Brovic's Crossroads

Exercise

2012-02-12T22:30:00.000+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903, Off and On
2.12.12
Exercise

KHUK KHAK, THAILAND - This calico cat has been hanging around, hanging around. I don't care for cats that much, being more of a dog guy. Seems like cats come with women. Dudes don't bring a cat into the house. We come home with a dog, someone who'll listen, somebody we can relate to.

Cats are good for rats and snakes, they say. That being the case, while going after trash bags at Nang Thong Market (to clean up eight months of rubbish out back, pushed down my way by the two Thai yabba meth freaks three doors down, who got busted by a dozen police pounding on their door at 3 a.m. and taken away for rape and murder two months ago, I was told), I saw the cat food, tuna, salmon, other kinds there in the with the dog food, and thought I'd give the cat a treat, prompted by seeing the shedded skin of what had to be a eight foot snake in the garden, today.

Saw it, no snake, just the skin, snake for sure, no doubt, laying there, went one way four feet, wrapped around a small tree, and went back the other way, four feet. I looked at that a moment, head to tail, then gauged it's width with my thumbs and index fingers in a circle, oh, about the size of a, of a, of a, it's a fucking python.

So, can a cat keep a python away from the house? Or would the cat serve as lunch for the python? When they say 'cats are good for snakes', what does that mean, exactly? Good for lunch, or keeping them away? You tell me. Boa, Python, I don't know. About the size of a softball. Bigger than an orange, for sure. Smaller than a grapefruit. A softball. That's a python, right?

The skin was laying flat, so I was imagining it, and what I saw was one big fucking snake, whoever you want to call him. That could explain the jumpy nature and wide-eyed, fearful look in the cat's face whenever any sound occurs. Any sound.

Now it's become somewhat of a nuisance, underfoot and bugging me while I'm trying to get the place squared away from eight months of neglect, but I guess I'll just have to accept it with the illusory hope that somehow this little cat can keep a python away.

The more I think about it, what's a python doing here in the first place? Could be the snake habitat I've created. But the cat was obvious here, already, too. Hmmmm. It's a puzzle. I'll let you know what, if anything happens, cat-wise.

___

You saw Tarzan, didn't you? Those old black and white movies? You saw him wrestle with the alligator, crocodile? You see him wrestle with that python? He always had a knife handy, so that's what I do. Scissors, couple of knives close by, a machete', a bow saw, a hatchet.

With Tarzan, there was a contest of strength before he dispatched the snake, and I'm not sure if the monkey had to go for help once or not, but as you would know, Tarzan prevailed because of the next episode and many other King of the Jungle reasons, but for me, noticing a particularly sharp loss of muscle mass and strength over the past few years, I think my best bet is to keep some sharp-ass slicing and dicing utensils within reach, when working in the garden.

See? I'm still thinking about that snake.

Could be a cobra. Cobras can go eight feet.

Which is worse?

Makes a nigga just want to heave a big sigh.

____

Exerting himself to the extreme, Tarzan's hollering, wrestling the fucking python, "CHEETA! GO GET JANE!"

"NO, CHEETA! WAIT! GET ME MY KNIFE!"

____

People over here acted like they were pissed I stayed gone in the States for so long, upsetting their view of where I should be in their world. Found myself explaining spending Christmas with my family for the first time in years, and then New Year's, and the nice weather, and lights and electricity and water and the internet and the squadron responsibilities, and the projects I had to wrap up before heading out just as that snowstorm hit Denver.

BBC in Bangkok said people in Europe were freezing ass. Out on the sizzling street, I was drenched with sweat, an obvious new arrival just off the flight, too stupid to stay inside from the mid-day oven, feet blistering in sandals after being tenderized eight months in socks and shoes.

Over here, people have a thing about feet. You can't point your feet at a buddha. It's uncivilized to point your feet at anyone, or show them the bottom of your feet. Don't put your feet up on the table or up anywhere. Feet belong on the ground or motorbike foot pegs. Only heathens won't remove their shoes at the door.

So, after being here for seven, eight years, I take particular notice when someone is picking and playing with their feet, their socks, their toes, then want to do something like pass me a joint. I have to decline and tell them I'm trying to quit. Maybe other folks don't notice things like that, but I do.

Like Digger told his good friend Devon, "Nigga! You gonna step over ALL those shoes inside the doorway and come walking in here on my carpet with your muddy-ass shoes!"

The Thai won't say anything; they're too shy and non-confrontive. They'll just stare at your feet.

____

The squadron, mentioned earlier, the 335th, The Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron (I answer the phone there, '335th Tac', just like they, the radio operators, do if they were really doing it) was taking up more time since taking on the contract to deliver 63 planes by the end of January, delaying my departure until that loose end could be wrapped up.

Talked to Lupe' and Bo & Misty about picking up the production of about, well, 247 planes at $5 a plane.

Lupe' did some figuring, and said with a shake of his head, "Bro, you can't live on five dollars a day."

True, not even on the rez, but you could amp up your production. I can knock one out in about four hours; three, if people leave me alone and stop bugging me about another cup of coffee and would I mind if they checked out their Facebook page.

So, despite the claim of being 'made in America,' I sought out the Myanmar girls, got three already, and when I can get two more and somebody to translate, I'm going to re-fire up production over here with one girl on design, one on cut-out, one on drilling, and two on assembly, day wages at 200TB per day, per girl.

That's about seven bucks each, and selling them at $499.99, I'll make a fortune. Seven bucks. Even if they only crank out two a day, it's better than what Lupe' thought he could do after reverse engineering the thing and saying, 'maybe I can make them faster after I make forty or fifty,' he said.

Bo Davis was non-committal. Misty, too.

"Five bucks a plane," I told them. "And, you've got to deliver them to Denver."

Bo just shook his head. Misty wouldn't look me in the eye. They didn't ask about the transportation costs. Their unspoken message was that they can make more doing bead work.

So, it looks like my best bet is over here with the cheap Myanmar labor. There goes another five jobs out-sourced out of the country. There goes another shot at tribal sovereignty.

Already told you I've got the Chinese beat, hands down, with our 40-point assembly. Theirs is a laughable three, a punch-out idea off a flat piece of cardboard, stolen from my templates, mind you, after being hustled off to Shanghai by my former crew boss, Li An Song Su Ky, a hateful, scornful, no-smiling, scowling, snake-of-a-woman, who was formerly a sweet little dirt-poor, flat-footed, no-make-up, up-country village girl until coming down here and mingling with all the corrupted infidel foreigners, with whom she undoubtedly had a bad experience prior to our association.

You see it happen. People get burned, they get pissed and maybe withdraw. Don't want to trust or be open to the world. Start making accusations maybe and fall into some kinda prolonged emotional septic trench.

As old man Palamioni said after Tito's fall from the trapeze, 'These-ah thingsa happen froma time-ah to time-ah."

You may know the taste of deception or theft. Best is to spit and let it go. In any case, excuse the digression, the shipping costs of the planes are going to offset the labor savings, and with the squadron now six years old with 187 pilots, it's still in its marketing phase until 350 aircraft are produced.

Thus, our principal investors won't realize a dividend until sometime in 2015. Maybe earlier. I keep telling them we must stay the course, look at the long-range plan, beyond the elections, beyond the Mayans, beyond our wildest imaginations.

____

Honor Your Food

I've been trying to eat four, five, six times a day. Part of it is trying to replace a sharp loss of muscle mass and strength noticeably absent in the mirror and when swinging a splitting maul, and part of it is the food is so good.

At home on Pine Ridge we eat what they like to call food, all of which comes in a package or can, loaded up with horrible shit that will kill you sooner than most other addictions or other hosts of vampire bugs and parasitic chemicals floating in our environment. Out planet is just DRIPPING with toxins. Any Indian will tell you the government is practicing genocide with the food.

Don't believe me? Take a look. Take a look at Indian people.

Even here, where the eating is fairly close to the picking, I'm told the Thai have 25,000 harmful chemicals in their agriculture. Yeah, and the restaurants usually have dogs, and sometimes chickens working the place.

Dad prayed every meal. A good habit. Went something like 'Our Heavenly Father thanktheeforthisfoodforwhichwereboutreceiveforthenourishmentofourbodiesandsomethin
somethinsomethinsomethininJesusakeIpray Yamen.' It caught on. Not the blessing, but the habit, the idea of saying thanks before you eat. Since if we didn't eat, we'd die. A little thing, then, to say thanks.

So, are we praying for the food, or because of the food. hoping the shit won't kill us.

I was laying there in bed thinking about our food, and how much of it I'd consumed that day, and what life and energy it gave me, and what I'd said and done with that. How did it get played out in interpersonal relationships throughout the day?

Day one, in the womb, we start packing on the pounds, and when we get out, out of the womb, out of the house, out of town, all that food continuum, that energy continuum, gets expressed on our gigantic canvas. What color is yours? What does it look like? Would it be an aura?

I use profanity a lot around the boys, like, barracks talk. I tell the nephews, 'I was in the fuckin' army. This ain't a fuckin' girl scout camp.' And they laugh, keeping it loose, and sometimes in writing I'll use profanity, too, just to keep it loose and real, or to make a point, but when I think about honoring my food, and like Al says, 'You pray with that same tongue?', then sometimes I think I should tone it down and not swear so fucking much.

My friend, the Dalai Lama, doesn't swear around, at least in public. I was sitting with David, the manager of the new Italian restaurant where yesterday I ate one of my meals, said of one of his friends, as if to impress me, "He's friends with the Dalai Lama."

I looked him straight in the eye and said, "I'm friends with the Dalai Lama, too."

His face registered surprise, then he sat staring at me for a good fifteen or twenty seconds. I never blinked. Finally, he asked, "You've actually met the Dalai Lama?"

"No," I replied. "I've got his picture at home on my pantry door."

"Oh," he said, pushing back in his chair and turning his head sideways in a scoff, "Then I'm friends with the Dalai Lama, too."

"Sure, you are," I told him.

Some of it has to be who you're hanging out with. If it's the boys, or the boys in the barracks, then you can say any fucking thing, right? You should hear the way these motorcycle gang members talk, and the Brits, and the Aussies. They are really, really, bad. In front of women, their girlfriends, their wives, their mothers, for Christ's sake! I couldn't believe what Damon called Margaret Thatcher with his mother sitting right there, who didn't disagree.

It's so bad, I can't print it, so I'll tell you psychically.

Get it? That's pretty bad, isn't it?

Wow. Talk about getting side-tracked. Where the fuck was I?

Well, I'd like to think that I honor my food by being kind to plants and animals.

____

Even before I got on the plane, I was thinking about massage. Shortly after checking in after a solid 26 hours flying in coach class (say, 'sardines') DenverLosAnglesHongKongBangkokPhuket - Wham, Bam, Blam, Boom, exhausted/wired, went straight to the hotel massage, and for ten bucks, had a woman attack me with such ferocity it felt like Turkey Vulture tears up roadkill rabbit. It's quite possible to leave feeling poorer than when you went in.

Complaining? You could say a bad massage in Bangkok isn't as bad as an excellent massage in Pittsburg.

____

They're Just There

Manuel stopped by the 335th HQ before I left the States, and among other topics, spoke about people being engaged with their mobile devices. Absorbed.

Around the world, new technologies have distanced us further from one another, putting us only physically in the presence of others. For those around us when we're electronically engaged, we could just as well be in vegetative state, on life support.

As Manuel said, 'They're not talking with you. They're not visiting or listening. They're just there.'

____

I just found some M&Ms I had stashed.

Ok, today, Yon, who gave me the bananas six years ago (yielding just now; sweet), stopped by when he saw I was back. I showed him the snakeskin in the garden. He looked, then looked again, closer.
With his left hand, he encircled his right forearm, indicating the thickness of the snake's body.

"What kind?' I asked, excitedly. "Phython? Anaconda?"

"No Anaconda," he said. "Cobra."

Someone said cats can beat a cobra. At dinner tonight, I ordered fish. After eating most of it, I asked the waitress, "Si krang, samrap meeo, Krap," a 'to-go' bag, please, for the cat.

- end

12.2.12

Two Of You, At Least

2011-12-17T13:51:00.002+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903, Off and On
12.12.11
Two of You, At Least

PINE RIDGE, SD - You ever get the sense that the whole universe is waiting for you to get your shit together? That's what they're saying about the entire planet. Waiting for all of us to make some changes so they can complete the symphony. If everybody could elevate just one tick, we could make that quantum leap.

'Three...two...one...ignition, annnnnnnd LIFTOFF!'

We've got to do something different, tinker around a bit more with dna and stem cells, or scrap the old model entirely and return to the drawing board. There must be some reason why we came to the garden, if there's a reason behind everything, like people like to say. I've heard people say it, anyway, as if it were a common truth, like gravity.

What if they're wrong? What if the bumper sticker is right?

No. Contrary to contemporary proclamations, shit just doesn't happen. Shit happens because of prior shit happening. Any scientist will tell you. Cause & effect. Buddhists say karma. What go around, come around. Isn't learning figuring out relationships? Monkeys and lab rats figured it out. Why can't we?

In any case, here we still are with things closing in. Live, evolve, reproduce, die. There must be more. Experience? Create? We sure make all kindza shit. Seems like there would be a tipping point, a breaking point, where we can't make any more shit because we've used up all the resources. I can see the graph. Then what can we make? Or maybe we can't make any more shit because all the jobs got shipped to China. Perhaps they could assume our capacity to make war. They've got the guys.

Reason why I say that about the waiting universe is because I'm still thinking of the multiple universes, a parallel universe of endless possibilities, my clone over there on the backside of a black hole, trying to copy all my moves, trying to keep up with me on the dance floor. I'm over here doing all the heavy lifting while he's over there just going through the motions, vamping on my psyche.

You think people see the same person you see reflected back at you in a mirror, who all these years you think you are? They're seeing the real you. The person we're looking at has it all backwards, but thinks they've got it straight. Check it out. The part is on the wrong side, if there's a part. Look at a photo. That's you. The mirror? That's an illusion. The Self-story, the bullshit script we tell, is all delusional, a chasm between the perceived and the real.

Reason why I say that about the mirror is because I just saw some creepy horror movie over at Bo and Misty's where the girl was in front of a mirror, and when she moved, her reflection didn't. That was creepy. It got worse. Her reflection came crashing through the mirror, no shit, into the room, and proceeded to...you don't want to know...maybe you do...try to kill her with a long, pointed mirror shard.

Maybe you know the movie. Gave me the yim yams. Turned out, the girl got away from the evil twin, and was all right by the end of the movie. I don't care for that horror shit in the movies, ever since Vietn...ain't gonna say it...ever since my time working for the government in Southeast Asia, the aftermath of a tsunami, and life here in the Real 3-D World on Pine Ridge. Who needs more horror?

____

Speaking of being scared, have you noticed lately on the radio the government, FEMA, is telling us to continue to be afraid. Prepared, actually, and that's okay because that's the motto of the Boy Scouts, a fine organization, and what do they say about an ounce of precaution?

Nothing. But they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. An ounce of precaution will save you a boatload of paranoia. Insofar as FEMA public service announcements are concerned, they're asking us what we'd do in the case of a disaster with the combined sounds of a tornado, screeching brakes of a subway, and agonized cries from hell going on in the background. They advise getting a kit.

If you aren't the go get a disaster kit type, or maybe you'll put it off until the last minute, along with a gallon of milk, which won't be of any significant consequence if a massive solar flare hits us, we get slapped by something big & nasty whizzing in from space, or if you find yourself quite suddenly and unexpectedly swimming for your life.

But what gets me is the language they use, asking; 'What would you do if life as you know it is turned on its head?' and later, 'What will you do if your family's world gets turned upside down?' One hopes they're speaking only figuratively, but what an odd choice of words. Twice.

If you live in a perpetual state of fear or non-specific anxiety, and are even mildly concerned about the possibility of polar shift instantly freezing your lake and iced tea in July, then that kind of momma earth-spinning talk could be disturbing, to say the least, especially when it's coming not from some alarmist late-night end-of-the-world kook, but from your government.

They say have a back-up plan for your family, in case everything 'goes down'. Is this like fallout shelters and 'Duck and Cover', or are they prepping us for something everybody has a feeling is coming? You can go to www.ready.gov.

You don't have to be paranoid to be good boy and girl scouts. Stock up. Be prepared. Food. A gallon of milk, more ammo.

'Duck and Cover' - For those too young to remember or to have participated, the federal plan in case of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, the Russians, the fucking Communists, all same same at the time. Don't run to the window to see the source of the brilliant flash. There's going to be a helluva shock wave next. Get under your desk. Grainy black and white instructional films of happy, white, early1950's American kids in the classroom, all obediently and quickly taking cover in unison at the instruction of their teacher, 'All right now, children...everybody...DUCKANDCOVERYOURASS!"

It was funny then, and it still is now, has lasting comedic power, and as ridiculous as yesterday's discarded color-coded federal terrorist threat alert system, to be heard only in airports. You'd have to go to an airport to learn how afraid to be on a given day. Surely, someone in the administration at the time was asking, 'Shouldn't we be broadcasting this message on street corners and Wal-Mart?'

The response had to be, 'No. That would create too much a climate of fear.'

Everybody soon realized the obvious, including government security agencies after a time, a decade, that you don't need to be in the air to be extra afraid, though we continue to experience a charade of security as American air travelers who are all first treated as presumed suspect criminals, then allowed clearance only after submission to humiliating invasions of privacy at the hands of strangers.

This bothers me. It seems an acute outrage, and in airport security lines, I feel an absurdity, an innate urge to resist a numb, voiceless pathology, removing one's shoes, remove all items from your pockets, don't make them pull you aside, move along, move along, down the plank, stay in line, into the boxcar, over the cliff.

____

I've got this thing about being in the air; in fact right now I'm seeing how up I can get. Climbing trees, tree houses, kites, back-flip high-dive high school swimming pool clown, the high-wire circus act, helicopters in Vietn...ain't gonna say it...helicopters in a Southeast Asian rice and noodle-eating nation starting with a 'V' and ending with 'M', the transmitting tower incident at the Fort Wayne tv station, and now, today, these airplanes all over the place. The air up in here is thick with aircraft.

In reflection, I'm beginning to get it - I always wanted to be 'UP', or high. I can still hear my mom, 'Come down from there!' the chief engineer screaming, "DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY VOLTS ARE RUNNING UP THAT TOWER?" and years later, the judge hollering, 'STAY OFF OUR ARCHITECTURE!' after those guys, the cops and those people, talked me down from the attempted St. Louis arch crossing ('Judge Fines Man in Arch Crossing; St. Louis Post-Dispatch 4/16/73).

The attempt was to prove to my colleagues in the Flying Palominos that I wasn't chickenshit, after all, as they had alleged. That was without a net, a six hundred and thirty foot drop from the crest of the arch to the Mississippi, but it seemed a lot higher than that. A misleading headline, as well, since I was prevented from crossing, but I probably could have made it had they not interfered. Like they said after the spelling bees and the war, 'You didn't win it, but the important thing is that you tried.'

And just the other day, my daughter asked her brother, 'What was he doing up there in the first place?'

So, I see this 'air thing' a persistent and lifelong strand, my android clone operating a robotic device, harvesting minerals and rare ores from asteroids in the ort cloud. Speaking Chinese.

____

My Chinese Friends

Speaking of speaking Chinese, I'd like to welcome you new Chinese readers on board. What a plllleasant surprise! Tell all your friends. All 1.3 billion, ha. I've been trying to get a toe-hold over there. A toe-hold; that's a figure of speech. That's like, 'a foot in the door'. That's like, uh, developing new markets, okay? Maybe you know English figures of speech, already. That's what I do, officially, professionally - cliches and figures of speech. I have no idea of your proficiency, but, whatever, welcome. I hope we can be friends. I lay off the Chinese jokes. My landlord is Chinese. I buy of lot of your stuff in Wal-Mart.

Annnnd...without sounding overly patronizing, one of my best friends is Chinese, and I have another good friend who studied Chinese in Kunming. Did I say my landlord is Chinese? I was raised Chinese, we had a China cabinet, I eat Chinese food fairly regularly, I can find China 'Town' on Google Earth, a distant grandfather served with General Tso, and as a small child I ate spinach because of your starving people, and, and, I watched you guys launch your spaceship last month.

So. We're like brothers. Be sure to tell your friends. What? You want Chinese jokes? Okay. I've got one for you; In China, even if you're a one-in-a-million guy, there's 130,000 guys out there just like you.

In China, you've got to get caught red-handed, because nobody can describe the suspect.

Will this get by your censors? Next time, some jokes about you guys finding a wife. What're the odds over there of getting laid, 10,000 to one? No wonder the young dudes are heading out. Who wants to oversee a mining operation in Nigeria? The sheer demographics of it have the world's population as half Chinese by sometime soon, so you can feel good about the future.

____

You see where they found a new, possibly life-supporting earth-like planet about two or three times the size of us? Told ya we'd find it. That's the good news; there will be lots more space for everybody. Only thing is, it's 15, 20 light years away, give or take a bump along the way.

How do they know? A little bird. Also, they can see it. This isn't the not-too-hot, not-too-fucking-cold 'Goldilocks Planet'. That one was much farther away in another distant galaxy. This new one is close. It's right there. We can practically reach out and touch it, with a long enough hand. A virtual hop, skip, and jump.

Fifteen light years. Hmmm. Some say twenty. Another dude said 600. Oh? Is it possible that something could be racing toward us from deep space and we wouldn't know about it until the last minute? They said yes. Which direction would you look. Up? No. Out. Look the fuck out. Again, duck and cover.
____

These aren't 'ramblings', as some readers have referred to it; 'Keep sending your ramblings.' I'm working from notes here. Just looking for a way to tie it all together into some form of a consistent line of thought, which it is not. It's not a treatise. It's a...it's a...a..uh...

A sort of rambling report from my world. No doubt, you've got other things to think about in your universe. If we listen to people talk, we can tell exactly what's on their minds. What never ceases to amaze me is how each and every one of us has something different going on in their head. As they say in Asia, same same, but different.

I had an arrogant asshole of a boss one time tell me, "I need your best thinking on this." This was several years ago, but it stuck, and today I'm still as baffled by his comment as I was at the time. What the fuck? Like, your hazy, everyday, 33 1/3rd isn't good enough? You need some ginko? Slam it into overdrive? And if so, just how do you do that?

I suppose a person could start with a pot of coffee.

Milo Yellowhair stopped by for a pot of coffee last week, and upon hearing my lamentations that few, if any of our eighty-six pilots knew their tail numbers or the name of our organization, created a hypothetical prisoner-of-war scenario for downed and captured pilots from the 335th, more than willing to spill their guts at the hands of their captors under the threat of torture, but helplessly unable to remember the tail number of their aircraft or the name of our squadron.

"WHO ARE YOU FLYING FOR?"

"Wait a minute! Wait a minute. Let me think," he said, holding up his hand. "I can tell you. You guys don't have to do this. I can remember. Just give me a second. It's on the tip of my tongue...the ah, The Aerial...the...The Slim Buttes Aerial Squa...uh, The Slim Buttes...uh..."

____

The Cafe

With the advent of high-speed glass data delivery here, we witnessed the unofficial opening of a dream of bringing an internet cafe and coffee shop to Slim Buttes, with several people showing up, saying, "We heard you got your internet."

They stayed way beyond 1 a.m., sipping coffee on a tab, listening to pow wow music on You Tube, surfing the net, checking their email, fiddling with their mobiles, texting, and totally ignoring me and my jokes. 'So this is the way it's going to be,' I thought. In disgust, I had to eventually kick them out.

Along with the big new sign, 'Home Of The Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron', the six-wicket croquet golf course, and Bavarian Beer Garden on Tuesday and Thursday nights out on the veranda, the plan is to serve connoisseur coffees; your Guatemalan, Ethiopian, East African Uzuri, Sumatran, got your organic Free Trade bean here from Costa Rica, and my favorite, East Timor.

We're going to be as serious about our bean here as the folks in Seattle, and as as you may already know, Indians are some serious, competitive, major league coffee drinkers.

Okay, as opposed to Facebook or the dream world, here's a serving all in one big glob, one big blogglob. Enjoy the holidays. May you and your loved ones be blessed through the coming year.

-end

Thank You, Water

2011-11-30T09:49:00.001+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903, Then Quit For A While, Then Started Up Again
November 2011
Thank You, Water

PINE RIDGE Indian Reservation, SD - HEY! WHERE YOU BEEN AT?

I don't know about you, but me, myself, I've gotta be in 'my space' to write. A coffee shop or airport lounge doesn't cut it. Sure, you can zip off a quick confused, incoherent message amidst overloud distracting chatter and espresso machine...how would you describe that sound?..KRRRRRRRRRRRTT....but for focused writing, like, to you, like, now, I've got to be in my space. From here, I can produce a clear and focused, concentrated, incoherent message.

That would be right here at home. Just got phone and internet. Only took 2011 years and eleven months. Just got water after a six-year wait, and electricity after two years of off-the-grid solar, four years of candlelight and batteries when the solar attempt failed, and after four months ago when I swallowed my eco-electro energy independence dream and went over there to Martin, SD and humbly requested service from Lake Creek Electric Company.

"You got a special deal for vets, or retired people on fixed income?" I asked the efficient and polite middle-aged lady like the kind you see working for years at a rural electric company.

"No," she said.

"How does it work, then?" I asked.

"The way it works is, you give us money, and we give you electricity."

They wanted a signature on a ten-year contract, just short of marriage, so I scrawled 'Peter Larsen' on their paperwork, laid down about $700 bucks up front for the poles and the deposit and the survey and the crew lunch and office party and gas and whatnot, and here about a month ago, they came out the very same day the tribal water crew installed the long-awaited yard hydrant, and run the lines and set the poles, telephone poles, inadvertently cutting through the Mini Wiconi water line with that bigass hydraulic auger when they drilled the holes for the poles. I had water for fifteen minutes.

"Couldn't have hit it more dead center if they'd laid out tobacco and prayed," I told Bo and Misty, who were over here drinking coffee and getting some kinda way, hearing the story three times. "There's only one place those lines (water & electric) intersect, and they nailed it."

Thinking maybe it was just me, I asked the guy, "This has happened before, right?"

It had. Not alll the time, but it had, like the time they went through a, wha'd he say?, a four-inch line? and had the truck submerged before a bigass wrecker pulled them out of the sinkhole they'd created. It happens, he said with a shrug of resignation. Fortunately, the water crew was still here with their backhoe and bobcat, and repaired the water line straight away, as the gecko likes to say.*

Anyway, I've got water and lights, lights on all over the place, and just here last night, phone and internet.

Maybe city and off-the-rez folks take all that for granted. Like, a shower and indoor flush toilet. After all this 3rd-World time doing without, hauling water, out of communication, and sleeping on a Meadowlark's schedule, I can just say I'm pretty happy about life here in Slim Buttes.

Soooo, just because you haven't heard from me doesn't mean I don't care, or haven't been thinking of you. I have. And it may sound cliche', but I've been meaning to write. Really. I've got notes, notes out the ass.

Let's see...let's see here. Yeah, I've just been out here checking my traps, managing air traffic control up in here, and waiting for contact from the Pleidians. That's what I told Jack and those Red Cloud nephews when they came out here, none of which seemed to register, because they just said, 'Uh huh'.

So to make an imprint and see how much attention they were paying, I shouted out, "TO HELL WITH THE HOG MARKET REPORT! WE WANT SOME FUCKING FOOTBALL!" as I went over and changed the AM station on my little battery-operated radio, tuning in the Cornhuskers at home in Memorial stadium over in Lincoln.

They didn't laugh at that, either. I don't know what it was. Maybe they didn't know what to expect.
They seemed a bit apprehensive, staring at all the planes.

Mouse traps. But they didn't ask. Didn't ask who the Pleidians were, either. Just kind of nodded in agreement that they'd prefer the game over the price of pork bellies.

Here, on Pine Ridge, it would be a fair guess to say most Indians don't give a shit about livestock reports, but just down the way in the panhandle of Nebraska, from which the local station broadcasts, the price of grain futures and bulls and heifers and hogs dominates the noon news. Around here, the people become excited when water comes to the 'ville.

___

You see where my predictions came true? Shit falling from space? ('Alarm Raised Over Shit From Space' 07.03.09) Yeah. And I've got another one for you - things are going to get better before they get worse. Like that? That's what Reagan told us, and you can see he was right. Get government off our backs, he said. Trickle down economics. Um hmm.

So yeah, I'm trying to elevate to where y'all are at. Ipod, Ipad, GPS, palm pilot, cell and mo-bile device, text, twit, and triangulate, tweet astral realm and ascended light body, but things happen slowly out here, everybody knows. TMI, man. ixnay on the x-rays. Give me a hand search. Still trapped in human body. Still working without a net. Contact me by ESP.

Gotta elevate. Soon. Before 2012, they say. Before Armageddon. Before the rapture. Before Niburu. Gotta start working out. Gotta have some dreams. Gotta have some ideas. Where you going to get your ideas? Copy somebody else's? Join somebody's circus? You're going to need some hiking gear.

