtracted the second part--copied and cut--and clung to the first, pasted it to the day--Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas to all!

Appearing also in the Bali Times was the continuing story of two Christians on their way to church--one beaten senseless, the other stabbed in the stomach by a mob of extremist Muslims. The assailants, in part three, had been sent to jail, and their compatriots were now protesting the unfairness of the thing. It was their feelings, apparently, that had been hurt in the first place by this Christian couple headed to their place of worship.

Remember how love was all around? Whatever happened to it all?

Christmas in Sanur, 4

2011-01-08T10:48:00.002+07:00

It is all a mistake after all, an imagined affront. How embarrassing for the man who mistook Santa Claus for the son of God. Or then again, maybe it’s just simpler that way.

Toyland, toyland
Little girl and boy land
When you dwell within it
You are ever happy there

But we must not leave the Hindus out of the mix--that 95 percent aforementioned--nor do we wish our objections to suffer a narrowing effect such that we may be thereby misconstrued as betraying a will toward hurting the feelings of one particular group or another. For the fact is that the better part of the Hindu population possesses no more of an informed appreciation of what Christmas is really about than does the Muslim, or for that matter the Christian himself in his modern days. So, as you see, my will is to hurt all feelings, not just some.

I have a particular friend with whom I exchange a knowledge of language--I, being an American, of English, she, being Indonesian, of bahasa Indonesia. We meet two and three times a week, generally at the table outside my wife’s salon, and simply talk by turns, each in that language which he does not know, in the hope, I suppose, whether admitted to or not, that one day a miraculous breakthrough will occur, and that we will, perhaps at one and the same time, find ourselves suddenly fluent. Miracles, after all--and unlike Santa Claus--are a part of faith, and faith itself is the evidence of things not seen. Ours, therefore, is a religious exercise.

Christmas in Sanur, 3

2011-01-07T13:12:00.001+07:00

An article recently appeared in The Bali Times, the English language newspaper here, which seems particular suited toward further delineation of my point, and so I quote verbatim as follows:

MUSLIM CLERICS CRITICISE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

The country's top Islamic body has said Christmas decorations in malls, amusement centres, and public places are "excessive and provocative."

Christmas ornamentation has been put up in an "excessive and provocative way," said Muhyidin Janaedi, one of the chairmen of the Indonesia Ulemas Council (MUI).

"It should be done in a proportional manner, as Muslims are the majority here, otherwise it will hurt their feelings," he said.

He said that MUI issued a recommendation urging mall and recreation centre managers to act proportionally in decorating their premises.

"We received complaints from a number of malls' employees who are forced to wear Santa Claus costumes which are against their faith. Such things should not have happened," he said.

"We need to restrain muslims from joining the festivities," Junaedi added.

Against their faith, the man says. What, the dreaded Santy Claus costume? Forced to wear the infidel red hat, the pointy one with the white cotton ball on top? Shiver me timbers!

But what faith is this that the man calls their faith? What faith is it whose members worship a fat man in a red suit, so offending the members of another faith in the process. What is it about Christmas trees, colored lights, excessive shop window decorations that has “hurt their feelings?”

Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!

Ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!

Yes, it’s piracy, nothing less. We have been struck on the high seas, the ship has been scuttled, the castle has been sacked, and the booty made away with by that jolly old pirate with the pink cheeks, the cherry red nose, and a stomach that shakes when he laughs like a bowl of Jello.

Dastardly, I say! Robbery pure and simple.

We are inclined to agree with the man from the MUI.

But wait . . . What faith are we talking about. What faith is represented by Santy Claus? Why, none, of course. He is neither Pope nor God nor the son of God. He is not a prophet. He is neither Krishna or Vishnu. You do not find his portrait on the church alter or pew. His charge is over eight reindeer, not twelve apostles.

Christmas in Sanur, 2-1/2

2011-01-06T13:28:00.001+07:00

It is useful to observe at this point that Bali is about 95 percent Hindu, where profession of the population is concerned--although how Hindu the Hinduism of the 95 percent really is, is a matter its own, and no different a one than the Christianity of Christians or the Muslim-ness of Muslims. All this really means is that ignorance regarding the tenants of ones own professed faith, not to mention the beliefs of other people, runs faithfully at about 95 percent the whole world over. It becomes therefore not only possible, but reasonable to conclude that Santa Claus, sleigh bells, and pine trees bedecked with glass ornaments and twinkling lights are central icons of the Christian belief system--which may, it is generally supposed, have also something to do with a man named Jesus, although likely only secondarily so, given the attention shown to the former trappings as opposed to the latter personage.

Here then is the most telling example of the power of advertising that I know--that jolly old Saint Nick and Rudolph the Red Nosed Rain Deer are more readily recognized symbols of Christianity than Jesus Christ Himself. And the fact that this misapprehension prevails just as persuasively in the West as in the tropical islands of Southeast Asia or the snow cast wastes of Manchuria ought at the very least to strike terror upon the missionary and awe upon the philosopher, for we celebrate not the birth of the man of sorrows, not the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, but toy land and a parade of tin soldiers, rat-a-tat-tat and a-rumpty-tum-tum.

Christmas in Sanur, 2

2011-01-04T16:59:00.002+07:00

Christmas in Sanur

2011-01-03T11:52:00.001+07:00

The first thing to remember about Christmas on the island of Bali is that there is none to speak of. There does exist in general among the local folks an appreciation that a time of year has come upon them wherein Western folks are wont to celebrate, but the exact nature of what these folks are celebrating remains a point of but sparse knowledge and even sparser interest. Ideologically, I mean. There is much already about the Westerner that is unusual, deviant, and this strange parade of colored lights, pointy hats, flying reindeer, and a fat man in a red suit is just one further facet to the mystery, glittering and winking in so many directions that the center of the subject remains enigmatic.

It is, however, at the least common denominator, an opportunity to sell, and so new booths spring up on the beach front, warungs are strung with lights, hung with gold and silver garland, and young girls don red hats with white fleece, and call out with renewed expectation Shopping? Shopping? Come looking at my shop, just looking Mister, yes?

The sensibilities of the West, no matter how unsearchable, all smell of money, an extravagant penchant toward purchasing the most extravagantly worthless items and carrying these away to their own countries for storage in closets or sale in garages. It is the need for needless things, both the will and the wherewithal to waste, that most endears we Westerners to the Third World shop owner and street merchant. It is known moreover that the vacationing Westerner is more acutely inclined than ever to divest himself of riches--to empty his pockets of so much superfluous padding--otherwise known as money--that he may return home victoriously, lighter in both coin and spirit than when he came. Spirit, in other words, is purchased in the form of the bauble and trinket, tucked into the suitcase and carry on, and transported over the thousands of air miles to big houses in small suburbs--little museums of temporary meaning--to dazzle the less fortunate and provide substance for the owner until such time arrives when these things--for they are only and after all things--are drained of lively association, have lost their edge, and have become at last quite purely just as ordinary as they were to begin with, no more precious to the purchaser than they were to the purveyor.

Thankfully for the traveler and the tourist the world is full of exotic islands of every shape and size, and fuller yet of new baubles and trinkets, and so the spirit is renewable through the many years, essentially inexhaustible, a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.

Thankful also is the shop owner and the street merchant.

Christmas in Sanur

2010-12-31T09:18:00.003+07:00

The sensibilities of the West, no matter now unsearchable, all smell of money, an extravagant penchant toward purchasing the most extravagantly worthless items and carrying these away to their own countries for storage in closets or sale in garages.

Ridiculous

2010-12-24T13:21:00.002+07:00

This article is hilarious enough on its own to just post verbatim, no editorial comment needed.

MUSLIM CLERICS CRITICISE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

The country's top Islamic body has said Christmas decorations in malls, amusement centres, and public places are "excessive and provocative."

