Slouching Towards Obesity

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

A photo taken during my class last week unbeknownst to me has prompted serious thoughts about my stomach.

In his poem, Yeats was contrasting the post-World War I malaise with what could be seen of the future.  Rather than a peaceful Jesus returned to rescue humanity, he imagined the Egyptian sphinx rising up after "twenty centuries of stony sleep" and moving ungracefully into the world.  Instead of a utopian vision of future bliss, this image is distinctly dystopian.  Given the history of the late 20th and early 21st century, I have to admit Yeats was a prophet.

After accidentally stumbling across my photo on a student's Facebook page, I stood on the scale we hide under our bed to discover that I now weigh 86 kilos (nearly 190 pounds), up at least 3 kilos from the last time I'd checked.  Of course it's all in my gut which gravity has now encouraged to droop below my belt.  It's painful to realize one has become the worst cliché of a fat old farang in Thailand.  I'd been considering getting suspenders (braces for your Brits) to hold up my pants which might disguise the distinction between girth and waist.  But I've not actually seen anyone wearing them over here and a shopping expedition turned up none at all.  A style change, however, would not erase the fact that I'm growing obese day by day.

The revelation about my belly and the necessity to do something about it came during the second week of the Bangkok Shutdown. My worst fears about "Armageddon," as I referred in my last blog post to the siege of the city by thousands of anti-government protestors, have gone unrealized.  While the mob has closed almost a dozen intersections in the center of the capital to traffic in an effort to bring all government activity to a halt, Bangkok has simply absorbed them with urban antibodies to ward off the infection of chaos.  I did not need to stockpile water or food for the stores in my neighborhood remain well supplied.  It's hard to tell anything unusual is going on not far away.

In my mind I'm still as skinny as I was here playing volleyball on Venice Beach in 1974.  My weight for years was around 150 pounds and my stomach was flat, if not exactly a 6-pack.  While the rest of my body remains slim, my stomach has ballooned in the last 15 years.  I cannot see my toes; belts fail to prevent pants slippage.  The elevators in my condo have mirrors and I'm forced to review the damage at least twice a day.  Shirts sized XL seem too small.  I have been like a smoker who knew the dangers but loved his ritual cigarettes nonetheless (as I did for 30 years).  For me it was an addiction to Oreos and cartons of ice cream with chocolate bits inside.  I drank sweetened ice tea with meals and for a treat stocked popsicles in the freezer. I loved chicken skin and peanut butter sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise, and cheese popcorn with a Coke at the movies.  Cakes and donuts are temptations I rarely resist.  The reasons why I've gained 9 kilos since coming to Thailand six years ago are no secret. And the end is near.

The anti-government (some say anti-democracy) protest has been going on for several months, calling for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of the exiled and much hated (by Bangkokians but not by those in the rural northeast) Thaksin, to resign.  After a couple of weekend demonstrations which drew several hundred thousand people, protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, deputy prime minister under the former unelected administration, set the "final battle" to begin on Jan. 13.  For me, it was the "rough beast" slouching into Bangkok. But once here, the beast was tamed. The rallies at a half dozen sites draw perhaps 20,000 nightly and resemble carnivals rather than stages in an insurrection.  During the days protestors, many bused up from southern provinces and now sleeping in tents, march to various government locations and try to shut them down or convince the civil servants to join them.  They've not been without violence.  At night shots are fired at rally guards and twice someone threw a grenade into a crowd, killing one man and injuring over 60.  Up in Udon, a prominent red shirt government supporter was wounded in a drive-by shooting at his home.

It may seem a stretch to pair concern about my weight gain with a siege of Bangkok bent on demolishing democracy in Thailand, but it's where my mind is at these days.  Armageddon is taking a long time.  When not preparing for class, teaching or reading my students' homework, I sit on the couch glued to my laptop, perusing twitter and the blogs and posts collected for me by my Feedly account. Occasionally I turn away from the news tweets and Facebook comments to watch a film or TV show I've downloaded ("True Detective" is my new favorite). And, until a couple of days ago, I'd snack on Oreos, ice cream, popsicles, popcorn, and anything else I could stuff in my mouth to make the uncertainty of the future go away.  Although I'm not really worried about my safety, I am concerned about what will happen next in Bangkok that might require some adjustments in our life here.

The two-week shutdown so far has had a devastating effect on tourism.  It's the peak season, and the upscale hotel where my wife works in the Siam district is down to 30 per cent occupancy when it's usually full in January.  While people buy protest-related tee shirts from vendors in the carless streets, the luxury malls and stores near them are almost empty.  There are various scenarios about where this is all going, none of them good. Though the election is scheduled for Feb. 2 it could be delayed by the courts since the opposition party is boycotting it and candidates could not register in southern provinces where the protestors blocked them.  Even if it's held it could be invalidated as happened in 2006.  Other court decisions could end Yingluck's reign with a judicial coup similar to what happened in 2008.  If Yingluck goes, the pro-government forces in the north and northeast have said they will fight.  More violence could bring about another military coup (there have been 18 since 1932).  People are talking about the possibility of moving Yingluck's government to Chiang Mai, and of the chances for a civil war in Thailand.

I visited four of the rally sites before the bombs made it more dangerous to hang out with the protestors, and I took a selfie like everyone else around me.  Participants take photographs, blow the now trademark whistles, and wear outfits customized with patriotic bling.  In my rounds I become increasingly aware that excess weight stresses my weak right knee, and can make it exhausting to climb up and down stairs.  This week I commiserated with my friend Jerry.  He's 78 and has survived open heart surgery and the installation of a pacemaker.  Because of a strict diet for his heart situation, Jerry weighs 70 kilos and looks quite svelte.  He eats only twice a day and avoids most of the fat and sugar that I consume.  Something finally clicked and I formed a few resolutions about eating and exercise (swimming has been curtailed by the chilly weather).  Can I change the future now by adhering to a disciplined program?  At the moment it still feels like slouching, a slow ramble not exactly in a straight line, but the destination is away from obesity and towards something more wholesome and lasting.  If Thailand descends into chaos and civil war, it might be a good idea to get healthy in order to deal with the challenges.

Waiting for Armegeddon

Anticipating the shutdown of Bangkok next Monday by tens of thousands of anti-government protestors brings up memories of the great flood of 2011.  We knew it was time to leave Bangkok when the cockroaches came up out of the sidewalk pursued by rising waters.  By then the major thoroughfare outside our condo was nearly empty as were shelves in the nearby stores.  At first we journeyed south to stay with Nan's cousin and then north on a bus that skirted the flooded areas of the city to the province of Phayao where my wife's family lives in a small village.  In the beautiful (and dry) rural surroundings, we waited for two weeks until the waters subsided before returning home.

There the similarity ends.  While large protests have disrupted select areas of the capital for decades, this "final battle" has been planned to make Bangkok totally ungovernable and to bring down the administration led by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of the exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin. Given recent experience and statements, no help can be expected from either the police or military and the governor of Bangkok, whose sympathies are with the protest, has remained silent.  No one knows how severe the shutdown will be or how much suffering will be caused.  Even though its purpose is to overturn the government and end the "Thaksin regime," the collateral damage for ordinary people in the city could be extensive.