Double universe, parallel universe ain't nothin' but a theory. Just think, there's a person over there just like you, doing all the same shit, making all the same choices. Would they look over here, through the mirror, and ask you to cut 'em a break, cut 'em some slack?

___

The nephews understood the comment about air traffic control, seeing as how the air space here is becoming crowded, the home strength of the Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron at fifteen aircraft. Yesssss. Fifteen. Eight new 7th ed. tri-wing Fokkers went out over the summer to some retar...special needs kids down in Colorado, with production working by candlelight filling back orders from before the economic downturn and later, a shutdown after that slut Li An took off to China with my templates** last summer, and after layoffs everybody knows its hard to get up and running to full steam once again. Even then, once you see a profit, it's hard to take on new people and not put that cash in your pocket.

Anyway, as of last quarter, end of July, the 335th experienced twelve downed aircraft from pilot error, six prop damage, ten landing gear failures, five strut and wing damage, one tail section mishap same same Reno air show, two downed from enemy fire, and one downed from cat playing tetherball.

Internal Affairs has taken over the investigation of the purported attempted sale of a squadron aircraft at Cubbies convenience store in Oglala for $4.99 by one of our pilots whose name is being withheld because of her age. A witness stated the pilot was unable to sell the aircraft.

Note to pilots: For minor damage, such as props and rudders, fix it in the field if you can. For more extensive damage, haul 'em in for general maintenance. And...no more flying over the grandstands! Period. No more horsing around. You see what can happen.

Ok. Mixing up a little work with play here. Play with work. Work is play. Work is play, they say. Work is play if you love what you do, and you're not working for an asshole. Gotta get the word out. We've got 86 pilots now, with No. 129 rolling out off the assembly line just last night. That rate of production over six years may seem anemic by Boeing or Lockheed standards, but for a one-man operation since the Myanmar girls got pissed and quit, it's not too bad.

**I'm going to deal with this here, as opposed to a footnote at the end of the story. Li An, you may recall, was my hateful English-speaking Myanmar crew boss. First, she incited the crew against me, then while I was home for the summer, she absconded to China with my templates, which she claims was her idea, and the result was my plane appearing on the street six months later as a cardboard cut-out with some assembly required. All of 'em blue. Mine are one-of-a-kind. Theirs are cheap, mine are $499.99. Theirs are made in China and stamped out, mine are handcrafted, made in the USA. Except for the ones that were made in Thailand, then shipped back to the US. Mine are limited edition, they've made a blue million of them. You can get theirs at Wal-mart and on the street; mine, you can't. They also produce a punch-out aircraft carrier; I don't.

So, there.

____

You ever experience the 'hurry up offense', caught unaware perhaps, where plays are coming at you so fast you haven't the time to organize a defense appropriate to the alignment on the field? Its later, when reviewing the events and replaying the tapes that you can get an accurate picture of what occurred, how it happened, what you could have done, what you could have said.

A person needs a generic, knee-jerk, off-the-shelf, reptilian, reflexive, prevent defense, some kind of preparatory instantaneous survival mechanism. Fight, flight, lie, deceive, cajole, manipulate. Catch 'em napping. Stop 'em in the red zone. Keep 'em out of field goal range. Make 'em punt.

____

Did I give you the results of the croquet golf tournament, the 1st Annual Slim Buttes Invitational Croquet Golf Tournament? I won it. Ballanco took silver. Ted Ebert got the bronze. That was Labor Day Weekend, following a last-minute agreement between the owners and players arriving at a settlement, which means the 2012 croquet golf season is BACK ON!

Back in July we held a weekend 'Zero-Tolerance' Advanced Fly-Swatting workshop for adults, focusing on long-term vigilance, long-distance recognition, interdiction and elimination. There were breakout sessions on fundamentals and techniques such as the feint, the overshot, the no-look backhand, fade-away, the ceiling slapshot, and 'coming out of the sun'.

Upon completion of the program, participants were presented with new, vinyl 'Nevva Miss' swatters in the shape of a hand. We made a video. You can check it out on UTube.

Maybe city and off-the-rez folks don't have to deal with flies the way we do, either. Out here, it's a basic fact of life, and we take it seriously. Quite seriously.

____

Do you have a personal trainer? No offense if you do. Complete the sentence; A person who has a personal trainer is someone who...

Just wondering. How about a hero? On the radio an ad for returning vets said at the end, something to the effect of...'let's help our wounded warriors...let's help our heroes...' which sent me seeking a dictionary definition of heroism. Yes, like you'd suspect...'above and beyond...without regard for one's own safety...courage...sacrifice.'

Sure, many of the vets are heroes, without a doubt, but it requires more than putting on the uniform. There's nothing heroic about getting blown away by a roadside blast. Not everybody who takes a hit was doing something heroic at the time. It is more a matter of unfortunate circumstance, a wrong place and time, no hero in the humvee, no extraordinary measure of valor. Can you be a hero just going along for the ride? Can you just toss the word around?

The reason I ask about a personal trainer is, why? We had personal trainers, too. It was called a swing set.

____

Waterboarding couldn't have been worse. About a little more than halfway through the appointment, I had as much as I could stand, the breaking point, I flashed the girls a timeout signal and literally leapt up from the dental chair. I HAD to swallow. I HAD to spit. They recoiled in surprise. I asked them, "You ever have people jump up like that?"

"No," they said, shaking their heads.

"You're kidding me!" I thought it to be a common occurrence. I told them I could take it, but only for so long, then I had to get up. Same with an airplane seat in coach. Same with this computer screen. Know what I mean? I told them that when I die, I want to be cremated because the thought of being closed up underground like that in that claustrophobic casket would drive me absolutely crazy. I wouldn't be able to stand it. I've seen it happen.

In fact, any type of confinement bugs me - rat cage, prison cage, handcuffs, chem class, jock strap, sweat lodge, peyote meeting, human body, my own delusional thinking. The rez. That dentist's chair.

Wow. Got me to thinking...were you a 'squirmy' child? Or were you okay with being held and snuggled? How long?

No, I don't think it's that, some kinda Freudian shit. It's probably Dr. Sardonicus being buried alive, a horrifying movie I saw decades ago and have never been able to forget. And just when I thought I had the notion completely suppressed, here comes 'Kill Bill II' where she gets buried alive. Ohhhhhh God. Just cremate me, ok? Just be sure I haven't got a pulse.

Okay. Enuf talk about dying. It's winter here on the rez, everything dead, geese gone south, but I've got water and light. Coffee, too, and here comes visitors.

- end

*yeah. about that gecko. a gecko is a lizard, right? a cousin to a snake. you're going to buy insurance from a lizard? a cousin to a snake? On the surface, just think about it. Just for a moment. Isn't there something primeval about not trusting reptiles? Not just Genesis, but deep within our DNA? And on top of it, he's speaking with a British accent. You're going to buy insurance from a lizard with a British accent?

Rubber Grove

2011-05-09T07:12:00.000+07:00

Abandoned Spirit House

2011-05-08T18:44:00.000+07:00

Coming Out Of Retirement, Maybe

2011-05-04T23:06:00.000+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
4.30.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Some people use the words, 'washed up,' or 'burnt out' to describe those people, usually athletes, but not always, who are considered retired and whose years of greatness and productivity are behind them.

You can think of a number of stars who have retired, and then 'laced them up again', 'returned to the court', returned to the ring, the stage, the field, government, gunslinger, or corporate world to see if they 'still had it', resurrecting some of that old time magic to once again fulfill somebody's wish.

Could be the money. Could be the money. Probably could be the money. Big contract, big offer, big incentive, big crowds, big ego, everything big, so big it will make an over-the-hill retiree think he or she can still go out there and show those young pups a thing or two. Still got game. Lookit Ali, George Forman, Michael Jordan, Newt Gingrich, Whatshername.

What one may soon learn, especially if you haven't done much more heavier lifting than a fork, is that you've lost your edge. Timing is off. Way off. Things, like muscles and mind, might move a bit slower. Reaction time is too late, went for the fake, didn't catch what was said, lost me in the innuendo.

The mind, and maybe some of your friends and most ardent believers will tell you, 'You can do it! You can do it! Go back out there and show 'em how it's done!' and maybe you can, but after a long layoff, the body can be an unwilling or reluctant performer. And sometimes you forget.

It could be any stage of performance; actors and comedians tossing out lines, politician making a run, third-string philharmonic flautist, substitute teacher, got called at the last minute, asking if you could fill in on the trapeze act, second semester, come run the offense, the CIA or State Department, pull the corporation out of the tank, help out weekends on the check out line.

It happens all the time, you've seen it plenty.

So, I've been testing the water.

Yeah, I'm thinking of 'giving it another go', 'tossing my hat in the ring', and yes...coming out of retirement, making a comeback. Why not?

After the last time, people said, 'This is it. He'll retire after this.' And even beforehand, there was speculation, ok, consensus that I should've have considered permanently 'hanging it up.' People shook their heads, saying I was too old, or didn't have that ol' magic, that edge, that touch, and razzle dazzle, like the old days.

They say not to let doubt enter your mind, and move forward positively toward your goals. Ok, I can buy that in theory, but one need consider reality, as well. Sure. For instance, there won't be Manny to help with the necessary training and rigorous rehab, and not because he swore he'd never work with me again, but because he's dead.

If he was living, I think under the right conditions, the right offer, I could move him from his avowed position, and the lights just now suddenly flickered twice, which could be a 'yes' or a 'no', if it was in fact a message from Manny from the spirit world, which I am inclined to believe it was, given his temperament, so, given his temperament, I'll take that as a 'no', he won't be on board.

Manny, Mr. Ferguson, and most of those guys from the old crew, the inner circle, the 'goon squad', are either dead, doing time, or reformed and found Jesus, so I'd have to tap some new talent, new ideas, fresh faces in the places.

Gotta get your people together, people you can trust, people who'll back you, some goons, some lap dogs, some yes men and a couple of complete idiots, the best possible team behind you, whether you pulling a heist, running a monestary, or making a run for the roses.

You'll need an outline of your scheme, and a big sack of money or how to get it. Right up front, people like to talk about the money. Got to get the money straight, who gets what, what the expected returns will be, how a share will be divvied up if someone dies, get the unofficial, off-the-record nods from the folks who prefer to stay in the background, out of sight, out of the press.

Then there's a whole bunch of hard work, the heavy lifting to be done before you step back out there. That's a lot to consider, and you've got to ask yourself if you're really up for another go at it, and if you are, whether you've still got what it takes. Gotta walk before you can crawl, and you gotta crawl before you can backstroke, or whatever. Could be a long shot. Could be pathetic. Could be glorious.

- end

Post-Bin Laden

2011-05-04T21:36:00.000+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
5.5.11
Khuk Khak, Thailand

You say these same people have nukes?

- end

Near Thung MaPrao, Phang Nga, Thailand

2011-04-30T23:00:00.005+07:00

Surreal Time

2011-04-26T08:23:00.001+07:00

ASSAD TELLS SYRIANS, 'BE PATIENT'

Thai Spirit House and Water Urn

2011-04-18T18:51:00.003+07:00

It's A Party!

2011-04-12T20:06:00.007+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
4.13.11
KHUK KHAK, Thailand

Facebook Question Party.

Think about that for a minute. It's a party. You're invited. It's a party where you're going to be asked a lot of questions. What kind of party is that? That's not a party. That's called interrogation.

What, something short of Gitmo? That's a party, too, they say.

Maybe it's just me, and my naturally occurring suspicious and paranoid ways. So I checked into it; I'll play your game, following the link, the pathway through the electronic labyrinth that eventually led me to a page requesting 'allow' or 'don't allow' access to personal information, ID, gender, web address, list of friends, contacts, and all other information posted to all others.

Whhhhhhaaaat?

Give 'em that right, and you can open the magic box.

I thought about it for a minute, 'Nah, I don't want to play the game that bad...got things around here I could do...' and then hit the 'don't allow' button, thinking I can contact people via another avenue to see what they want, or what they're up to. I really don't need a Facebook personal info data-dump going to someone's holding pen, a datadumpster.

'What do they want to do with all that?'

Sell it, use it against you...tell you it's for your convenience, your tailored needs, your benefit.

So, I hit the 'don't allow' button, and the same page came up four times in a row, almost insisting I change my mind and hit the 'allow' button. Seeing no change in the program's behavioral response, and provided no other choice, I exited the site, my suspicions further substantiated, my paranoia compounded and reinforced by the programs' catty intransigence.

It's a game. It's a game. A fun game. Lighten up, wouldja? Millions are playing it. Play along.

I can see where a person might be coming from, saying something like that. 'Don't be so daggone paranoid,' but seeing how there's so little out there in the consumer/marketing world that would be trustworthy or reliable to convince me otherwise...

hunter/gatherer, hunter/killer, gatherer/killer. we haven't moved too far in 7 million years. ever since Lucy learned how to do 'The Locomotion.'

Lucy, then Little Eva, Grand Funk Railroad, and Kylie Minogue, all hits a decade apart after that long stretch following Lucy.

'You can't walk like that
talk like that
go on the attack like that

Share something with you; a partial something, and then maybe tell the whole story later, but a portion of it involved a dream resulting from an inquiry about a certain artifact, a stone, an atlatl point, to be precise, of speckled Jasper. In the view presented, two cave people were sitting around a fire after an apparent dinner, joking around in an extremely rudimentary language and working on their weapons.

There was more to it, for me to extrapolate any personal meaning relevant to the atlatl point, estimated at six to ten thousand years old, but the connection here being, that ever since Lucy and maybe before, we've been at war.

Some kind of war with something...the environment, that wooly mammoth, that big-ass boar. Then soon the arrival of the Spaniards, air raids over London, AIDS and resistant bacteria. Only thing that's changed over time is the enemy and the weapons systems.

Sure, you could say the cave people from the, what was it, upper paleolithic, only used their spears, clubs, and atlatls for hunting...like you could say the same thing about a semi-automatic weapon or a Predator Drone.

Further inquiry in the archeological academic and intelligence worlds demonstrates that even your best guess, or what you think could be real or accurate, is only a theoretical pinpoint in what could in fact be a vast universe of difference and erroneous to what the truth is. Erroneous intelligence. Erroneous targeting.

Are you sure?

Give me a Ballpark Guess. Ask any cave man, shaman, priest or general.

Good news is, everything is becoming more refined. Everything. Your phone camera, more pixels till they flip it over; your personalized nano-doctor; our view of distant worlds; the laser-guided, real-time, smart bomb; your dining habits; advertising.

Sittin' in the drone zone
waitin' for a ring tone
should have kept your ass at home
and now they gonna make a crater
on the news we'll see it later
you and your meeting high command
composed of
disposed of
terminada
eliminada
from a console in Nevada

It's a game! A fun game. Millions are playing. Come play along.

- end

Arm Libyan Youth

2011-04-12T19:33:00.003+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903, sure
4.13.11.

Most Agree To Arm Libyan Youth

'....and this is live ammo, kids, so for God's sake, Allah's sake, be careful!'

.

NO, Officially

2011-03-31T07:51:00.005+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
3.31.11

NO U.S. GROUNDS TROOPS IN LIBYA

They're all in the air. Except for our people on the ground.

.

Thai Broom

2011-03-26T19:57:00.002+07:00

Then What Do You Say?

2011-03-26T17:40:00.006+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
3.26.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Just lately I've experienced a sudden flood of re-connections with people from the past, with whom I haven't heard for ten, twenty, forty years. School reunions, war zone compatriots, students and mentors. Some old girl friends. It's quite nice, isn't it? Saying hello once again.

And after a few lengthy updates, what do you say? There is a reason this person wasn't in your daily life. Your commonalities ended. You went on with your life, and they proceeded to follow their own paths. What more can you say?

What changes a relationship? Usually, geography has a major bearing. It could be a job, jail, or attitude. Could be you're on the run, the rebound, a refugee inside your own skin. Maybe you wanted to sober up, make some new friends, a new circle, or entourage. Join some kind of group that already had people in it. Or maybe you went into a depressive funk and wanted people to please just leave you the fuck alone. Relate to that?

Besides physical relocation, what would it be if you were in near proximity...same town, same house, same idea, same T-Shirt, same kind of shoe. Different dynamics would be at work, no doubt. People would be playing race, class, and gender roles, with the circles becoming smaller and smaller, and why is that?

Turns out one day, you're sitting on your step, exhausted, and you look over at the dog. He ain't saying nuthin'...just looking back at you.

Now, THERE'S someone who understands you.

Did I tell you about going into the farm implement store in Nebraska for the third time, after the necessary part, and asking those guys behind the counter wearing company caps, white oval sewn-on name tags, blue shirts, and steel-toed work boots, 'You ever have one of those decades where every move you made...was wrong?'

That got their attention. '...nothing you could do...would please her...your boss...the cat.'

One of the guys turned to get the part. The older guy cut his eyes over at the boss when I said 'boss'. The younger guy, flipping through a parts catalog on the counter, looked up and gave me a look of comprehension when I said, 'her'.

It wasn't a comedy act. I wanted to see if they could relate. Maybe a decade is an exaggeration. Maybe it's not.

.

So, everybody's away, school, work, whatever they were doing, and everyone's pissed at you, it seems, or maybe you just had this awkward volatile misunderstanding, and it's just you and the dog there on the back step.

Could be you just lost your job, the argument, your composure, got fired, divorced, bad news from the DA, the doctor, the IRS; rent's due, got rejected, was runner-up. And you look around, and there's no one there but the dog. Facebook tells you, 'You have 0 friends.'

Or, could be, you're on top of your game and want to play frizbee.

Everything is working in your dream, and...there are those important to the dream, and those who are not. Simple as that.

So, for one reason or another, we lose touch with folks, everybody does. Significant at the time and place, we may hold an illusion those friendships will last forever, but change in time and place, and life's experiences tell us otherwise. We simply move on. Unless we don't.

And then you get an email from an old friend. After a few lengthy updates, what do you say? 'Look me up when you're in...fill in the blank. Hudson Bay. It would be good to see you.'

You stopped being my friend after you:

moved away
wouldn't answer my call, email, friend request, invoice.
graduated
sobered up
got transferred
got married
became famous
found Jesus
insulted me
got arrested
got a life
became a Republican
left me hanging
took sides
went back to the States
pressed charges
voted for Bush, twice
joined the opposition
fired me
testified against me on the stand
lost it on the back nine
screwed my best friend, old lady/old man, girlfriend/boyfriend
screwed me
screwed my bank account
stayed silent
found somebody else
became holy
found the truth
won
became the boss
got abducted

Why else do relationships end? Mostly it's because of geography, but it's interesting to explore some reasons, which, if we needed to get over, would allow us to write back. But after a few lengthy updates, what do you say?

-end

.

Libya in Crosshairs

2011-03-22T13:16:00.009+07:00

GADDAFI NOT TARGETED IN COALITION STRIKES

...'CEPT THIS IS WHAT WE DID TO HIS HOUSE.

Slow To Come Around

2011-03-17T12:27:00.022+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903, eh?
3.16.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - This being a public forum, a free-for-all journalistic mud pit wrestle, for what? Communication, Information, entertainment, basically; artistic expression, exhibition, advertising revenue, 2D world second life, purchasing, and what else? Control?

One of the wonderful things about the mud pit is that millions of people worldwide, for whatever purpose, have returned to the joyous craft of writing, lost during the ugly, wired, land line, fixed telephone years of Alexander Graham Bell till just here the other day.

Except now we're writing with our thumbs, a retrograde skill, it would seem, so what the hell, is that evolution?

And by writing to a vast audience through a highly technical medium, sending a message, trying to inform, convince, sell, keep posted, we unwittingly expose our ignorance, mainly; our narrow rigidity, stupidity, vulgarity, infantility, no such word, you get the idea; our intolerance, temperament, opinionated narrow-minded smallness, crass lack of civility, crude lack of propriety or discretion, and whimsical exuberance in broadcasting our claptrap to all the world.

I know, because I commit these whachyoudcall literary sins every time I write. It's a pitfall, a snake pit, a vipers nest, where sometimes your author doesn't even know for sure where he's coming from or at the very least, lost the train of thought.

With the technical means of delivery blistering by at faster than lightening speed, I've stripped the gears in my rational hot-off-the-presses think tank restraint, a kamikaze run, you'll see, and Bobby, it ain't just you and me.

As my Thai friend said convincingly, 'Everything too quick!'

check.

Don't believe me? When's the last time you...? Catch that? See what I mean? Everything too quick!

If you're serious, it helps to have an editor, a Manny father figure around to keep your ass in check. But who has time for that? You'd have to send it, they'd have to look it over, then send it baaaack. You'd have to make the changes....Nobody'sgottimeforthat.

If you're not serious, or think you're serious but really not, you don't need no editor, but maybe a second set of objective eyes, like that gecko over there on the wall. Others can catch stuff we don't see, or even think about...

'...do you think it's a good idea to talk about....?'

...Drugs, Allah, your politics, your boss, your whereabouts, your breakfast?

If you're not serious, and nowhere near really good, or even near sort of half-assed good, say it, bad, then fuck it, you can let anything fly, it's a free loosey goosey world where you do your thing, voice your opinion*, use your own lingo, do your art, tell people in comments columns to fuck off, go fuck themselves, and worse...because for one, you're not getting paid and there's no advertising pullout threat, and two...

...no one is going to censor or shut you down for saying some half-baked wildass shit...unless you're in an Islamic Having-a-Revolution-Right-Now country, or China, Myanmar, or Pakistan, or the U.S., where gestapo mind police can crash your door to take away you and your computer; and several other free speech countries where you'd better watch your free-lance wanna be journalistic step. The maniac on the loose might look you up.

Odds are not in your favor there's no maniac extremist opposed to anything you might say. You say it, he's against it. And odds are, he's on the loose, smoldering on idle until the last straw you provide.

It's a sad, sad state when a population reveres a murderer for slaying an advocate of moderation, tolerance, and free speech. What have you got when the voices for tolerance and moderation are silenced? You've got a situation where you've got to keep the nukes out of their hands.

We already know what can happen when extremists run the show. Isn't that what got us where we're at now, the subject of my new rap release?

So, freedom of speech isn't all what it's cracked up to be when the integrity of the State or the status quo, especially, is at risk, is it? That's what all them guys, China, Myanmar, Muammar, Sheik and Sultan and 'em, know. Control the flow. Oil, information, arms, commodities, you name it. Seems like it ain't nothing but a matter of time, a matter of time, my friends, before dem wallsa Jericho come a tumbling down.

Join me now in song, ya'll.

(After sitting in my 'drafts' folder for too long, I've decided to publish my newest rap release. Please understand that it is a parody, and not intended to offend the reader, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect those of the author. I don't particularly care for rap, and there are many thangs about it that go against my grain, in this one especially, but artists, poets, and comics must say things that others cannot, and in this case, say it, let go of it and move on to something else. Unless it can be packaged and sold).

Rap with me, now, 'Axabrutha'; If you wanna, move your shoulders, with the beat. Show some attitude. Get that head moving...and can we get a little rythym for us with them sticks?

Doo bappa, doo bappa, chicka chicka doo bappa. That's it.

Axabrutha ('bout Mutha Erf)

It's a mess, a mess
a muhfuckin mess
people on this hot rock
talkin' 'bout a sun spot
solar mass ejections
electron injections
mayan predictions
and cosmic afflictions

ain't that what yo' mama sayin'?
ain't that what yo' shaman sayin'?
all that horseshits comin down
nasty shit all floatin' 'round
something you ain't seen befo'
in yo' lifetime not befo'
ain't nowhere to run to
'cause there's nowhere else to go

Where is all the people going?
where is all the people going?

High tide mudslide
muhfuckin double wide
crack in the sea flo'
open up a hell doe
all the oil sucked away
belch up a doomsday
muhfuckin walla water
nuke plant fuel rods
gettin' hotta
time to look for clean air
anyplace anywhere
everywhere everyplace
people bein' displaced
swimming in they own waste
now they only wish they hadn't
trashed away they garden planet

Japan took a hit dinna?
make the nippon spin a minna
over yet?
naw nigga
erf a tsunami trigga
on the Richter itsa bigga
land and people undawatta
flood control cannot preventa
bigass hood catastrophe
main street swept up out to Sea

Ripple cross the world went
GPS message sent
time has come to pay the rent
real time
surreal time
time to cut a deal time
on the street
people meet
RPG and twitter tweet
what is on your mind, my niggas?
what's that in yo' hand, my nigga?

I see you got yo' cell phone
i see you got yo' i phone
camera phone
megaphone
sittin' in the drone zone
waitin fo' a ring tone
masta blasta supa stome
gonna see you make a crater
orchestrate a def theater
muhfuckin detonator
terminator
devastator
mosque bazaar or marketplace
women children in the space
who gonna say who gonna die
inhuman twisted views apply

They hate you
they hate you
they hate you, nigga
for being who you are, my nigga
what you represent, my nigga
get it through yo' head, my nigga

I see you got yo' camera
you see me with my camera
UTube picture gonna wanna
see you light yo' petrol bomma
everyone a picture taker
photo op the riot maker
upload the atrocity
document the refugee
whole world gonna wanna see
red blood runnin' on the street

who blood
yo blood
his blood
anybody else blood

What the nigga gonna do?
make a martyr out of you?
shut down the internet
set up a dragnet
snuff the poet
jail the writer
execute the freedom fighter
bolt the do'
control the flow
perpetuate the status quo
thwart the niggas' overthrow

Bring on the Big Dogs
that shit can't go on forever
ax a brutha
any brutha
that shit wont go on forever

I got me here my homemade rocket
AK ammo in my pocket
drop a warship out the sky
stop a tank by suicide
storm the gates and then the palace
take apart the apparatus
liberate the torture cell
overtake the oil well
da people gonna take no mo'
till Mr. Nasty out da doe

Left wing right wing
hoodwink in between
wall street banker scheme
pulled a rip off so obscene
take the whole world down the drain
from a villa south of Spain
Tierra del Fuego
where all the people's money go?

And who's it fo'?
you, my nigga
you convinced of that yet, nigga?
you got yo' freedom yet, my niggas?

Uh oh, damn, there go yo' job
then yo' house they gonna rob
while they be livin' off the hog
bonus check and profits, dawg
snatch it out from 'neath yo' feet
put you homeless on the street
downturn didn't hurt them none
bloodsuckers
muhfuckers
corporation giant won

Stole yo' pension broke yo' plan
safety net and food program
poor sap worker bee still hold
myth and bullshit that he's told
rotten cotton he's been sold
dollar still be good as gold
China hostage collar hold
all new shit come from they molds

Don't wanna ask it
body bag basket
dogtags inna casket
implement the masta plan
Iraq and Afghanistan
tribal region Pakistan
liquidate the boogey man
eliminate the taliban
all through the vicinity
war in perpetuity
who the winner gonna be
take a look around you, sucka
last man standin' is one bad muhfucker

Whazzup in yo' world, my niggas?
what happened to yo' world, my niggas
Ax a brutha
Ax a brutha
ax any brutha's brutha
tell me something new, my niggas
someone tell me why, my niggas

copyright 2011.

(I tossed this over to Barbara Bush, and she said it flowed fine, but 'nuke plant fuel rods' was hard to spit. She give me a thumbs up).

Freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression. Those are two wonderful things that some you know have died defending.

.

Untitled

2011-03-07T19:14:00.009+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
3.7.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Wisconsin. Isn't that just up the street from you? People all over the world, picking up a cause. Remember the peace movement? I like the way we defined ourselves by what we were for, rather than what we were against.

'There was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air.' - Bob Dylan

.

Any of you
breathing underwater
in your dreams?

If so
Where did you go?

Same with flying, right? Just have to remember you can, and your technique. Same same Superman. One, Two, Three, up, up and away.

Kind of like watching a toddler realize they don't have to crawl around everywhere.

Get up. Go for a little walk. Take a look arouuuuuund.

.

You're invited to a dinner party next month! I'll give you a map and let you know the details later. You'll have to find your own way here, because I can't pick you up at the airport, but I suppose I could send a taxi and have 'em hold up a cardboard sign with your name on it. That's a nice reception. Big smile on the driver's face when you see your name and your eyes meet his in recognition.

I've done the fake out before. Look up, see the name, smile and nod at the driver and just keep walking, never looking back again. A person could go so far as to take the fare, have 'em deliver you to your destination, and really screw up Mr. Wolfe in the process. It would be great for a comedic routine, but not so funny in the Real 3D World.

You'd have to go with a Western name, right? It would be hard for my black ass to pose as Mr. Shin. Middle East, no prob. Sweden? Not. And then, you'd have to have the right clothes to look the part. So, if you're wearing less than five-star clothes, you'd need to examine the hotel for whom the driver was working. That's not a lot of time. You'd need to be close. Forget it.