Christmas ornamentation has been put up in an "excessive and provocative way," said Muhyidin Janaedi, one of the chairmen of the Indonesia Ulemas Council (MUI).

"It should be done in a proportional manner, as Muslims are the majority here, otherwise it will hurt their feelings," he said.

He said that MUI issued a recommendation urging mall and recreation centre managers to act proportionally in decorating their premises.

"We received complaints from a number of malls' employees who are forced to wear Santa Claus costumes which are against their faith. Such things should not have happened," he said.

"We need to restrain muslims from joining the festivities," Junaedi added.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha . . . Oh whoops, please excuse the burst of editorial comment.

Chicken (in proper order)

2010-12-19T09:14:00.002+07:00

In ecologically sensitive times such as ours, litter is not pretty anywhere. Of course, it never has been pretty, but there is just more of it now, and so we are more aware of it than ever. The island of Bali, in this regard, is no different than anywhere else. We have our share of floating, blowing, huddling, homeless garbage, in the street, in the sea, in the gutter and on the highway--and in fact, to be honest, more than our share.

Depending upon the strength of the tide, the direction of the submerged ocean stream, I may sometimes find myself swimming alongside empty Lays Potato Chip bags, double cheeseburger wrappers, the daily ceremonial offerings to the gods, and the occasional plastic diaper.

There is no readily discernible garbage, I mean sanitation, service in Bali. There seems to be no regular scheduling of men or trucks--and God knows where the occasional men and trucks that do happen by take this stuff once they collect it. Pressed for an answer to this riddle, I might guess that a good deal of it is deposited in the field just a block down from my house, for I cannot begin to imagine how else it got there except by plan.

One will see these haphazard trucks, circa 1950, roaring up the highway, streaming miniature clouds of gravel and non-biodegradable refuse in their wake, but where they are going, no one knows. I do note that the river just up the Bypass, and just before you reach the Matahari Mall, is very often choked with a sludge of manmade refuse, and so maybe that is where some of these trucks relieve themselves of their loads. I think it must be so--for, again, how else could the situation have arisen?

In any case, what I want to talk about here is more than your common, run of the mill sort of litter. No, what I want to address is Bali’s very particular version of litter--or garbage, if you will--those local men on the beach who hang about in the shade and seek to sell chicken. I’m not talking about the sort of chicken that is commonly fried, baked, or barbecued. No, this chicken is of the human variety, of the female gender--those girls, those daughters of men, who find themselves without money, a home, a job, a guardian, quite without pity or charity, continually up for bargain like cheaply made baubles and trinkets in the market. They receive but a pittance of their own wage, along with the opportunity to be housed, in a communal sort of way, to eat, to be clothed--all according to the magnanimity of the pimp. The going price is 500,000 rupiah, about 50 US dollars. This includes the room, one hour of time, a beer, a massage, a bath, a condom, and pretty much anything else within the limits of human depravity that can also be fit into the space of one hour.

Now litter is not wholly without appeal, at least in some limited sense. It may be, for instance, that the Big Mac carton, yet seaworthy as it tops a nearby wave, inspires a vague notion of hunger, or the orange Fanta can, snuggled in a nest of sea anemone, gives rise to thirst, but God help the man who is offered a 17 year old girl and straightaway seeks to consume another human being, as if she were nothing more than a bit of meat for his appetite.

Five hundred thousand rupiah, as I have said, is asked; but of course it is only the rare man who will end up paying this price, and the rarer pimp who will not ask a good deal more at the outset. It is a game of negotiation, of lie and bluff. Everything here is got by bargain--shirts, hats, sunglasses, paintings, watches, bracelets, and human beings. The beach boy starts high, forever hoping for the jackpot--a callow Westerner, a white man with money--and the wise, yet hungry customer starts out very low indeed.

In broken English the pimp paints his fresco of paradise--a cliché, a joke, a lie, a dream--while the customer, already containing at least two or three drinks and probably more--continually checks his wallet, hems and haws, careful to show that he is a man to be reckoned with, and no fool.

One hundred thousand rupiah sounds like a lot of money, but of course it is all relative. It is nothing to the common Westerner on vacation, much to the pimp, and without pertinence to the prostitute herself, for again she will receive but her pittance and her pittance alone.

It is, at the present rate of exchange, about 11 US dollars.

I am told that one is taken by taxi or motor bike up the road a piece and onto the winding back lanes. Where light is dim, where wild dogs wander, where children cry and squalor thrives, the man is let out to a Kos-Kosan, a central dwelling coupled to four or five small rooms. Each room is equipped with a toilet and a bed. The driver winks, money is exchanged, and the nervous yet anticipant purchaser finds himself facing perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty women--young, older, thin, fat, pretty, homely--the well endowed and the unendowed--the experienced, the jaded, the fearful, the hopeless--all the little girls now trapped within the value of their flesh.

What bargain has been worked this night, what price, what deal, what swindle made for this father’s daughter, for this mother’s treasure, for this young woman’s heart and soul?

The next day another man will visit the beach. There he will find the same trash--unbothered, irremovable, as permanent as the sea itself--and despite the whiteness of the sand, the long sighing of the breakers, the majestic rise of the inland hills, the play of a child’s laughter on the breeze, he will do his business, make his killing, and reap the life of another human being--never seeing, never hearing, never imagining that paradise, rightly judged, had been available all along and quite without cost--free for the asking, albeit with this one caveat attached: He must seek in truth, ask with honor, and embrace with the sort of thankful compassion that should be the common currency of all men.

*

But the Bali beach boy is only the tip of iceberg--a small player, rightly reckoned.. I mention him first only because he was my own first experience of this peculiar institution after my initial arrival on the island. He is a scrapper, a scavenger, a jack of all illegal trades, and some legal ones as well. He prowls up and down, like a hungry lion, so to speak, seeking whom might be devoured, or whom he might offer for devouring, in the case of the chicken. It is commonly a community effort--no one gets the whole victim, but only each a piece--say a flank, or a thigh, a finger or a nose. He is the middle man, and less than the middle man. He is one head on the totem pole, a link in the chain. It’s all about networking, you see. This man has connections, whether they be to boat owners, diving instructors, drug dealers, or whore house proprietors.

Maybe the Bali boy starts with a boat. Everyone wants a boat ride, don’t they? Snorkeling?

Fishing? It is, in any case, a safe, a neutral starting point.

Mister, you want boat? One hour only? Swim? Snorkel? One hour, very cheap for you.

Right.

It is his first card only. No worries, there‘s more to come. His pockets are full of options, each more tempting than the last.

How about a driver? A motor bike?

No?

How about magic mushrooms then? How about a girl, very young, young girl, 17 years only.

Mister, you want?

A wink of the eye then, a lowering of the voice, a confidence, a newly forged friendship.

My goodness, this Bali beach boy is friendly.

Perhaps a man had started out for a walk on the beach. Perhaps he had stopped to eat in one of the beach front warungs, or more probably one of the upscale restaurants with the bule prices. Perhaps the beach boy watched him along the way. And then the next thing he knows, this man is riding on the back of a scooter, bound for the dark end of a back street in Legian or Kuta, with maybe a stop at the ATM along the way--for there is more available, as he learns, than the one hour only, the quickie, the single bottle of beer. It is the party of his lifetime. He did not look for it, it looked for him. Maybe it has become two hours, or three, or the full long night. Maybe one girl, maybe two. You name it. The sky the limit as long as his pocketbook is fat. And it is fat, always, for the vacationing Westerner here on the island of Bali. This man, common enough in his own country, is rich now, a man of means, the whole pallet of the paint of life set before him.