My wife is not a worrier and tells me, quite often, to cool off, to be less serious and not to think too much, the usual advice Thais offer to agitated foreigners.  It's true that spending too much time on Twitter, Facebook and the internet searching for up-to-date information about the shutdown, the protestors and the government's response can be deleterious to health.  My couch is well worn where I sit to commune with my laptop.  Rather than exercise, I snack on Oreos and ice cream, afraid to abandon the internet for fear I'll miss something.

Friends outside Thailand who come across stories from here that seem alarming will inquire about my safety, or ask if I fear the possibility of violence.  Not really, I tell them.  For the most part all previous violence has been localized, even in 2010 when nearly 100 demonstrators were killed and a thousand injured.  I could look out my window and see the smoke from a mall that had been set ablaze, but it was from a safe distance.  In 2008, anti-government mobs closed airports, but fortunately I was not flying anywhere.  Since I don't drive, clogged highways are usually no problem unless I'm in a bus.  And the BTS Skytrain travels above the crowded streets while the MRT subway goes underground.  There's always the river taxis to get where I want to go.

To be honest, the political strife in Thailand is exhilarating.  When I was a boy I wanted to grow up and lead an exciting life.  And for the most part I've achieved that aim, with no bucket list needed.  Since becoming an expat, I've studied the history and politics of the region diligently to try and understand events that sometimes mystify outsiders. Now that I've been taken prisoner by social media, I participate passionately in online discussions and exchange information with like-minded "friends."

I moved here for good not until after the "bloodless" military coup that ousted Thaksin in 2006. I remember people voting in a referendum to approve the constitution written by coup leaders that was designed to block politicians like Thaksin who had become too popular for the ruling interests. But in 2008, voters elected Thaksin partisans to office.  The first PM was ousted by a court set up by coup leaders because he received pay for hosting a TV cooking show, and his replacement fell afoul of other legal problems.  Through back-room deals, Abhisit, leader of the opposition Democrat party, was selected to replace the Thaksin party in office.  The two-month protest in 2010 was intended to force him to hold new elections, but these only took place after the protest was violently ended.  In the next election, Thaksin's sister won overwhelmingly with votes primarily from the northern and northeastern provinces.  Now her reign appears to be ending.

My intention here is not to provide a history of current events or to argue the pros and cons of Thai politics; I do that on Facebook and Twitter.  What I'd like to do is give a sense of what it feels like to be under siege and not to know what the future holds.  Recently my brother and I have been debating the significance of Near Death Experiences (NDEs).  For him, the evidence shows that non-local consciousness, unconnected with a body, is a real possibility.  But my reading of neuroscience in the past year has convinced me that consciousness, mind and self require brains.  I wonder why some people feel the need for a metaphysical soul that transcends death of the body.  "Are you going to be shocked if and when you find out you're wrong," he said as his parting shot.  I'll be surprised if I survive 2014, was my reply.

Uncertainty is a curious state to be in.  I told my students Tuesday that I didn't know whether we would have a class next week but I hoped we would.  If they can get through the blockade Monday and go to our campus an hour away near Ayutthaya, then I would try to get there on the school's commuter bus the next day.  But at this point, who knows?  I worry about Nan who works at a hotel in Siam near where several intersections are scheduled to be blocked.  She can use the river and Skytrain to get to work, but not after dark when river traffic ceases.  If the chaos is too bad she can sleep at the hotel.  We live in Pinklao, a section of Thonburi across the river and from the maps I've seen we should be able to move around this area with no trouble.

Thais ask me, as the head of my department did Tuesday at school, "When will you go back to America?"  They are thinking the political chaos that has plagued their country for so long will send me packing: 18 coups since the country was declared a constitutional monarchy in 1932, the shooting of citizens demonstrating in the streets in 1973, 1976, 1992 and 2010, intrigue around the Palace and draconian laws that make much discussion impossible, and traffic that defeats all attempts at control.  But from the moment I first arrived here almost 10 years ago I have felt at home in Thailand.  When asked why, I come up with the usual suspects: weather, food, beaches, friendly and generous people, Buddhism and temples, etc.  The reasons really don't matter.  I'm not a complainer like those sorry expats on the internet boards who come for beer, surf and women and hate everything else about their adopted country.  For me, it's just...home.

Today, however, the mob of protestors, led by the demagogue Suthep, will march on a trial run through my neighborhood a block away from our condo.  I'm leaving after lunch to go into the city to see a friend and attend an event held by my Buddhist group.  I may encounter them on my way to the river to catch a water taxi.  If I do I'll smile approvingly like a dumb tourist and take lots of pictures of the marchers.  I've done this several times so that all I know doesn't just come out of my computer screen.

There are many scenarios from different commentators about what might happen in the next week.  None of them are benign.  Yingluck has called for a new election on Feb. 2 which she will surely win, so the opposition is boycotting the election (this is a repeat of events of 2006).  In Thailand the military's role is to protect the monarchy rather than the people, and they have so far refused to help make sure the election takes place.  Candidates in southern provinces controlled by the opposition have not even been allowed to register by protestors.  Several court decisions in the last week could very well impact Yingluck and her political party which might prevent an election.

But the most worrying scenario involves the government's supporters in the north and northeast who have seen their will in several elections thwarted by powerful Bangkok interests including the military, and they've vowed to strongly resist the changes demanded by Suthep's mob of protestors who seek to end the election they cannot win.  At worst, Thailand could descend into civil war, with the possibility of the country splitting in two.  When the bullets start flying, we would then get on the next bus to Phayao. But it might take longer than the flood waters to recede for Thailand to return to normal.  This haunts my daydreams and tempers any excitement I feel about the grand drama of Thai politics to which I am a witness.

The Decline and Fall of Reality

The year ending today, 2013 brought a slew of articles on the death of conversation and the disappearance of face-to-face connections because of the onslaught of social media. People more and more to look only at digital virtual reality and ignore what's going on around them. Talking or sending messages on mobile phones is said to now be a major cause of traffic accidents (one woman texting on her phone reportedly walked off a pier into the water).  Sherry Turkle says we've replaced conversation with online connection.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference. 

Turkle, in "The Flight from Conversation," urges people to look up from their devices and look at one another.  The author of a book on how people relate to their gadgets, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, she advocates an understanding of and a control over technology that seems less and less possible.  Social media is a convenient scapegoat for many disenchanted with the way modernity (or even post-modernity) has turned out.  In some ways they resemble the Luddites in early 19th century England who destroyed labor-saving machines that threatened to put them out of work and became a symbol for anyone who felt threatened by new technology.

It's now fashionable to protest proliferation of digital devices and the networks of apps to which we've become addicted. We even complain about it on Twitter, Facebook and LINE.  But we forget that smart phones and portable tablets are only the latest technologies to distract us from "real life."  Thais don't read newspapers on the Skytrain but when I was a daily commuter by train between Manhattan and Connecticut no one was without their newspaper (folding it to keep it out of your neighbor's face was an art).  Every invention that threatened conversation was been bemoaned by someone, from the telephone and typewriter to the fountain pen and paper.