Better for you to hire a guy outright. You'll need to taxi from Suvarnaboumi International over to Don Muang, the domestic airport, and fly from Bangkok into Phuket. Don't pay the driver any more than 1400Thai Baht to get here. Stick to your guns. Start at 1200. He'll laugh and start at 2,500, then immediately offer 2,000, then 1800, then ask around if anyone wants to take a farang to Khuk Khak for 1400. Someone will. Give him a 200TB tip, and he'll offer to pick you up to take you back.*

Don't need to. I know a local guy who'll take you down for 1,000.

I can put three, four, five of you up without discomfort, and sardine-style, like the Thai or Tom Cook's basement, I can put up, oh, about seventeen. The rest of you can stay over at Karl's Lakeview Bungalows, just across the lake.........he was over here today, telling me how to go about my work.

Yeah. Green wood puts off more smoke, he says. No shit, Sherlock. I'm clearing land and burning it off. Green jungle burns. Everybody knows that. He suggested I save it, let it 'dry a littaabit,' and have a barbeque, a big bonfire, after asking why I cut the nature. "Why do you cut the nature?" he asked.

Didn't wanna let it dry. I'm clearing a section of land and burning it off, with the help of my Myanmar gardener friend, the workhorse guy who's hard to keep up with, the one who lives in a pitiful hovel between here and the beach, whose wife died in the tsunami, and whose grass trimmer is on the fritz, and I'd like to shoot a photograph of him and his place, but I don't want to insult his personal dignity.

Dirt poor. Worked all day and took only one break in both the morning and the afternoon, but I beat him back from lunch. It was hot. We're going to wrap up the project tomorrow, and having no further need for it, I'm going to trip him out and give him the saw, just to see the look on his face.

Karl checked out the saw, asked how much I paid for it, and said he was busy, full up over at the bungalows, and couldn't stay. Said he'd see me later. Yesterday, Michael from England said my idea of clearing that section of land was akin to 'that Joni Mitchell song,' 'Pave Paradise...put up a parking lot...' and those freaking lyrics kept running through my head all day.

'...cut down all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum
and charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.'

Don't want to see jungle. Wanna see the lake.** Already got jungle on three sides, anyway. Got plenty of jungle. Plenty of jungle here. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing, and besides, when you mow your lawn, are you doing it for your neighbors, or for yourself? How about that shed? And the color of your bathroom tile.

Well, you can see some of that 'you oughta' stuck. Now, you could call me a hard-headed nigga, and you wouldn't be the first, but already told you I bristle when someone suggests they know what I should do. Recall that essay on thinking for your own damn self? THAT'S what I'm talking about.

Someone...OUTSIDE, myyyyyy...........skull, wants to tell me what they think I should do.

"If I were you, I'd quit those Krong Thips (local cigarette)," said my friend from Sweden, bless her heart.

"You're not me," I told her calmly without hesitation.

After a long pause, she said, "You're right." And we pretty much let it go at that.

.

A few years back, the second opinion at the VA ran through the checklist; 'Depressed?' 'Living alone?' 'Divorced?' 'Up at 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock?' 'Wake up in sweat?' 'Resistance to authority?'

OH YEAH!

Found my head nodding through the questionnaire.

"You brought all that shit home with you," Michael said, when the conversation went near that direction.

"I never killed anyone," I spat out, reflexively, the same thing I told the second opinion. "I don't have no ghosts or flashbacks."

Well, okay. I understand the survivor's guilt, delayed grief, denial, acceptance and all that, but I just don't like it when someone thinks they've got your past, dreams, and motives figured out. I wasn't a fucking door gunner, for Christ's sake. That's what I told him. "I was a medic, a angel of mercy. Guys was glad to see me........"

And he pretty much let it go at that.

But I didn't.

After a pause, I said quietly, "I lost a couple good friends over there...I should have been the one, both times...I saw people, whole people just a few minutes ago, all butchered up, Mike, all torn up, lives changed forever. I treated everybody; Americans, Vietnamese civilians, the enemy......"

He nodded, and I had a story of a North Vietnamese Army patient, but I pretty much let it go at that.

Well, my fellow Americans, that's what wars do; kill and injure people. Maim all the rest. We should bring our people home.

Exhale, Joey. Don't take in water.

.

That's enough.

- end

*What the heck. You don't have to go right back. If you're coming for the dinner party, you might as well stay a couple weeks.

**With the racket from the chain saw and all, booming across the lake, we attracted the attention of a few monks who sauntered around the bend to see what I was doing over here with the nature. Later, it was our good fortune to be asked by a couple of old local men if they could have the wood. They wanted it over at the temple, they said.

No sooner than I could get 'Sure!' out of my mouth, four Myanmar guys showed up with a pickup truck and hauled off all the long poles. Never mind Karl and Michael - something was very right about the project. The monks got the wood, my friend gets a new saw, and I've got an expansive view of the lake.

.

Seven Eighty

2011-03-05T18:59:00.002+07:00

Live Fire

2011-03-05T06:12:00.003+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
3.4.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand -

The people went to see the king
his politics for them extreme
the king said all is calm and well
the outside world may go to hell

and for this discord who to blame
as common people rise inflamed
their world long tired of tyrant rule
and dignity so miniscule

that hopelessness prevailed on stage
the palace plaza's seething rage
should set to fire all the past
and bring to them their fate at last.

.

"We're going to issue each of you a clip of ammunition. The first ten rounds of the clip are blanks, but the last five are live bullets, so for God's sake, be careful."

- Commander to a group of children

.

To set your anguished heart to rest
we'll have a tailored suicide vest
for you to wear to marketplace
and demonstrate to human race
compassion is not commonplace
but murder for the sake of cause
is righteousness devoid of flaw.

.

Ganesha

2011-03-03T23:56:00.002+07:00

Three, Two, One One

2011-03-02T22:22:00.006+07:00

Gruffy, P'Thai, Sii-Dam, lately

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
3.2.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Heyyyyyy, when I said 'diapers and a gallon of milk' a couple of posts back, ha, I didn't mean to let on I was still having babies. Nope. Not me. That was intended as a literal, but generic parental statement, and we were talking about 'things' a person needs; diapers and a gallon of milk for, gee, several years straight, isn't it?

Seems like babies, adolescents, and adults are happiest when all their needs are taken care of, with many carrying the childneed right through on out to the grave. A tisket, a tasket, then a green and yellow casket. And what would be your final wish?

"I'm gonna sayyyy...'Master of the univer'...no...wait."

Is that your final answer?

There may be some who are thinking, 'he isn't talking to me...this time.'* But you can see it played out around you, right? how infantile we can be when we get our way thwarted. Never mind the everyday zen, those retreats, and the however many years of TM did you say?

I am happiest when...fill in the blank...'when everything is going my way.'

And so a person could say, 'world peace' is their way, or something noble and magnanimous. Think we could have something if enough people wanted it? Anything?

.

Man, I gotta tell ya, I don't care for snakes or any reptile in general, but today the dog, the one that's been hanging around taking Gruffy's share, since Gruffy decided to hang out across the lake at Karl's Lakeview Bungalows, since there are three bitches there, and no males, and the girls in the kitchen keep feeding him, along with all the other guests...and when I pulled up over there for breakfast last week, he came charging up like my long lost buddy, and I told him, "SO!", and he got this really sheepish look on his face, put his muzzle on my knee and said sadly with his eyes, 'you understand...' which I did, but he sure as hell can't just DROP IN spontaneously and out of the blue, expecting his daily handout.

Gave up three square meals a day to go beg tourist tables over at Mon's restaurant. Mon and her sister, Roon, feed him, but Karl doesn't want himl to stay, although he admits he likes having a male in the mix.

"During the low season, that's another mouth to feed," he said.

Anyway, this other dog, a white with brown spots female Thai 'Ridge Back' from the temple with her ribs showing, has been laying around in the sun over here and waiting for Gruffy's share, like I said, and she was barking out there today, enough to make me take a look.

Lo and behold, what was it? I didn't have my glasses. Looked like a big lizard's tail in the crust of an old stump out there. I drew closer, and what the hell? Holy Smokes! It'safuckingsnake. 'I hope it's not a cobra,' I thought and tried to see it's head. There wasn't a head. There was a huge swelling at the other end with a rat's ass and legs sticking out.

When I got close enough to actually make out something I'd never seen before in my life, I finally saw the head, tiny, atop this mass of....and when I saw him, he was looking right at me, and you know how snakes are psychic and everything, and he immediately began disgorging the rat, leaving it in a grey mucous-covered lump of yuuuck, and headed without delay for that hole in the middle of the stump, and within a matter of, oh, about fifteen seconds, the whole show was over.

Except for the rat. What am I saying.? EsPECIALLY for the rat, the show was over. I checked later, and it was still there, covered with ants.

Whaddaya thinka that?

So, yeah, you'll encounter snakes over here from time to time. Last month a cobra sleeping between two sacks of coconut fiber suddenly awakened when the nursery lady pulled the top sack off. He began a slow sleepy slither away, but she quickly grabbed a stick and pulled him back out in the open, whereupon he coiled, rose up, and just when I was thinking, 'I wonder if it's a cobra,' fanned out his hood.

Remembering that they can blind you at twelve feet with their spit, I immediately began a roadrunner-esque back-pedal, a Muhammad Ali bob and weave shuffle, knowing that cobras can't get a fix on a moving target.

As he was following me with his tongue, the nursery lady off to his right was really the one he should have concerned himself with, posing the greater threat, for she dispatched him forthright, leaning over and striking him across the neck, if a snake has a neck, with her lips pressed together in an impressive display of firm determination of intent to kill if I ever saw it.

He went limp with that first blow, stunned and severely incapacitated, although it wasn't fatal. That came moments later across a log. She laughed about it as she tallied up the bill for the coconut fiber and potting soil.

'Ha ha. Sa-nake,' she kept saying and laughing at my obvious discomfort, raising her arm, bent at the elbow, her hand bent forward at the wrist, making a shaking snake's head. I was still trying to discretely brush the goosebumps off my arms, and shake the chill from my spine.

- end

*I'm always talking to you. Every time.
Who? Me? Yes. You.

**'Gruffy' was a nickname given by Claudia. 'P Thai' was the formal name given to him by his owner, who moved back to Takuapa when the high season ended and obviously left him here. We were all feeding him, but he preferred the company over at Mon's, where they call him 'Sii-Dam' (Black). Everybody, the guests, everybody, says he's real likeable. All black with a wispy white goatee.

Caddies Up And Running

2011-02-28T21:35:00.006+07:00

Brovic- Blogging Since 1903
2.28.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Just wanted to let you know we got the shower caddy operation back up and running, which in and of itself is remarkable, since I located the former crew manager, Li An Song Su Ky, and she magically reassembled the remnants of the Myanmar tag team, the crew, on conditions.

After lunch they, Li An and the four girls, were there at the table working on the caddies, and I was thinking, 'Now, that would be a good shot, photo, with their faces all painted in powder, their colorful sarongs, and everything.' AND it would actually provide actual proof that I'm not bullshitting you here on this one.

Had the coconuts, the wire, the prototypes and the tools and everything right there, but they wouldn't consent to being photographed, and became downright hostile when they caught me all smiles trying to surreptitiously obtain a shot. Quit working, all of 'em, angrily slamming the tools and coconuts on the table, and just sat there glaring at me, rattling off some shit back and forth to one another and casting dagger glances at me.

I was thinking, just then, 'Heyyy! Easy on the angle grinder!' but my thought got cut short by...you know how it is when you can tell a foreigner is talki...actually, I'm the foreigner here...they're the locals......how when you're in somebody's country and they're talking about you, not behind your back, but right in front of you, in their own lingo, spitting some vile shit about you and your kind, thinking you can't understand what they're saying, which you don't, but you can tell anyway?

That's the way it was with those girls. I could understand a little bit of what they were saying, and it wasn't good...I could make out the words, 'liar', and 'cheap', but mostly I was reading their expressions and body language, and that wasn't good, either. Hostile. Openly hostile.

Li An got up in my face and told me they SAID they didn't want their pictures taken, and I was backing away, telling her, 'I know I know I know, sorry, sorry, tell 'em I'm sorry,' hoping she could patch things up by telling them somehow 'no' got lost in the translation with this ignorant foreigner, and so they wouldn't walk off the job again the way they did with the airplanes.

What is it? What is it ABOUT these people?

The conditions. Right. The conditions. Those girls wouldn't work hourly or by the day. They demanded to be paid 'piece work', or per unit, which we didn't determine just yet, because I wanted to get up and running right away already, and they wouldn't negotiate individually, but demanded to be represented collectively with Li An, who hates me, as their spokesperson. Plus lunches.

So, why, you may wonder, would you hang out, or work for or with someone who despises you, inside? People do it all the time. It's about the money. It's about the money and the mutual co-dependent nature of the relationship. For Li An and the tag team, it's about the money and just how far they can squeeze me until I snap, and for me, I need an interpreter.

I need an interpreter, and I need a crew. It's the only way we can get these caddies out there. Already told you, the demand's there.

I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up. I can get you your picture. Gotta use a different approach. Gotta tell 'em I'll pay them...pay them to model with the caddies. Yes. That's it! Pay them to model with the caddies. That'll work.

That should work.

Uh...wai...there's going to be a problem. Problem is, they're going to ask me what I'm going to do with the pictures, and when I say they're going to be published they're going to want to know where and who's going to see them, and that's going to be hard to explain, maybe impossible, and then they're either going to want a large sum of money, or return to being too shy and just say no.

I'm going to have to get back with you on this; this photo business.

Anyway, the caddies are up and running. I thought you'd appreciate being among the first to know.

- end
.

Lizards Holding Their Ground

2011-02-27T09:46:00.005+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
2.27.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - I mean,* every time I write 'Since 1903' I gotta smile...just putting me in the right frame of mind. And the reader, you, my friends, right off the bat must be thinking, 'this guy can't be serious.' You would be most absolutely correct!

And so, from the git go, to really follow along with any writer, comic, politician, talk host, your fishing buddy, whoever, right? you got to buy in to where they're coming from. Your client. Your patient. Requires listening, at least partial attention.

'Were you listening to me?'

"Yeah...sort of.................something about feeling homicidal."

Point is, lemme think here a minute, point is, sure, you can hear see feel where a person is coming from, and you're either following along with the rant, tale, complaint as an objective listener, or you can be discerning and judgmental, depending on where you're coming from.

If you're the flexible sort, and have had a nice dinner, you can listen to about anything from anybody. When people are hungry or wrapped too tight in their own stuff, then that can result in tomatoes being tossed on stage, beer bottles hitting the cage, folk jumping up in fits of rage, molotov cocktails igniting the throne.

I used to see that all the time in the audiences. Some are there just to enjoy the night out and have some entertainment. Those are the ones who are with you 100%, love what you're doing. You a rock star. The empathetic, too, are with you. They want to see you do well, the mothers in the recital audience.

Then you've got those who doubt you, and wonder what you're doing up there** to begin with. And then there's a percentage with whom you just sort of naturally clash, the class I would call natural assholes, because it's not you; they are genuinely assholes with everybody if you listen to their rap.

And then the last category, and who knows what percentage that is, is the nasty little evil low-life...anti-Christ......baaaaad people who are outright against you. They and the genuine assholes are your enemies. Everybody's got at least one (see Lennon, Gandhi). They want to see you fall.

**Yeah, I'm gonna clarify this right now, as opposed to running it at the end, past the end, because...just because. By 'up there', I mean the tightrope. No net.

Top of the luge run. Top of the charts. King of the hill. Or, you could be a Bernie, a shyster, a perp-master magician or the ex-governor of Alaska or the prez hisself. A mover and shaker. Saddam. Pablo. Pinochet, Qaddafi, or Hose Me Mubarak.

Gaddafi. Gadhafi. Kaddafi. Kadhafi. Quaddafi. Quadafi. Gotta Havi. Speaking of lizards holding their ground. You notice? Although it seems the whole world knows who this guy is, King of...Tripoli, right?...it seems there is no consensus among major news organizations on how to spell his fucking name. Lemme check with uncle Al. Al Jazeera. 'Gaddafi'.

Sure, people want to see him go down. Lula. Lula was about the only leader in the world that people didn't want to see go down. Lula and Michael Jordan. Nelson Mandela. And what'shername, Sirleaf, running Liberia.

Seems like it depends on how you go up. You stepping on people, running a gitmo, beheading your opponents, then you're bound to have some enemies wanna see you pull a Humpty Dumpty. What public figure do you know who enjoys popular support?

Popular support? What? Where am I going with this? This was supposed to be about lizards, and having a sense of humor.

Out here on my patio, I noticed the lizards aren't running from me anymore. They just...stay there, holding their ground. I wonder, is it the music? Me talking to them? The jokes? A reptilian affinity? That sunny spot on the concrete?

- end

* I absolutely hate it when people begin a written or spoken statement with, 'I mean.' That's a clarifier, isn't it? I mean, don't you already need to say something first? God, I hate that!

.

Tooling Up

2011-02-26T11:25:00.004+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
2.26.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - 'I will achieve happiness if only I could get that angle grinder.'

Once you've been ripped off for all your tools three or four times, the experience leaves you feeling violated, of course, but also, tool-less, so to work, you must go back out and re-purchase those same tools once again. Question is, do you buy the good shit, only to have it stolen, or the cheap shit, in anticipation of passing it along to someone else.

I used to carry the good shit. Craftsman, Black & Decker. 'A workman is only as good as his tools,' some people will say. Old worn tools, passed down from dad's hands. All that stuff is gone. No need to lament too long. Be happy that someone got some good tools, cheap, for drinking money.

'Tall ones' (16 oz.). A case. Enough to kick Indian ass and end up in jail. Not for the theft of the tools, but for what the tools bought.

So, in the end it's all paid for. At my end, I go out and buy the cheap stuff in the bargain basket at Ace. I use it until it breaks, and then I go get the good tools, after all. If you've got the proper tools, you can do all kinds of things. You got a camera? You got a computer? You got a back hoe?
You got an off-shore drilling rig?

I got the heavy-duty Makita planer last year so I could immediately loan it to Marc, straight out of the wrapping, who was building tables for his restaurant at the time, and last week I broke down and finally bought my second heavy-duty impact drill so I wouldn't have to keep asking Damon to borrow his.

And just yesterday, I went for the angle grinder so I can re-ignite the shower caddy operation.* Did you know coconuts are a hard nut to crack? Harder than Chinese arithmetic.

Over here in Thailand I've had my tools removed, along with...awwww, I don't need to list all the stuff Thai and Indians have taken from my home during my long absences. They've stolen nearly everything I own...tools, laptops, cameras, artwork, star quilts, ceremonial drums.

Here, if you want people to leave it alone, you've got to leave the key in the ignition of your motorbike, the door to your house wide open. On the rez, you need 50,000 volts of electrified fencing.

Choice is mine - give up your tools or your aching joints. I go for following the sun, ducking South Dakota blizzard and Southeast Asian monsoon. Best bet is to put down tobacco, burn incense and ask for spiritual guard dogs.

Ask for guard dogs and give it all away before you leave. Feels good. Somebody's going to need that chainsaw this winter, anyway, and the battery charger, for sure. Can't take it with you, they say. Can't take it with you on the flight, and can't take it to the grave. Forget the guard dogs and electrified fence idea. Give it away.

We were talking at dinner with the Swiss and Germans about happiness and how it may result as a by-product of lifestyle rather than the pursuit of acquisition of 'things'. 'My friends at home have all the newest gadgets, but I would rather have the plane ticket,' said the young visitor from somewhere near Saltzburg.

Still, at times, to be happy, some things you've just got to have. Food, shelter, comfortable shoes, contact comfort, sex, all those esteem needs, some chairs for people to sit around on, a decent ride, diapers and a gallon of milk, a get-away, a raise, an angle grinder.

- end

*The Shower Caddy operation. I see this can happen only with the employment of the Myanmar tag team. After just three caddies, even with the proper power tools, I grew disenchanted with the project and moved on to something else. The demand is there. The demand is there. I've just got to produce the supply.
.

She Didn't See Me

2011-02-26T10:32:00.003+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
2.26.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand -

She was sitting twisted
on her motorbike seat
on the side of the road

looking back over her shoulder
at the oncoming traffic
waiting for a chance to cross

as I passed by
recognizing her
and lifted my chin in greeting

but she didn't see me
otherwise she probably
would have smiled.

- end
.

Welcome

2011-02-23T22:52:00.003+07:00

Design

2011-02-23T12:43:00.006+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
2.24.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Writing, not unlike a yoga routine, a mathematical puzzle, or laying a patio block walkway, in that it is an exercise, and often, as you may have long ago noticed, it appears I have little of consequence to impart, other than to say hello, and am only exercising whatchacall this craft. It's like you and what you do, except maybe you're more serious.

Maybe not. I hope not. After a very long time of serious, listening to Manny, I tried not so serious here for a decade or so, a much less stressful avenue I must say, and much lighter, insofar as loads go. People always say when returning home from here how serious everybody is. Nobody smiles.

'Blogging since 1903'. Silly. Sure. But, who else is making that claim? Better jump on it while the field is wide open, right? Like the 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron, 'Who else is making these planes? Noooobody. I'm on the front edge of that wave, My Friends, if it ever catches on.

It's what everybody says when I ask, 'You know anybody else makinese?' 'Huh uh,' they say, usually shaking their heads slowly while their eyes scan the home squadron, anywhere from ten to eighteen tri-plane aircraft in teams of two-plane mobiles. Everybody's got a wing man. I mind read. They're saying, 'You're fucking crazy............these are pretty cool......I could make this shit.'

Out loud, they say, "I could make these."

Ok. You say crazy. Ok. Well, we've got 96 pilots. Ninety-six. Grrranted, some are quite young, but some are quite old, too, by USAF standards. Top Gun is 61. You're wondering, right? That would be Ted.

Sure. Nobody going to argue with that.

If you know Ted, you hear he's Top Gun of the Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron, without hesitation you're gonna say, 'Right...Right.'

Ted is one of the few people who would accompany me on a trek into Northeastern Laos, across the Plain of Jars. 'That's my old stompin' grounds,' he said. But right now wouldn't be a good time for him to go, because of reasons.

He told a tale in the men's spillover tipi at sun dance of falling asleep atop a crate of food and ammo in the back of a cargo plane, and next thing he knew he was riding the package down under a parachute and had to hoof it two weeks in hostile boonies back to camp.

"I didn't care about food," he said. "I was just hoping on the way down that there was ammo on the load."

Yeah, he's got the 'behind enemy lines' stories out the wazoo. He's also the only one routinely flying combat missions and filing regular status and operations reports, thus his promotion to Captain and designation as Top Gun. How 'bout you, Chuckie? When's the last time you flew a combat mission? You gotta do more than just clock in, clock out.

-

'...and if those degrees don't work out for ya, you can always fall back on shower caddies.'

Business is slow for BOMERS, (Brovic's Outpatient Medical Emergency Roadside Svc.) with two more happenstance clients last week, but like fish, they're out there, you just have to be patient. But who has time to be cruising up and down the highway all day? a vulture trolling for roadkill.

So that's not working out full-time. It's a pot shot kind of a thing. How 'bout you? Is that working out for you, what you're doing?

Incidentally, don't know if I already told you, and you can call it superstition or whatever, but over the past six years I've had about fifty road patients. None of them were wearing buddhas.
Never leave home on a motorbike without it.

Hey, I have been thinking about firing up the shower caddies again. I got the coconuts, right here. I got your copper wire, right over there. I got a dreel, and needle nose pliers, and buddy, that's all you need. I can give you part-time work, show you how it's done. Day labor, hourly, it's your call. The beach is just down the road.

My Myanmar friend, a logger I think, younger and much blacker than me, in a hovel just around the corner between here and the temple, showed me today where he just about took his finger off last month with an angle grinder and a diamond cutting blade, screwing around trying to cut the top off a coconut.

To the bone. We sit and drink his instant coffee with hot water scooped from an electric pot, and basically communicate with smiles and sign language, 'cause he don't speak no English, and I always get lost trying to talk their lingo in depth.

Besides logging and hand-cutting board lumber with a huge, ancient Stihl, he shreds coconut pulp with one of those spiked spinning machines, and is an artist, dicking around making stuff from coconuts and cool pieces of wood he's found. People around here (Asia) like that kind of stuff...driftwood and hanging plants and Orchids everywhere and people plant crazy. It's kind of cool. The gardens never die.

Although we haven't much to say other than good morning how are you, I'm on smiling and waving terms with the neighbors except those at the T in the bad chi house, getting slammed by all the anxious taxi energy of the road from the beach.

I've attempted to reduce that influence by a wall of bananas, a really nice coconut tree, two slender beetle nut trees and a cluster of long plants. They never die. You've got to cut stuff back.

You've got to cut stuff back, and you've got to find stuff to do. Creative stuff. But you do have to be careful with the grinders. The slightest cut, and I mean the slightest, requires immediate and constant attention. Any opening on the skin is a matter of deep concern. Karl's dad spent two months in a hospital in Germany after scraping his arm in a motorbike accident.

My friend Carl spend two weeks in a Phuket hospital trying to grab a hold of an infection that set in, in the wake of a motorbike accident. Bill had a hangnail! Got infected.

Gotta watch it. This place is JUST DRIPPIN' with parasitic vampire no-name bugs floating around looking for some unsuspecting farang from the northern hemisphere here on holiday to open up their epidermis as a host.

Don't believe me? Check it out. Look out the front. That's jungle across the street. Look out the side. Solid jungle, cep where I've carved it back to make what they call a garden and what I call a yard. Out back...'Gee ya! Lookit the siza that, wouldya?'

Yeah.

First night they were here, Digger's wife Taylor, had dreams of something coming up out of that shower floor drain, so next day we went down to the hardware store, early, like, on a priority mission, to get a drain cover.

So, yeah, there's snakes, too. It's good to have dogs and cats around.

-

About two or three times a week, or sometimes, a day, I go down to the hardware store, where those guys have sold me most of the stuff in my house, and where a mangy old ugly brown dog with stiff legs is usually laying in the driveway.

Often, I'll point to him, and ask, 'No work?'

They'll respond, 'No. Sa-leep. Him hab hang (hangover). Zantika (night club) last night. Him hab lay-dee...danCING.'

In truth, after six o'clock lock up, he's working night shift security at the hardware store, the 'grave yard' shift, 6 p.m. until 8 a.m., long tough hours for anybody.

- end
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Out Of Place

2011-02-21T04:55:00.005+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
2.20.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Sure feels good to go somewhere everybody knows your name. Go to your favorite bar, your favorite coffee shop where they already know what you'll order. Your favorite restaurant. Walk down your hometown street, smiling, greeting folks by name.

Sit with friends, chatting excitedly, focused on your immediate conversation, absorbed in the moment of interpersonal interaction, oblivious to all around you. There's great comfort in that, sitting with friends around a poker table, a barbecue pit, swimming pool, a tailgate party, tickets to the Big Game.

It seems more often than not, I'm on the outside looking in. Like over here. Wrong nationality, right off the bat. Among the partying ex-pats, I don't drink or stay out late. Don't fit it. Square peg, round hole.

At home on the rez, wrong tribe. Wrong blood quantum. Wrong blood. In my hometown, where nigga meant something, wrong race, momma said. Don't get out of place. In church, couldn't find the hymnal page. In Vietnam, wrong side. Got hit, zigged instead of zagged. Voted for McCarthy in '68. Thought 'Freedom Riders' was a band.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The word even looks funny. Looks Chinese. Sounds Chinese. In college, I was the 'non-traditional' student; wrong word choice in English class, misplaced commas, dangling modifiers. Warmed the bench on the basketball team. Couldn't make the debate team 'traveling squad'.

Later, the wrong color among an all-white faculty, and the 'Chosen One' for minority representation on their committees, always whipping that same ole dead-ass horse across disciplines, across departments, across campus. Among the intellectual elite, I was in the wrong department. Among academics, at the wrong university. In court, wrong side of the law.

Down at Damon's Biker Bar, I've got the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes and no tattoos. Same at a Nebraska farm auction. No red hankie, no skoal, no work boot, no redneck tan. Everywhere I go, people give me that, 'You're-not-from-around-here, are you?' look.

Same thing at the ISS. All those scientific types inside being all buddy-buddy across nationalities, and who's outside with a monkey wrench, doing another spacewalk, looking in through a porthole at all the fun going on, beaming live video back to earth.

Growing up, shoes were too tight, the pant legs too short, last guy chosen. Where did everybody go last Friday night? Who gave you that haircut? Where'd you get that jacket? Blank space beside me in the yearbook. Voted 'Most Likely To Not Do Squat.'

Seven Facebook Friends. Three in real life, the Real 3-D World. They seem to be having a good time over at that table. 'Why am I the only one that got a...?' 'Why am I the only one that didn't get a...?' Why did the conversation shift? What just happened? What was the joke? I don't get it.

Who? Whaa....?

Why are all these other people getting service, and I'm invisible? Last tickets just sold out. How long do I have to stand here before...? Would somebody please tell me...'That model is no longer in stock, Sir.' Why are they getting their food? I was here before those people even sat down!