The taxi driver is another link in the chain--not, again, the pimp, but the middle man, the man who knows, the man who facilitates. Take a walk after dark and see for yourself. A man alone, just walking like that? What else can he want but a woman? The driver slows down, creeps up to the curbing, beeps his horn once, rolls down his window. Where are you going, he asks? What do you want? Young woman, yes. Very young, maybe 17.

He does not take no for an answer. He creeps and insists, insists and creeps. He argues the value of his offer. He knows what you really want.

Money is got by all means here, and the competition is stiff, very stiff indeed. The man who is not quick, the man who is not saavy, plays at ruin and starvation.

And so the meter runs. And so the alley opens to the light at the end of the tunnel.

*

Bali is an island of stunning beauty. There is the beauty of the deep blue Indian Ocean, the beauty of the Bali Sea, the beauty of the sugar-white sands of Seminyak and the coal-black beaches at Klungkung. There are the stately palm and deciduous trees which shade the long sighing coastline, and the jungle canopy upcountry which brushes at the wall of the hard blue sky, while chattering monkeys tell the strokes and cicak and tokay lizards critique from below. Above all the mountaintops shoulder through the last of the high green thatching--Batukau, Batur, mighty Agung, counted to be the center of the world by the people--seven links on Bali all together in the ring of fire that stretches all the way from the Asian continent to the islands of Sumatra and Java, simmering to the depths like troubled giants, yet gracefully sleepy for the time being.

Lovina in the north winks at Sanur in the south, having much in common--Sengaraja nods toward Kuta--Candidasa, adorned in ceremonial gold, spills its pearls to the temple in the sea and whispers with the breaking surf about gods and rites and offerings tucked into baskets made of hand cut fronds.

It’s classic, almost a cliché, a picture book place straight out of the glossy pages of a coffee table album. But there is more, and what is more is more of a secret nature, and the height of what is more is higher, and the depth is deeper. Here is the unpaved alley with its one room dwellings hewn from stone almost as if they had been carved rather than erected--no glass in the windows, no door in the doorway, no bathroom aside from the field out back. Here are the children I meet every day on my way down the alley to the Circle K store, sitting on the entry step and wall, intent on a game or marbles among the puddles, who rush forth to meet me on sight, shrieking hello, Mister, hello, hello, hello, overjoyed at having mastered this much of the English language. Here, further down, is the man who eternally repairs an old VW, and his buddies who watch as they smoke Kreteks, and his wife holding his baby by the Marigolds which spill over the wall to the brim of a bucket filled with ancient black oil.

What is the beauty that breaths behind the glossy page. It is in the lettering on the last wall before the alley lets onto the street, in the words which hang from the crawling ivy, bright, insistent, unknown.

Some months back, seeking to make some extra cash, even if only in Rupiah, I began to do some work writing and editing for a magazine called Bali Style. This is a slick, Western style production prepared in Bali and printed in Jakarta, generally covering all things unaffordable, otherwise unattainable for the local population--fine linens and ceramic ware, five star hotels, sprawling new white walled villas, walk in closets with sliding ladders and shelves for the shoes, jewels for Dutch necks and English fingers.

All that glitters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold

We call these things precious, sumptuous, lavish, exotic, succulent, luscious, divine. These are the words we use. And when we run out of such words, we use the thesaurus to find more. We paint our Western picture. We build our castles on the sand and atop the crumbled wall. There are people, I will tell you honestly, who come here to Indonesia, and yet never actually arrive.

So one day during an editorial meeting--a foreign thing in itself--I found myself daydreaming, exhausted, disheartened by luxury, and I began to construct in my mind a different sort of issue of Bali Style. I called it, in my mind, Bali Style--The Real World Issue; and the article I wrote, in my mind, in my daydream, went like this:

Those who are familiar with Bali Style magazine will find our current issue a bit of a departure from the norm. No Villas here, no Ming Dynasty “vawses,“ none of the usual glitz and glimmer. Rather, we shall visit the real world, and hope to impart a new, more down to earth taste for the palate of our typical reader.

Here, dear reader, is the classic Balinese homestead. This simple one room dwelling is made completely of stone on the outside. It is also made of stone on the inside. In fact the stone on the inside is the backside of the stone on the outside. It is, in short, the same stone, inside and out.

Within these understated walls we find furniture in the well-loved antique style, genuinely aged, cleverly constructed from mossy planks of pre-used lumbar found in the pristine field out back (which is where the pre-used nails were found as well). On the armoire, brightly nostalgic in the classic red and yellow hues of 1950’s plastic ware, sits grandma’s unfinished bowl of mie goring, although grandma herself has not been seen for several months’ time and may, it is thought, have succumbed to Dengue Fever.

From the square eco-friendly front window (for it has no glass or other impediment to the cooling breeze), we turn and take three steps to the far side of the dwelling, careful not to stir the dust along the way. There in the corner sits a tiny cane, propped just so, waiting for its tiny owner to return. And a chicken. Beside the cane and the chicken are a few pellets of chicken shit, as well as one dog turd.

Lighting throughout the house is unobtrusive, as indirect as a tongue in cheek comment--none of these glaring overhead globes, which do, after all, require electricity, not to mention money for payment of the electric bill. Therefore, we are inclined to call the interior lighting here a suggestion rather than a shout, a rumor rather than an actual fact.

Mother’s bed is on the eastern wall, nestled beneath several rather artistically imperfect stones that jut from the wall and serve as convenient natural nightstands. Or handholds if need be. Father’s bed is there too. As are the beds of junior and his two brothers.

A short distance further into the interior of the home (and I do mean short), we find we are actually in the backyard. In fact, we find ourselves standing in the bathroom. It is a sharing of space, a dialogue with nature. Again, the accent is on simplicity, on intimate relationship with the land. And the evidence of this relationship is all about--so watch your step folks!

*

What is beauty? Yes, the young woman also, the maiden from Sumatra, the kampung princess from Jawa Selatan. She is the girl who works the side street in Kuta, the one who goes by taxi two and three times a night to the hotel in Legian, the one who sits at the long bar in the dark club on Jalan Danau Tamblingan in Sanur and waits, facing the street, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, for someone to notice, and pause, and check his wallet.

On Jalan Danau Poso my wife has a salon. We do hair and nails and massage. Next door is a short lane which leads to a brothel, and next door to that another. Other services are offered there, but the girls regularly come to our place to spend, in a way that seems incredible to me, their hard earned wages on manicures, pedicures, cream rinses, and gossip. But of course the gossip part is free, and there are a million good stories to go around, believe you me.

At first I did not understand who these girls were. I noted only (ever callow I) that there seemed to be a lucky surplus of beautiful women on our street. They would sit and talk, inside or out, waiting one turn in the chair for another, and eat their lunch outside--nasi kuning, mie goring, bubur ayam--at the table where I also sit and write.

Here the daylight pays the night’s price, and the exchange is made in smiles, in words, in pampering and primping. Here is where they care for themselves, body and soul, redeeming their wages for the rewards of friendship and common conversation. In short, they become real people again. And these are the people I have come to know, the real women, the girls, some of them not much more than children, come to remove the masks of night in favor of those made of cooling cosmetic creams and lotions, wrinkle reducers, face rejuvenizers, skin pore cleansers, eye socket balms, mustache removers, exfoliating ointments, and whatever else of chemical mystery is served up in my wife’s salon. They are Ayuh, Ketut, Gina, Dewi; from Java, Sumatra,
Surabaya, Jakarta. In Bali they make their money, and send a goodly portion back home. They say that they are working as beauticians or clerks, waitresses or cooks, so that the money they send will not be tainted.

Meme had grown chunky in the months that had passed since we first met. She had made a particular friend of my wife, and would appear daily at the salon from around the corner, just to talk. Every day, or so it seemed, she grew a little bit larger. It happened also, in suspicious coincidence, that her clientele began to fall off and wither. So it happened that my wife began to worry for the girl’s welfare.