As an active user of various social media (though I've never gotten into Instagram and rarely attempt a call with Skype), I frequently find myself defending it against attacks from modern Luddites and promoters of a kind of realism that often seems to downgrade imagination and fantasy, at least off the printed page.  Yes, as I travel around Bangkok, every other person I see in cafés and on public transport is looking at a small screen, taking a photo with their device, tapping out a message on the tiny keys or talking into a phone behind their hand (Thais are polite that way).  Today, at least in this Asian capital, digital devices are ubiquitous.  Is it a sign that civilization is crumbling?

I don't think so.  My argument isn't very sophisticated: This is the way it is.  This is what people choose to do in 2013. Accept it and quit bitching about it.

No one has to use the new technologies, just as no one is forcing the Amish to abandon their horses and buggies for gas-guzzling cars.  Many of my friends shun Facebook and Twitter and I know one or two who do not even own a mobile phone.  But even they might use the internet for email or research on the web.  You can pick and choose.  Some people of my advanced age, however, avoid the computer and all it entails.  They claim to prefer writing letters to far away friends instead of sending email. Hand-written messages, they believe, are so much more personal.  And they are.  As someone whose hand writing has always been illegible, even to myself, I always loved the more impersonal typewriter.  My father's secretary taught me to type when I was 12 on an ancient Underwood, and I carried around a portable Smith-Corona for years.

When I was teaching environmental philosophy back in California, I lectured on the unintended consequences of technology, and I have much sympathy for the old Luddites as well as the more recent activists who campaign against nuclear power (long before Fukushima proved correct their worst fears.  I know that chemicals developed for warfare were introduced into the environment after 1945 and the increase in use since then closely parallels the rise in cancer rates around the world. The consequences of new technologies are often not benign and impartial government and international agencies are needed to protect the public.

I'm not a very good Buddhist, but one of the messages that got through to me was that hoping that something might be different only brings discomfort and upset.  I wish that I were more handsome and leaner and that it wasn't so cold today.  The bird in the tree outside should shut up. Why is there so much conflict and misery in the world?  The Serenity Prayer is very good for this: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."  Friends back in my town in California would complain about how bad the traffic had gotten.  It was so much better in the old days, 5 or 10 or 15 years before.  I loved Berkeley in the early 1960's before hippies, drugs and street people changed the scene irrevocably. Today's music is terrible: boy bands and sampling have ruined it.

The Oxford Dictionaries selected "selfie" as the word of the year for 2013.  When cameras shrank to the size of a pocket and then were put inside mobile phones, the world changed forever. Go anywhere today and people are photographing it and themselves in it.  In every restaurant people are taking pics of their food (I do it all the time). According to Turkle's article (above) some people have developed the skill of looking in the eyes of a person they're with while texting on the phone in their lap to someone else. Impolite, yes, but the end of civilization as we know it?

Back in the late 1950s, Erving Goffman wrote about the performative aspects of social communication in his now classic book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.  Goffman echoed Shakespeare in seeing the world as a stage and everyone in it as actors in different roles.  I believe that the internet with its apps and smart phones with their tiny cameras have given humans lots of new ways to present themselves to others.  If there is no essential self (or soul), as Buddhists believe, then our self is a continuing act of creation brought about when our brains encounter the world.  And the drama goes on as long as we are alive.  As for me, my Facebook timeline and Twitter tweets give me a stage in which to perform my dance.  It's both a newspaper and the draft of a novel, as well as an art gallery where I display my photos, and a confessional couch where I can reveal inner most thoughts to those I consider "friends" (and FB allows for extensive categorization of relationships).  I can be my "self," the person I think I am, or I can create a new identity with an icon and a set of fabricated  attributes.

Conversations online and on LINE may be different from face-to-face interactions but they are still taking place and something is exchanged between human beings.  I'm connected virtually with people I've known at every stage of my long life. We exchange thoughts, opinions about current events, gossip, movie reviews, pictures and birthday greetings.  This is REAL communication, even if I'm at my computer in Bangkok and they're halfway around the world. Definitions that oppose "real life" to what we do with our devices are just as misleading and damaging as an addiction to the screen that makes looking into another's eyes difficult.  It's all "real," not just your slice of it.

Dreaming of Christmas

In this Buddhist country where I now live, Christmas has become a major holiday, at least for the shoppers.  Even in my large neighborhood mall, where seldom is a Western face seen, the stores are littered with fake trees, colored lights and misspelled displays like the above.  Christmas carols can be heard on the PA systems, beginning in early November, and the only thing missing is a Salvation Army Santa.  I try to be cosmopolitan, but there's just something so wrong with "Jingle Bells" in Thailand.

Last year there was still snow on the ground when we left Seoul on Christmas day after a week's holiday.  The day before, on Christmas Eve,  I had seen some Salvation Army Santas ringing their bells in the crowded shopping center of Myeong-dong, but I assumed that's because a quarter of the Korean population have embraced Christianity.  Here in Thailand they are less than one per cent; missionaries have always traveled an uphill road among the Thais.  In Seoul we saw street corner preachers and even a man on his knees praying while pedestrians swarmed around him.  The snowfall a few days before had been delightful. The possibility of experiencing it had been one of the reasons for our visit, but throwing snow balls failed to resurrect in me the Christmas spirit.

As a parent I tried to recreate the Christmas rituals of my childhood. The bigger the tree (and we had to chop it down ourselves) the better. I accumulated tree ornaments through two marriages (and left them behind in the divorce settlements).  On Christmas eve, just as my father had done with me and my brother, I read my children "The Night Before Christmas."  One holiday in Connecticut, when my brother-in-law's family traveled from Ohio to join us, we were without a copy and had to recreate the story from our collective memory.

My parents loved Christmas.  Every year they put cards received up on the wall and outfitted themselves in red.  When my brother and I were young, we went to bed without a tree and awoke to find a bejeweled fantasy surrounded by mountains of gifts brought by the Santa who had consumed the milk and cookies we'd left for him.  My mother would never let us see it until she'd made coffee and gathered her note pad to record who gave what for future thank you cards.  Our aunts, uncles and cousins on the West Coast combined their presents for us in a large barrel they sent overland weeks before.  In the evening, with the wrapping paper neatly folded and put away for next year, we'd play with our toys in the living room around the TV set where Perry Como would be singing Christmas songs like "O Holy Night" and "Silver Bells."

Bing Crosby's singing of "White Christmas" (seen here from the 1954 movie of that name with George Clooney's aunt Rosemary) is one of many musical triggers that evoke the Christmas spirit for me.  He first sang it in the 1942 film "Holiday Inn."

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the tree tops glisten and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

Whose heart cannot be moved by those lines? Well, it might be pretty meaningless to my neighbors here in Bangkok.  "White Christmas" is on every holiday compilation album and all popuar artists have sung it at one time or another, even Boy George and Lady Gaga.