The exam is TODAY?

Am I the only nigga on this beach? Jeeez, this looks like a gay bar. Lower 15 percentile. What, nobody else wants to go? No vacancy, full up. Why didn't someone tell me they changed the departure time? Sorry, all out. That waitress doesn't even see me. I didn't know it was politically incorrect. You'll have to come back. Tagged out at the plate.

Very funny, you guys. That door led out to the alleyway. Then it locked behind me.

Rock, paper, scissors. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again. Who got the short straw? We need volunteers - You! Who? Me?

'Man, I haven't seen one of these in a longggggg time. Ha. You can't get parts for these anymore. Where'd you find this?'

Shouldn't have been there in the first place. Had no place being in the ring. Sucker punch. Wrong place, wrong time. Breech baby. Sorry about the seating, you'll have to eat Thanksgiving at the kid's table. 'Ha. You should've got off three stops ago.' Went for popcorn just when...

"You paid how much? I got mine for half that!"

You see what's happening here? You see what's going on? Been wrong so long, it's a way of life. So if that's the case, off the pace, off base, off key, out of place, out of step, why is it then that I always, always, think I'm right?

- end

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Just Listening

2011-02-17T21:52:00.012+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
2.18.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - I'm looking through my address book, wondering who can relate to Skeeter Davis. Or Archie Bell and the Drells. Booker T. & the MGs? Trying to avoid, 'remember when..?' There is just no end to oldies on UTube. The Chambers Brothers.

Did you know Skeeter had a thpeech impediment? 'Don't Thay No'?

Notes. All I've got here is just notes, to be expanded upon later.

Thoughts - You ever have 'em? This was going to be the working title, but was discarded because of...how do you say?...peacepoor.

You'll soon be given many new freedoms; The first is your 'Freedom to Listen'.

Wull, wh...wh...what about freedom of speech?

Don't worry about freedom of speech. Just listen!

Like Lupe's God told him in ceremony, "PUT...the drum...DOWN! DON'T...touch ANYthing! Just LISTEN!"

'...an stop bothering me. I already know what you're going to ask for. Same as before. An don't sing. Just sit there. Sit there and just listen.'

Like now. Just listen to those songbirds.

Fact>Myth>Reality
Myth>Fact>Reality

Have you noticed, or is it just me? I don't know whether to call it outright thievery or what, but Big Time, Big Name, Big Speak copy-cat journalists are ripping me off for my ideas and passing them off as their own (well...it's something everybody does, isn't it?), same same cotton gin.

I'm seeing my work pop up in other people's material, without attribution or reference. You read the 'Times', 'The Nation', 'Truthout', or 'Democracy Now'? Check the editorials. You watch UTube? You Twit? Hangout on FB? See anything familiar? Reckanise it when you see it? It's not so much the ideas, but style, because you want the CAFs* to float.

It's the style. Maybe we're all on the same page, the same frequency, the same download. People never broke the rules like that. People didn't use to write like that, talk like that, think like that. You see it? Corks and bullshit ain't the only things that float. You can't contain an idea. Once it's 'out there', anything is up for fucking grabs. Lookit Egypt.

Same as artwork. You place some pieces in a few high-end galleries, and next thing you know, every artist and his momma is slapping roadkill on their work and calling it authentic. Don't beeleemee 'bout dat? Ask Misty about her turtles. Great idea, design-wise, but she got beat to the punch at Denver March Pow Wow by the Japanese.

So it's more than likely a combination of the two; people are exploitative thieving liars, and ideas are floating around, waiting to be hatched. ESP just a flip away. This wasn't going to be a 'remember when' exercise, but remember when people used to use the internet? And cell phones? Pony Express of the tech age. Implant me now with your newest version...super-size that dog...and give me a Pick Six lotto ticket.

-

My friend and Thai businessman, Sewitt, invited me to eat with him at a local Thai funeral, a week-long affair, and since many Thai live right alongside the roads, a section is set off with triangular markers with flashing red lights indicating a funeral.

You're supposed to slow down, since oftentimes trucks and motorbike parking consumes half the highway. In the country, you'll see rows of blue plastic seating and the canopy extending to the middle of the road.

Folks will begin to gather at about seven o'clock and stay for several hours, eating, and then listening to one of several monks from the local temple deliver a...presentation?...and mantras each night over a portable speaker system.

An army of staff runs the kitchen under large heavy-duty plastic tents and serves the public for several days at rows of tables; four days to a week, I think, depending on...what, I'm not sure. A dozen or so monks sit up front each evening in the first row of plastic seating, opposite the body, in an elaborately carved white casket on a raised platform, adorned with large plastic bouquets, tiny colored flashing lights, and big pre-made paper mache' lotus flower burial decorations about the size of a modest portrait, the significance of which I am ignorant. 'We're Sorry For Your Loss', I think.

After the wake, the feeds and everything, they load the family, friends, the casket, the person inside, and all those decorations onto a large flatbed truck and cart the whole shebang off in a slightly less than carnival entourage to the local temple, where they set off a thousand firecrackers ending with a BIG BANG to ward off the evil spirits, and then run the body into a kiln, and there you have it; up in smoke. The casket and decorations get used again.

Like the flowers, you go buy the decorations. Same place you get the orange 'buddha buckets', the plastic-wrapped monk bucket gift set with soap, hand towel, instant coffee, snacks, sweets, and other sanctioned goodies, especial for the monk. The Muslims call them (Thai monks) 'freeloaders'.

Sewitt wasn't there when I arrived, so after parking the bike I was escorted gingerly by the elbow by an old man usher/parking volunteer who led me to a table of Thai men who offered me to join them. I say 'gingerly' because he watched me take the first two shaky steps after getting off the bike, and seemed to treat me like an old man.

Taking a cue from other arrivals, I greeted the old lady with a silent smile and feather handshake, mouthing 'mama' into her watery but lucid eyes. She smiled back and welcomed me to eat. The men at the table said non-verbally, 'pull up a chair, join us', and pushed in front of me bowl after bowl of chicken, pork, fish, salad, greens, rice and water.

Sewitt showed up with what looked like a couple of bodyguards, and made his way around the tables shaking hands. People deferred to him, but not in the same way as me or the monks. 'I didn't know that dude was mafia,' I thought.

He came over and shook hands, greeting the men at the table. I pointed at my wrist and said I showed at seven, like he told me. "Sorreee," he said, his eyes darting around the room. Our table eventually dissipated and when I rose to stretch and have a smoke, Sewitt came over and said, "Sit down!", pulling out a chair for me in the group seating in front of the deceased, whom I didn't know, but recognized folks from the community.

I sat listening to the monk on the speaker, among fifty people sitting with their hands in prayer at their chests. Some of the people in the back were chatting casually amongst themselves while others appeared to be hanging on every word of the talk and mouthed the mantras.

The kitchen was still serving new arrivals. Sewitt sat eating off to the side with another group of men, all dressed in black. As darkness fell, two uniformed men with flashing batons slowed the traffic between the flashing red and white triangular funeral markers out on the highway. I sat just listening, not understanding anything of what was being said.

A clustered fan of motorbikes four rows deep had me hemmed in, and I had to jockey around with the help of a parking attendant upon departure. It wasn't the first Thai funeral I'd attended. Maybe the fifth or sixth. Thai people will often invite you to the feeds, even if they don't know you. 'Come eat,' they say.

Nevertheless, it always feels a bit awkward, probably not unlike a foreigner or a white person being plopped down on some gymnasium bleachers at an Indian funeral where you don't know the deceased, or anybody, and don't know the lingo they're speaking, and everything is dazzling and colorful and you're pretty much just looking and listening.

Like floating in the Sea. Just you and the sea, floating on your back in a heavy salt water solution, trying, trying really really hard to not do anything, all sound muffled to your respiration, heartbeat, and water slapping against your skull, an infinitesimal microbe in the hemoglobin of Mother Earth, dendrites of God's brain, and if a massive solar eruption of electrons should sizzle me, I'd just have to be okay with that.

Along with millions of other Earthlings on, in, near, or composed of water. If instantaneous worldwide shift in life at the cellular level should occur, then one might suppose water may play a role.

Floating...just floating, like in a...you're thinking, 'womb', right? No, because the womb was too stuffy, claustrophobic and alcohol-laced. Not a place to stretch your legs. The Sea is much more expansive and embracing. Floating, like a...cork...a human cork. Just you and the Sea. Where the Sea just lets you be your own person.

Floating, like on acid, except for the head trip, the hallucinations, the body rush, the euphoria, paranoia, clarity, confusion, pulsing hands, flashbacks, hooking up with Jimi and sweeping out all the cobwebs from here to throughout all eternity.

Other than that, it's about the same, out-of-body experience-wise.

No, wait. Hodup once.

Floating in the Sea isn't anything at all like an acid trip. Just the floating sensation.

No destination other than nirvana. Just floating. In 'the zone'...which could be anywhere I suppose; on a slope, a precipice, in a pew, on your knees, upside down, daily work, in a sweat, your garden, a poet's retreat, holiday cruise...band camp...whatever, offering a fragmented but acute glimpse of a timeless sense of self, using a whole nuth...a whole different part of the br...no, the brain doesn't have anything to do with it**...a whole different part of who you really be.

-

Sometimes you've just got to shake your head and smile, ala Ronald Reagan:

To a visiting guest, I pointed out a beautiful four-year old coconut palm out front of the house: "I planted that coconut tree there four years ago."

As if Hoosiers would know anything about coconuts, my guest, from Indiana, corrected me: "That's not a coconut.................................................is it?"

"Were you listening?" I asked.

- end

*Cliches, Aphorisms & Figures of Speech

**They (the people who ran the trials) said I scored 'above average' on the RIT Test, the rodent intelligence test. It's okay to tell people. I brag about it all the time. I've already told a bunch of people. They, those guys, said I was a genius on their scale, comparatively speaking. Upon hearing this, I jumped forward in my seat, pumped my fist and shouted, "Alright!", but they, those people on the team, just looked at each other with a dumbfounded expression on their faces. Maybe they've been around rats too long, ha. That's what I said to them, laughing, still electrified from the news of their test results, and then I said, "Maybe you guys should move on to monkeys!"

I was still laughing until one of them said seriously, "Maybe we should explain to you the test evaluations in further detail, and what we mean by 'comparative'."

.

Pets In The Afterlife

2011-01-28T12:04:00.011+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
1.28.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Some of you people* out there with fifteen, seventeen hundred Facebook friends - you keeping up with all those folks? Just wondering. I've only got seven, and half of them don't write. Don't bother sending a request. Three of my seven friends are my kids. What's left...four friends? I consider myself lucky.

Confirm, Deny, Remind me later, Don't Bother Me With This Shit. Make one choice.

Welcome to the new readers! Hope you enjoy the stories. Most of the entries are written from here, and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and a figment of my imagination, and my computer screen, whichever is closest.

The people mentioned are introduced in earlier writing, like, who Mrs. Murphy is, and who's Manny, and who Lupe' is, and Damon, and so on, so I'll presume you'll know who's who, and that you've read the material like a book, from the beginning.

Who's got that kind of time? Well, it's just like college. You party your ass off the entire semester, and then come finals, you find yourself up all night, cramming, or you have no idea of what's going on.

If you can't relate to cramming for finals, then how about waiting to mow your grass until it's up to your calves, and you're going reeeal slow, three, four times the time it would normally take, backing up, pushing down on the handle until the rmps rev back up, and one, two steps forward, RRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrr. You needed a bush hog.

You hear your neighbor out there, cutting his grass like that, and a smirk forms at the corner of your mouth. Shoulda kept up with it. It's hot, too. The dummy.

This blog extends back to...gee...1903, I guess...you can check the archive. Most of the time, the stories are lies, but, but, they're based on tru...something real! Or maybe something that might have happened, or something that could happen.

The circus fire? A lie. All lies. I didn't start it. Stand-up comedy act? Complete fabrication. My years with the high wire act? It was only one summer. Shot out of a helicopter in Vietnam at a thousand feet and fell through triple-canopy jungle during a hot hoist mission? Who's gonna believe that shit?

Everybody knows you can't pull a hoist mission from a thousand feet. Especially when you're sitting behind a typewriter in Saigon.

Me in space? Aboard the International Space Station? I got the T-Shirt at a yard sale.

Just because it could have happened doesn't mean it didn't. And just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it could. It's no less believable than some of the many things we've witnessed in our lives. Besides that, everybody knows if you tell a lie often enough, but you can't make him drink.

Right here in 'the Real 3-D World'**...as opposed to your computer screen, or a figment of your imagination. You've heard that before, and you'll hear it again. It's been very slow to catch on, albeit one of my top three favorite what I call 'dynamic phrase coinages'.

Maybe you've already noticed, but 'big-ass', and anything, hyphen-'ass' has caught on, evolved, and 'went viral', as they say. I coined that one way back in...'07. You can check the archive story. Remember? 'Big-ass house? Big-ass hairdo?'

I know, you're saying, "C'mon man. 'Big-ass' started on the the reservation."

You are correct! It did start on the reservation. By me. It's what I do.***

Who would've known that rappers would have made it take off the way it did. Now, every rap star wanna-be is spitting out lyrics full of words like, 'ghetto-ass', 'chump-ass', ' punk-ass', and 'one hood-ass nigga', so, 'big-ass house' is blase' now, check. Overused. That would be the minor leagues for CAFS, cliches, axioms, and figures of speech, which is, technically, what I do, you know, for money, for a living. Everything else is on the side.

'Big-ass house' is out. So is 'went viral'.

Thanks to rap, white boys who wish to rap, rez Indians who want to talk gangsta, and the god of communication, 'big-ass' anything, or anything-'ass' is now in common circulation and usage, coin of the poetry realm, including prime time television and National Public Radio. Cool, huh?

Toss 'Real 3-D World' to a rapper, a songwriter, an economist. See what they can do with it.

Is that all? To the new readers? Is that all you need to know? Humor, social commentary, a lot of fiction, some dicey stuff, some war stories, some paranoid delusional (still against cell phones), creative ventures, bending and breaking the rules of grammar and social propriety.

You won't hear me talking about the weather, but I see where it's seven degrees where you're at. Here, it's been balmy, about 84 all day. Rained, and then the sun came out, then it rained again. Now it's stopped. It's been a bit cooler than normal for this time of year...

("I don't like to talk about the 'Nam," said Aaron Running Hawk, a Vietnam vet, in the truck with Tom Cook on our way to DIA, Denver International Airport. In the next breath, he says, "One time we was out in the bush..." and proceeded to tell three war stories).

You can write directly to brovic48@yahoo.com, and I'll respond. I like to hear from you.

Once in a classroom, Communication 101, a putz course, I put forth the suggestion that God is communication, deduced from communication being the most important thing in the world, because even if you believe God, an abstraction, or relationships, here in the real 3-D world are most important, the basis of relationships, with God or anyone, is communication.

That's why you smile when you get mail.

How 'bout you, Bobby? Your gods communicate? You communicate with your God?

Yes. Sent Him a text message. Told Him it was all in His hands.

Sure, you can argue against that premise. But tell me, what is more important? Your health. Okay. That's pretty important. And communication is an act. A verb.

Okay.

What else? Even if what you're thinking is more important, I won't argue. But you'll have to admit, communication is pretty important, isn't it?

Otherwise, you're in a bubble, a isolation chamber, and everybody knows an isolation chamber will make a ni...will make you go bananas, eventually. That's why extended isolation is considered torture, because it breaks you down mentally and snuffs your spirit.

That's what they're doing now to Bradley Manning, the kid who let loose the flood of wikileaks. By the time he ever stands trial, and yes, he will eventually stand trial, he'll be a basket case, a casket case, a vacant shell of a human being. You watch.

A person needs to communicate.

.

There are these dogs in the neighborhood, three of them, trained through ESP to come over when I put out scraps. I put the scraps out, and then tell them through ESP, 'I've got something for you here,' and then they show.

But they also appear every day, regardless of whether I've put out food. That's not ESP then, is it? That's classical conditioning. Intermittent reinforcement. Those dogs will come over until kingdom come to see if there's any food. Maybe there's chicken bones, maybe not. Gotta check.

Can you work ESP with your pets? Will they come to you on mental suggestion? Everybody knows all dogs except Cujo go to heaven. Will yours be greeting you in the Spirit World, happy to see you've come home?

-end

*what do you mean, 'You People'?

**The Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Aviation Squadron, for instance, is in fact a real entity. Don't believe me? Ask the pilots.

***a couple of you wrote, saying you enjoyed my 'ramblings'. Thanks, but, ha...ahhhh, just to let you know...this stuff, my material, is THOUGHT OUT, man! Look, there's a catchy title, an introductory graph, a theme running somewhere through it, the body, the connective thread tying it alllll together, and the snappy ending. Ramblings? What the hell.

.

Think For Your Own Damn Self

2011-01-25T20:04:00.012+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
1.26.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Google thinks I'm in Thailand, and sends me pages in Thai script. Yahoo presumes I'm in Japan, sending me Japanese stuff, in Japanese. Utube thinks I'm in Korea. I know they must know more than I think they know, but the bothersome thing, besides having to translate the pages, is that what they know is incorrect.

Can you relate to that? Ever run up against something like that, when you're on the phone, frustrated, maybe a little heated, and you're ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN the error is at their end? Maybe a credit rating company, the phone company, a government agency, something you bought. A billing. Your transcripts. Wrong identity.* A Hawaiian birth certificate.

'There must be a mistake.'

"NO SHIT! I'M TELLING YOU THERE'S A MISTAKE!"

Su, a local tour guide who possesses limited but passable English skills, is nonetheless an effective communicator. In the instance of the above, or to express frustration with a person, she will narrow her eyes, press her lips into a line, tighten her jaw, grind her teeth, and make a tight wringing motion with her hands, like wringing out a towel, or a chicken's neck...one, two, three times.

Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason, The 'Honeymooners') would do the 'slow burn.' Remember the look ('if looks could kill...') of the Chicago crime boss in 'The Firm', when Tom Cruise, their attorney, whom they were trying to kill, walked into their office with those documents?

Sometimes, the most perfect conveyance of an idea is wordless.

My neighbor Karl, from Lakeview Bungalows around the lake, was complaining about his lazy-ass stepson, who he says is worthless, and can't think for himself. There's an inevitable 'you're-not-my-dad' clash built into the relationship already, but even more pronounced when between an exacting and pushy German step-father, and a laid-back Southern Thai kid.

"I have to tell him every move to make," said Karl.

He's not a kid. He's 25, 26 yrs. old. Well, yeah, whatever.

On the rez, Lupe' would raise his voice at me in mock anger and yell in that heavy Mexican accent, enunciating each word, 'HECTOR! Do I hab to tell you ebery pocking mube to make?' So, I know what it's like.

Problem with that is, you've got someone standing over your shoulder, watching your every move, and everybody knows that's a poor performance environment. Another problem with it is, aside from the constant need for supervision, is that it encourages helpless behavior. I had Lupe' doing more work for me just by fumbling my approach, appearing incompetent.

Coaches, down in the paint, demonstrating help-out D; my kids, walking me through a computer operation; the hygienist with the floss. Show me. Speak slowly please. Spell it out.

Like the vicious home crowd, derisively razzing each footstep of the big stupid opponent as he walked slowly to the bench after fouling out, "LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT! RIGHT!...LEFT!" until he sat down. God, that's funny when they do that. An entire arena full of thousands of people, all doing a joke together. A real good ha ha ha at the expense of some poor dumb goat on the other team.

I know what that feels like, too, to have a whole stadium full of people have a good laugh at my expense, and it wasn't a comedy act. Last thing I remembered was the coach yanking me by the jersey and saying, "GET IN THERE!"

Then there was a great explosion of laughter before everything turned to darkness, and it wasn't until later that

Well, it took a while. It took a while to learn to think for myself. Much too long. At some point you've just got to chuck the game plan and call an audible.

'First, you've got your parents making your dream for you, telling you every move to make, right?' Karl nodded his head yes. He was supposed to be something, but turned out to be something else. His brother became the something.

Then, what, you've got teachers, coaches, people like Manny telling you you've got your head up your ass, barking drill sergeants, corporate suck-ass brown-noses, department chairs, division heads, lap dogs, attack dogs, petty yapping dogs, associate vice-presidents and a whole hierarchy of bosses telling you, essentially, like we joke on the rez, "you're on this job from the neck, down."

'On my honor
I promise
To do my duty
to honor my country
and to obey the laws of the pack.'**

"If you're married," I said to Karl, "you've got a woman telling you what to do."

He sighed heavily and nodded, but added brightly that now, with his second wife, Mon, he can move forward on his own if it's a good idea, without...without...checking in. If it's a good idea.
If she thinks it's a good idea.

So now, I bristle when someone, especially if it's some young punk, tells me what I should do, or what I oughta do, or suggests what I need to do, or outright commands me to do something, like...'upagainstthewallmotherfucker'.

'Please step out of the car, Sir.'

'Face down on the ground! Hands behind your back!'

Oh, shit. 'Don't tase me, Bro.'***

Most of the time, it's not that bad. Airline security is about as bad as it gets for an ordinary person. Seldom is it that bad, with regard to being ordered around, but in many ways it appears that many people let other people (think, 'talk show host', 'pundit') do their thinking for them.

That's okay for deep space exploration, but for matters closer to home, like my social and political views, I'd prefer to think for myself. Freedom of thought. Isn't that...?

'Do your own thinking," dad said once. 'Don't join anything.'

At the time, the reference was...the Lion's Club, or maybe a social cause...SDS, or something local...the Elks, the VFW. I forget the context, exactly, but I remembered the quote. I asked him why.

"They'll try to do your thinking for you," he replied.

__

Ohh, I gotta tell you this, because it's real, and part of the story. I thought, 'No, leave it out'; 'put it in'; leave it outputitinleaveitoutputitin, so;

There was six or eight of us working together on or near Pine Ridge, stacking tipi poles or moving stuff around, getting firewood or some shit, on Tom Cook's agenda, when someone told Frank to do something.

Frank Crociatta, working as Field Marsh...Field Director for Running Strong For American Indian Youth, was Tom's immediate supervisor, living close by, going to ceremony, and being one of the guys, hanging with the crew.

"I AIN'T YO' NIGGA,' Frank spat out. Everybody laughed. Then with emphatic indignation, Frank added, "I'm Massa Tom's nigga."

Wes, Bo, Lupe', me, and whoever else, picked up on that and ran with it, using it whenever the opportunity arose. It evolved to, 'Be yo' own damn nigga,' and pretty much ended when Frank left, to be his own nigga, and Wes found work out east, to be his own nigga, and Lupe' got married.

"I used to be Tom's neeger," Lupe' said, laughing. "And now I'm Sandy's neeger. There for a while, I was my own neeger!"

We'd laugh, in the same way Malcolm X moved thousands of inner-city blacks, talking frankly and publicly about 'house niggas' and 'field niggas', and the difference between the two. When does critical, independent thought occur? Even once we've arrived at independent thinking, we remain enslaved by self-imposed boundaries exempt from rational evaluation. We can be the sheep, or we can be the not sheep.

Airport security...you be sheep, my people. You, me, and everybody else. Better do just as your told. It'll be quick and painless. Just do what everybody else is doing. Get out of line, get offended, get smart, they can fffffuck with you...in a Big Way.

Missing your flight will be the least of your worries. As of '07, something like 280 accidental deaths from taser guns occurred in the U.S. against unarmed people,according to amnesty international. Not saying it happens in airports, not saying it's a suppression of freedom of thought. Just saying it happens. Happened to an unarmed 72-year old woman.

Granted, there might be times in life when you've got your nuts in a vice, or for you women, your titty in a wringer, as they say, or 'up against the wall', when you very well may be thinking for yourself, but you're nevertheless serving the interest of someone else, perhaps to your own detriment. Hmmm? Evva happen?

Landlord? Boss? Banker? Corporate entity? The State? The asshole on the phone.

Something about it doesn't feel right. Something twisted and wicked and evil, crushing to individual dignity, suffocating to the spirit. You could say this is the way of the world. Reality. Doesn't mean it has to be.

The thought never occurred to me until one afternoon. One afternoon in a green helicopter, when dad's words rang true. And later, in a darkened bunker, listening to a group of 'hard core' infantry brothers question why we was where we was.

A person just needs to stop and...I, I guess, just needed to stop and ask myself, 'what do I want?'

-end

*On the rez, we joke, "It was that other guy...Your Honor."

**Motto of the cub scouts

***Most memorable quote of the year, 2007; Yale book of quotations. A Univ. of Florida protester, taken down at a Sen. John Kerry public speaking forum, to University Police. They hit him with the taser anyway. 50,000 volts. Twice.

.

Drops In On You

2011-01-24T17:36:00.009+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
1.24.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Yesterday Karl, my German neighbor around the bend in the lake, asked me if I go for physical exam. I told him, "Yes. Once a year. Physical, dental, and mental."

He seemed surprised I'd want to talk with a professional mental person, a shrink. I acted surprised that he was surprised. Everybody knows everybody needs someone to talk to. Even shrinks need other shrinks. Just to get the screws tightened. A psychological lube job.

You wouldn't want to get aboard a flight not having the screws tightened, would you? Jumbo jet, wide-body, with 450 on board with a couple of screws loose. No. You'd wish to bring it to the attention of a flight attendant, at the very least.

Oh, you could see a medicine man, or a priest, or your good friend, or your neighbor, or talk to the Sea, or your dog, depending on who you believed in and who was the most reliable. Your dog? Great listener, accessible, 'there for you', but weak on advice. The Sea? Again, great listener, open schedule, can see you any time, but the feedback is almost imperceptibly subtle, like the garden.

Your good friend? Sometimes the best, especially in a pinch. But also, sometimes your really good friend can offer you really poor advice, and in all likelihood, lack the proper training and background to offer sound psychological counsel. Big on empathy, but short on skills. 'Simon says...'

'DOOR THREE!'

Priest, medicine man, shrink, gypsy fortune teller. Your call. A roll of the dice. Who you go to depends on what you want to hear. Shrink is going to give you a prescription, for sure. You bet. Pharmacological intervention. Priest is going to give you, ohhhhh...something to think about. Medicine man...? He might have you do something. Maybe, maybe not.

Go to the garden. Go talk to God. Wikipedia. Over here, folks go to the temple. They go see the abbot.

.

Arthur, the guy from Australia, who lived in the U.K. and then in Kuwait, and then Mumbai, and then na na na na, stopped by earlier in the day for ten minutes and stayed a couple of hours. Smoked half my cigarettes.

Said all we gotta do is put out our desire to the universe and then not screw it up by not being joyful in advance, or something along those lines. You know the accent...even though it's English, it's hard to understand, especially if it's a sort of rolling, under-your-breath, trailing off mumble.

Anyway, you may have heard me say it. Told him, "Create your universe and go live in it."

That's what I told him, which he seemed to grasp and agree, yeah, and went on about clarifying his earlier comment. which I got the first time. We were sort of talking about the same things, but there wasn't a full and clear connection at either end. There were nuances to frames of reference each of us held, clear in our own minds, but somehow not fully communicating to the other the ideas behind it. Know what I mean?

We were both talking about creating a dream, but the approaches were different. His was alignment of energy and the dynamics of the universe, and I was thinking more about paying attention. I don't know if that makes any sense to you, or not. But it did to me then, and it does to me now.

How many times you need to pray.
Muslims say, three times a day.

Constant communication, open channel?
Ritual thus on holiday
asking
asking
God for this
asking
asking
God for that
need we change our prayer
or lay it down
and listen
to the silence
dropping in on us.

Change up the sentence structure a bit.

___

Talking about the things we take for granted; the monkeys, arriving yesterday in a truck with a large metal frame on the back, like for stacking up firewood; four of 'em, to harvest a truckload of coconuts next door, the monkeys operating on one-syllable commands from the men on the ground, tethered at the neck by a thirty-foot nylon cord.

I stopped to watch them work. Two German tourists stopped and shot photos. The monkeys grabbed the coconuts, spun them off in a twist, and dropped them to the ground.

The men will gather the fruit and head into town with the monkeys atop a heaping load. I don't get too close to them. There's something about their eyes and the movement of their eyebrows and displaying their teeth that makes me want to take a step back. I see they keep them on a short leash. Lightening quick, could pull your eye from its socket.

Last year in the suffocating midday heat, a monkey was chattering away high up in the coconut trees, working, angrily throwing the coconuts down with unusually loud THUMPs. In her restaurant, Karl's wife, Mon, stopped, listened, raised her eyebrows and interpreted, "Monkey say it's too HAWT!"

Now, I know I've already told you that one, remember? but those monkeys reminded me of her comment, and a good one is worth telling twice.

If you don't remember, tells me you haven't been reading the material I send you, or maybe you just signed on lately, or maybe hit and miss. If you remember, then, cool.

.