“Meme can’t get any customers,” she told me. “There are too many girls next door.”

Too many girls next door? Was that the problem, really? But the competition is stiff, you see? The candy store is overstocked.

Nonetheless, I made no comment, other than to suggest that she might consider a change in career.

“Change to what? There are no jobs here--especially for a girl like Meme. She’s got no training, no education, no skills.”

Other than the skill she is already plying. This was the sentence so very clearly unsaid. And indeed it is so--for Meme’s experience, her training had started long ago--first at the hands of her father, then of her uncle, then back to her father, and so sadly on. Meme worked even then, and not for money, but only as a human barrier to keep guard over her much younger sister.

What is right, after all? What has honor? What exactly is exchanged in trade?

I feel so bad for her,” Louis said.

I could not help but think that a diet might be a place to start, but I did not offer this as an opinion.

“I’m going to call some people,” my wife said.

“For what?”

“To try to help her.”

“You mean--”

“Yes! What else? It’s the only thing she knows how to do.”

“So now you’re a pimp?”

“If that’s what it takes!”

“Well for Christ’s sake,” I objected.

“Don’t say Christ,” she answered. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain."

I don’t understand my wife. I don’t understand her thought processes. Moreover, since my wife is a woman, I guess I don’t understand women in general. I mean, what are we talking about here? Prostitution, right? Women degraded at the hands of men, purchased like so many loaves of bread.

But Louise is a realist, not an altruist. When the day is done it is not high morals that matter, but food in the mouth, rent on the table. It is a hard course to argue, for we argue starvation against survival, crucifixion against contentment.

In the end I merely mentioned Weight Watchers as a possible good.

But weight, I was told, did not matter. Rather, it was not the weight of one girl that had become problematic, but the weight of many.

One late night, already a long time in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Meme. Something was wrong. The police were on patrol. Meme was hiding. Hiding . . . Where? In the bushes on the grounds of the Mercure hotel?

I picked these things up piece by piece, scattered as they were among a lot of other pieces and all strewn about in the chaotic manner of the Indonesian language spoken in rapid bursts of slang.

“Tell her to come here,” I said, allowing a groan to escape at the end. “Tell her to take a taxi.”

“Don’t be scared,” Louise was saying into the phone. “Don’t be scared, Meme. Just stay there, okay. Just stay in the bushes. My husband will come and get you.”

And then she turned to me and said:

“Pleeeeeese”

*

We will say in conclusion that once a year the police in Sanur do an official sweep, rounding up the girl on the street, the underage worker, visiting the brothel and the chicken bar and such like. It is, as I say, a once a year event--and perhaps always the same day at that, a sort of holiday on an island already overrun by holidays--Galungan, Nyeppi, Ramadan, Christmas, and so on.

This was the day Meme hid in the bushes at the Mercure, and the night she stayed in our spare room at the house. It was the night the police arrested a 17 year old, a 15 year old, and a 14 year old girl. And exacted a fine on the owner of the brothel which had furnished the same.

And then back to business as usual.

Oh, the officers still visit the brothels--once and twice a week at that--but only for graft, to collect their fee, the cost of departmental blindness. And the Bali boys are back on the beach, and the taxi drivers hale from the dimly lit streets. And the girls--well, the girls are as prolific as ever in the long sigh of the many eons of time.

Chicken, 6

2010-12-11T09:56:00.002+07:00

Some months back, seeking to make some extra cash, even if only in Rupiah, I began to do some work writing and editing for a magazine called Bali Style. This is a slick, Western style production prepared in Bali and printed in Jakarta, generally covering all things unaffordable, otherwise unattainable for the local population--fine linens and ceramic ware, five star hotels, sprawling new white walled villas, walk in closets with sliding ladders and shelves for the shoes, jewels for Dutch necks and English fingers.

All that glitters is not gold;

Often have you heard that told:

Many a man his life hath sold

But my outside to behold

We call these things precious, sumptuous, lavish, exotic, succulent, luscious, divine. These are the words we use. And when we run out of such words, we use the thesaurus to find more. We paint our Western picture. We build our castles on the sand and atop the crumbled wall. There are people, I will tell you honestly, who come here to Indonesia, and yet never actually arrive.
So one day during an editorial meeting--a foreign thing in itself--I found myself daydreaming, exhausted, disheartened by luxury, and I began to construct in my mind a different sort of issue of Bali Style. I called it, in my mind, Bali Style--The Real World Issue; and the article I wrote, in my mind, in my daydream, went like this:

Those who are familiar with Bali Style magazine will find our current issue a bit of a departure from the norm. No Villas here, no Ming Dynasty “vawses,“ none of the usual glitz and glimmer. Rather, we shall visit the real world, and hope to impart a new, more down to earth taste for the palate of our typical reader.

Here, dear reader, is the classic Balinese homestead. This simple one room dwelling is made completely of stone on the outside. It is also made of stone on the inside. In fact the stone on the inside is the backside of the stone on the outside. It is, in short, the same stone, inside and out.

Within these understated walls we find furniture in the well-loved antique style, genuinely aged, cleverly constructed from mossy planks of pre-used lumbar found in the pristine field out back (which is where the pre-used nails were found as well). On the armoire, brightly nostalgic in the classic red and yellow hues of 1950’s plastic ware, sits grandma’s unfinished bowl of mie goring, although grandma herself has not been seen for several months’ time and may, it is thought, have succumbed to Dengue Fever.

From the square eco-friendly front window (for it has no glass or other impediment to the cooling breeze), we turn and take three steps to the far side of the dwelling, careful not to stir the dust along the way. There in the corner sits a tiny cane, propped just so, waiting for its tiny owner to return. And a chicken. Beside the cane and the chicken are a few pellets of chicken shit, as well as one dog turd.

Lighting throughout the house is unobtrusive, as indirect as a tongue in cheek comment--none of these glaring overhead globes, which do, after all, require electricity, not to mention money for payment of the electric bill. Therefore, we are inclined to call the interior lighting here a suggestion rather than a shout, a rumor rather than an actual fact.

Mother’s bed is on the eastern wall, nestled beneath several rather artistically imperfect stones that jut from the wall and serve as convenient natural nightstands. Or handholds if need be. Father’s bed is there too. As are the beds of junior and his two brothers.

A short distance further into the interior of the home (and I do mean short), we find we are actually in the backyard. In fact, we find ourselves standing in the bathroom. It is a sharing of space, a dialogue with nature. Again, the accent is on simplicity, on intimate relationship with the land. And the evidence of this relationship is all about--so watch your step folks!

*

What is beauty? Yes, the young woman also, the maiden from Sumatra, the kampung princess from Jawa Selatan. She is the girl who works the side street in Kuta, the one who goes by taxi two and three times a night to the hotel in Legian, the one who sits at the long bar in the dark club on Jalan Danau Tamblingan in Sanur and waits, facing the street, legs crossed elegantly at the knee, for someone to notice, and pause, and check his wallet.

On Jalan Danau Poso my wife has a salon. We do hair and nails and massage. Next door is a short lane which leads to a brothel, and next door to that another. Other services are offered there, but the girls regularly come to our place to spend, in a way that seems incredible to me, their hard earned wages on manicures, pedicures, cream rinses, and gossip. But of course the gossip part is free, and there are a million good stories to go around, believe you me.

At first I did not understand who these girls were. I noted only (ever callow I) that there seemed to be a lucky surplus of beautiful women on our street. They would sit and talk, inside or out, waiting one turn in the chair for another, and eat their lunch outside--nasi kuning, mie goring, bubur ayam--at the table where I also sit and write.