When did it all go bad?  When did the Christmas dream become a nightmare?  It didn't happen with the realization that Santa Claus was only a fairy tale and Rudolph had no red nose.  For years I listened to the songs I loved each December, sent cards to my friends, cut down and decorated the biggest tree that would fit in my house, and bought more presents for my loved ones that I could afford.  I tried to replicate for my four kids the marvelous Christmas I spent at my father's cousin's farm in snow-swept Ohio when I was five just after the war.  They were rich and the tree in the entrance way was two floors' tall.  Or the Christmas when we traveled in a blizzard through Pennsylvania to my wife's brother's house in Cleveland.  Those Christmas dreams are sustained by the presence of children and the promise of peace on earth and goodwill towards all.

What turned me ultimately into a bah humbugger was the ever increasing necessity for more and costlier presents and the fear that they would never be good enough to please the recipient. Nothing changed, since Christmas has long been an exercise in consumerism.  I grew up and became less of a dreamer.  Snow was a paradoxical consequence of global warming and probably carried noxious chemicals or even radioactive particles.  We tried making rather than buying gifts, and that wasn't appreciated by the kids.  With friends in California from Denmark we celebrated their traditions of dancing around a tree lit with live candles followed by the drinking of aquavit and the eating of herring (this is the Christmas my two youngest kids will dream about and try to recreate some day).  But as the shopping season drew near ever year I would retreat into my shell and leave the decorating, buying and cooking to others.  It didn't go over very well.

The Christmas spirit didn't totally die for me, it just got less parochial.  In 2005 I celebrated a cold, drizzly Christmas in an Anglican church in north London, in 2007 it was in a Catholic ashram in Tamil Nadu, India.  The world now owns Christmas, even if it has lost its moorings in the birth of Jesus.  Back in the U.S. the Tea Party claims there is a war on Christmas because many have replaced "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays."  Some in the religious right have always thought Santa a dangerous pagan.

Pagan Pattaya is all dolled up for the holidays with decorated trees and Christmas messages, many of them in Russian and Arabic.  In 2008 I spent my second Christmas there surrounded by poinsettia plants (not a native species) and naked Santas.  In the hotels there and in the supermalls of Bangkok there are trees taller than the tallest redwoods back in California and like the sequoia sempervirens they will last almost forever. I've been taking pictures of Christmas trees and decorations this year and this is perhaps why it seems a more popular holiday than ever before.  My wife growing up in a small village in Phayao only knew about Christmas because her aunt's boyfriend from Belgium decorated a tree and handed out presents to all the children.  Today, however, the internet and social networks have made it a -- if not THE -- universal holiday (sorry Tea Party folks, I have yet in my travels to see a creche with a baby Jesus and mama Mary outside of Christian precincts).

Nan and I have Santa hats and a reusable tree to which I added this year a string of colored lights.  There's a big tree in the condo lobby.  I have 80 songs in my iTunes in a Christmas folder and recently added "A Motown Christmas" and "Phil Spector's Christmas Album," two classics. Fortunately Nan has tomorrow off from work so we're planning to pick out presents for each other at the mall (nothing closes here on Dec. 25th) and have a holiday meal, perhaps a Japanese buffet.  I haven't sent any Christmas cards since I moved to Thailand since mail in the age of email and the internet is passé.  But I've filled my Facebook timeline with YouTube videos of my favorite Christmas songs along with the photos I've taken for the Christmas in Bangkok album.  There are a lot of good wishes swirling around the Net.  And if it weren't for the current insurrection in Bangkok, I might assure everyone of peace on earth and goodwill toward all.  It's only a hope now in Thailand.

Bah humbuggery, of course, coexists with a nostalgia for the Christmases in our (often false) memory.  The dream of Christmas promises much but rarely delivers, and disappointment is the seedbed of cynicism. The holidays are a time of sadness and even suicide.  My son Luke was as sentimental as me but he dreaded the Christmas season which made his chemical dependencies so much more difficult to control.  Fortunately my perennial sadness is now offset by a wonderful life. This song always puts me in the Christmas spirit wherever I am.

 

Hatred is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

As I write this post, mobs of anti-government protestors are invading and occupying government offices throughout Bangkok.  Their leader, a former MP named Suthep, has vowed to bring down Thailand's elected government by tomorrow night.  For the past week, marches and demonstrations, marked by the screeching taunt of blowing whistles, have blocked streets and caused chaos in the capital.  Tens of thousands of Thais from Bangkok and the southern provinces have gathered around the Democracy Monument to listen to fiery speeches denouncing the "tyranny of the majority" and calling for an end to elections, and an appointed government under the authority of the king.  They are allied with the Democratic Party which has not won an election since 1992.  What unifies the protestors is hatred bordering on mass hysteria of one man, Thaksin Shinawatra, as well as his sister, Yingluck, currently the country's prime minister.

When I arrived in 2007, Thaksin was already in exile, having been deposed by a military coup the previous year that had been provoked by similar street protests organized by his enemies.  During my first months there was a referendum on a new constitution written by the military junta that passed narrowly.  It was designed to prevent the executive branch excesses of which it believed Thaksin was guilty.  I read the biography by well-respected academics Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit and learned that Thaksin had mixed business and politics in an unethical and sometimes illegal way, a practice common among Thai politicians in the past.  He built the country's first mass political party with populist policies that increased his popularity in the rural north and northeast.  Opposition to his power arose among the traditional elites centered in Bangkok and the 2006 coup, a much used technique in Thailand, cut short his reign.

At the next election, despite the junta, a party allied to Thaksin won easily.  Thaksin haters, now called "yellow shirts,"  put pressure on the government in 2008 by shutting down the international airport for a week.  And when the prime minister was deposed by a court decision because he accepted money to appear on a TV cooking show, his replacement, Thaksin's brother-in-law, was also removed by what has been called a "judicial coup."  After a few MPs changed their allegiance, Abhisit Vejjijiva, leader of the Democratic Party, was declared an unelected PM.  In 2010, supporters of Thaksin and the voters whose decisions had been overturned three times, now called "red shirts," occupied a section of central Bangkok for two months, their goal to force a new election.  Abhisit, with the assistance of Suthep, ejected the demonstrators with brutal force resulting in nearly 100 deaths and a thousand injuries.  Irony of ironies, in the election Abhisit finally agreed to call, he was overwhelmingly defeated by a new party led by Thaksin's sister, Yingluk Shinawatra.

The present crisis began when Yingluk's party foolishly tried to pass an amnesty bill that would have allowed her brother back in the country and able to claim his confiscated fortune, but would not have punished Abhisit and Suthep for ordering the killing of red shirt protestors in 2010.  It galvanized the resistance of all factions. However, after the amnesty bill was withdrawn, Suthep declared his intention was now to rid Thailand of the "Thaksin regime," and a week of marches and takeovers at numerous government ministries resulted. The huge government complex at Chiang Wattana in the northern suburbs of Bangkok besieged by over by an estimated 20,000 and most operations shut down, including Immigration where thousands of expats and tourists come daily to apply for visas.  Their pain will cause international grumbles.  But of course Thailand's present troubles are already major news in the world's press and social media.