Yeah, those monkeys...the line of monks and uniformed schoolkids each morning, the Myanmar women and their babies' faces painted with powdered swirls, everyday things we take for granted. Stop to think about the people in our lives, thankfulness...the air...our food...our hearts, pumping away, boom boom, boom boom, boom boom, all this time, every second, this moment, all these years, without really thinking about it.

- end

.

How Long Has It Been

2011-01-21T22:16:00.008+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
1.21.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Don't you just love these numbers? The dates. Aren't you glad to see 1.21.11? Glad to be alive? I hope your day wasn't boring.

During boring moments, I'm multi-tasking, on the toilet, smoking a cigarette, cup of coffee, and reading the history of Laos for two months now (reading the book, not sitting on the toilet), a continual succession of ping pong power struggles between the Thai, the Lao, the Khmer, the Burmese, the southern Chinese, the Ho's, and the Vietnamese.

That's right, the Ho's.*

With the movement of armies and wholesale capture and relocation of populations, cities burned to the ground, people taken away, many of the people were related both linguistically and in lineage, particularly the Thai and the Lao, and borders really never got mapped and set down until mid 1800s when the French stepped in, with colonial designs of their own, to counter the British in India and Burma.

Thus, Thailand became a buffer State, to the French Indo-Chinese States of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, with land grabs and treachery going every whichaway.

You already knew this, right? Yeah, it's not a history lesson...just to say the Thai and the Lao are related, and the Khmer, too, like asking a Hispanic in Texas if they have relatives across the border.

And this king and that prince capturing the throne and executing all his brothers and all the members of the ruling royal family...stuff like that, all up and down the line. People fleeing on foot, fighting on elephants, crossbows and lances. You could see why the French thought they were superior.

Came in, got in the mix, hung around a hundred years. They had the muscle. They had the firepower, the balls, and sufficient arrogance to subjugate an entire...send the elite kids off to school in Paris, learn to be a bureaucrat.

Ahhhh, sorry. That's what I'm reading. Most people don't give a rat's ass about Laos or it's history.

The Ho's? The Ho's come out of southern China.

You can see it, the French influence, in the architecture, and up north, in the delis, where they have Camembert and Brie in the cooler, and a selection of breads and wines at check out.

Down here, catering to the Germans and the Scandinavians, we've got choice of some of the best chocolate in the world. A mountain of it right at the check out counter.

___

I don't like getting hung up in the middle of a project, or having it sit on a shelf, 'on hold'. After about the fourth trip to the hardware store, that shit starts to get old; the first trip was just an estimate, just to get started.

'How many you need?'

"Ba ba...ten, er, fif...er, gimme a couple dozen."

The second trip was to get what was actually needed for the job. The third trip was the necessary trip made halfway through the job upon realization more materials are needed, more than what you originally thought ('...that should be enough.' It never is), and to get the things you forgot on the first two trips. The fourth trip is to get the stuff you need to finish it up.

Just gotta stay on it.
___

Like the swing, for instance. Took me three weeks to get the board, then it laid here another two weeks awaiting Damon to bring his drill up from the bar. Laid out there so long, the ants began to colonize the underside.

Ended up taking it down to the hardware store, where, in successive trips, I got the chain, the rope, and the Ubolts to secure the rope in place, and had the guys there sand, polyurethane, and drill it. Then Damon came over and helped me put it up. How long has it been since you've swung?

I've got two of them up now; a bamboo old-timers swing like you'd see on a front porch in Iowa, and this one here. We've had 'em ever since the kids were kids; dangerous, all of them, don't believe me, just ask Bob Luckett, crossing a river, a terrifying plung down out of a tree across a ravine, an exhilarating zip line across the back yard, the 'chair swing' the teenagers busted, all so frightening that level-headed adults avoided them, leaving them entirely free for the little kids and the teenagers.

People should swing more, if you ask me. Swing more, and fly kites.

This is more like a conversation, right? It's not really a case of a, of a, of a professional writer trying to sell a book or an idea or something. Nah. This is more like you and me sitting here, and you sitting there and me going on and on and on about something where you can't get a word in edgewise, and maybe your mind drifted off and came back only when I started laughing at my own joke.

It's more like something like that. More than just reading and writing, right?

___

There are so many uniquely Thai cultural characteristics that one can take for granted after being here a while, such that would cause the tourist to gawk or point. You've got houses on stilts and spirit houses grand and small. Seen one temple you've seen 'em all.

There are vendors selling evvverything on canopied three-wheeled motorcycle 'slings', or sidecarts. Fresh fruit abounds. Buddha amulets worn for protection; shorts and flip-flops on motorbikes. The great food. Great beaches. Ladyboys down at the cabaret, elephants on the road, and monks chanting each morning at the temple just around the bend in the lake. What did Dorothy say to Toto?

There are guys going down the road on motorbikes, carrying covered bird cages, driving with one hand, on their way to songbird contests, where dozens of bird owners show up each Saturday and park their trucks and bikes right off the road. Their birds, trained to bust a song at the instant of a referee's whistle, compete in lines of cages hung from a tall metal frame, surrounded by all the squatting owners, picking their teeth and studying their birds as would a coach from the stands at a Grand Slam tournament.

I've never stopped at one of those bird song competitions. But I'm going to, and if it's cool, I'll tell you about it. Thai boxing and cock fights? Never been.

I've never been to a couple of waterfalls in the area, close by, nor the Khao Sok National Park, just up the way, which they say is stupendous. Never been to Ko Kao, a cool little island just not too far from here.

After working two weeks straight in the garden, I went to the sea for the first time since. You can take things for granted, sure. Never have been out to the Similans, an hour off the coast, and one of the diving meccas of the world. People come here just for that. Never been there.

Damon offered me a free boat ride and all expenses on him if I wanted to go out there with him tomorrow. I told him, 'I'm a busy man. I'm a terribly busy man. I'm right in the middle of a project.'

- end

*It would appear incorrect plural possessive, and thus, confusing. the apostrophe is there so you'll know I'm not saying 'Hoss'. It's 'Hos' or 'Hoes', like, 'My Hos,' or, as in, 'The Second Ho Invasion.'
.

The 'H' is Silent

2011-01-19T19:39:00.008+07:00

Brovic -Blogging since 1903
1.19.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Damn, I had a title earlier. Can't remember what it was, but it seemed workable. Maybe it will come to me later.* You reading this stuff? I wonder, especially when someone writes, asking, 'Where are you now?'**

What is it you want? Humor? Commentary? Off-the-wall Tall Tale? Horrific war story? A brand new car. Pick up a cause, Piss you off, Fire your imagination? Where I am now? Hows the weather. Where are you? Closing the circle, circle the wagons? Family and friends. Winding it down, winding it up, not as much as you used to, too numb, too fried, too afraid, too much information, too much shock, too much too much? Yanked up by the roots.

Sat staring at this blank screen for the longest time. Out there in the garden, I was swamped with ideas.

That songbird froze me in my tracks. I was leaning over, reaching for a container for yet another of a thousand seedlings, when just overhead, right there in the palm branches, a wild songbird let loose on an extended song, all over the place in form, rhythm and structure, like Coltrane, spellbinding. I was afraid to move, frozen, reaching for the flower pot, thinking, 'this surely must be something like heaven.' Just that moment.

Then, timelessness, the green, the jungle, the damp smell of wet, rotting organic matter, lizards flicking across the ground, the black mold creeping across a faded pastel French colonial wall, a light midday tropical breeze, the sun's rays glinting through palm leaves on a gardener frozen by a songbird's expression. Could have been another lifetime.

Everybody knows you've got to thin your carrots. Was it the same with palms.

'What? Are you thinking of adopting a baby?' asked Claudia, Damon's Swiss girlfriend, sitting on her motorbike in front of Mr. Gui's hardware store after turning around when I yelled at her as she passed by. 'Why would you think of that?' she asked.

"You know, you've got time to think in a garden," I said. "I just wondered if it's in the best interest of the seedling to be pulled now, in infancy, and set in a nurturing environment, than to wait until later, say, adolescence, and yank 'em out by their roots and put 'em in a strange place and strange family...and if the same would apply to humans, as well, that's all."

There was a connection somewhere. Maybe I couldn't express it clearly enough, just then. In the garden, I was thinking, foster homes and loving parents and babies who wouldn't know the difference until much later in life, and how no matter how much pre-soaking you do before yanking them out by their roots, they nonetheless yield grudgingly.

'You have time for philosophy in your garden?' Claudia asked.

With the noise of the traffic, I wasn't entirely sure she hadn't said 'mediocrity'. Manny used to infuriate me when he'd say I'd never rise above mediocrity.

"You don't know the right people," he'd spit, "and you haven't got the natural talent or work ethic..." have I already told you this? Manny's 'mediocrity' speech? Lecture. How I could never make it to county commission, and all that? Still eats at me.

You'd think he could have been a little bit more supportive, given his role, and when I said that to him, 'you could be a little bit more supportive, you know,' being the type not to mince words, he told me I could have been a little bit more than what I was.

You ever get told you just weren't good enough to make the starting squad, or measuring up to your potential? If so, why?

'You can never be the shamp,' he'd say. Perhaps he was realistically setting the bar low, to affect such a low self-esteem that any small measure of achievement could be perceived as outstanding performance. Half the time he never even bothered to show up for tournaments, that's how....

HEY! DAMN! Hodup, now. There's a GREAT Big-ass moth that just flew in here...I mean, BIG. He's up on the ceiling...about a five, maybe six foot wing span, I'd say.

Ho-lee Sa-mokes! I've gotta do something here.

- end

*which it did, on the way back from 7/11.

**The Goldilocks Planet? Just like Earth? I mean...can we...can we...take it over?

.

Your Buddha Hab No Power

2011-01-12T19:19:00.006+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
Your Buddha Hab No Power
1.11.11

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Everybody knows babies require a lot of attention. Constant. Same with plants. I've got about 800 + here now. Little yellow palm starts, potted in clusters of four or more, encircling the parent plants from which they were spawned.

'Same same resort,' remarked the workman who cut a giant hole in the wall for a new window, transforming a dull, cell-like room into an airy breathing space. Now, instead of looking at a wall, you can see the garden, and the lake. Karl, from across the lake, said the builder was thinking, "...'Five units.' He wasn't thinking of living here."

One, eleven, eleven, already. Don't time fly? Here it was, New Year's, just the other day. 1.11.11. Gotta put up a post on a date like that; one which falls once in a lifetime, just like all the others.

___

Just to prevent time from slipping by without trying something different, across-the-grain, counter to given sensibilities, discretions, and tendencies, I went ahead on down to Damon's bar and joined Damon and the couple dozen Hells Angels who'd gathered there last weekend.

Lots of loud noise (from the bar and bikes), black leather, patches (Australian chapter), tattoos, suspicious looks, and what else? I don't know. I can't really say I 'hung out' with the dudes; in fact, when I came in, they were all in the back, and when I went to the back, they went to the front, it seemed, and when I took a seat at the bar, they sort of dispersed, and gee...eventually left.

"I didn't mean to run off all your bros," I said to Damon, half kidding. I had taken some photos of a guy and his girl (with her camera), and another group photo of everybody at the bar, and Damon, doing his master of ceremonies best, had thrown his arm around me when I first entered and introduced me, 'Here's my neighbor, my friend, my bro,' and introduced me around, but still, I caught a couple of them eyeing me suspiciously and studying me hard.

It was okay. The vet hat with wings helped. The most impressive thing was Damon stopping traffic as all those bikes rolled out of there in a roaring, thunderous, ear-splitting swarm, and the last guy backing his bike into the bar, torquing it out with the front brake on, revving up to about three thousand rpms, and laying a tire-screeching 'burnout' patch of rubber from the bar and out onto the asphalt, in an impressive, deafening display of 'see ya later.'

Damon explained after they had gone, 'It's not you, bro. They're like that with everybody. They keep up this image, 'if you're not one of us...'

'then you're not one of the bros,' I finished for him. 'You can't be trusted.'

Given the right circumstances, any one of us could have been a biker. See yourself as a social outcast, see yourself as a non-conformist, see yourself un-loved, a rebel. See yourself in a tattoo parlor, black leather, on a hog. See yourself with a ready-made family of people you can trust.

It's a pretty loud family. And there's an element of scare in the family. I could see it in the eyes of the Thai, watching the family leave. Hells Angels, on their way back to Phuket. Everybody stopped, and took notice.

___

Given the right circumstances, instead of who you are, anyone of us could have been a marine. An instant family. People you can depend on, people you can trust. There is an element of scare within the family. You could see it in the eyes of the Afghans when the predator drone struck. Everybody stopped, and took notice.

___

Everybody stops and takes notice at an accident scene. I've had three people in the last three days; one just in front of me, the other just behind me, a truck smacking both a motorbike passing a Moken (Sea Gypsy) kid on a bike.

It seems like I'm pretty focused at those moments, because helping hands appear from nowhere, a time-compressed blur, not unlike pulling missions in Vietnam, and it's later when I can't sleep that I see those folks...the stunned Indian man, shaken but relatively unhurt, with the other two Thai guys fleeing the scene on foot, leaving their bike; the Thai man in the road with a busted knee, and that Moken kid, maybe ten years old, in shock, scary quiet, a single tear sliding from the corner of his eye as I cleaned the sand and blood from his face and addressed his wounds.

'Talk to him,' I said to the man who dragged the limp kid to the side of the road. 'Tell him everything is going to be okay.'

___

I'm going to stop telling you these accident stories. They happen every day. It's not like I'm a magnet. I hear the sirens going down toward the traffic and tourist bottlenecks of Bang Niang and Khao Lak. They happen all the time. Just last week, two Germans on a motorbike got dragged under a truck in Bang Niang. Thing is, to go out prepared.

You know? You're not writing about your work. If an emt wrote about all his runs, it would have to be nothing less than gruesome, or a doctor in the emergency room...you're not telling me about your work.

I guess I tell you this because it's relatively unusual and impacts my life in a meaningful way, beyond nonsense and storytelling. I guess I'm just thankful my uncle provided me with the training so I can continue to have deeply compassionate contact with other humans throughout life. It's a blessing, and not a curse.

__

They inform the user at Yahoo to protect your online identity and reputation by not publishing personal information or content that may jeopardize your integrity and safety.

Man, I've been saying all kinds of stuff, since...1903, I guess, so, what the hell.

Yeah, it's more than just 'family and friends'. Put it in the file. So, people think, 'I'm no threat. I've got nothing to hide.' And we quietly submit to increasing intrusion, observation, and control in our lives, and erosion of our citizen's rights. Don't believe me? Go through airport security.

So never mind concern of third-party knowledge of personal activity between you and family and friends. Everything you've ever said, on the phone, in a text, on a keyboard, downloaded, is collected, packaged, and sold.

Isn't it nice you're that important?

___

My neighbor waved me over the other day as I passed on my bike. We've only been saying hi to each other for the past two years. Turns out, his daughter and her husband and two kids run the little shop next door that caters to the Myanmar, and opened when there was a huge Myanmar population in the neighborhood, rebuilding the resorts.

I'm friends with those guys at the shop, and I didn't know that was her mom and dad next door until this year. Anyway, they've been waving hello, and the other day he had me stop in at his picnic table, where I see him huddled with other Thai men in the afternoons.

He invited me into his house, speaking only rapid Thai, which I didn't understand, and pointed to the walls, pictures of Buddhas, pictures of himself as a younger man with famous monks, citing their names, their wats, their towns.

Didn't have any pictures of his grandkids up there, or his family. Just the monks. Some big pictures, and lots of small ones. Underneath was a glass cabinet full of Buddha amulets on top of a long case with drawers full of amulet cases and necklaces for the Buddhas.

Obviously, he was a serious collector, or a collector's collector. That's what all those guys were doing each afternoon around his picnic table, examining Buddhas under the pocket magnifying glasses all serious collectors have, a pursuit you don't see in neighboring countries.

Out at the table, he looked at the Buddha I was wearing and frowned. He made a Popeye muscle-flexing pose, turned his mouth down in an expression of distaste, and shook both his hands in that bulb-screwing motion that says 'no have', or, 'I don't know', and waved his daughter over from the shop.

His nephew, who was sitting at the table and could speak hesitant English, said, "My Uncle says your Buddha hab no pow-ER."

The daughter, I don't know any of their names, came over in a rush from the shop. Her dad rattled off something in Thai, and she indicated in sign language that my Buddha wouldn't protect me from a motorbike accident, or getting cut, then she sat down, taking a Buddha that he'd given her, made a quick silent prayer, extended her arm, then placed her hand over her heart, then returned the amulet to her father. Then she stood for a moment before returning to the shop.

Her dad then proceeded to remove the amulet I'd been wearing (I won't say his name, but it wasn't Luang Po Thuat, for those of you who have been depending on him for travel safety),* removed it from the necklace, and replaced it with the new Buddha.

"Rong Paw Gao," he said. "Wat Klua Wan. Chanburi."

That's the Buddha, the temple, and the city. I had him repeat it five or six times so I could get it right, then he got a pen and paper, and I wrote it down. The nephew looked at it.

"Rong Paw Gao," he said, pointing at the paper. "Rong. Rong," he said again, pointing at the 'R' and shaking his head. He took the pen and scrawled an 'L' over the 'R'.

"Ohhh," I said. "Luang Paw Gao!"

They both nodded their heads, smiling broadly, eyes glistening in seeing I'd finally gotten it right. I put the amulet around my neck. My neighbor then again flexed his muscles and nodded his head, lips pressed together. "Hab. Hab."

The Thai are very superstitious. They believe it's unlucky to look both ways before pulling out into traffic. Just go. No helmet. No protection. Just shorts, flip-flops and a Buddha around your neck.

-end

*isn't that comforting?

.

Say When To Stop

2011-01-03T14:20:00.006+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
01.04.11
Say When To Stop

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Just realized why I'm here and not there, and there when I'm not here. It's so I can garden year-round. It came to me in a flash yesterday while working around the palms, which incidentally, have yielded a crop of about ten thousand offspring, palmlets, now about six inches high.

They're all over the place, thousands of them, after the palms flowered last year in little yellow...how would you describe it?...loose, almost grape-like clusters out-of-a-pod profusions those little tiny-ass yellow bees went after like crazy, then next came little oval smaller-than-a-pea hard green seed-like...seeds...that eventually fell to the ground, took hold, and now, VOILA!

I'm sitting on a fucking gold mine, baby! Alls I gotta do is put them in individual pots with a little potting soil and coconut barks and fibers, let 'em lay a couple years, maybe three, or five, and we're talking a substantial amount of cash, especially if you can sell your product to naive foreigners, twice above and beyond the normal, everyday Thai.

A nursery. A nursery, they'd call it in The States.

Okay, granted, it's labor-intensive. I've learned that on the first fifty. You can hire a Myanmar, factor in the cost, the plastic pots and soil mix, and you still come out ahead, unless you keep giving them away. One-year old yellow palm tree-to-be...fifty cents? A dollar? Two years, five bucks, sure. Three years, you're looking at a 7-10 dollar tree. See how it goes? Four years, five years, yeah, now we're talking...plane tickets.

'How mush you need?'

"How mush you can pay?"

___

I Give You Three Choices

Yeah, some of you people on that contact list, I haven't heard from in a LONG-ass time. What've you got, three options? You see who it's from, and delete it, straightaway to trash; you can open it, and read it, and never respond; you can open it, read it, chuckle or not, and drop me a note.

As in, drop me a note expressing how you can relate, how the story put you there, how it made you roll on the floor, tears in your eyes, how it made you wonder...either about the content, or the writer.

No feedback. You know what they say that does to a nigga, don't you? Make a nigga go bananas, momma used to say. Or, no, maybe that's an isolation chamber. Yeah, an isolation chamber make a nigga go bananas. No feedback is something else...lack of knowledge of results. And if you don't know what the results are, you can keep on making the same mistakes, over and over, the same redundant mistakes.

over and over.

___

It was Damon who came in here telling me, 'You're lucky. You know what you do. You're a writer.' And he went on to tell me he had a new drug that he thought I'd like, if I wanted to come down to the bar, something like ecstasy, 'It'll make a nun turn into a prostitute,' he said. I told him in declining that it didn't sound like something good for me. I'd have to catch him later.

Point was, he told me I'm a writer, which was a comforting affirmation from the outside 3-D world, outside my head, of who I think I am, and so after laying off for a good spell, partly because the coffee shop internet cafe on the rez isn't the best place for writing, and partly because I didn't have no good ideas, then came a flurry of entries launched at the end of the year to make it look like I'd done something in 2010, as a writer.

____

Say When

Take landscaping, for instance. Or a piece of artwork. Or a military venture. Or a lot of things I undertake; sometimes I don't know when to stop. I see it in others, as well. Head across the Gobi, up the Nile. Some people don't know when to stop; like, drinking, for instance, on the rez, or me, when I think I'm being funny and getting a good laugh from the audience, I keep on until I make my own self nauseous.

People are just being kind, I know, when I run through some of my routines, like Hitler, a speeded up mimed rendition of his speech at Brandenburg, pointing at a map, pinching a child's cheek, flashing off a salute... clutching at his chest with clenched fists...everybody has seen the same footage...you could say it's funny...it sure feels funny when I do it.

Or, say, a piece of artwork. A shield; 'Those feathers look good on there. Let's add a couple more. Balance it out. Add eight. A couple more, until the whole thing looks fucked up, and not the simple thing you set out for it to be. Know what I mean? Check out your garage, for instance.

Could you get a car in there? That's what I'm talking about. And dinner last night, for instance. Somebody should've stopped him. What the hell, two scoops. Supersize that motherfucker.

And out there in the garden, or a landscaping project, the dance floor, the lie, the never-ending story, the bullshit-without-end, the fanatical pursuit of a current project, like the nursery, where like tobacco prayer ties, you make fifty, and you can't stop right there, so you make one hundred fifty more, and it's starting to look and feel real good, so you're on a roll with a couple hundred more, and before long, you've got a thousand seedlings and a long string of ties and somebody tell him when to stop.

And then it's done. Done, to the point where you can say so, if you're not a perfectionist, over-critical of every eensy-teensy little flaw. Just say, 'Thanks,' man. Done with the shields, the amulets, the theses, the painting, the drums, the aircraft, the back flips, the kites, the saxophone...now there's one, where the kids always told me when to stop. They told me to stop when they saw me pick it up...begged me after the first few notes.

Who was it?...I asked somebody if they put out a garden. They said no. 'Not even one tomato plant?' I asked.

'Not even one.'

____

Now, see? That's a natur...what I'd call a natural ending, a perfect place to stop, and we could end it right there, but, see?...this is what I'm talking about. But there's more, like Tom said about redundancy, 'It sounded so good, I'm gonna say it again.'

Picking up sea shells, putting all them fucking railroad ties in that raised-bed garden in Indiana,* going over the rapids after that guy, all those drugs, the comedy routines that turned a favorable audience hostile, the basketball, swimming out to sea...somebody should have told me where to stop.

A woman will tell a guy when to stop. 'Stop right there. If you cut any more, it's going to look weird.'

Flat out, she'll say so.

'If you keep...(fill in the blank), you're going to...'

uh...

So, I guess we need that hand check, like editors and whatnot. 'Here, take a look at this. Tell me what you think.'

Honest people will tell you if it's for shit, or not. Nice people, and your friends will tell you it's the greatest, some of your best work, you're the greatest, keep it coming, you've should've won, you should've been on the starting five, you've could've been a part time network anchor.

Manny used to say everybody needs somebody to tell them when to stop.

'Don't go too far, Tony.' Remember that line, from 'Scarface?'

'No, Mel. You've gone too far.'

When to stop, walk away, count your losses, regroup, take a step back, pump the brakes, ease up on the choke hold, assess the damage, see if it fits, call for the switch hitter, relief from the bullpen, clear the bench, put in the subs, toss in the towel, tap out, beg for mercy, look for a new job, pit crew, a new hobby, quit bull-riding, bronc-riding, smoking, overtime, hard drinking, hard drugs, peyote meetings, fucking around, going 'out', driving a car...

'One of these days he's going to have to stop driving.' They said. Your mom, your sister, your kids.

You need a refill? Tell me when to stop. Say when.

-end

*When we moved from the area, an Old Order Church of the Brethren (big hat, long beard, black suspenders, long-sleeve blue shirt; on her, a pioneer's dress and bonnet) couple moved in. I joyfully thought I had bequeathed them a prize-winning victory garden, with raised beds, hanging plants, and flagstone patios and walkways. They had it torn up and reduced back down to bare, straight rows again. It was, 'too fancy', they said.

.

Schedules

2010-12-28T22:48:00.006+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
12.27.10
Schedules

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - I was laying on my back, there on the floor, gently rocking, and thinking about how one's life can revolve around schedules, habits, and routines, and how yoga on a full stomach isn't a good idea, especially the inverted postures, especially spicy fish.

What to eat and when to eat pretty much determines a yoga routine, or conversely, the yoga, routinely, determines when to eat and what to eat. And then there are other things, like time, or alcohol, or work, that are precluded by the routine. I'm left thinking, 'will it interfere with the yoga?'

Hey, I'm not a yoga freak, like some people I know. On and off for 40 yrs, mostly off, with entire muscle groups neglected or atrophied, and energy centers blocked, calcified, or non-existent. I practice now because I have to if I want to walk or ride a motorbike, or sit in an airplane seat. How about you? Can you knock out some jumping jacks for me? Gimme a couple minute's worth.

'It's the hamstrings,' I kept thinking. 'It's all about the hamstrings.'*

Well, there's a lot of 'I's' up there, I know, but how can you tell a personal story if you don't use 'I'? How you going to get to know someone if they don't self-disclose? That's what I told the shrink when she asked why I was asking so many...have I already told you this?

Over at the VA...in South Dakota. Anyway, how is a person going to relate? I knew she'd never been in combat...spent all her time going through med school**...so...oh, never mind. Talk about ideas.

Like schedules.

Yeah. Schedules. There was school, with the bell going off, Mrs. Rose ringing a hand bell on the playground at recess, practice schedules, haircuts, everybody's got work-related schedules, always late for church, can't be late for a date, a squad of rubber mold presses dropping every fifteen minutes, track practice laps, mid-terms, conditioning schedules, press deadline, medication schedules, time to mow the lawn, pick up the kids, doctor's appointment, parent/teacher conference, tax deadline, time to harvest, time to plant, and ohhhhh, this could go on for...

"SCHEDULE???" Exclaimed Bo as he and Misty and I were headed down Slim Buttes Road into Chadron, and I had foolishly said we were running behind schedule, something you don't really say on the rez. Late for an appointment, sure, but not schedule.

"We ain't GOT no fuckin' schedules," one of 'em said, and I can't remember who. I'm thinking it was Misty, but it could've been Bo. All I remember was slowing down and thinking I'd used a poor choice of words. All three of us squashed together in heavy winter coats on the bench seat of that old, cold-ass Chevy truck, running late, in my mind, for something.***

That's the way it is on the rez, where most people, something like 95%, are unemployed. Astounding, isn't it? But the flipside is, there's low stress. If you discount a number of early death-related factors. So rez life should be pretty loose, which it is. Why am I talking about the rez, and not Phang Nga province or coolies in rice paddies? I don't know.

I had yellow rice and chicken for breakfast, with sticky rice and coconut...then swam in the Sea. Facebook stuff.

Point is, we're conditioned since, who knows, the womb?..since the womb, to be on schedule. Give or take some delivery time and time between then and potty training and the recess bell and when the boss is picking you up for lunch, your anniversary, your meds, and when's the funeral.

And all along, our bodies are recording the whole shebang, the muscles and tissue layers responding to the injuries, the scars, the deaths, the trauma, laser scorching anger, defenses, the boys don't cry, the drill sergeant, handcuffs, trapeze fall, heavy lifting, humiliation and shock of surprise, and fears, all constricting and leading us to a certain particular way of walking on Earth.

- end

* Everybody knows it's more than just the hamstrings.

**I'm going to ask her, what's her motive. Can't be the pay. Service to her country?...the war effort? She can easily answer that one, don't you think? I asked about missing the trees in Indiana, the oaks, the sycamores, the maples, hickorys and hardwoods you don't get in South Dakota, and she seemed uneasy with the question. "I miss them," I told her, just wanting to see if she could relate.

***Maybe I already told you this one. I did, didn't I? But not in the same context.

.

God 2010

2010-12-27T03:24:00.011+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
12.27210
God 2010

KHUK KHAK , Thailand - A friend recently wrote in an end-of-the-year email, 'God 2010 has been tough.' Without punctuation, you can easily see where this ambiguity could lead. 'God, Twenty-ten.' It sounds kind of like, 'God 2.0', a new improved version.

For those of you still using God 1.0...you must first uninstall your old version of God, and then download...

'Your download should begin automatically. Simply click and drag the God icon into your applications folder. If God 2010 has been less than user-friendly, you may find God 2011 to be more kind to you. More kind, more loving, faster.'

If you are having difficulty, click on 'Help'.

___

In other good 2010 news I forgot to tell you, a couple of weeks back, after years of foot-dragging, the US finally became a signatory party to the UN's Resolution for Indigenous People's Rights, a great day for native people around the world.