Here the daylight pays the night’s price, and the exchange is made in smiles, in words, in pampering and primping. Here is where they care for themselves, body and soul, redeeming their wages for the rewards of friendship and common conversation. In short, they become real people again. And these are the people I have come to know, the real women, the girls, some of them not much more than children, come to remove the masks of night in favor of those made of cooling cosmetic creams and lotions, wrinkle reducers, face rejuvenizers, skin pore cleansers, eye socket balms, mustache removers, exfoliating ointments, and whatever else of chemical mystery is served up in my wife’s salon. They are Ayuh, Ketut, Gina, Dewi; from Java, Sumatra, Surabaya, Jakarta. In Bali they make their money, and send a goodly portion back home. They say that they are working as beauticians or clerks, waitresses or cooks, so that the money they send will not be tainted.

Meme had grown chunky in the months that had passed since we first met. She had made a particular friend of my wife, and would appear daily at the salon from around the corner, just to talk. Every day, or so it seemed, she grew a little bit larger. It happened also, in suspicious coincidence, that her clientele began to fall off and wither. So it happened that my wife began to worry for the girl’s welfare.

“Meme can’t get any customers,” she told me. “There are too many girls next door.”

Too many girls next door? Was that the problem, really? But the competition is stiff, you see? The candy store is overstocked.

Nonetheless, I made no comment, other than to suggest that she might consider a change in career.

“Change to what? There are no jobs here--especially for a girl like Meme. She’s got no training, no education, no skills.”

Other than the skill she is already plying. This was the sentence so very clearly unsaid. And indeed it is so--for Meme’s experience, her training had started long ago--first at the hands of her father, then of her uncle, then back to her father, and so sadly on. Meme worked even then, and not for money, but only as a human barrier to keep guard over her much younger sister.
What is right, after all? What has honor? What exactly is exchanged in trade?

I feel so bad for her,” Louis said.

I could not help but think that a diet might be a place to start, but I did not offer this as an opinion.

“I’m going to call some people,” my wife said.

“For what?”

“To try to help her.”

“You mean--”

“Yes! What else? It’s the only thing she knows how to do.”

“So now you’re a pimp?”

“If that’s what it takes!”

“Well for Christ’s sake,” I objected.

“Don’t say Christ,” she answered.

I don’t understand my wife. I don’t understand her thought processes. Moreover, since my wife is a woman, I guess I don’t understand women in general. I mean, what are we talking about here? Prostitution, right? Women degraded at the hands of men, purchased like so many loaves of bread.

But Louise is a realist, not an altruist. When the day is done it is not high morals that matter, but food in the mouth, rent on the table. It is a hard course to argue, for we argue starvation against survival, crucifixion against contentment.

In the end I merely mentioned Weight Watchers as a possible good.

But weight, I was told, did not matter. Rather, it was not the weight of one girl that had become problematic, but the weight of many.

One late night, already a long time in bed, we were awakened by a phone call. It was Meme. Something was wrong. The police were on patrol. Meme was hiding. Hiding . . . Where? In the bushes on the grounds of the Mercure hotel?

I picked these things up piece by piece, scattered as they were among a lot of other pieces and all strewn about in the chaotic manner of the Indonesian language spoken in rapid bursts of slang.

“Tell her to come here,” I said, allowing a groan to escape at the end. “Tell her to take a taxi.”

“Don’t be scared,” Louise was saying into the phone. “Don’t be scared, Meme. Just stay there, okay. Just stay in the bushes. My husband will come and get you.”

And then she turned to me and said:

“Pleeeeeese”

*

We will say in conclusion that once a year the police in Sanur do an official sweep, rounding up the girl on the street, the underage worker, visiting the brothel and the chicken bar and such like. It is, as I say, a once a year event--and perhaps always the same day at that, a sort of holiday on an island already overrun by holidays--Galungan, Nyeppi, Ramadan, Christmas, and so on.

This was the day Meme hid in the bushes at the Mercure, and the night she stayed in our spare room at the house. It was the night the police arrested a 17 year old, a 15 year old, and a 14 year old girl. And exacted a fine on the owner of the brothel which had furnished the same.

And then back to business as usual.

Oh, the officers still visit the brothels--once and twice a week at that--but only for graft, to collect their fee, the cost of departmental blindness. And the Bali boys are back on the beach, and the taxi drivers hale from the dimly lit streets. And the girls--well, the girls are as prolific as ever in the long sigh of the many eons of time.

Chicken, 5

2010-12-07T11:16:00.001+07:00

It’s classic, almost a cliché, a picture book place straight out of the glossy pages of a coffee table album. But there is more, and what is more is more of a secret nature, and the height of what is more is higher, and the depth is deeper. Here is the unpaved alley with its one room dwellings hewn from stone almost as if they had been carved rather than erected--no glass in the windows, no door in the doorway, no bathroom aside from the field out back. Here are the children I meet every day on my way down the alley to the Circle K store, sitting on the entry step and wall, intent on a game or marbles among the puddles, who rush forth to meet me on sight, shrieking hello, Mister, hello, hello, hello, overjoyed at having mastered this much of the English language. Here, further down, is the man who eternally repairs an old VW, and his buddies who watch as they smoke Kreteks, and his wife holding his baby by the Marigolds which spill over the wall to the brim of a bucket filled with ancient black oil.

What is the beauty that breaths behind the glossy page. It is in the lettering on the last wall before the alley lets onto the street, in the words which hang from the crawling ivy, bright, insistent, unknown.

Chicken, 4

2010-12-06T12:33:00.001+07:00

Bali is an island of stunning beauty. There is the beauty of the deep blue Indian Ocean, the beauty of the Bali Sea, the beauty of the sugar-white sands of Seminyak and the coal-black beaches at Klungkung. There are the stately palm and deciduous trees which shade the long sighing coastline, and the jungle canopy upcountry which brushes at the wall of the hard blue sky, while chattering monkeys tell the strokes and cicak and tokay lizards critique from below. Above all the mountaintops shoulder through the last of the high green thatching--Batukau, Batur, mighty Agung, counted to be the center of the world by the people--seven links in the ring of fire that stretches all the way from the Asian continent to the islands of Sumatra and Java, simmering to the depths like troubled giants, yet gracefully sleepy for the time being.

Lovina in the north winks at Sanur in the south, having much in common--Sengaraja nods toward Kuta--Candidasa, adorned in ceremonial gold, spills its pearls to the temple in the sea and whispers with the breaking surf about gods and rites and offerings tucked into baskets made of hand cut fronds.

Chicken, 3

2010-12-04T12:04:00.001+07:00

Perhaps a man had started out for a walk on the beach. Perhaps he had stopped to eat in one of the beach front warungs, or more probably one of the upscale restaurants with the bule prices. Perhaps the beach boy watched him along the way. And then the next thing he knows, this man is riding on the back of a scooter, bound for the dark end of a back street in Legian or Kuta, with maybe a stop at the ATM along the way--for there is more available, as he learns, than the one hour only, the quickie, the single bottle of beer. It is the party of his lifetime. He did not look for it, it looked for him. Maybe it has become two hours, or three, or the full long night. Maybe one girl, maybe two. You name it. The sky the limit as long as his pocketbook is fat. And it is fat, always, for the vacationing Westerner here on the island of Bali. This man, common enough in his own country, is rich now, a man of means, the whole pallet of the paint of life set before him.
The taxi driver is another link in the chain--not, again, the pimp, but the middle man, the man who knows, the man who facilitates. Take a walk after dark and see for yourself. A man alone, just walking like that? What else can he want but a woman? The driver slows down, creeps up to the curbing, beeps his horn once, rolls down his window. Where are you going, he asks? What do you want? Young woman, yes. Very young, maybe 17.

He does not take no for an answer. He creeps and insists, insists and creeps. He argues the value of his offer. He knows what you really want.

Money is got by all means here, and the competition is stiff, very stiff indeed. The man who is not quick, the man who is not saavy, plays at ruin and starvation.