While discussion of the monarchy is prohibited in Thailand with stringent laws punishing the slightest slip of the tongue, any talk about Thaksin is difficult if not impossible because of the implacable sides.  No one straddles the fence. Yesterday a German expat I've known for some time tried to convince me that Thaksin was the equivalent of Hitler.  When I said he was only a typical corrupt politician whose sins were shared by many others, he shouted at me: "You've been brainwashed!  On Facebook my opinions have been challenged by other expats who believe Thaksin's approval of extra-judicial killings of drug dealers puts him behind the pale.  When I suggested that most Thais accepted this violence at the time, as well as that of Muslims killed while in custody in the south where an insurrection has been ongoing for years, my views were ridiculed.

I borrowed the title of this post from Chris Hedges' book about his experience as a war correspondent, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.  He tells about becoming addicted to hatred of the other and of the eruption of rage at inappropriate times.  Veterans talk of their experiences in warfare as an intense meaningful time when everything made sense, when good was defending your own and bad was the enemy.  Hatred is a primal emotion that distinguished our side from theirs at a time when territory meant survival and loss of it death.  Today the other may be just like us but for something that sets them apart (religion is a powerful dividing force, but support of different sports teams will suffice). Shared hatred can promote group adhesion and identity.  But psychologists also tell us that what he hate in the other might be what we most fear in ourselves (confused sexual identity can be a problem here). And hatred is a bitter pill that often can hurt the hater more than the one hated.

Unlike other large protests in the past, which can be colorful and carnivalesque, I've stayed away from big gatherings during the past week as much as possible.  I see the masses of naive and utopian protestors as riding on a speeding train that is sure to crash, and soon. Given Suthep's uncompromising goal of total victory over the government, there cannot be a peaceful outcome.  Eventually the authorities, police and military, will have to confront the mobs occupying government offices and I'm sure there will be considerable violence. There was a protest in my neighborhood a few days ago at the Ministry of Culture and I walked up to see what was going on. A large police presence prevented anyone from entering the building, and the crowd was largely boisterous but not angry.  They were blowing whistles, snacking from the food carts, and taking selfies against the police background.  Apparently 14 ministries have been targeted like this one.  The anti-government protestors appeared to be mostly white collar and middle class with women in their office uniforms on lunch break.  As I write this, fights have broken out between pro and anti government protestors.

Thais enjoy life and sanuk (fun) is often the standard. Demonstrations, whether of red or yellow shirts, are not unlike a rock concert with lots of music and even dancing between the rip-roaring speeches that never mince words (according to translations I've seen). Even my sister-in-law went last night to sample the excitement.  The yellow-shirt PAD and the Democratic Party have tried numerous times in the last two years to rouse their supporters to come out in the streets to protest against Thaksin and Yingluk but nothing until now has achieved traction.  The amnesty bill did the trick, and now the mobilization has achieved critical mass, enabling Suthep to aim high, the end of democracy as it is commonly manifested in the west and the inauguration of a new form of absolute monarchy.  They may have as many as 50,000 troops to achieve this objective in Bangkok.  But an equal number of red shirts are gathering on the outskirts of Bangkok who will strongly oppose any regime change.  At the last election, over 15 million voted for Yingluk even though most knew her brother might pull her strings.  I doubt that these voters will appreciate being disenfranchised by a street mob unified only by hatred of the man in Dubai.

Until the hatred of Thaksin is discussed, debated, resolved and put to rest, Thailand can never advance beyond the political crises that have paralyzed it over for over a dozen years.

Below: I happened on this mob outside the Royal Thai Police headquarters.  Later it was learned that protestors had cut electricity to the facility and also to the hospital next door.  Soon there will be a response to such vandalism and it won't be pretty.

The First Reality Show

Fifty years ago this week, my first wife and I were staying at my parents' house in western North Carolina.  We were recovering from a train crash a few days before on the border between Texas and Louisiana.  A woman in a pickup with her son and dog had driven into the third car back and derailed Southern Pacific's Sunset Limited from Los Angeles.  We were in the lounge car talking with new traveling friends on a sunny Sunday morning when the train car started jerking and tipping over. Aside from a few cuts and bruises, the passengers survived, but the occupants of the truck were killed instantly.

It's a peculiarly modern custom to celebrate milestones, like "fifty years," which mean little in the grand scheme of things.  We especially mark decades and quarter centuries as worthy of note to cheer or mourn.  Next summer I will turn 75 and I suppose there will have to be fireworks. The current generation now counts off the years from September 11th, 2001, when "everything changed."  But of course everything changes every day for somebody.  Two months ago we recalled the March on Washington fifty years ago that meant so much for the move of America away from its era of segregation. A week ago it was Armistice (or Veterans) Day when World War One ended. That date will get more fireworks next year on its 100th anniversary.

And yet...1963 is inescapably etched in my memory and in that of others in my cohort who remember what they were doing the day President Kennedy was killed.  My wife and I were moving from Berkeley to New York City to begin a new adventure.  Eventually we would continue on to Europe.  We were in our early 20s and relatively fearless.  The comfortable Fifties were giving way to new possibilities, and the symbol for the Sixties was our young president from Massachusetts and his fashionable wife.  I had chosen Kennedy when I voted in my first election two years before.

My parents were not particularly happy with my choice of a wife.  We'd gotten married earlier that summer by a Justice of the Peace in Laguna Beach.  "Living in sin" at our Berkeley apartment, where we pretended otherwise, made her insecure to the point of hysteria, and I imagined that legitimizing our relationship might help (it did, but only for a while).  My mother, who got up daily at dawn to mop the kitchen floor, would stand outside our bedroom door talking loudly in hopes that her new daughter-in-law would awake and join her.  But that was not to be.

I went out in the afternoon of the 22nd of November to do some errands with my mother.  We were returning from her dressmaker's and listening to the radio in the car when an announcement was made about Kennedy being shot.  It did not make sense.  When we got home, my wife, brother and father were in the living room watching our small black-and-white TV. There we stayed glued to our chairs and the screen for the next week.  Walter Cronkite (our announcer of choice) tearfully confirmed the president's death.  We learned about the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald.  And two days later, in a live broadcast from the Dallas jail, we saw strip club owner Jack Ruby shoot and kill Oswald in a room full of police in full view of the news cameras. That too did not immediately sink in. A murder live on TV in our living room.

There have since been other significant events shown live on TV. But for me the killing of Oswald by Ruby in front of millions of viewers was the first reality show.  Though I missed the first plane, I saw the second strike the World Trade Center as I drank my early morning coffee.  Now that we have YouTube, there are horrendous videos posted daily, most taken down quickly if they disturb the sensibilities of viewers (like the recent video of a beheading that I mercifully avoided).  In some ways, seeing IS believing.  We know who killed Oswald because we saw it with our own eyes.  But there is still doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, at least not without help, and a significant portion of the population believes the collapse of the Twin Towers was an inside job.  Of course, there were many who thought the moon landing was a fake despite the live telecasts from space -- "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  Seeing is not always believing.