I observed in a minor journalistic role, along with Milo Yellow Hair, Tom Cook, Loretta, Uncle Joe American Horse, Uncle Joseph (Larue) Afraid-Of-Bear, and several other members of the Oglala and Great Sioux Nation who met with representatives of the U.S. Departments of State, Justice, and Interior, when they gathered at Ft. Robinson several years ago during tribal consultations on formulations of drafts to the resolution.

It was confusing, to say the least, with Indians bringing a mountain of issues, complaints, and wrath to the meetings, for which the government officials were unprepared to address.

Much of those proceedings, which boiled down to Indians asserting their right to sovereignty, have been forgotten or lost in bureaucratic lack of inertia, with the head of the government delegation promising, 'We'll get back to you on that,' which they never did.

The funniest part of the whole business was following that comment, one of the Indians stood up and said, 'We give you three days.'*

That was in 2005.

- end

*this was particularly funny because back during the treaty-making days of the 19th century, government officials would issue this sort of ultimatum to the Indians, to be concluded with, 'or else we will consider you hostile,' with the unspoken '...and hunt you down and kill you.'.

.

Coal In Your Stocking

2010-12-24T15:21:00.007+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903
12.24.10
Coal In Your Stocking

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - There are some things you shouldn't do alone, they say;

Eat
Sleep
Drink
Swim
the holidays

A poll asked if you'd been good this year. The results were positive overall, but nonetheless disturbing, as 65% of the respondents declared they had been good, flossing, fighting the forces of evil and saving the planet from the other 35% who reported being bad.

Problem is, I know as well as you that a fairly substantial portion of the people who said they'd been good, are outright liars, such as myself. I haven't been that good, really, enough to say that generally, 'I've been good'. Not as good as I used to be.

No. Quite the opposite, in fact. People such as me would skew the results and render the poll invalid, tainted, or at the very least, unsubstantiable. And how much bad would be required to offset the good, tipping the scales into the 'bad' category? Can you say you've been good ALL the time?

yeah, yeah, yeah. bullshit. I don't believe you. If it was true, your actions, your neighbors, loving God and all that, then why, pray tell, would we be in such shape as we are, world-wise?

Ahhhhh. 'Shit happens', you say? Well, shit happens because of prior shit happening, no? And, leave God out of it, even if He has His hand in all things, despite whether or not you think God is a man and has hands.

___

Thankfully, the bike repair shop guys were still working on Christmas Eve, because Christmas doesn't mean anything to the Thai. The guy could've changed that tire in his sleep, he'd done it so many times, changing out the tube and ready to go again before I could stub out the cigarette I'd lit while he worked. About three bucks. In and out in five minutes.

The front tire went flat while I was going about 3/4 bat out of hell, not quite full bat. I felt the wobble and immediately slowed down, hoping the thing wouldn't throw me, like that other guy the other day; an ugly slap of metal on metal, the truck's screeching tires, the bike spinning across the road, the rider flailing, rolling, tumbling across the asphalt.

Not good. Another chalk outline on the blacktop. Sometimes there's not much you can do, if you were thinking of aid. Sometimes the best you can do is hold their hand while they die. Tell them everything is going to be okay.

That's another thing you don't want to do alone.

-end
.

Mekong River, Street produce, Vientiane, Laos; Andaman Sea, Cape Pakarang

2010-12-17T10:57:00.012+07:00

Low Water Mark

2010-12-16T16:07:00.005+07:00

Low Water Mark
12.16.10
Brovic - Blogging since 1903

VIENTIANE, Laos - Looking down on the street from a fourth-floor balcony must be something like being in the spirit world; you can hear and see people, but they can't hear or see you, nor do they, in going about their business, appear to have any idea you're there at all.

'Square up' to the bucket, coaches said. Square up to the keyboard. You could get a crick in your back.

Do people suffer alone, or do we pretty much share the same ailments? Spared some, and given others, huh? Blessings wrapped in a karate chop. That silver lining people speak of.

I've got to get to work on China. I read the stats on this blog for the first time since...since 1903, I guess, and saw that most of my readers are in Germany and the States, with a few readers in Thailand, Mexico, Sweden, and Japan, but only eleven people in China. Holy Smokes, isn't that a HUGE population over there? Seems like that's a market I should try to crack.

No need to go on about the bad knees business, but this being a 'walking city', where motorbikes are too fast for gawking, and the 1950s vintage sit-up-straight French bicycles are too corny to be seen riding, I needed to wait until the endorphins kicked in, or go find the strongest possible pain-killer possible before venturing out onto the street.

Where do you find the strongest possible pain-killer in Vientiane? Motorcycle taxi driver, where else? Hooked up a mere twenty minutes after going through immigration. 'You want girl? You want lay-dee?' he asked in a whisper?

'Nah. Just the...'

Problem is, after taking them, they were so good, I was afraid to leave my room.

Paranoia. Paranoia, an unrealistic fear. Paranoia can have you:

Run to the window.
Swallow the roach.
Talking about the illuminati.
Flush your stash down the toilet.
Turn the music down.
Slow to under the speed limit.
Keep looking in the rear-view mirror.
Thinking the reptilians are out to get us.
Spray the air.
Light incense.
Brush your teeth.
Use mouthwash.

Keep looking around.
Close your Facebook account.
Remain in the car.
Remain in your house.
Remain on the couch.
Slap on some after shave.
Wonder if that's a cop.
Peek out the curtains.
Swear to God you'll never do it again.

What do they say? 'Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.'

Nothing stays the same, except when it doesn't. Down along the river, where the 'Mighty Mekong' was lined with quaint little restaurants on stilts and the embankments thick with gardens and vegetation, has now all changed.

For a year they've been continuously trucking in loads of earth from somewhere downriver, grading it, packing it with steamrollers, and have built a new sea wall, capped with concrete, and constructed a huge, expansive sculpted block inlay promenade that now has the place looking like...Geneva.

It's quite nice, with potted plants, artistic landscaping, a children's playground, and each evening throngs of people exercising, bicycling, or coming out for the sunset, but not the same. You wouldn't recognize the place.

Gone is the huge pavilion where the Lao girl in spandex would lead an aerobics class of a hundred each night, and where I laid down on the cool concrete and passed out after running a four-block wind sprint after taking a strong pain-reliever two years ago.

Gone is that Vietnamese riverfront restaurant that rented the bikes, and all those other places you could sit and watch the sun drop into the Mekong while having a tall beer Lao, a spicy lab salad, or Mekong river fish.

So now, to relieve the two-way traffic congestion, they've created another road running parallel to the promenade, the river, and the old street. That's a new road between the river and the old road. Everything is different.

Dick Martin, the late Richard Martin, my wonderful journalistic mentor and cutthroat editor, would say, 'Don't tell me about it - show me!'

Like they say, 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' And so that's what I'm trying to do with all this new digital technology that I have an innate resistance to, to which I have an innate resistance, Dick, Martha, Kathy Short, the librarian...and so there's some photos up on this blog.

And another thing...for the first time since...1903, I guess...I checked the stats...already told you...checked the comments, too, for the first time. Geeeee, you guys! Thanks so much, and thanks for the encouragement. Here I was thinking nobody was reading because few of you email or let on...and then there's this guy in China...

What? I need to catch you on Facebook? I'm too paranoid.

Another thing...you can go all over the place (virtual world) can't you? I mean, I'm just finding out. Never mind.

I noticed while going through a number of airports recently, the aforementioned body scan, and everybody playing with their electronic gadgetry. It's a remarkably easy fake out, to pretend you're on a phone, loudly taking a call, or fiddling with your thumbs on an imaginary device, not interacting with your immediate environment, 'being' somewhere else.

The dedicated SLR slung around your neck is a museum piece. Electronic technology has made everyone 'at the scene.' Everyone is a photographer. Everyone is a writer. No more waiting for the paper to hit your doorstep. Those days are long gone. Paperboy Same same milkman. News is instantaneous. Kind of takes the unique sort of journalistic fun out of it for me. Unless you've got it running through your veins.

Another thing...you can check out around other folk's blogs...sure...I'd just never done it, and lo and behold! There are some really nice blogs out there! Design-wise, some beautiful work, give me some ideas...like putting up photos...and content-wise, as well. Some good ideas floating around, and not all nonsense, like some people. Or some of that angry stuff people post on U-Tube. Unfuckingbelieveable what some people say.

Where does that leave us? Numb? I mean, can we be shocked by anything, anymore? Two wars? Two wars? Katrina, tsunami, job gone, house gone, retirement gone, 911, Sarah Palin, heyyyyyyyyy. Anything fucking thing can happen, can't it?

Every once in awhile, something really cool happens...the internet, guys emerge from a cave, black man's elected president, San Aung Su Kyi set free, Dick Cheney goes away, Voyager keeps plugging to the edge of nothing, guys find anti-matter, and what other remarkable shit has happened that you're glad to witness?

Meanwhile, to keep you occupied...'This week, Lindsey Lohan...'

Did you ever wonder where the term, 'Who gives a flying' fuck?' came from? I'd like to tell you I coined it, but I didn't.

And another thing...(can't nobody say that like a black woman), this time, from the Funny Front; that toothpaste to which I'm preferential, 'Darlie', nice eco-friendly green and white box, dapper fellow in a top hat and big smile, I recently found out, was modeled after Al Jolson in blackface, and originally named, 'Darkie'.

WTF! Yeah, 'Darkie'. It's sold widely throughout Asia, and is produced under another company under Colgate Palmolive, who changed the name because of, well, you know, it's just not politically...what do you say?..politically...it's not proper, racially, to have some big lipped nigga in a top hat grinnin' a big-ass white smile, so they toned it down, turned the brother into a white man, shrank the lips, shrank the smile, and changed the name.

Except for the Chinese. The Chinese still sell the product in China as 'Darkie.' Wanna know why? Because they don't give a frying fuck about black people or other sensitivities the rest of the world observes, in some cases, to be fair, in their own interests of course, just like us, but their tune is slowly changing because of precious minerals and other commodities. In Africa.

In any case, I'm not buying the shit any more. Darlie, Darkie, got me looking at all the toothpaste manufactures labels. Colgate? What else do they make?

Everything. They make everything.

Man, I came up here with no proper writing instruments. No laptop, no paper, no pen. Had to wait until I was in line in immigration to fill out the arrival card because I didn't want to appear the fool to the Chinese guy sitting across the aisle in the plane by asking to borrow his gold pen.

On my way out (of Don Muang domestic terminal in Bangkok), I got side-tracked over to a couple of immigration officers taking care of the overstay people. As the lady did the paperwork for two days overstay at 500 TB per day, I began a prepared routine...

"I stay for the King birthday."

"One thousand baht," she said pleasantly.

"The King gib me one day," I said. "FREE!"

She looked up. "The King give me one day," I repeated seriously. "I sa-tay for the King's birthday."

His 83rd. It was huge. The whole city was lit up, jam-packed with people in the streets. Everybody lub the King.

She considered, and it looked like she was changing the receipt. She said something to the man on her left at an adjacent desk, and another uniformed man slouched in a chair behind them. They laughed good-naturedly, shaking their heads no.

"FOR THE KING?" I asked incredulously. "You charge me for the King's BIRTHDAY?"

They blushed. The lady wouldn't look me in the eye. Ashamed, she said, 'Sorry. One thousand baht.'

1 USD = 28 Thai Baht. Last year, 33. Five years ago, 42. Ten yrs. ago, 48. When we print more money to fix our predicament, it becomes devalued IN the world; don't need an economist to tell us that.

___

I was feeling kind of bad for not connecting with my immediate environment, and it wasn't a cell phone, but rather, an insensitive disregard for the less fortunate who crossed my path, maybe I already told you.

So I was sitting at dinner, just off the sidewalk, watching the guy with no hands approach tourists up and down the street. And there was that lady in the hand-cranked tricycle cart, the one I'd ignored the previous day while I sat eating breakfast.

'I'm not going to jump up, but if they approach me, I'll give,' I thought.

Neither of them approached me, but after dinner I was doing that old-man-after-dinner stroll down the row of vendors, not looking to buy anything, and there he was, right behind me, the handless man. He didn't see me. He was hitting up some other people, who refused. When he turned toward me, I already had the note out, which he accepted between his two stubs and thanked me in Lao.

I walked off, but turned to see him turn and give the note to a little boy, who scampered off the sidewalk to his mother in the hand-cranked bike/cart, giving her the note with a grin and big eyes.

'Oh. They're all together.' We didn't sit at the same table, but in a sense, we all ate together.

My New Digital Camera

So, these new photos posted herein are a result of importing the recordings off the chip and exporting them to the blog, which I did, after erasing my previous work and the 265 shots of a visit to Hong Kong by a group of young friends, one of whom, the redhead,* dropped her brand new 10.0 Sony Cybershot onto the beach, which was found by the Swede, who gave it to me, since she already had one.

She was staying at the Mariott, according to her digital recording of the room, the view, the dining room, the beach. The Swede said she tried to find the owner, but no one would claim the camera, so I thought about it in a karmic sense and the connection between my good fortune and the misfortune of someone else; the camera coming to me, my sense of worth following the motorbike accidents; Vietnam as a medic...

and then there was the connection between the doctor/therapist and the patient/client, the teacher and the student. Which is which, and who is who?

-end

*see photo

Stretch

2010-11-18T16:47:00.015+07:00

Brovic - Blogging since 1903

Stretch
11.18.10

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - A lot of days, you'll find me sitting on my ass, reading a book, or going over daily ops.

Happy day next door, as in, Myanmar, with Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom. A great day for humanity, not unlike the universal joy expressed at the release of Nelson Mandela. We'll see what happens next, Liu Xiaobo.

Interestingly, all those Nobel Prize winners were former or current political prisoners. Xiaobo in jail, and Obama, of course, who is still being held under House arrest.

You see where the boys at CERN, the guys with the 10 billion-dollar atom smasher, had a breakthrough creating an anti-matter atom? Why, hell, I can do that right here in my kitchen, at my place.

Hey. I'm looking at my money and the calendar, seeing how many days it is until next pay day, and thinking, 'Geeeeeeeee, that's going to be a stretch.'
That ever happen to you? More than once?

I've never forgotten the expression of Ben Corley, a basketball teammate with whom I was trying to hoop our ways to an undergraduate degree, and was riding to work at our 2nd shift shit summer jobs in the press room at General Tire & Rubber Co. in Wabash, Indiana, and one Sunday night, after being paid on Friday, Ben opened up his wallet and stared at it for the longest time before slowly saying in wonder, 'Where...did all my muhfuckinmoneygo?'

You ever ask yourself that question, maybe not in those words?

'Let's see...we went to the gas station...the garage sale...Mickey D's...and the bar.'

One of the Myanmar gardeners, the unreliable one, came by here today, holding out five baht, the equivalent of 20 cents, in his palm, no eat, he indicated, making a gesture of a spoon to his mouth and shaking his head, looking pitiful, pathetic, begging me for work.

I looked around. Some sweeping up leaves, I guess. I told him okay, sure.

Not today, he said. Tomorrow.

___

That incredibly self-absorbed person I was telling you about, the non-Thai, stopped by here to continue her story. While listening, I remembered to show her the shot of me in space, hanging onto the ISS, here on the blog.

"Here. I wanted to show you this," I said, turning the laptop toward her. "Iko Nakamura, Japanese guy, took the shot," I mumbled nonchalantly.

She took out her reading glasses and peered at the photo for a moment. "I just bought these today," she said. Putting the glasses back in their case, and the case to her purse, she continued with her story.

___

'SARAH PALIN SAYS SHE CAN BEAT OBAMA'

at what?

yeah, sure, the story went on to say the obvious, but that was my initial reaction to the headline.

____

Wouldn't You Say?

"How do you turn off the insects?"

"What do you mean, 'How do you turn off the insects?'? Everybody knows you can't turn off the insects. Please elaborate. You're being too vague."

"What about underwater?"

"What about underwater? Put the insects underwater?"

"No. Your head. What if you still hear the insects underwater?"

"Well, if you still hear them underwater, then they're probably...they're probably in your head. Wouldn't you say?"

____

Post-game Collegiate Football Radio Interview Pt.2

"I mean, you know, like, any team can, you know, way the ball bounce, I mean, like, hats off, you know, they, sometimes your way, you know, and sometimes, like, you know, go back out there, you know, I mean, any given day."

"Thanks, Coach."

____

Freedom & Feardom*

You flown lately? Prepare yourself for genuine sexual molestation. If it was you or me, doing this to someone we didn't know, we'd surely be facing criminal charges.

'Invasive' is the word being used. Highly invasive. I experienced the new enhanced groping procedures at a connection in Guangchou, China, where the young plastic-gloved girl ran her hand up my thighs to my crotch, causing me to exclaim in surprise, 'OHHHHHHHHHHH?' with a head-clearing shake of my head to full and maximum full-trottle alertness. Code red.

My spontaneous outcry caused everyone in the vicinity to pause and look. At that point, I wanted to ask her to remove her gloves and proceed, and maybe could we have dinner together.

It usually takes flowers, dinner, and sitting through a ballet performance to get a girl to go that far on the first encounter.

'Arousal' isn't the word. 'Publicly Violated' is more fitting. Like one humiliated passenger said, 'It would be considered sexual harassment if it was anybody but the government.'

How many terrorists are Americans? Why subject every single citizen to this treatment when one's citizens aren't the threat?
'For everyone's safety', we recognize and understand, but wait until you experience its humiliating public personal intrusion.

The Fourth Amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Replace the 'i' with an 'e' in Rapiscan, the company that produces the X-ray body scan used at airports, and you have a more accurate description of its function. RAPE SCAN.

____

You seen where the prospect of having their retirement stretched out two additional years had the French in the streets? What're they at now, a three-day work week already? The corporate world has learned efficiency to the point of making your job unnecessary, an overall belt-tightening reaction around the world. A fully-staffed foreign news bureau is obsolete, replaced by the internet and 12-year old Naji with his cell phone, you and your apps.

____

Slipped the buddha around my neck for the first time, after being asked why I hadn't been wearing it, headed out the door, and hopped on the bike. At the entrance to the highway, I turned left toward the Cape Pakarang 7/11 instead of turning right to the Khuk Khak 'Seven', three kilometers closer, don't ask me why.

Just as I was leaving 7/11, a northbound motorcyclist had his transit interrupted by a truck entering the highway intersection from Cape Pakarang road. He slammed the truck with a resounding crash and went skidding diagonally across the road. I was the second guy immediately on the scene, the first man directing the heavy traffic.

The cyclist, a Thai guy, had a broken ankle, for sure, and a nasty open gash to the bone. Slight abrasions on the knees and hands. While an angel of a little Thai girl appeared and held his leg, I packed his wound with gauze and wrapped his ankle with an elastic roller bandage, then we held his leg elevated until the ambulance arrived. We could have used a splint to immobilize his leg, but under the circumstances, we just waited for the certified crew.

When they got there, I told the first guy who rushed up that the guy had a broken ankle, held the leg as he put on plastic gloves, then stepped back as he unwrapped the wound, looked at it, and immediately reapplied fresh bandages from his kit, and wrap it again with a new roller bandage. He just re-did what I did, re-opening the wound. I stood watching in silent bewilderment thinking, 'Load him up, man! He's good to go! GO!'

It was hot. I was soaked with perspiration, and disgusted. A crowd had gathered. Traffic backed up both ways. I gathered my small kit bag and slipped through the crowd to my bike, a cop now directing traffic snaking by the scene, another spray-painting an outline on the asphalt around the bike, the Thai emergency crew huddled over the injured man. A lady who had been standing there watching, looked up at me and smiled.

____

Shrinking Man

Last time I went in for a physical they measured my height at 6 feet. 'Can't be right,' I said. 'I'm six-foot, two.' We double-checked. Six feet.

Gee, the high school football roster, the college basketball lineup, the circus highwire poster, boot camp, all had me at six-foot, two. I used to b...

In the mirror, that guy's skin seems to be getting looser. Take time to stretch. Saltwater float in the Sea. Nowhere to go, but just be. The water was choppy, but good therapy.

Thinking of who we used to be reminded me of Lupe' on Pine Ridge, one day saying emphatically, 'I used to be...I was one of the...I was the BEST.'

Never mind about what he was the best at. Whatever he was doing at the time, he was the best. Same with you and me. Did I tell you I embarked upon the International Space Station, and ended up making shields? The best shields, and some of the worst.

_____

Batfink got poisoned. That's what they said, she got poisoned. Batfink ('because her big ears make her look like a bat', said Damon, who named her) was a typical Thai dog that came around here looking for food, and to escape the Myanmar camp just up the road at that time. Medium-sized rat-like bitch, short hair, black as the ace of spades. Wouldn't let you lay a hand on her. Understood only Burmese. Ignored you if you spoke Thai or English.

Then she had pups, and that changed her whole attitude, and she became One Fine Dog, learned English, guarded the complex and did her job, along with Sugar ('Chu-gah'), her mother, who earlier, also got poisoned, they said.

Batfink, who you couldn't see in the dark, could scare the hell out of you, coming up on you silently from out of nowhere to nuzzle your hand, especially with those long pointed ears, long pointed nose, and yellow eyes that gave her the appearance of Satan's Helper, or something goosebump scary.

Now, Batfink's gone, and so is her daughter, Caramel, who come up missing three weeks ago after being on the scene here for two years. We all just shrug our shoulders, look off, eyes searching the road. Poisoned, I guess, since they're all road-wise. Nobody gets hit.

So now, there's just 'Gruffy', or, 'P. Thai', to the Thai, a black, wiry-haired guy with a white beard and great disposition. He's lying out my back door, having just eaten a whole fried chicken from the market, head, feet, and all. The whole ting.

___

'Let's go down to the bah,' said Damon in his heavy British accent. 'The band's playin' an' Claudia's singin'.' Couldn't say no to my bad boy motorcycle four-doors-down neighbor. He'd just fed me dinner. 'I'll go down for a coke,' I told myself.

'You can keep up with me,' he said, hopping on the yellow motorbike he's been riding since he sold his big bike for the cash.

'Ain't no way,' I told him.

'Yeahh you can,' he said laughing, zooming off.

He waited for me at the intersection to the highway, then we crossed over to the left side and headed south through Khuk Khak and Bang Niang to his bar halfway to Khao Lak, 14 kilometers away, Damon winding out the gears and leading the way like a bat out of hell, 'full bat'** at night, riding the center stripe and flying by people and passing cars, which only crazy or impatient people on motorcycles will attempt.

I backed off the throttle north of Bang Niang when I swung out to pass the three vehicles Damon had just gone around, and a guy coming the other way flashed his lights and swung out to pass a slower northbound vehicle. Both he and Damon stayed on their respective sides of the line, but the distance between their mirrors was close enough to hear a voice say, 'Old man, you're not in that big of hurry.'

And he's right, that guy inside my head who sometimes overrides the insects.

'Lead, follow, or get out of the way,' they say in the Marine Corps. The same is true on motorbikes.

-end

*you can see this material is dated. However, note this was before the Thanksgiving uproar.

**everybody knows you never go full bat.

.

Here Now

2010-11-11T16:33:00.002+07:00

Here Now
11.08.10

KHUK KHAK, Thailand – Hey, anybody can make a mistake. That’s what Saddam said. He came back from the dead to testify in defense of Tariq Aziz, his buddy till the end. Turns out, the current ruling clique don’t see him (Aziz) as innocent as the international community does, being the sort of folk who take revenge seriously, leveling upon him a death sentence.

Maybe you don’t care about that, or anybody else. Maybe we’re just merely attempting to advance and preserve our own interests, however twisted, convoluted, or direct our approach may be. What is your prime motivator? Perhaps Aziz, like everybody else, was simply trying to not be hungry. Remember the war?

Which one?

Sat at Don Muang airport in Bangkok, the 3 p.m. departure to Phuket delayed until 20:50, said the status monitor behind the three frustrated girls behind the counter, trying to address the three-deep throng impatiently demanding what was going on. They (‘One-Two-Go’ Airline’) didn’t have a plane for us at the moment, they said.

One-Two-Go. They’ve changed the name to ‘A…uh…something ‘Thai’…and right now, I can’t for the life of me, remember the name of the carrier*, but they’re still the same people who had a crew attempt the short-field runway and run off into the sea, and worse, tried landing in a super bad rainstorm and crashed, with some of the survivors staggering away from the craft on fire, one’s worst nightmare when flying, except maybe having some kind of failure over the ocean.

I try not to think of that shit, but you can’t help it, especially when you know already you’re with some kind of fly-by-night operation who offer really really cheap seats. I’d change the name, too, wouldn’t you, after a couple of spectacular disasters, both of which were human judgment errors? But anybody can make a mistake.

I always ask for an exit row, that way I can be the first guy off the plane. You’re supposed to perform some kind of heroic your-fate-is-in-my-hands scenario by reading the card in advance and acknowledge your understanding of your duties to the flight attendant, and if need be, remove the door, stash it in the row in front or behind, up to you, then exit, and assist other passengers in de-planing.

There’s more legroom on the exit row. Everybody knows that.

Partly to escape that Thai airport cop’s incessant whistle, and trying to burn five more hours at the airport, after already showing up two hours early as they demand, I re-traced my route back through security and across the street to the designated smoking area and sat for a half hour or so with a couple of Thai guys and the Ethiopian women’s 400-meter relay team, pretty much absorbed in awe of the people you see in a city of 12 million people, and what kind of condition my place would be after six months absence.** Only ran across four beggars in three days. Two crippled guys and a couple of old ladies. Out of 12 million people, that’s not many asking you for spare change.

Not much else to say about that, except the dollar has depreciated noticeably against all foreign currencies. Over here, everybody is working.

I say ‘over here’, because some of you thought I was here already, but I wasn’t. I was still home, home on the rez, but now I’m not there, I’m here now. Same as you. We’re always ‘here’, aren’t we? Unless we’re somewhere else.

Did I tell you about ‘It’s Me’, my radio program?

The lady was apparently trying to impress me, when during the course of conversation, I’d mentioned skiing, and she raised her eyebrows, looked away and said she’d skied ‘Mt. St. Something Or Other’, in France. To ‘over’ on her, I said I’d been aboard the International Space Station.

“In France?” she asked.

“In space,” I replied. “You can check it out on my blog.”

Registering absolutely no surprise or other impression, she continued with her story. I expected some sort of reaction, like, “WHAT?”, or “Really?”, or “Oh? As a scientist or teacher or billionaire space tourist?” or “You liar,” but she just continued with her story.

-end

*now, I remember; ‘Orient-Thai’

** apart from the typical scum, mold and gecko shit, the only other remarkable thing was finding the skin of a snake across the shoulders of a hanging shirt. Unsettling to say the least. Yeah, no shit. I was wondering the same thing.

Good thing was, the garden is glorious, the six-year palms over the roof. A particularly extended wet season, they say, here, while Indonesia is getting hammered, first by an earthquake, then a tsunami, and now, a volcano. You want to go?

In response to a break-in three years ago, during which the thieves removed all the copper wiring and fixed themselves some of my noodle soup, I made the place here impenetrable. I’ve got the keys, and I couldn’t even get in. Had to do some climbing and squeezing and falling from about six feet, busting my ass in the process. Then the interior door disintegrated in my hands from a termite infestation.

Turned out, the one key I didn’t try was the one that opened the burglar-proof iron gate, I found out after I had already busted my ass in the fall. What’s a guy supposed to think of himself after some shit like that? Manas told me I was too old to be climbing around.

Well, it feels good to be back, just like it does when I’m there, and not here. It feels good to be anywhere.

Fly

2010-11-11T15:22:00.003+07:00

10.26.2010
Pine Ridge, SD

Slim Buttes – Meant to tell you about the radio show. It’s hosted by me, out of my place here, doing all manner of innovative against-the-brain irreverence atypical of contemporary broadcasting formats, working in a few comedy sketches, poetry readings, music from Africa and the Caucasus, self-promotion, wise-cracking, and functioning essentially as a pirate station, broadcasting at 50,000 watts.

Fifty? Yeahhhh. They say on a clear night, they can pick me up in Nashville.

Did I say ‘against the brain?’ My bad. Freudian slip. I meant to say, ‘against the GRAIN.’ Although I never use my name, given name or stage name, you’d know it’s me. That’s how I identify myself on the air, like someone at the door, or over the phone; “It’s me.”

Oh. Almost forgot. KNRBbbbbandit, somewhere around 610 or fifteen on the am dial, give or take a couple frequencies. Sometimes you may find me up around 1650…nearly off the band at both ends.

Friday nights, nine eleven to 1 a.m., give or take a half hour, depending on how quickly I may need to shut down and close up shop. With that kind of transmitting power, I can override most stations, so you should be easily able to pick up the show. If they ever triangulate my position, I’m dead meat.
____

You wonder where all the oil went? Me, too, there for a while. Then we got shifted over to miners in Chile and election stuff, and forgot alllllll about that oil. What did they say? Vaporated? WHAT? Yes. Magical, magical. Poof. It’s gone.