And so the meter runs. And so the alley opens to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Chicken, 2

2010-12-03T18:05:00.000+07:00

But the Bali beach boy is only the tip of iceberg--a small player, rightly reckoned.. I mention him first only because he was my own first experience of this peculiar institution after my initial arrival on the island. He is a scrapper, a scavenger, a jack of all illegal trades, and some legal ones as well. He prowls up and down, like a hungry lion, so to speak, seeking whom might be devoured, or whom he might offer for devouring, in the case of the chicken. It is commonly a community effort--no one gets the whole victim, but only each a piece--say a flank, or a thigh, a finger or a nose. He is the middle man, and less than the middle man. He is one head on the totem pole, a link in the chain. It’s all about networking, you see. This man has connections, whether they be to boat owners, diving instructors, drug dealers, or whore house proprietors.

Maybe the Bali boy starts with a boat. Everyone wants a boat ride, don’t they? Snorkeling? Fishing? It is, in any case, a safe, a neutral starting point.

Mister, you want boat? One hour only? Swim? Snorkel? One hour, very cheap for you.

Right.

It is his first card only. No worries, there‘s more to come. His pockets are full of options, each more tempting than the last.

How about a driver? A motor bike?

No?

How about magic mushrooms then? How about a girl, very young, young girl, 17 years only.
Mister, you want?

A wink of the eye then, a lowering of the voice, a confidence, a newly forged friendship.

My goodness, this Bali beach boy is friendly.

Chicken

2010-12-03T12:06:00.002+07:00

My Own Comment Is ....

2010-11-18T11:06:00.003+07:00

I've said this before, but I'll say it again--it is keenly annoying to me (as well as disheartening) that comments most often posted here concern unwanted, unsolicited, unwelcome crap like advertisements for penis lengthening pills or hair products or pyramid schemes, and etc. and so on. WTF! One looks to make a meaningful connection and all he gets is a damn door-to-door salesman. Enough with the random crap, a'ight!

The Grace of God

2010-10-17T16:46:00.002+07:00

Next time you get up tight about the Christian Right, consider this:

Recently the publisher of the short-lived Indonesian version of Playboy--a 'toned down' version of the magazine which displayed no nudity whatsoever (yes, people really did buy it for the articles), was arrested in Java and slapped in jail. At the initial hearing the charges were dropped and the man was released. This, however, gave rise to an immediate uproar from muslim extremists, demanding that the man be returned to jail (obviously, the will of the law and the court meant nothing). Forthwith, the publisher fled to the shores of Hindu Bali. If was not far enough. A few weeks later he was tracked down and arrested in Bali and returned to Jakarta, where he is now back in jail and facing a two year sentence.

If not for the grace of God . . . .

Does Human Morality Arise from Brain Chemistry?

2010-10-15T08:44:00.002+07:00

Well it's a no brainer, right? And I do mean no brainer.

Yes, the latest scientific/medical research, along with follow-up studies from Harvard and Cambridge universities, suggests morality may be a function of serotonin levels in the brain (the high level indicating, I would guess, sainthood, the low level the serial killer).

So at last here is the answer to all societal woes, to crime and violence, bigotry, avarice--in a nutshell, as the apostle Paul put it, to adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. Hallelujah.

We need only dispense citalopram on a universal scale in order to have done once for all with this sad fallen world of ours and thereby enter the new--paradise, the New Jerusalem, Shangri-La, the Brave New World!

Somebody say Amen!

The Color Scam

2010-09-12T17:01:00.004+07:00

Pencuri

2010-08-10T08:51:00.002+07:00

I had not heard of so much as one incident of theft here in Bali until yesterday when someone stole my friend's bicycle. He had left it unlocked in front of his house, but this is not an uncommon practice. I will often leave the doors to my house unlocked so that friends can go in and out. I regularly leave my laptop on a table at the beach while I swim. I very rarely lock my helmet into the scooter seat, but just hook it onto the handle bar.

Of course one theft does not an epidemic make, but it is disturbing nonetheless. All it takes is one person without conscience I guess.

More disturbing than the theft itself, however, is the advice given thereafter by a neighbor here to the effect that all things should be locked and watched during the days preceding Ramadan, as, according to him anyway, Muslims will often steal and sell things in order to raise money to go home for the religious observance.

One needs hardly comment on the absurdity of cause and effect here.

In Bali I have never felt anything other than utterly safe and secure. Any person, man, woman, or child, can walk down the long, unlighted alleyway to the Circle K store without being accompanied by fear or suspicion. If you approach the group of young men, for instance, gathered around their motorbikes, they will simply greet you, move aside if need be, and maybe ask you where you are from, how long you will stay, and whether you like Bali.

Time and time again I have walked alone, anywhere, everywhere--in the alley, on the beach, on the front street or the side street, and have not once felt threatened or unsafe. When you pass someone--when someone passes you--you don't glace his way warily or walk faster, or hold on to your wallet or purse. On the contrary, you exchange a friendly greeting, maybe stop a moment to talk.

The isolated theft, therefore, seems all the more insulting, all the more out of place, and all the more unfortunate. We are not insensitive to such things, as is the case in America, nor do they seem just part of the way life is. The people of Bali have not yet come to that sad state of mind. And happily they yet have a long, long way to go.

Apa Yang Lain ....

2010-08-07T10:50:00.004+07:00

What else?

I can say without qualification that I DO NOT miss rain. Rain type rain, I mean. It does of course rain here in Bali, occasionally, but this rain is warm and brief. It is a happy sort of rain that makes you laugh--like taking a quick shower with your clothes on, a la The Three Stooges, and then drying off within minutes when the sun returns. The rain in Oregon, on the other hand, is cold and constant and gray and depressing, and it drove us indoors for days at a time.

Living in Bali is a bit like camping. One spends the lion's share of his time outdoors. One cooks outdoors, eats outdoors, reads and writes outdoors, relaxes outdoors.

There is a flavor of the rustic in so many of our daily pursuits. One does not take water from the faucet for instance (unless one wants to contract some sort of bacterial illness). Rather, one gets his water from a five gallon jug, and when the jug is empty he refills it at the water warung down the street.

Laundry is hung from lines on the back patio after being washed and rinsed with soap and water on a board. We are cavemen here--cavemen from the 1950s--reliving the childhood of postwar America.

We buy gas in bottles, and the amazing thing is not so much that we buy it that way, but that they sell it so. The whole structure of the place is ready to explode and collapse, but it never does. Day by day people walk to the store or the market and carry home their purchases on the tops of their heads. At the market you buy not only your fresh chicken but your flies as well, and bring both home to be divided and properly dealt with before cooking.

We do not have ovens in Bali. Or at least most of us don't. We have bunson burners, hot plates, with propane tanks. We do not roast or bake, we fry or steam. Two or three ovens fired up at one and the same time might well cause a complete collapse of the power grid here (such as it is).

We have no cakes, no pies, except those that are bought in the grocery store (having been shipped from the bakery).

Missing You America, Please Write Soon

2010-08-06T17:23:00.003+07:00

People here in Bali will often ask whether I miss America. My immediate answer to this question was for the longest time simply "No." But things that are new and different have a way of excusing themselves from the more sober sort of examination that comes with the passage of time, the growth of day to day familiarity. What seems at first endlesslesly curious and unique begins to be humdrum and commonplace. Such is the condition of the wandering spirit of man--it cannot forever tolerate sameness.

So do I now miss America? I have thought the thing over anew. And I can say that there are after all some things that I miss. One of them is competence.

Competence? It sounds a bit strange yes? But here is what I mean. I miss the orderliness of America, the reliability that is built into so many facets of everyday life. These are easily taken for granted. They are just there.