There's no denying that fifty years is a long time.  I've already lived out the three score and ten years allotted to me in the book of Psalms.  The difficult part is making sense of it as a whole. Like the simplistic definition of history, it was just one damn thing after another.  A friend recently asked me to play the game of posting some little known facts about my life; her's were all fascinating.  I couldn't come up with any. One's life is never a singular event when it is contemplated from within.  We're the only animal that can stand outside itself and see how it measures up to an imaginary standard.  I can chart the distance by comparing points in time and noting the difference.  Sometimes I fear that the outcome is rigged.

In November of 1963 I was a skinny lad of 24 with a bit of experience as a journalist ready to scale the ladder of success in Manhattan (my second attempt).  By the spring we were living in a garrett apartment in Greenwich Village on Christopher Street.  I was writing for a broadcasting trade journal and my wife was a copy girl for Women's Wear Daily.  She was friends with Eric Van Lustbader who was on the staff a dozen years before his first fantasy novel.  A year later we were living in London where our son was born.  I wrote about TV shows for a regional magazine and she stayed at home as an unhappy, unfulfilled mom.

Fast forward to November 2013, fifty years later.  When I look at myself in the mirror I see past the fat, the wrinkles and the sparse white hair to the callow youth I once was.  Have I progressed? Have I learned anything about myself or about the world to justify the time spent at living?  My home is in Bangkok on the 9th floor of an apartment building with an expansive view of the city's central skyline. Sunrise is a continual joy.  Social Security from the U.S. allows me to live comfortably and I supplement this income with part-time teaching of English to monks at a large Buddhist university.  I only work one day a week but the interaction with young and enthusiastic students from a half-dozen Southeast Asian countries gives me great pleasure.  Married for the third and happiest time, my wife cares for me with a respect and love I've never deserved.  She works at an upscale hotel and on her days off we play together, eating out, shopping, going to films. On extended holidays we've traveled to a number of Thai islands as well as to the Asian capitals of Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul.

I can write easily about now and then, but it's the in-between years that escape the thread.  How did I get from there to here?  Were the choices I made at the time random and accidental, or was there a purpose to it all?  Often it's the harm I've done to family and friends that stops all thinking in its tracks.  If karma is real then punishment must be delayed for it seems I've lived a charmed life.

Now I'm an old man counting out his life in cappuccino spoons.  My two ex-wives despise me and most of my children as well as my brother no longer speak to me (or maybe I don't want to hear the judgements they have about me).  I go about my life halfway around the world from the California where I spent most of my years.  Sufficient funds and a marvelously developed social technology enable me to exist at a comfort level I could not imagine when I was younger.  Of course the sky could fall tomorrow.  The medical insurance I kept when I retired from UC is no longer sufficient to stave off emergencies, so health is the great x-factor. But until it's time to go I can enjoy my reality.  It's even documented with photos and videos on Facebook.

My Uncle Ted

Ted and my father were fraternal twins, yin to the other's yang.  He was my Auntie Mame, the relative whose glamorous life held out the promise of adventure beyond the boundaries of home while rooted in the family.  Ted was an actor on Broadway, a pianist who had accompanied Paul Robeson, the host at an exclusive inn on Cape Cod, an expatriate in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and gay.

Mame was the subject of a book by Patrick Dennis in the 1950s about his eccentric aunt, and it was made with much success into a play, musical and film. I saw Angela Lansbury in the role in the 1960s.  By then, inspired by our adventures in Mexico together in 1962, I'd moved to Manhattan to become a writer.  Ted, on the other hand, fell ill with emphysema during our trip and moved to San Diego with George, his partner of 20 years, where they bought a house with money he'd inherited from his wealthy grandmother.

Dreams do not always turn out as planned.  The stories and poems I penned over the years have amounted to little and the only writing I've really done is here in this blog for the past half dozen years.  Ted, terrified of suffocating, took his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1969. George succumbed to the alcoholism that had long plagued him.  He willed their house to a neighbor, who told me it was totally trashed, and his book collection to me.  Several boxes arrived at my house in Santa Cruz and they contained original manuscripts of stories George had written in the 1950s for shabby imitations of Playboy. There was also a heavily underlined copy in Ted's meticulous handwriting of P.D. Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous."

I don't know who was born first.  Ted was named Edward after their father, and his brother was encumbered with Homer (later nicknamed Humpy by his friends), the name of his grandfather. They were born in Toledo, Ohio, where their grandfather had been a successful inventor.  He discovered a process to extract turpentine from pine tree stumps, and in Toledo he piped steam through pipes under the sidewalks to melt snow (old-timers still remember "Yaryan heat").  After their father died of TB while working at the family business in Mississippi, they moved with older sister Margaret to a mansion outside St. Petersburg, Florida, where their new step-father was a speculator during the land boom years.  Soon they had three new siblings, brothers Frank and Mac and sister Nan.

My father was bigger and athletic, while Ted was thin and often in ill health.  He learned to play the piano by ear and fooled listeners into thinking he could read music.  Neither boy got along well with their step-father.  And when Margaret, for reasons lost in the mist (she died in 2001), got into a dispute with her grandmother, somehow she and my dad were cut out of her will while the beloved Ted remained (this provided the inheritance to buy that house in San Diego). He was always good with old ladies!

Homer and Ted were room mates the summer dad worked as a life guard at Cape May, New Jersey.  Later I was told by my father that Ted couldn't be gay because he had been worried that he had gotten a girl pregnant.  My father soon got married and I was born in Toledo not long before Hitler invaded Poland.  During the early years of the war, Ted was stage director for a touring version of "Othello," starring Paul Robeson, and at after hours parties he would accompany the black actor/singer on the piano. Robeson was persecuted during the McCarthy period for his political beliefs and support for civil rights. After Ted joined the Army where he worked as an entertainer, he directed a version of "Little Women" with soldiers in drag for the troops at Camp Lee, New Jersey.  It made the pages of Life Magazine, and it was during that production that he met George, one of the actors. Dad's hand had been maimed in an industrial accident which confined his war service to Coast Guard duty on Lake Erie. After the war we moved to North Carolina, and were living in a small town in the western hills when Ted came to visit us in 1952 (the photo at the top of this post).

It was family legend that Ted was an actor on Broadway.  At the age of 12 I was madly in love with the movies and my dream was to become an actor, or better yet, a movie star. When dad told him of my ambition, Ted's advice was: Drown him!  He came to visit us during rehearsals for Horton Foote's play, "The Chase," directed by Jose Ferrer.  I later learned that his understudy for the role he played was Jason Robards.  In 1945, Ted had been cast by Ferrer in "Strange Fruit," a play made from Lillian Smith's novel about an interracial romance.  It was named after a song sung by Billie Holiday.  When "The Chase" opened, Ted told me that he got a playbill autographed for me by its stars, Kim Stanley and John Hodiak; sadly it never arrived in the mail. Neither play directed by Ferrer, unlike his Broadway hit "Stalag 17," lasted for more than two months. The movie version of "The Chase" in 1966 starred Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda in lead roles. Robert Redford and Robert Duvall were also featured and Richard Bradford reprised my uncle's role.