‘Annnd now…we’ve got 31 guys trapped a mile undergroun, my friends…’

That sort of trapped-in-a-mine shit happens like clockwork in China, alllll the time, and nobody cares, except the families. In fact, it did. They had a cave-in at the same time, the guys over there, speaking Chinese of course, asking the world, fixated at the moment on Chile, ‘Hey, you guys. What about us?’

Well, they’re all out now. The Chileans. I don’t know about the Chinese guys. You hear anything?

___

The ‘Fly The Rez’ kite contest was a fabulous success, held here on the grounds, and I can’t describe how much fun it was. We had ‘altitude’, ‘duration’, and ‘last man standing’ categories, and I won all the events.

I arranged a small harness for my opponent, the white cat,* Oscar, Chester, Casper, whatever he said his name was, that appeared here a few weeks back, but the apparatus proved to be unmanageable, with the cat invariably getting all tangled up in the string or freaking out every time the kite would lift it off the ground and carry it a few yards away, so most of the events went to me by default since there were no other contestants.

One of the highlights of the contest was duct-taping the mice into a tri-plane (as you may imagine, the cat was going absolutely nuts during this procedure) and sending them up, suspended from the kites, setting new altitude records for the 335th (Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Squadron)**, but after a couple of the pilots extricated themselves from the cockpit and fell to their deaths (no parachutes. we’re 100% legitimate, rudder to prop), we discontinued the exercise.

I didn’t witness the deaths. They were too far away and up too high. When we brought the kites in and looked into the planes, they, the mice, were gone. You can see the excited smiles fading into disappointment on the faces of me and the cat.

___

Ohhhhhhhh yeah, the Goldilocks Planet. Sure. How many light years? Like we’ve got someplace else to go now? Stop. Say no more.

You see the sequel? Why do they make them? You ever see a sequel that was better than the first?

Uh. ‘Fly – The Sequel’***

____

Why don’t people like Buddhists? Working from partial notes here; aren’t all notes partial? That’s like all those referees turning on their mics and saying, ‘After further review…’ They reviewed it, then they reviewed the review. Wasn’t the first review the review? After further review of my notes...

With all the Islamophobia floating around, someone conducted a study, you saw, on toleration in America, or lack thereof. Turns out, Americans like atheists, agnostics, Mormons and snake handlers before they like Buddhists.

Geeeee. What’s that say about us? What do they, the Buddhists, stand for? Awakening? Compassion? They wearing dynamite vests? Goes against our aggressive American grain, that compassion talk, not to mention Biblical scholarship. It’s against the spirit of gun laws, except in places nearly like San Franciso and Boulder, Colorado, of which there are none, where citizenship is defined by ownership of two bandana-wearing dogs and at least one strand of Tibetan prayer flags.

I don’t get it. We’d prefer a godless neighbor, or that person who just isn’t sure, over that guy who just sits there, doing nothing.

Smile on his face.

What’s he up to?

It’s so damned dark in here by candlelight, I can’t see my notes. Partial notes.

Here’s a bumper sticker T-shirt idea:

‘Shit Happens - as a result of prior shit happening’

There are a number of things you don’t have when you don’t have electricity, I noticed.

You don’t have:

electrical shock
electrical short circuit
electrical problems
electrical bill
electrical light
ice cubes.

What happens when you’ve used up all your words and ideas to the point where what you’re saying sounds like the shit you’ve already said? Did old man Macbeth run into that? Man on the radio proudly said he’d (not Macbeth. The guy) written 117 books. Now, that’s cranking, isn’t it?

____

As I was headed south across the Nebraska panhandle toward Cheyenne, I come up over a hill and holy smokes, there’s not one, but two State cops pulled over, lights flashing.

Just off the road, with the help of one of the cops, two guys were struggling to offload a huge bull elk, massive rack, obviously dead, from a pickup truck, over the barbed wire fence, and into another pickup on this side of the fence. I wondered if the animal had been poached, since the cops were there, lights flashing.

Putting my pipe out of ‘plain sight’, I braked and pulled over and stepped from my truck. Hitching up my belt as I approached the four men, I affected the puffed up manner of someone in authority.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded.

The young cop standing in the back of the pickup with blood and elk hair on his hands began, “We’re trying to ge…” before being stopped with a hand check by the clean, older, serious cop on my side of the fence.

“Who are you?” he asked, suspiciously eyeing first me and then my truck.

“I’m Colonel Brovvik, commander of the Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Squadron,” I said with a gruff, authoritative indignation, fully prepared to explain myself further, if necessary.

“Colonel WHO?” He didn’t buy it. Not for a minute. I was wearing sandals.

“I advise you to return to your vehicle, Sir,” he said, ‘overing’ on me in a serious tone that suggested little patience for interference with official in-the-line-of-duty Nebraska State cop business. I would either have to bluff, fold, or play it half way. There was no way I could prove my command of the 335th.

“Is there a crime here?” I asked. “Who shot the elk?”

“I got him,” said one of the men proudly, which told me the whole story. No crime, with the clean cop advising me again to return to my vehicle.

“Thought you guys might need some help,” I said, walking away. At least three of them must have thought so, too, judging by the size of the elk; six, maybe eight hundred pounds, and could have had the assistance were it not for Officer Clean. All the way to the Wyoming border, I expected him to roar up in my rearview mirror, chasing a fishy story.

___

No Problems Anymore – Just ‘Issues’

Have you noticed, or is it just another overused word? Nobody has ‘problems’ anymore, just issues. On the radio, I hear guys talking about car repair issues, lower back issues, issues in the defensive secondary, immigration issues, NASCAR pit stop crew issues, health issues, firearms and concealed weapons issues, eye ear nose and throat issues, deer hunting issues, jogging issues, and Johnny Cash’s daughter’s growing up issues. It sure is comforting to know people aren’t having problems anymore.

Other really overused words:

‘ExACTly’ - Used in response as an affirmation. Replaces ‘You’re right’, ‘You can say that again’, ‘uh huh’, ‘For real’, ‘preCISEly’, ‘Fucking aye’, and ‘Yes’.

‘Actually’ - Heard it used more than a dozen times in each of three separate ten minute interviews; a political commentator, a UFO researcher, and a seventh grade girl scout. Please stop.

‘I held my nose/I closed my eyes/I took a drink’****

- end

*showed up here hungrier than hell, looking like someone had tossed him out onto the gravel road at 50 mph. A white male, one blue eye, one yellow with a cataract . Who needs a cat with cataracts? “I don’t have no cat food,” I told it. “I don’t even like cats.” Looked up in the cupboards. “All’s I got’s this tuna,” I told it, opening the tin. When the smell hit him, he looked like he’d been hit with electric shock, eyes stricken with surprise, like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

“TUNA?”

**Fly – The Sequel
In this case, the sequel is expected to outperform the original. Did you see it? I don't know how much to give away here, and could allow you to await its release in theaters, but the gist of it is me as fly ninja assassin, the best in the world, with scenes of me giving lectures and swatter demonstrations - to a class of cadets, a round table of Chinese businessmen, Larry King, Oprah, a parenting class of 6 mo.-olds (a mother proudly exclaiming, "He's so gifted!" of her fly-swatting child), promoting the book on the Today Show, and so on, technical stuff like backhand, ceiling slap, long-range detection, recognition and interdiction...looking for a way to tie it all together, and another way to end it, and another way to make it appealing to a large audience who wouldn't instantly think the producers were insane. Who would've thought Planet of the Apes would have taken off the way it did?*****

***renamed ‘Slim Buttes 335th Tactical Squadron’

****‘Love Potion #9’. If you know the rest of the words, you have my deepest sympathy.

*****"You've given this a lot of thought, haven't you?" said Louie in surprise when I ran the idea by him. I reminded him that I'd witnessed him talking to them, he had two swatters, right there on the table, and the reasons why we hate them; they eat shit, ok? They're cannibalistic and necrophiliacs, Jeffrey Dommers of the insect world. They make maggots. They like to land on your food without washing their hands, especially after eating shit, and they like to wake you up by going up your nose, to list a few. Bo knows. Those guys live in a trailer. He knows what it's like to wake up swinging out of a dead slumber. Bolt upright out of a deep delta rhythm sleep, cursing and swinging at the air, maybe slapping himself in the face. Even my dad, a truly peaceful man, hated flies. He's the one who got me started. You get hit and land dead in the gutter, who's the first to show up? Cop? Ambulance? Bystander? No.

Bobcat in a Hole

2010-09-22T00:14:00.002+07:00

Bobcat in a Hole
9/9/10
Pine Ridge, SD

Slim Buttes – Whew! There for a minute I thought I’d lost my sense of humor.* Comes and goes, y’ know, returning in disguise in what these days seems to be a heightened cynicism.

Like, after waiting five years for the tribe to process my paperwork and install a water hydrant, thereby hooking up to the local pipeline, Mini Wiconi (‘Water of Life’) and relieving my need to haul water. The guys came out and planted two little blue flags indicating the existing water line and where the hydrant will be, and left.

But, besides me, who cares? No water or electric for five years, or indoor plumbing…an outhouse, candles, batteries, wood heat, internet access at the coffee shop a half hour away in Pine Ridge ‘Ville’ (Village), no fridge, keep it simple, gas and groceries.

Sweat lodge twice a week, kids hanging themselves in an across-the-rez epidemic, uranium-contaminated groundwater, death by auto accident, death by diabetes, death by freak accident with people hungry for the details, raccoon killing all 48 or however many of the ducks, massive grasshopper infestation, eating everything, pine needles, trees, anything green, everything.

“Last resort is to catch a bunch of ‘em and put ‘em in a blender and blend them up. Then strain off the juice and spray that on your trees (two-year old cottonwoods). Apparently, they don’t like the taste of their relatives,” said the lady at the greenhouse.

That method seemed extreme, and I considered it after the tobacco juice (Copenhagen. Brady swore by it, and said his granddad swore by it, too) failed. Picking them off individually, which I’ve done up until now, is terribly labor intensive and time-consuming, requiring constant monitoring and vigilance to the extreme.

Catch and release, what I do, except for the very unfortunate few I threw against the trailer’s metal siding, telling them, “KEEEEP…I SAID…STAY THE FUCK OFF MY TREES,” but that was only in frustration, and of course if you were there, I wouldn’t have used such language, but since it was just me and the grasshoppers, wtf, and that was after already trying the ‘talking to nature’ method for a couple weeks, seeing if the word would spread through their community and if it would take effect.

I reminded them, a few in particular, holding them right up to my face, that I hadn’t been killing them, and wouldn’t kill them, and they could have evvvverything else out here, but would they please stay off my trees and pass the word along.

They say you need ducks. Ducks can’t get enough grasshoppers, they say. But then, you’ve got to provide security for the ducks, as Tom has learned after Mr. Raccoon decimated his duck population this summer, outsmarting Brady and his traps, climbing the six-foot perimeter fence, and over the hot wire, which unfortunately isn’t hot, electrified; it was an idea. "A duck a night," Tom said. Still needed a few elements to be operational, Tom said.

___

On the entry and exit paperwork, they ask you what your profession is, and I usually put ‘writer’, or sometimes ‘writer/comic’, but I seriously doubt if anyone
in their right mind EVER reads that pile of cardboard that accompanies each and every flight into and out of the country, except you can’t just toss it, you’ve got to have it to leave, and if you don’t, then it’s a big hassle and fine at the departure gates, but anyway, if a person is going to claim to be a writer, then they should probably try to write, right? or not write, and either lie, or simply say ‘comic’. And that would be a lie, too, but perhaps at that moment, not.

However, I have some new material, some new sketches, sports related; ‘The Dad at the Little League Game.’ A silent production; he leaps to his feet, comes stomping down out of the bleachers, gets into it with the umpire through the chain link fence, waving heatedly, animated, pointing his finger, gets thrown out, barking over his shoulder on his way to the parking lot, blood hot in his cheeks, madder’n hell. Fun, huh? You’ve seen it?

‘The Third Base Coach’, going apeshit, mistakenly waving the runner around second, attempting to stretch a double into a triple, then frantically trying to wave him back to second, big eyes as the throw comes in from the outfield, telling him to slide…DOWN! DOWN!

The guys sitting around the table down at the base farm were sort of indifferent. Light chuckles, slight smirks. They liked the ‘Hometown Hero’ slo-mo touchdown run off a fake slant-in, deep route, catch, straight-arm the safety, tiptoe along the sidelines, high-stepping showboat strut the last five yards, wrapping it up with a little bit of a circus show in the end zone and high-fiving the fans on the way back to the bench. You’ve seen it a dozen times, slo-mo maybe, but not on stage.

Can I post some of this stuff for you on utube?

Then, there’s ‘The After-Game Interview’, and you can imagine how that goes; ‘and I mean, like, you know, the ball bounce my way, and like, preparation, and I mean, like, take advantage of our opportunities, and I’d like to give a you know like shout out you know to all our you know troops overseas…HEY…and I mean, like, you know, thankgodandallthefans an like, I mean…the coaches…the tutors, like, you know, like, I mean, it was a you know, team effort, you know.’

What was it? I haven’t been keeping notes for the last four months, just mental notes.

‘Physical, Dental, and Mental,’ I say when they ask me at the VA** if I have an appointment. One appointment turned into six follow-ups and an urge to choke the lab girl, and I meant to ask the new, well, she’s not so new now, but relatively new lady shrink from Purdue if they can discontinue treatment if you get nasty or say something really fucking rude to any of the medical or administrative staff.

Louie says they can. And he should know, but it seems like they’d take into consideration if a guy was on meds or not, you know, like, I wanted to ask her, the relatively new lady shrink, if she ever felt threatened in the context of a session, and if she had something like a gun or taser in her desk in the event of such a…uh, eventuality…scenario.***

As for the lab girl, after asking if I could proceed directly to my appointment without the blood work, and her replying snottily, “It’s up to you,” I simply got out of the chair and walked into the hallway, punching the down button on the elevator and saying loud enough for the other four awaiting veterans to hear, “Not today, lady,” with the elevator punctuating my words with a loud DING announcing its arrival.

Don’t need to go into it here, because it’s petty, and they say don’t go on and on about your medical shit, because people don’t care, but suffice it to say that considering her attitude, I didn’t want her sticking me with a needle just then and vamping my blood for her tests. It was a spontaneous act. You ever have a day when you didn’t want anybody blowing you any shit, not in the mood for it?

Usually the VA treatment is excellent, along with genuinely friendly attitudes, including the luncheon canteen, which generally effects a comfortable feeling of justification for having risked my life and taking a hit, and then maybe she was just having a one-star day.

Speaking of stars, I still haven’t gotten mine yet. What’s that…a Brigadier General? I’m still a colonel, full bird, eyeing that first star. But generals don’t fly, and I still want to fly. Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Squadron, 86 active duty personnel, pilots, some quite young.

Eight new planes went out the door, squadron strength is currently at eleven, number 102, sixth edition (all tri-planes), rolled off the production line two weeks ago, and a bunch of people got promoted to captain, full-blown pilots. You want to make major? Then you’ve got to do more than just clock in, clock out. Everybody knows that.

-end

*Everybody knows a sense of humor is something to be maintained, like a car, a relationship, or a checking account, or, gee, a lot of things require maintenance when you think about it, but lately, like the last year or so, yeah, give or take a few months, the thought crossed my mind just like it did Bo’s, when I astral projected over there and overheard him saying, needing a ride to work, ‘I ain’t got no fuckin’ friends’, and just to test the accuracy of the perception, I repeated the phrase as Bo would, when he and Misty were over here the other morning, and watched their lips turn into a curl.

Bo was needing a ride to work, and a friend to get him there, and after a month and six flat tires, my truck had grown tired of Slim Buttes road.

That gave me something to do, yanking me out of my surly mood, needing meds or pep pills, or maybe just a big dose of Jesus, waiting for water to arrive on the property, and thinking people really don’t care much about one another; you come in alone and you leave alone, unless you’re in a multiple-car accident or go along with a bunch of other people in an aircraft, but you know what I mean, you die alone, mostly, and in the meantime, from birth to death, people pretty much just tolerate one another’s shit. You’re lucky if you’re not wearing diapers again at the end.

“Just like a baby again,” laughed a friend. “Sleep a lot, wearing diapers, need someone to push you around.”

Well, that’s depressing enough, isn’t it? Well, take a look around. Want to talk about the environment or politics, the bobcat, or somebody’s notion of what somebody else should do? In the end, aren’t we simply acting in selfish interest with little regard to anybody else in the universe?

Like in ceremony, in that sweat lodge, in your church, the synagogue or mosque, everybody came in with something on their minds. After the ‘wipe off’, collection plate, begging forgiveness, bargaining, request for gift, we all return to our own worlds. It’s sometimes amazing, even within our own cultures, our communities and families, we can communicate in the same space, the same language, the same notions of what is real.

**You see a lot of guys over there wearing hats declaring which war they served in; very few WWII, some Korea, Vietnam Vet, Native Veteran, Iraqi War, Afghanistan, and so on. Walking wounded, what it says. It occurred to me in the rear view mirror, that the only place those hats mean anything other than there at the VA, is an Indian Reservation or airport security.

You don’t wear it, you’re just another old guy limping along. You wear it, you tell everyone you were one of those fools or patriots who served for whatever reason. To the other vets coming in for treatment, it usually gets you a nod.

***“No taser,” she said with a laugh, “but I’ve got a panic button, right here,” she said, reaching under the desk. Said she had to use it once.

Me in Space

2010-05-11T21:02:00.002+07:00

Here I am pictured high above you. As you can see, I'm hanging on for dear life. Ha. Actually, I'm tethered off. It would require a major screw up for me to go floating off, never to be seen again, like that guy in 2001 Space Odyssey. That's the newly installed viewing cupola I'm hanging onto, with all you guys there in the background.

Is That You, Dr. Jeckyll?

2010-05-06T20:53:00.016+07:00

Brovic - Blogging Since 1903
6.3.10

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - They asked at airport security why I had purchased a one-way ticket. I told them I expected this to be my last earthy incarnation.

That remark earned a 'Please step over here, Sir.'

"I see here you failed statistics twice as an undergraduate," snickered Never Mind My Name, glancing up from his computer screen.

Suppressing a startle at the surprising depth of data at his fingertips, I rallied, "Yes, but if it matters on this flight, I aced Anatomy & Physiology."

"What do you think you are, some kind of comic?" he asked with a sideways calculation, affecting with a slackjaw squint the power to screw with me immensely.

"Yessir," I said. "Says so on my all my paperwork."

"That's bullshit," he shot back. "You're a has been. You're a could've been, a chickenshit in the ring."

What kind of ring? I wondered. Drug? Car theft? Rollerblade? Frodo's gift? I toyed with asking, but I knew what he was referring to by the snicker coming out of the side of his mouth.

They knew I was with the circus? That was hitting below the belt, causing me to catch my breath. I eventually came to terms with that label (chickenshit) after a brief appearance with the Palaminos, subbing in for Tito (recently paralyzed) on the high wire, and later, in court after the fire.

Trying not to register shock, I asked softly, "Can I use that?"

"Use what?" he asked.

"Could've been. Who I could've been. Manny used to say that."

"Who's Manny?" he asked.

Had him by the nutsack, playing along, my game, ball in my court, home court advantage, ad in, my serve, free throw, penalty kick, buzzer beater, 2nd round TKO, end zone antics, high-five, Gatorade locker room dunk, show the trophy to the crowd, victory lap in a millisecond flash across my mind. They had all that other information, birth chart, shoe size, net browsing and don't like turnips, but nothing about Manny.

Stopped caring about the flight. There's lotsa flights, lotsa flights. I had time. Never Mind My Name was dishing up great material, a virtual motherload of raw ore, a comedic soup, a gift. Out of the thousands of non-detained passengers going on to their destinations and personal agendas, he chose me. He was going to make my day.

"Just wondering," I asked after a long pause. 'Can you find Batavia on a world map? If you are one of the first ten correct responders, you will automatically advance to the semi-finals round.'

___

The Docta's In Da House

Just as I was about to leave his office, just down the way, walking distance from my modest quarters, Dr. Freud said, "If those don't kick in by noon, double up on the dosage."

More is less. I had previously informed the good doctor that the pharmaceuticals he had prescribed yielded a compromising nature to normal, everyday, 3D World reality, and the many and bizarre side-effects, like...well, who do YOU trust, God or Pfizer? God or Eli Lilly?

But whereas the doctor had an 'in' with the drug companies, as in kickbacks and 'freebies', as he called them, in a doctor-hospital-pharmaceutical ring, he disclosed that he was on thin ice with God, mostly because of his atheism, his niece, and youthful indiscretions upon which he declined to elaborate when pressed for details.

He suddenly asked, "Which do you prefer?" as if looking up from a menu. "The beef or pork schnitzel?"

The lost thread of the conversation?...seemed like avoidance, nor could I grasp what could compel a man to plunge into Lake Geneva in February.

"Hey Freud, I asked. "How effective do you think your treatments are?"

"The ice dips or my practice?

"Your practice."

"Psychiatry is just like religion," he replied. "You've got to believe in it for it to work."

___

New Mosquito Out - Coming To A Cookout Near You

Bangkok - Entomologists at Chulalongkorn University related their recent discovery of a new, smarter, resistant mosquito that has been plaguing Southeast Asian countries in recent months.

The new mosquito, Stegomyia Aedes Ablopictus Noi (small tiger-stripe mosquito) appears to have developed a remarkable resistance to all known bio insecticides, capable of inhaling poison and withstanding a direct blast of aerosol flying insect killers.

"Right now, our only defense is mother nature," said leading researcher, Professor Amapornaharasat Bulalanamantatorasat (Ju) at a news conference yesterday at the university. "Geckos and granddaddy longlegs are the only things that can stop them."

In addition to the development of new defenses, the breed is smaller and smarter, attacking victims on the ankles, behind the knees, and on the back of the shoulder, all locations that permit easy getaway before being slapped.

"The easy kill is over," said Prof. Ju. "They don't land on the forearm or back of your hand, like prior larger species of the genus. These little (expletive deleted) will get you on the back of the neck, behind your shoulders, and places you can't slap."

In Europe and North America, the mosquito, Culiseta annulata, is common and can be mistaken for an Asian tiger mosquito because of its black and white ringed legs. However, this species is missing the distinctive white line that runs from the middle of its head and down the thorax. It is also considerably larger than Aedes albopictus.

Like other mosquito species, only the females require a blood meal to develop their eggs. The search for a host takes place in two phases. First, the mosquito exhibits a nonspecific searching behavior until the perception of host stimulants (humidity, people) followed by a targeted approach. For tiger mosquitoes, carbon dioxide and a combination of chemicals that naturally occur in human skin (fatty acids, ammonia, and lactic acid) are the most attractive.

"Stay indoors at feeding time," suggested Prof. Ju. "You could say they've stepped up their game to a whole new level."

___

It's probably socially unacceptable, or politically incorrect to make light of the way people look, but sometimes you have to keep from staring because of exceptional weirdness, remarkable beauty, number of piercings, tattoos, or in the case of the neighbor girl, who could be 'a natural' for Planet of the Apes.

It's not the nose or lips so much as it is her hairdo. I mean, she could be a 'walk-on', right past makeup, directly onto the set...not one of the really black apes...more like a reddish brown. She surprised me the other day, walking up on me from behind, and when I turned around, I was like, 'Waaaaa!'

I mentioned it to Damon, and he chuckled and said, "Yeah, she could."

___

Grotto Now Asphalt

There was a small condo I had near Tokyo, thinking that maybe some of you considering a trip to Japan could possibly enjoy it, free of charge of course...sauna, running water, sun deck, zen garden, grotto...but the property, small even by Japanese standards, got wiped out when Godzilla rolled through and tore everything up, back in...oh, I forget...before the Venus sisters. You probably saw some of the footage...it was horrible. Too much damage to restore that part of the city where he came through, so they razed the entire block and built a new hi tech office park set in a Formura 1 track for the Asian circuit.

uh.

uh.

___

Trouble Again On Korean Peninsura - China Staying Tight-lipped

"We will get mad if you punish us for sinking your ship!"

Maybe we're getting the straight story, maybe not, but doesn't that just seem straight out weird to you?

Hillary Clinton says, 'Nigga, Pleeease.'

___

You Say, 'Leak', We Say, 'Gush'

BP Petrol is saying, "It's only, like, 5,000 liters, er, gallons, er, barrels a day." Coast Guard, Tulane, Mississippi scientists, Interior Dept., NOAA, survivors of the rig, people scooping up the oil, crayfish, Ms. Boudreaux's third grade class are all saying, 'Nigga puhlease.'

___

World Outrage at Gaza Aid Raid - U.S. Staying Tight-lipped

-end

The Poor and the Weak, The Sick and the Lame

2010-05-04T12:40:00.008+07:00

5/5/10

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Finally found the smaller venue I was seeking, but had to re-work all my out-dated material, constructing a whole new presentation designed primarily for an intoxicated audience, replacing old worn-out and dilapidated jokes with new, sanitized, top-shelf gags, laced heavily with helplessness and paranoia. It's been getting sold-out performances and scary laughs.

Mostly stuff about people losing it, going off the deep end.

You see it everywhere, so it's not just your neighborhood or hometown or house or Pakistan or Gaza; people flipping out, tripping out; too much of something.

Maybe too much of the 21st century. Just yesterday, relatively of course, all we had to worry about was fire in a cave.

Thematically speaking, it's great material for mass audiences, like the thousands of red shirts we waded through on Rachadamnoen Avenue in Bangkok, the perfect setting for testing new material, shaking a raised fist and screaming along with everyone else, "YEAH!", which we got on digital recording, along with a short comedy routine before being hustled off stage by Red Shirt Security. There to bring down the Thai government, the red shirt protesters weren't in the mood for funny business.

So, I've worked 'Rabid Protester' into my act, silent and slo-mo. Red headband. Takes up about three minutes on-stage. Got some other silent stuff too, like the 'Awards Banquet Guy' who suddenly doesn't know what to do with his hands while the coach talks about him. Same guy who performs each Saturday before thousands in a stadium, is paralyzed by fear, frozen in an agonized eternity as the coach's muffled praise buzzes in his ears.

I guess you'd have to see it.

Chinese Monkey in Space. Really funny.

Had to drop the Farakhan skit ('Take a Look Arouuuuuund') because nobody knows who Farakhan is, or cares, and...same same Jesse Jackson. They had their day, everybody knows, trolling in the wake of Malcolm X, REVDRMLKJR, and real bruthas of influence, inasmuch as they (Minister Louis and JJ) were frightfully comedic in their own time.

Got some other silent stuff, like 'Cocky Criminal', smoking a cigarette with a smirk on his face that slowly fades to drained recognition of the looming prospect of incarceration, then cut-a-deal desperation, during the proceedings of a silent interview. Takes about a minute. It's been done dozens of time in film, but not in slo-mo, not on stage. About a minute's worth.

Stage time. It's kind of like court time. Basketball court; not civil, municipal, State or federal.

uh.

There are a lot of reasons for a writer not to write; no idea, no time, too lazy, too inept, scared, doing life, had company...HolyMarymotherofChrist...could go on forever...what's your excuse? Not for not writing, but for not doing the work you need to do.

"Awwwwww. That can wait."

So I decided to wait out this computer. Decides on its own when it wants to operate, so I set it aside and checked it every day or so, then suddenly, it works! I've found the solution, ha ha, thinking it just might be the moisture in the air, I set the computer in the sun for oh, about ten minutes, maybe fifteen.

Comes back in hotter than hell, scorching to the touch. But, VOILA! It works! It ain't the muthaboard, after all. Go figure, right? Except nobody says that anymore.

Which reminds me; I coined some new terms. Let me find my notes. Yeah, here. Check it out.

'Flat Earth'

Huhmmmmmm? Like it?

"No doubt." Watch this one. It's catching on, used as an affirmation, in any setting.

Also, you may not have known that I was the first person to come up with:

"Duuuuude." Caught on out west and went east, like everything else, first California, then New York, then Chicago and finally, Des Moines and Alabama. You want to know what's coming? Look west.

"BRICK!" I shouted this out during a quiet moment at a Celtic/Lakers game just as 'Wilt the Stilt' was shooting his famous girl scout underhand free throw.

'Letters to the Editor'. This one went big, now institutionalized across the board nowadays in all forms of media.

I didn't miss the Super Bowl (as in, who won?), but I did miss a backwards (back to the basket), blind, two-handed underhand shot from half court (you've seen or tried it), otherwise known as a 'heave', and although the shot was attempted in everybody's gym class, I was the first to use it in collegiate tournament play, a panic attack heave against a full-court press.* I got benched, despite hitting the rim and eliciting a gasp from the crowd.

'Effects Man'

- That's the guy who does anything from political events or a motion picture set design of NYC in the 1920s, to the lighting and pyrotechnic display at an AC/DC concert; different than 'special effects', the Pope's press people, psychiatry, or cosmetic surgery or anything like that.