I'm talking, for instance, about mail that comes every day, not mail that comes maybe, not mail that comes if you're lucky. I'm talking about a legal system that is accessible, a legal system that can be used if need be by any person possessing a phone and a phone book. I'm talking about streets and highways with signs, with lights, with arrows, along with a shared knowledge of what these signs, lights, and arrows mean. I'm talking about a shared conception of rules for the road, where flow is determined by obediance, not by belligerance.

I miss the cup of Starbucks, the Grande cappuccino, made with real milk.

I miss the structure, the effortless seeming organization, the predictability of prices and places, the transit system, the freeway, the parking lot, the shopping mall; karmel korn, candied apples; the Fred Meyer store just down the block that has everything and more.

I miss the sheer abundance of America, the availability of everything. I miss Hollywood Video, and oh my God the Barnes and Noble Bookstore!

Can I live without it all? Most definitely so. But does it seem different now than it seemed before. Yes, it does indeed seem so.

Proverb of the Day

2010-08-04T08:56:00.007+07:00

Looks like rain.

--Buddha

Is this politically incorrect? Is it culturally insensitive? Oh well, lighten up. All in the spirit of fun. The ideology that has no sense of humor is bound to wither and die, for humor is often the function through which we best understand ourselves and our beliefs.

I remember once hearing a joke about Jesus. Standing before an angry mob about the stone a woman caught in adultery, Jesus said "Let that person among you who is without sin cast the first stone."

Straightaway a good sized rock flew in.

"Mommmm!" Jesus said.

Now that has always seemed funny to me.

Another joke goes like this: Whose prayers does God hear best--those of the Christian, the Jew, or the Muslim. It is the Muslim, of course . . . they use loudspeakers.

It may be suggested that a lack of humor is always accompanied by an increase in intolerance, for the offense taken is not toward God--certainly not for His sake, for He has no need to be defended by poor creatures such as us. Rather the offense is the result of peevish self interest and a poverty of true self-esteem.

A Day in the Life

2010-07-27T16:16:00.003+07:00

My wife is in America. We talk via Skype and Gmail. Along about noon today we have a little fight about money. She is very tired--I can see it in her eyes--and she is in a mood. So I cannot help but laugh, which makes things worse.

So I take a walk over to the Circle K to pick up a Bintang. Classic. The White Dog follows me, as usual. She persists in believing that she is my dog. When she tries to come into the Circle K with me the cashier asks whether she is my dog and I answer Bukan, no. But I admit to knowing where she lives. The fact is, the White Dog lives as an uninvited guest in my house. But she is not my dog.

On the way back I pass a boy peeing from outside the doorway of his house into the alley. This is a penis with some power, for the stream barely misses me.

Awas, I say. Watch out!

The boy says Hi Mister . . . hi . . . hi . . . .

"Oh, Hi," I answer. What else is there to say?

But he's not done. He says hi until I turn the corner at the end of the alley and head down the street to my house.

As I pass the warung there--the one that sells Absolut bottles filled with petrol, cigarettes, cheese crackers, and other necessities--the man asks whether I want to buy something. He always asks that.

Tidak, I say. Tidak, makasih. I always say that too. It means no thank you, but thanks for asking.

By the time I talk to my wife again, perhaps a half hour later, she is in a chipper mood.

No worries.

It is like this every day in Sanur, Bali, Indonesia.

The Hopeless Bastards

2010-07-26T10:40:00.008+07:00

A couple weeks ago I stopped into a bar here in Sanur called The Arena. It's one of these nice looking places smack-dab on the Bypass and generally avoided by people who know how the price ranges work in our little tourist village. In short, bars like this one cater to the bule--the white man--summoning him in with bright lights, striped awnings, soft, dark wood within, of floor and bar, tables and chairs. And, oh yeah, air conditioning day and night.

Nonetheless, I went in, just wondering. I did not have money for food--not at their price anyway--but I did salivate for a time over the menu, with its offerings of bacon and cheese sandwiches, chicken cordon bleu, weinerschnitzel with mashed potatoes, beef steak (of all things), and a plethora of other culinary delights not tasted nor even ogled in six long months.

Having salivated by and by to exhaustion of the source, which naturally left me with a dry mouth, I ordered a beer.

Then it was that I met Adam, an Australian, and Ari, his beautiful Balinese wife. They were eating actual food, from the actual menu. I was envious, and I suppose I wanted to move my nose just a bit closer to their plates. So I struck up a conversation.

Adam, as I soon discovered, is the editor in chief of a slick Western quality magazine called Bali Style. I made haste to tell him that I am a writer and editor myself (yeah right), and straightaway offered by services. And it just so happened that he needed some help.

I knew there had been a good reason for coming here. I guess I just felt it in my bones. Plus I was thirsty.

Well, I learned thereafter that Wednesday night at The Arena is trivia night. You make a team, you get two pages of obscure questions, and then study these for the next hour or so, in between beers, until the master of ceremonies calls in the answers.

We decided to enter the competition. Why not? At the top of our questionnaire Adam wrote in a name for our team. The Hopeless Bastards.

Now the obscurity of these questions was quite uncommon, even for obscurity. We had not a clue. And so we guessed.

And we won. We won first place. The prize was a large pitcher of Margaritas.

The following Wednesday found us unable to repeat our inexplicable victory, however we did win third prize, which was two pitchers of beer, and so we were happy enough.

Now Wednesday approaches once again, and once again I will give my opponent (general knowledge, that is) my best shot. Sadly Adam will not be present, having had to return to Australia for a time, and so I am left simply to hope that at least one additional hopeless bastard will show up.

The Road Less Traveled

2010-07-22T10:48:00.003+07:00

I am misguided. By my own brain. I blame this on MS.

Most detrimentally affected is wit. A witticism delayed is a witticism lost, for wit relies on the quick addition, hinges on the unanticipated allusion. Wit seizes the moment--this moment, the one just passing at the speed of light, not the one that pops up a half hour later, long after the subject had been dropped and all but forgotten. The witticism offered at such a time is more akin to the sudden outburst of a Tourette sufferer--all but meaningless, distinctly awkward.

The brain of the MS sufferer has fallen into a habit of detours. It simply cannot travel direct from point A to point B, but must instead traverse a goodly part of the alphabet first. The thought, the response, the action intended thus shows up at its destination panting and ragged, like the man who is critically late for an appointment he must in any case attend. He arrives, and yet manifestly out of sorts.

I give the following as an example, a simile:

The other day I drove my motorbike to the gas station, perhaps a half mile from our home, and quite along the confines of a straight line. This part of the journey went without event. I arrived, I filled my tank, I paid my 10,000 Rupiah.

Upon departure from this midpoint, however, I found the route of initial success--the Jalan Ngurah Ra By Pass--clogged with unmoving vehicles and quite impassable. When the driver of the motor vehicle, like the central nervous system, finds himself faced with stasis, he seeks an alternate route, for he has found the most essential artery out of order.

So it happened, upon exit from the gas station, that I turned left instead of right.

I do not say that the return journey home was without interest of its own, just that the events along the way possessed no practical kinship with the mission at hand. There exists the road that is wide and straight--the dash between the A and the B--and there exists the forest of alternative paths, twisted, crimped, noodle like strands which, for all their effort, go no farther in essence than the straight line, but only take much more time to do so.

I saw new houses, I saw new children, I saw new dogs. I ran over a new dog. I smelled new smells, craned my neck to see the tops of new trees. I nearly missed running over two chickens. I made decisions--turn right, turn left. I found dead ends. I found a hole in the road, two feet deep. I saw new garbage, strewn about by the new dogs. I saw a toad by the side of the road inexplicably entering the mouth of a snake.

By and by I arrived home. I told my wife of my adventures and she responded that I was late, that she had been waiting nearly an hour, and was now herself late for her appointment at the beauty salon.