According to Ted, he was never more than a character actor, and after "The Chase" closed he gave up on Broadway.  He worked at the Queen Anne Inn on Cape Cod in Chatham, Massachusetts, where he was an all-around host and maitre d'hotel.  In the evenings he played piano for the guests.  And each winter when the snows came to the Cape, Ted would go to Cuernavaca where he bought a small row house on an alley in the northern part of the city.  He decorated it with indigenous art and his closest friends were Joaquin and Aurora, owners of a paint store, with whom he played canasta weekly and watched the bullfights on their TV.  He seemed fluent in Spanish, but he admitted to only knowing lots of modismos, expressions, enough to fool even the natives. Ted was also acquainted with the most celebrated expats there, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, who had directed her mansion in Japanese modern, and actress Helen Hayes, as well as a number of "remittance men," many of them gay, who were expats supported by their wealthy families so long as they stayed far away from the ancestral home.

In Berkeley that fall of 1961 I was on the verge of flunking out of the University of California and had stayed in bed during the final week of the fall term during final exams reading science fiction.  I wrote Ted about my confusion and he responded with an invitation to come talk about it in Cuernavaca. My father took me to the bus station and I sensed some reluctance on his part to let me go, perhaps even jealousy.  Like Ted, I had been a sickly child, prevented from playing sports because of asthma.  I felt I had disappointed my father.  Their sister Margaret encouraged my interest in literature and told me often how much I like Ted I was (She had married an aspiring writer who became a refrigerator salesman and an alcoholic).  My younger brother, on the other hand, took after our dad.  The ride from LA to the border, and on a Tres Estrellas de Oro bus from Tijuana to Mexico City was the most fabulous journey of my life up to that time.

Ted met me at the bus depot and took me to a small hotel where we talked long into the night.  I felt an immediate connection, as if he understood me in ways my parents could not.  I suspected he was homosexual although we never discussed it while he was alive.  Those were closeted times.  It was rarely mentioned in my family.  Uncle Frank's wife Mary adored Ted and got furious if the possibility was ever entertained by anyone.  Ted and I went by bus the next morning over the mountain to Cuernavaca and I moved into his one-room house (plus kitchen, bathroom and patio).

I had brought my typewriter and he asked a friend to make me a writing table. I sat under the large Jacaranda tree in the middle of the patio which dropped its purple blooms onto the keys when I wasn't fruitlessly trying to create the great American novel, or at least a story or poem.  George was away (on a bender, it was implied), and we were joined by their friend Alicia from New York who had retired after a career with the Girl Scouts.  She was a short, dark and animated lady, probably a lesbian although it was never mentioned.  The three of us traveled south by bus from Cuernavaca, to Oaxaca, Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz, and across to Coatzacoalcos and Veracruz, before returning home.  It was a wonderful journey and I had my fill everywhere of ripe watermelon and fresh shrimp.

During my stay with Uncle Ted we attended a couple of parties held by remittance men and their friends.  One was in a house carved out of part of the old cathedral and restored.  Beside the pool a dance troupe from the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City twirled torches and performed an Aztec ritual for guests. At the home of the business manager for Helen Hayes, I swam in a large pool decorated with gold coins. Between that house and the one next door there was a small slum where the domestic help lived. While I was swimming, guests arrived on the lawn beside the pool in a helicopter provided by the Mexican Air Force.

After I returned home to Southern California following my two months as Uncle Ted's protege, in many ways I felt like a failure. I was 21 but still a naive kid, fearful of the looks given me by the Indians at the pulqueria on the corner, afraid to venture far on my own, and a poor student of Spanish. The confusion I felt about my life in Berkeley had only been temporarily abated.  On the trip I had not written anything halfway decent, save for a long poem about a train wreck in which many peasants were killed or injured that profited dramatically from their misery.  Ted had encouraged a romance with a young girl who worked in her parent's store near our house, and he also prodded me to go after another girl I met at a party who worked in the diplomatic corps. Both came to naught.  I preferred to fantasize about a girl back in California whom I learned, after I returned home, was engaged to marry a close friend.  I was an usher at their wedding.

But being with Ted in Mexico did give me a look at wider possibilities.  I didn't have to go back to school and settle down into middle class life like my parents.  After recovering from a bout of hepatitis (bad water on the bus ride home, I deduced), I set out on a cross-country train journey with my typewriter in tow to New York where I got in touch with Ted's friend Alicia.  She introduced me to her nephew Alan and I was given a temporary home in the Greenwich Village loft he shared with his artist friend David.  Without Ted that never would have happened. Another guest in the loft was a car salesman named John from England, and we got to know Manhattan together.  This first foray into New York lasted only four months.  A year later my first wife and I returned to New York for more adventures and the following year we moved to London where we shared our first apartment in Baron's Court with that same John.

Thanks, Uncle Ted, for your continuing influence on my life, and for being my Auntie Mame.

A House is not Always a Home

I was the owner of a house for abut a minute. Then the marriage fell apart and I ran off with my wife's buyout offer.

Home ownership is a key pillar in America's civil religion.  It's also a component in what it means to be a husband, a father and a man.  Not only the poor are homeless.

Owning a home was the goal touted for veterans after the second world war.  My father served in the Coast Guard on Lake Erie because he'd lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident and the other services wouldn't take him (in later years he was unable to join the Elks or the Lions club because he couldn't perform the club handshake).  When he was hired to sell plastics in the south as a traveling salesman after the war's end, my parents bought a tiny house in Greensboro, borrowing money from relatives for the downpayment.  I was eight and I loved the big back yard with a tree I could climb. No more rentals like the apartments they'd had in Toledo.  My mom and dad traded up for the rest of their lives, buying houses in western North Carolina, Atlanta, Southern California and Florida.  After my mother died, my brother and I split the sale price for her cinderblock home. He bought an apartment and I spent my share on travel.

I was raised on cowboy movies and science fiction and the prospect of owning property, not to mention having a wife and children, never appealed.  I wanted a life of adventure.  The fact that paying rent produced no equity did not bother me.  I shared houses with friends who'd taken the plunge and noted their possessive joy, but it failed to change my mind.  House ownership was a complicated affair that chained one to an object that was a domineering mistress.

Women need a nest more than men, according to my understanding of sexual difference, and my first two wives were persistent in their desire to get a house.  Fortunately, I never saved enough money nor made a large enough salary to fill that need.  Whatever excess was available I preferred to use for travel (London 1964-66, Hawaii and Florida in the 1980s).

When my second wife received an substantial inheritance from a distant relative whom most in the family considered an oddball, all resistance faded.  My daughter and I found a house on a hillside in the Santa Cruz Mountains that was perfect.  It was surrounded by redwoods and fir trees, and had been enlarged from a cabin built by a friend, a piano player who taught music for years to prisoners at Soledad.  He and his wife, a stewardess with a drug problem, had a deaf child and when their marriage collapsed, he had to sell the property.

My good credit allowed us to finance a third of the cost of the house with two-thirds coming from the inheritance.  My wife began gardening big time, and she bought a hot tub.  A tiny cabin up the hill from the house became my book-lined study and it was there that I wrote most of my Ph.d. dissertation about the movement in California to save ancient redwood trees in the first state park. We were living in paradise, but time was running out.  She was particularly displeased when I refused to climb up on the roof to remove the leaves and clean out the gutters.  She loved hardware stores; I found them dreadfully boring.  A relationship that began when she admired my poetry which I read one evening in the restaurant where she was a cook was heading for disaster.

I don't have pictures of the house because I left all my photos behind when she told me she wanted to live alone.  The photo I took above is of one of the many Victorians in Santa Cruz where I visited not long before Halloween in 2010.

After the split, my daughter accused me of threatening to take away the house that she and her brother hoped someday to inherit from their mother who at that point held the purse strings.  They stayed with her and I went through a succession of rooms in the dwellings of friends before finding a secure rental in a pool house near the beach. I learned that my soon-to-be ex-wife expended considerable effort in getting the lowest possible estimate on the value of the house so as to lower the amount she needed to pay me to give up my half.  Her check for $20,000 provided traveling money for a couple of years. Her next husband was a plumber who knew his way around the hardware store and who installed a new wood-burning stove for her.  He also taught her to surf.

My son and his wife live in a palatial spread next to vineyards in the foothills of Sonoma County. He worked hard and was successful early in life when he and his wife made the decision not to have children.  They fill their rooms with dogs and cats, some living out their lives in the comfort of a house most people can only dream about.  It's basically a one-bedroom house with a couple of spare rooms over the garage, with a connected living room and dining room big enough to throw a large party.  I'm happy that someone in my lineage can have the chance to experience living in a 21st century plantation, but I found the small guest room upstairs fulfilled all my needs.  If my world here collapsed for any reason, it might be possible to retire there surrounded by grape vines and boutique vintners.

Now that I live in Thailand, I frequently run into expats who retain property back home which helps to fund their retirement (or escape) in Thailand.  Others talk of the condos they've purchased at prices far lower than they'd pay in the U.S. or England, or Denmark.  I've met people with maids and penthouse gardens.  My sister-in-law's boyfriend has put money down on a condominium that has yet to be constructed.  My wife would be very happy if we could figure out how to buy a place.  Jerry, who used money from writing to purchase a farm in Mendocino back in the 1970s, now visits his farm in Surin once a month where his wife stays to raise rice and pigs and they live in a house he built that is ostentatious enough to tell the villagers for miles around that a farang is in residence.

Social Security (which may be threatened when the U.S. government is forced to default on its bills in several days' time) and the small amount I earn from teaching English to monks will not permit me to share my wife's dreams, even if I didn't still have an aversion to owning anything so grand as a house and land or even a small condo.  I've always understood the practicality of buying over paying rent, and I feel the negative social pressure from being a man who lacks property.  But for now, this home of mine of less than 40 square meters, in which I've lived now for four wonderful years, will have to suffice.

What's the difference, then, between a house and a home?  At a bare minimum, I'd say that a house is a material structure and a home is more of a state of mind.  "Home" can be a wonderful metaphor that, for example, Brother David Steindl-Rast uses for his description of union with God which he sees as kind of a going home.  Graham Nash wrote this lovely song about living in a house in Laurel Canyon for several years with Joni Mitchell, but he is most certainly talking about a home.

Pissin' in the Wind

When I was a young man I used to be able to write my name by peeing in the dirt.  Sometimes my friends and I would have a contest to see whose stream could reach the highest point on a wall. The ability to piss higher, farther and longer was a sign of one's status in the teenage mafia. Even the girls learned a technique to pee while standing to show they were one of the boys. Holding one's pee would be a test of manhood.  "My teeth are floating" was a bit of braggadocio uttered while someone manfully delayed release.  A friend we all admired would hold the tip of his penis until it blew up like a balloon and then would let go his tsunami of pee.  Applause all around.

Urination and defecation may be the obligations that unite us as a species.  Asians are perhaps a little less uptight about it. In India and here I see men peeing often by the side of a road (I suppose women need a bush).  Although in Mexico I remember seeing an old lady spread her legs and her ankle-length dress to piss on the dirt of the alley where I was living. A recent YouTube video laughed at a mom for letting her young son pee into a plastic bag at a McDonald's.  Before I came to Bangkok I read that commuters here spent so much time in traffic that they needed portable potties. In Luis Bruñel's 1974 film "The Phantom of Liberty," people at a dinner party sit on toilets and occasionally retire to a small room to eat.  This reversal of habits is unsettling.

Old people think often about what goes in and comes out of the body, and how smoothly the process progresses.  In her last days my mother spoke of her need for a "stool softener," and when I visited her a couple of months before she died, she had an "accident" and refused to let me help her until after she cleaned the carpet.  A sign that my grandfather had to be moved into a retirement home was his inability to control his bowels.  For the young who poop and pee thoughtlessly, such attention to what should be natural is inexplicable.

The prostate gets in the way of a sleep-filled night.  This walnut-sized organ in males evolved to produce liquid to protect sperm, and like a donut it surrounds the urethra coming out of the bladder. In older men it becomes enlarged for various reasons and slows the stream of piss to a dribble.  Since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer eleven years ago, I have become an observer of the attenuated flow.  Lying down increases the need to get up and inhibits the bladder's ability to empty.  During the day however, I can almost pee normally (although I could only write the first letter of my name and not the whole kit and kaboodle).

I won't strain the reader's attention to mention the operation of my bowels, safe to say that "Bangkok Belly" from either tainted food or water can complicate the process.  When my stomach began to balloon with age, I determined that more regular elimination might keep the waist in check.  But this was a theory that never got off the ground.  At some point my innie became an outie and I found only drawstring pants would avoid the over-the-belt look.    If you Google my name you might find someone who won a beer belly contest with the look to go with it.

Jerry Jeff Walker wrote "Pissin' in the Wind" as a pessimistic antidote to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," the anthem of the 1960's antiwar movement.  For Jerry Jeff, the best intentions can lead to naught.  I think he's on to something with this thought.  As I survey the world scene today, an almost mindless exercise with a computer and wifi, I see few signs of hope.  The efforts of capitalists and well-meaning political and environmental activists alike lead to universal blowback, the unintended consequences of both imperialism and good deeds.  Blaming the other satisfies no one.  There are health faddists who believe that drinking one's own urine can counteract the carcinogens produced by our industrial way of life, but I won't go there.  "Piss on it" is a blunt put-down, but doing it might put out a fire (that is, if you're young and your stream rages like Niagara Falls).

(Yes, that is me in the photo above, peeing off a cliff in Wisconsin.)