And then I remembered the first point, the very reason for my journey. I remembered the letter A, long lost in the alphabet soup of possibilities. In short, the reason I had gone for gas in the first place was so that I could get my wife to her appointment at noon.

Remembering this however, as can be readily appreciated, is a far different thing than actually doing it.

And so it goes. The maze of necessary alternatives, that process which typifies the attempts of the afflicted central nervous system to succeed, is, like the delayed witticism, a mere spectre, an echo--not only wholly irrelevant, but wholly without hope of redemption.

I See It All

2010-07-20T17:22:00.001+07:00

From my chair
I see it all
I see it all
ongoing
from the palm fronds
waving
at sapphire morning
to the unfinished painting
propped by the wall
and the hidden rat
with night black mane
who jets
from secreting canvas home
to the folded feet
of the stonework Buddha
poised at the foot
of the waterfall
I see it all
I see it all
from the yellow glow
of the Balinese jaw
to the flame of the candle
in my wife’s Asian eye
which misses nothing
for captivity there
what better place
for my heart to dwell
than the broken stones
that make the road
or the hammered mosaic
tattooed in the wall
yes my love I see it all
and walk where I would
and where I will
and walk from my chair
to the smoldering hill
to taste perchance
what no one else can
the nectar of fire
the flowing land

Language

2010-07-07T10:09:00.004+07:00

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. Nelson Mandela

If you want learn speak Bahasa you must speak Bahasa, the man at the Jazz Bar and Grill said.

And he is right. You must simply speak, abandoning care, forcing yourself. Jangan malu--don't be shy.

This of course gets easier with every large Bintang you drink, and so it is good also to drink whilst you are learning.

It is good to have the live music as well, and the louder the better, for the most cogent sentences end up being those which are shouted above the din of the saxophone, drums, and electric bass. At the very least, there is no mistaking that you have spoken and have been quite definite about it indeed.

Most nights at the Jazz Bar and Grill the guests are invited to sing. This is also good for breaking down the barriers of self consciousnenss. After offering a bad rendition of Fly Me to the Moon, what, after all, does one have to lose?

It is the willing listener that constitutes the most complete classroom--he who receives, comprehends, corrects, and encourages all in one sitting. He gives and he receives, for his native ear is perfect while his native tongue seeks like instruction. Language itself becomes friendship, the will to assist, the will to understand, the will to communicate what is perceived--without which the world itself cannot exist.

As the Fan Turns

2010-07-06T09:39:00.007+07:00

It has been written, and statistically proven, that the defensive armament of the Second World War bomber, the fabled B17, comprised of two 50 calibre waist guns, a ball turret in the belly, a top turret, a gun bay in the tail and a gun bay in the nose--made in reality such little impact on attacking fighter planes as to be almost completely ineffective, thus nullifying any practical justification for their presence.

Nonetheless, the morale factor exerted on the bomber crews by these otherwise worthless tools remained so significant that the extra attachments, despite, the added weight and the expenditure of valuable ammunition, were retained throughout the war.

My intention, by way of this long introductory metaphor, is to apply in essence the same leaky raison d'etre to the presence of ceiling fans in the common Indonesian home. The fact is, these fans do nothing toward accomplishing their intended mission--that is, to dispel at least in some measure the oppressive heat that lurks between the walls. No, nothing at all. They may push the heat about to some degree, this is true--but this may in fact just stir the same to a more vigorous boil. High speed, low speed--it makes no difference. They whirl, they make a noise, they cast their sluggish tar-like shadows, but they do not cool the air in the least.

And yet we run them day and night, despite the mildly irritating sound they make, despite the expenditure of electricity, because to have not even this much to fall back on--the morale factor endowed by the tireless turning of those aerodynamically shaped blades, we should be hopeless indeed and perish from suffocation of the spirit.

A Gift

2010-07-05T15:18:00.004+07:00

This morning I received in the mail a Writers' Market, complements of my agent. Given that I have so far not written anything apparently saleable for him, I consider this a grand and uncommon gesture of the kindest sort. Luar biasa, they say in Bahasa Indonesia--literally outside normal.

Thank you, Neil.

Fishing

2010-07-05T14:14:00.004+07:00

A fisherman who casts his bait in the water four and five times and catches at least one fish is happy.

He who casts his line, catches nothing, yet gets bites is hopeful, and so continues.

The fisherman who fishes and yet gets not even one bite is a disappointed man indeed.

No News

2010-07-01T17:38:00.003+07:00

I set out to write something and end up messing around with the Designer for an hour, most of the time just trying to return it to where it was before I started messing around.

Lesson of the day: Don't touch it again!

Graduated today to Kelas IV in Bahasa Indonesia. Since I am my own teacher, I administered the graduation, and added honors. I was, after all, first in the class.

Traveled down the Bypass to the Grammadia (Indonesian book store) near Kuta. What a nightmare.

Second lesson of the day: Stick with the store in Denpasar.

Having a beer at the coffee shop (go figure) this evening and then will see what's going on out at the salon. The busy life of a retiree.

So, as the saying goes, No news is ... well, no news, actually.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

2010-06-28T11:07:00.001+07:00

Snore

2010-06-27T18:41:00.003+07:00

I just this evening noticed that there was a typo in the subtitle of my blog. Professional, ain't I?

Tired today, and the rain had me down. Guess I've gotten spoiled. We have a rainy day maybe once a month, and I'm bummed.

But anyway, we went into Denpasar this morning to buy a wedding gift for my daughter and her fiance, then came home and fell asleep.

The good news is that now I can stay up all night. Watch out Sanur!

Boldness

2010-06-26T11:51:00.002+07:00

So what if I just want the old design back? Can I get it?

Hanging out at the salon again today, still working on the Bali sketches. The more I write, I write the more. Strange phenomenon. Only begin, as Goethe said:

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Met a friend down at the beach last night. Very windy. First time I've seen that here. But not cold. Mild. Mild enough for shorts and shirt sleeves. The wind was picking up the white on the breakers and making it feel like light rain. I could not determine what was more beautiful--her eyes or the ocean.

Beauty here in general comes at you constantly from every direction, in every season, at every hour of the day and night. It rides on the wind, weaving through the palm trees on the sea shore, ambles up the path to the town, lingers outside the warungs, looking in for a moment, then makes it's way through the crowded pasar, rearranging hats and headdresses along the way. It sneaks along the alleyways, ruffling stray dogs, sniffing at the garbage bins, smudging the chalken slogans on the wall. It dreams with you at night, wakes with you in the morning.

Damn the Designer!

2010-06-25T12:44:00.002+07:00

Who wants to join the I Hate the New Designer Club? Sheesh. Or at least they should block users with MS. How many of us, I wonder, have already messed up our blogs beyond repair? Have a little consideration for those of us who cannot think straight! Include a warning label or something. Designer may be dangerous to those who suffer from multiple sclerosis or other cognitive disorders.

Well, drinking Bintang and eating complimentary peanuts here at Sindhu Beach, Bali. Would that the Bintang was also complimentary. With tourist season upon us, they have once again raised the price, having learned, apparently, that beer is one of the main food groups for Westerners.

Someone did tell me the other day that it makes hair grow (beer does, that is). Then again, the same guy told me that Dick Cheney was the actual President of the United States during the Bush administration.

Well, maybe it does make hair grow.

Mark Twain once said that people should be careful about health books, as a misprint might possibly cause death. In the same spirit, I suppose that one should be careful of doctors, for a misdiagnosis might have the same effect.

New Designer

2010-06-24T09:11:00.004+07:00

Seems like I messed up my blog with the nifty new blog designer. Try to fix it now. I have so far at least returned it to a readable format, albeit a pretty plain one. Sorry folks. Never was much good at art work. The fact is, in school my art projects used to be shown in front of the class as examples of what not to do.