___

It's so hot here on the Isthmus of Kra that on some days, those days when your shirt sticks to your back, those five-showers-a-day days, the only relief you can find mid-day is to stand stark naked, dripping wet in front of a fan, set on three. And even then, the relief is only temporary, lasting only until your skin dries. As soon as you step away from the fan, your skin is wet again, but now, from the dissipation of internal heat. Sweat.

Cat's lying stretched out and panting in a grimace, tongue hanging out of its mouth.

Timeless as the river, life on the upper Mekong hasn't changed much in a thousand years, give or take a few invasions by the Burmese and later, the Thai. In Luang Prabang, they were having the annual water festival, Songkran, the Laotian New Year, a three-day event; the first day of saying goodbye to the previous year, then a day of rest and contemplation and recovering from a hangover, then a final day of welcoming in the new year.

The city was bursting at its seams as hill tribe families of more than fifty ethnic groups from the northern provinces descended upon the ancient imperial capital to bring their children to the on-going carnival and participate in the crazed water tossing celebration to welcome the year of the dragon.

Color, color everywhere, a time for renewal and making merit, of washing, cleaning and sweeping out the past, taking a respite, then embracing the future. A heartbeat, a breath, exhaling and inhaling.

-end

*'79 NCIAC Championship. Against a full-court press with less than a minute in the game. The coach quickly achieved an advanced state of agitation (livid), and used up his last time out to yank my ass out of the game.

Buddha Park, Vientiane, Laos

2010-04-28T10:01:00.001+07:00

Vientiane, Laos

2010-04-28T09:56:00.002+07:00

Songkran Water Festival, Luang Prabang

2010-04-28T09:48:00.001+07:00

Luang Prabang, Laos

2010-04-28T09:43:00.000+07:00

Upper Mekong

2010-04-28T09:36:00.000+07:00

Six Months Neglect

2010-02-23T07:46:00.003+05:00

Six Months Neglect
02.22.10

Khuk Khak, Thailand - Out in the garden that never dies, how the plants would suffer through the hard season with no caretaker providing an attention to which they had grown accustomed.

What would withstand six months of neglect?

One’s health? That trip to Dr. So-and-So. The exercise, the diet, that tooth, the nagging injury, the engine repair, the dust in the corners. Couldn’t that job wait until spring?

And what of family and friends? A silent relationship, suspended animation, Cinderella’s illusion, the frog prince’s expectation, an unspoken repression, a state of denial, an atrophied claim, a forgot to tell you, an it can wait.

The unfinished work set aside, a potted plant, a crown or filling, a manuscript, a painting, a song.

Who would wait? The soldier’s mate, the fiancé, a promise, a vow, a tour of duty, off to college, a stretch in the joint, aboard the ISS, an appointment, a secret liaison, out of state relocation, no food, no water, no email.

The massage, the meditation, the walk to the Sea. The stretching, the designs, the renovation, the updates, the records, the competition, the time off, the contract renewal, the surgery, the root canal. Can it be put off for six months?

Hadn’t heard from them. Found another owner. Never watered it. People broke in. Slow leak. Needs a jumpstart. Pipes froze. Gonna need a new transmission. Better send flowers. Gonna have to replace the whole damned thing. Rust in the lines, residue in the filter. Gonna have to find her down in Texas somewhere. Gonna have to send an envoy. Gonna have to patch things up. Gonna minimally need duct tape, maybe a new identity. Gonna have to reconfigure, re-boot. Gonna have to shut the whole system down. Might mean war.

What in a life can go for six months without checking in? A definitive statement? To be continued? Pick it up where you left off? Let it go another six?

The garden that never dies will endure until the rainy season, but it may need occasional help, parched, wilting, crying for a drink.

-end

.

2010-02-21T23:44:00.000+05:00

Thai Scout

2010-02-12T20:25:00.000+05:00

Command Performance Cancelled

2010-02-11T20:32:00.011+05:00

12:02:10.

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - You ever ruined brand new clothes? Brand new, just out of the sack, first time you'd worn it; then, a spilled drink, a spaghetti stain, leaned against fresh paint, a hot ash, a cat's claws, a puppy's paws, caught on a piece of something, sticking out from something, fist fight at the reception.

I have. What's the feeling? Self-disgust? Karmic fate for you and that shirt, those pants, that outfit? Toss it in the bin, give it to the Salvation Army, send it to the rez.

___

You Okay Today?

"What brought you here today?" she asked.

With a perfectly straight face, I replied slowly, "Pine Ridge VA shuttle.".

"No, I mean," she began, then hesitated a half second to wonder if I was serious and that far out of sync, or being a smartass. "I mean, what brought you in ... why are you here to see me?"

"Just teasing," I said, laughing. "I drove my truck."

She looked at me hard and cold, not smiling, not into playing games or teasing, repeating her last question.

The other day I asked a visiting friend if it was ethical to reveal the contents of a conversation between a psychiatrist and their client. I already had the answer, but was testing his armchair ethics. He hemmed and hawed around, being evasive and hard to pin down, resting on moral relativity.

Of course, it depends. It's relative to the variables of the nature of the information and where you're sitting. If you're the shrink, absolutely not, unless the nature of the information is homocidal or suicidal. Otherwise, it's confidential.

If you're the client or a fly on the wall, then you're free to disclose any or all parts of the session at your discretion. You can say anything. It's your file, after all.

"The nurses over in intake suggested I make an appointment," I said honestly.

"Why did they say that?" she asked.

"Could have been my answers to their questions," I said, adding, "or maybe they wanted info on you. They told me to report back."

The news that the nurses over in Building A wanted information on her, and that she must be the subject of gossip, caught her by surprise and made her wonder, trumping my answers to the intake questionaire. She went vacant for just a second, wearing the expression of someone in disbelief of the incredible filth they had just encountered upon entry into a neigbor's home, then she caught her flow and turned to her computer screen, checking my history, while I sat studying. the degrees on her wall.

"Why haven't you made an appointment in five years?" she asked, turning to me.

"I've been feeling better," I told her. "And you're the fourth person in this position I've talked to over here. There's a lot of turnover in your job."

Rather than pursue an inquiry into the high rate of turnover in her position, the conversation turned to why she was there and where she had come from and the schools she'd attended and where she did her internship, and where she sat during the football. games between IU. and Purdue, the schools she'd attended, and when it flowed back to me, I told her I couldn't get out of my head those angry words those people were shouting at me.

"What people?" she asked.

"The audience," I said.

"What were they yelling?" she asked.

"GET OFF THE STAGE!" I yelled.

I declined her offer of a non-SSRI* pharmaceutical intervention, saying that by the time they kicked in,** I would probably be feeling better, and that I was feeling poorly last week; I was ok right then because I was boarding a flight in two days.

"Can I see your notes?"

___

Captive of Thung Maphrao

The Thai are big on songbirds. You see them everywhere, caged in custom wooden cages. I know the guy who makes them. Lives right across the street.

On Saturdays and sometimes other days, they have songbird calling contests, with the cars and motorcycles pulled alongside the road, like for a funeral or an auction or yard sale in the US.

You can often see a guy going down the road on a motorbike, cage in hand, covered with a cloth. Sometimes there will be a guy riding on the back, holding a cage in either hand. They say some of those birds are worth ten thousand baht, about three hundred bucks.

They whistle and call to the birds, and blow a metal whistle, or shoot a gun, getting all sorts of smart song responses from the birds, all fluttering around in their cages in rows on aluminum racks, the owners and observers sitting around on the ground. The winners of the competitions are considered quite valuable, they say.

At some of the larger temples, bird vendors sit outside and sell you a small bird in a small cage. You purchase the bird and release it for good merit. Everybody gains; you, the bird, the vendor.

___

They called him 'Lucky', but he wasn't lucky at all, being chained to a wooden post in a shed; a short chain at that, allowing him just enough tether to dig a cool hole at the base of the post, penalty for his penchant of killing the chickens.

___

In the vilage of Thung Maphrao, there was a man held captive and under the spell of a powerful shaman's family, allowing just enough tether to dig a hole, and he did. He was free to go, but he kept returning, making everybody wonder and attempt conclusions.

___

"... and a dream consultant, but not for fees."

"You mean, you interpret people's dreams?"

"No. There's a difference. Dream interpretation involves interpreting highly personalized meaning and symbolism going on inside someone else's head, a charlatan's act, and dream consultation involves only listening, listening to people describe their dreams."

___

Three dogs ran alongside the road under the lamplight as I sat in Khoh Kloi awaiting a bus to Malaysia on a visa run, a dreaded trip snatching me from my imprisoning in-country comfort zone. The last dog limped along on three legs, stopping to smell something as his friends trotted on, then sprinted to catch up with them, sprinting with a limp.

'That dog on three legs is faster than a man on two,' I thought.

Dogs can run faster, no question. They can smell better than man. They don't have to worry about the rent or a counseling load. It seems that their primary task in life is to find a good place to stay, maybe pull a little guard duty.

Their disadvantages? They don't have hands, thus, they aren't inventive. They can't have mood rings or chia pets, or listen to Def Leppard. They have to listen to us.

-end

* Psycho/pharmo lingo/babble for 'Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor'.

** Two to three weeks.

.

Swing and Lake Komaneeyakhet

2010-02-08T13:03:00.002+05:00

Bat Out Of Hell

2010-02-04T11:03:00.010+05:00

02.04.10

Bat Out Of Hell

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - That thing about the cat and the scalding water, ‘What does a cat hate worse than being sprayed with cold water?’ It wasn’t intentional at all; it’s just that the hose had been lying out in the sun all afternoon, and what can I say? It’s the tropics.

__

Everybody knows what going 'like a bat out of hell’ means. ‘Went by me like a bat out of hell.’ ‘Came out of there like a bat out of hell.’ When going like a bat out of hell, especially on a motorbike, you should never go full bat. Everybody knows you never go full bat.

__

I don’t particularly like driving at night, especially on a motorbike. Went up to Takuapa, some thirty kilometers north of here, a half hour ride, after sunset, fully knowing the drive home would be in the dark.

You never know when the Good Lord is going to take you, right? So if you’re expecting it, then it should come as no surprise. It could be a big hole in the road that could easily send a bike cart wheeling and the rider spinning through the air, KIA on impact with the asphalt, or that elephant appearing out of nowhere, heading home also.

I had to take a second look, since these days ever since the 90s I don’t like driving at night because of failing eyesight, a kind of blur. Especially on the streets of Takuapa, where the lighting is poor, there is constant construction throughout the city, the pavement is uneven, and you just might run into an elephant headed home.

“I’m sure glad I wasn’t coming the other way,” I thought, noticing him just at the last minute. “I would have hit him.”

That’s what had me thinking about the high possibility of an accident, and going like a bat out of hell, assurance of death. It’s just all so tenuous, existence, life, when you think about it, a mere 93 million miles from our nearest star.

So tenuous and fragile. Out there floating in the Sea, something could come along and gobble you up. Chance you gotta take, like crossing the street. Should’ve zigged instead of zagged. Should’ve caught the next flight.

Although at night like a bat out of hell, I should have been paying strict attention to the highway, the train of thought led to how I wouldn’t want to die. Wouldn’t want to die in the sky, or falling from the sky, hang gliding, parachute failure, Hindenburg sequel, or blasted out of my seat from an aircraft. Wouldn’t want to drown or have anything to do with not getting air, like, mine shaft suffocation, spelunking, or scuba diving. Wouldn’t want to get eaten by a shark, or any other big Jonah-sized fish.

Don’t want to hit an elephant, nor get hit blindside by fist, pool cue, wrecking ball or subway train. No RPG, IED, or UXO. Wouldn’t want people saying, “Never saw it coming…never knew what hit him.” Screw that.

Don’t want to die in a NASCAR crash or any other sort of public event or arena. No Daniel in the lion's den, Christian martyr, gladiator combat, crucifiction or Little Black Sambo. No sirens sweetly singing. Don’t want to die in a car or any other form of transport. No hangman’s noose, lethal injection, hospital, nursing home, or life support hoses, undignified or embarrassed.

Don’t want to die at someone else’s hand or someone else’s hand on the wheel, no death wish or suicide attack. No imprisonment of any sort, body or mind. No Alzheimer’s. No drug-induced coma.

Don’t want to die from carelessness or inattention, like stepping off a curb, looking the other way and getting whacked. Don’t want to go from ineptitude, or any other kind of stupidass negligence or lack of awareness. Please, for me, no mindlessness accident or bizarre twist of fate.

I’m trying to narrow it down, here.

Along with his autograph during an author-signing session in Rochester NY for his book, “The Wheel of Death,” The Zen Buddhist Roshi Philip Kapleau wrote, ‘May you live long and die well.’

I sure liked that. Hope it happens. For you, too.

A good way to go, for me I think, is of old age, out working in my garden. I’ve been working on that visualization for a number of years, for the distance future, of course. Old, old age, experiencing a convergence of garden and self, cultivating compassion with no anticipation of harvest. Along the way, try to contribute to the happiness and well-being of plants and other animals.

Dad went well. I liked his style. Worked hard, lived long, had a loving family, ate a good dinner prepared by a loving woman, and went in and watched about six innings of the Cubs in a Lazy Boy recliner and drifted off, catching my mom by surprise, washing the dinner dishes, when he failed to answer.

Well, you could go on and let your mind meander about all the ways you wouldn’t want to die. Like Elvis, Michael, high and low profile deaths, forgotten and tortured prisoner with no name. But we all come and go, our time here measured in what, years? Breaths? and against what scale? Life of the earth, the gods, a tomato plant, that of a butterfly?

-end

.

Out Of The Blue

2010-01-31T08:42:00.004+05:00

01.30.10
Out Of The Blue

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Out of the blue, just as mysteriously as it ceased to function, and as if it had a mind of its own, my computer ‘decided’ it wanted to return to operating status, after being unable to even turn on, at which point I took the machine a half hour north to Takuapa (Tah-koo-uh-pah) IT, where last month they installed a new hard drive, and then informed me after this latest visit that it needed a new motherboard, the warranty had expired, maybe they can fix it at Pantip Plaza in Bangkok but it’s going to be so expensive I might as well consider a new computer, but otherwise take this one back to the U.S. and have Dell fix it there.

So today, it works. God works in mysterious ways, they say. Or, maybe it can only be explained by swamp gas.

A lot of my material comes to me just as I’m falling off to sleep, and I think, ‘I should get up and write that down,’ then think, ‘no, I can remember this one – it’s too good to forget.’ But then, as sleep would have it, I forget it, and…or remember it but can’t ever again find a cohesive context to use it sensibly, so you can look at it two ways; you aren’t getting my best stuff, or, I’m forgetting my best stuff. So, all this is second rate, right?

Activity on the Lake

This lake, Lake Komaneeyakhet, I call it, since the locals know the Wat, the temple on the east side where there is an elementary school, a swimming pool, and tennis courts, with at least three semi-permanent Myanmar camps of several hundred second-class citizens between here and there, is one of several small lakes in the area that absorbed the shock of the tsunami five years ago that left the inhabitants of Khuk Khak relatively unscathed psychologically, but they say there are too many ghosts down on the beach, and there’s a crocodile in the lake.

Big shindig going on over at the Wat tonight under a full moon, with a big shadow theatre stage set up, dozens of vendors selling food and drink, monk toiletry buckets, kid toys, games, tools, used shirt, and your favorite Buddha amulet. A three-day celebration, the significance of which I am ignorant, but there’s a lot going on over there, with a monk walking around all day with a remote microphone on loudspeakers blasting across the water, doing a MC public address routine, I think. Come one, come all.

Ooooh, it’s big. Really big. Huge, in fact. Just came back, weaving my bike through a evening sea of several thousand people on the paved road through the temple grounds. Luang Pau Weng’s 40th memorial celebration, they say.

Big amplified sound, fireworks, floating lanterns, the wide palm-lined entrance avenue from the highway to the wat filled with vending carts, alternating blue and white florescent lights, dried squid on a stick, cotton candy and other sweets, pork on a stick, ice cream, people dressed in white, sitting on blue plastic chairs in a large pavilion, the large grounds turned into a parking lot, a double-decker bus full of people, a van full of monks off-loads. It’s big. Really big.

Across the lake, Karl’s wife, Mon, says, ‘Maybe croc-o-die come out.’

___

My neighbor four doors down, Damon, the tattooed bad boy biker from England with whom I have nothing in common other than living in his proximity, was sitting out on his front porch, taking a break from whatever was going on inside the house, when I suggested rather than just sitting there, we could fix his rotted, jerry-rigged bamboo frame that held his porch lights, two strands of amber tiny lights encased in small bamboo balls about the size of tennis balls.

“All you need is a new piece of bamboo,” I said.

“I’ve got it right there,” he said, nodding at two lengths of bamboo lying in the yard that had been spliced together with four nails as a splint. “Style ThaiLAND,” I said to Damon. “On the rez, we fix this with duct tape.”

I came back for my ladder, then held the bamboo across the handlebars of his motorcycle as Damon struggled with a claw hammer to removed the nails, which had been driven through the bamboo, then bent over. After watching Damon proceed to destroy the bamboo pole, I said, “Like Manny always used to say to me, ‘Here, let me show you an easier way to do that.”

“Who’s Manny?” asked Damon, giving me the hammer.

“My trainer,” I replied, turning the poles around and straightening the nails, then easily driving them back through the bamboo and removing them. Damon didn’t say anything more, nor ask what kind of trainer, as I thought he might.

“Didn’t you used to be a tradesman in England?” I asked. “A carpenter?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

After replacing the bamboo frame and re-stringing the lights, we plugged everything back in. They didn’t work. As Damon fiddled with the light plug, I collected my ladder and drifted on back down here to my place.

___

Over at Karl’s Lakeview Bungalows, I sat in the afternoon eating a slice of Karl’s two-day old chocolate chip cake. It was dry, I told him, and he said in a tone that suggested I was stupid, “You should have had the mango. It’s made today,” as his sign out front attested.

Joe, a returning German guest of Karl’s who I met last year, sat nearly drunk, arguing with his Thai wife, who grabbed the truck keys and sped off, leaving Joe grumbling and mumbling. Mon, waiting tables, asked if he wanted another beer.

“Sing lek ma kop,” said Joe, indicating his wanted a small Singha beer.

“What?” said Mon.

“Sing lek ma kop,” Joe repeated, then as she turned away, knowing I am an American, Joe said in imitation of an exasperated American, somebody from Chicago or New Jersey, “Bring me a Bud…Fuck!” then began laughing drunkenly, uncontrollably, covering his face with a large meaty hand in a vain effort to suppress his mirth.

They don’t have Budweiser in Thailand, never ever seen one, making his joke all the funnier. It was a pretty good joke, coming from a German to an American, indicating his appreciation of American humor and expression. Karl approached our table, raised his eyebrows and gave a slight, helpless ‘oh well’ shrug of his shoulders of his inebriated guest.

____

Early this morning I went down to Mr. Gui’s hardware store for a planer that Mark needed to borrow to finish his new bar tables. While there, I asked for further explanation of the weekend’s festivities at the Wat.

“Today, five o’clock, they take Luang Pau Weng to spirit house,” he informed me, so I don’t want to miss that.

He went on to explain that Luang Pau Weng’s remains had not deterioratetd for 40 years.

“Body no die,” he said, pinching the skin on his arm. ‘Has fingernails…has hair,’ said Mr. Gui, pulling on his hair.

Apparently, Luang Pau Weng was in possession of miraculous powers. “One day,” began Mr. Gui, “Luang Pau Weng sat at Takuapa bus station, and people say, ‘Get on, come on, we go to Khuk Khak.’

‘No,’ said the old monk. “I walk.’

“When the bus arrived in Khuk Khak at the Wat, there sat Luang Pau Weng, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. All the people on the bus look and say, ‘OHHH?’ ”

____

As I pulled out onto the highway, I had to follow that load of chickens, the cages stacked twelve-high, four times the height of the truck, feathers blowing out as the truck sped down the road. I was certain it was going to overturn.

I had never seen a load stacked that high, except for the guy on the motorbike with two dozen crates of eggs lashed on behind him, six feet over his head.

Amazingly, the chicken truck maintained upright as the driver weaved on springs and two wheels around motorbikes and turning vehicles, losing me as I chased him five kilometers through Bang Niang and southward toward Khao Lak. In my mind I saw the overturned truck with cages burst open and chickens scattering in the traffic, what could promise to be a terrific photo op, but it never happened.

___

Returned to the Wat for the placement of Luang Pau Weng’s remains in the spiffy new spirit house / mini-temple built for the purpose thereof. Thousands had gathered for the ceremony, everybody but a half dozen of us dressed entirely in white. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. Maybe there were four of us.

After waiting in silent formation for an interminable time that would have made a marine corps boot camp appear as child’s play, all the local monks, and those trucked in for the occasion, led the throng of people carrying the old monk’s body in the fanciest casket I have ever seen, three times around the small temple to its resting spot, where the crowd pressed forward into a compact, compressed knit of humanity seeking a closer reach, like an Elvis concert.

You know how they do the public funerals of slain martyrs in Palestine and Iran, with huge masses of jostling people carrying the casket on their shoulders? It was sort of like that, but not nearly as visceral and mad. The people carried a long string, a very long string, affixed at one end to the casket, and the other disappearing deep into the crowd.

Having channeled the old monk’s spirit, I sat off to the side eating noodles on the steps of an adjacent temple (there’s like, four or five temples of varying sizes on the grounds), being forgiven for eating during the ceremony and not wearing white, nor being Thai, short, with black hair. He clearly understood that I, as a non-Buddhist but empathetic foreigner, had only a slight clue of my cultural and religious impropriety.

There were other people eating, too. I wasn’t the only one. There were six or seven of us, at least. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Could have been more like four.

The front rank of five monks carried incense, flowers, a large gold-framed picture of the monk, and holy water, which was splashed this way and that on the attendees as the procession passed.

From the photo, taken when he was already old already, looked as if he was a pretty neat guy. I wonder what he really knew, and if indeed he was resident of another realm, bestowing blessings on faithful practitioners and watching the whole affair, and me eat noodles, or if he was simply gone, his mummified remains holding a spellbound populace in a perpetuated mystical belief that somehow, by venerating his life and accomplishment, their lives will be enhanced.

Alms, tithes, frankincense, flesh offerings, gifts, sacrifices, and desperate bargains. Feed the monks, dance through fire, swim in the Sea. Mummies have hair and fingernails. Elvis has hair and fingernails. Under the full moon, firecrackers and festivities, will the crocodile come ashore?

-end

.

How Smart We Could Have Been

2009-12-31T08:37:00.015+05:00

01.02.10

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Lately, like, in the past year or two, I've experienced a number of people reminding me of how smart they are. I sat and listened to their self-stories of I.Q. testings in the third grade, what they got on their S.A.T.s, entrance exams, how they performed on a Yahoo intelligence test, a Facebook questionaire, how close to genius they must be.

I could have simply said to each of them, right then and there, 'Mine's higher', or reminded them of some stupid shit they've pulled, but who am I to burst anyone's fiction? And to the pup who was bragging about the forty women he'd slept with, I could have told him, 'I stopped counting at 250,' but I didn't want to throw a wet towel on his story.

And to the Gee-How-Smart-I-Am people, I could have added, 'Mine was off the charts. Broke the machine. Needle went wayyyy into the red. They said I was so brilliant, they had no idea of how smart I really was.'

Well, that's what I could have said, or wish I'd said, as 'come back' as they say here for 'reply', but like I probably mentioned previously, and as Manny always used to say, 'You're slow. You're wayyy too slow on your feet. You never gonna make it at this pace.'

So, in fact, I'm a lot slower than most people, the guy who doesn't get the joke, the guy who asks, 'what happened?', late on the scene, bottom third of the class, couldn't find the party, never read the instructions, almost didn't graduate, had to re-take the final...

My degree? Mechanics.

"Is that deisel or gas?" the guy asked, like he thought I'd be good on a VW bus.

"Quantified Interstellar," I could have said. Could have just said, 'Quantum,' I guess, but again, didn't think of it until many days later.

Like Manny, my high school guidance counselor, and my birth doctor all said, 'You haven't got what it takes." Except for Manny, those weren't their exact words, but to give you an idea, my counselor suggested I might have a future in Vietnam, which, at the time, was blazing.

(there he goes, taking the story off into the 'Nam. How long is THIS going to last?)

"You could go to the 'Nam?" she suggested both as a question and a career option. And my birth doctor suggested to my mother that I could be given up for adoption, "you know...if you don't want to keep it," they said he said. "And if we can find some takers."

They didn't have to tell me. I was there. I heard him say it. Verified it in a past-life regression session. I wanted to look him up between that stint with the circus, parole, and the 'Nam, but everything was coming too quick in those days, everything too quick, and my math teacher in middle school sarcastically nicknamed me,'Quickness', and like I said, I was slow, except after those first few times in front of the bench.

"You here for a case?" asked the judge between items on the docket. I had a briefcase, and had dressed like a third-year law student.

"Yes, your Honor," I replied.

"Who's?" the judge asked, flipping through a stack of files.

"Mine," I said.

Upshot of it was, her near-respect soon turned to disdain as she read my file.

"I see here you said you're a rocket scientist," she said. "You must think you're pretty smart."

"YESDRILLSERGEANT!" I almost blurted out, but repressed.

Same thing Manny used to say. God, I got tired of hearing that. "Oh, no, Your Honor," I told her. "I'm not smart. If I was, I wouldn't be here."

She said she couldn't have agreed with me more, sentenced me to fif..five years, suspended it on an option to the 'Nam, which I took, and...the rest is history.

Good news was, didn't have to pull time in the joint. Bad news was, I had to pull two tours in the Nam.

You might be probably thinking, 'going to a war during its heighth isn't very smart.'

And you'd be right. It isn't, especially if you enlist. But going as a medic was, as it turned out. Enlisting, in and of itself, was pretty idiotic, but was perfectly understandable given my dim prospects for a future in the circus and the socio-cultural programming of who's fit for duty in America.

When does a person become the programmer? Ask a VA shrink.

"Ha ha ha," said the jerk with my orders. "You thought becoming a medic was smart, huh? You thought you'd be hanging around educated people, nurses, and drugs, right?"

I thought so, but they put me in helicopters. Grunts on the ground said, "ain't no fuckin' way I'd fly," but I loved it. Good news was, I got to fly. Bad news was, we got shot down.

(end 'Nam digression, return to story)

So, just like Manny, the juvenile home people, and the Ringmaster predicted, "Instead of hearing the man say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the next gonna be somebody,' you gonna hear The Man say, 'All rise!'

Sure enough, their prophesies fulfilled, their prescription's definition's boundaries I couldn't escape. Nobody in those days was thinking outside the box. Thinking outside the box is something that wouldn't occur until decades later.

Same way here. People ask, 'You work?'

I, uh, stammer and glance away if I'm having a slow day, which is usually every day, but if I'm quicker on my feet and have done some preliminary rehearsal, I tell them, "Yes. EVERY day!"

'What you do?'

"I'm a doc..a wri..a..stan..er, I'malmostretired."

___

What? You wanted a story about elephants and coconut palms from Thailand? You can write this shit from ANYwhere, man. Don't matter where you are, Manny would say. You're going to be doing whatever you're doing.

Ok. So why not the tropics? Tom said Pine Ridge had two feet of snow.

Or maybe you wanted a story about Li An Song Nu Kyi, a fascinating figure, and boss of the plane production company after the shower caddy venture tanked, not because of market or sales, but because it wasn't fun anymore. It became quite tedious long before the 493rd caddy, the production cut-off.

People still ask, "You still have caddies?"

The plane production is in it's fourth year now, going on five, if I can get the crew back together. It's worse than a band. In a band, you've got egos and attitudes and people trippin' on themselves, and with a crew of Myanmar, you've got all of that, on top of the language problem and illegal immigration status. It's one exasperating episode after another.

The squadron's doing ok, though. We've got some really capable people on board in command positions, a little reckless at times, but they can think for themselves and get the job done.

uh.

uh.

Go on.

"Go on," she said, showing interest, but caught glancing up at the clock.

"I guess I'm eating into your lunch hour," I said, looking over my shoulder at the clock and letting her know I was paying attention to her eyes, the new VA shrink, undergraduate work at Purdue, six years med school at Indiana University, psychiatric internship at...I forget, Chicago or somewhere, doesn't matter, what mattered is that I know those schools, taught at one of 'em, played her hometown, Elkhart, in basketball, which she found remarkably interesting and strangely coincidental, there in her office, where she asked what I taught and was wondering about why I hadn't had an appointment in five years, and my comment, 'the intake nurses wanted me to report back on the new shrink.'*

"Oh,no," she said, dismissing my concern for her time. "We started late."

She'd been on the job for three weeks, the degrees conspicuously large on the wall. I told her they had a high rate of turnover in her position.

She didn't say anything, but let the air fall silent, a cue that I was the one to be doing the talking in that setting. She had already revealed too much, but could rationalize it as establishing a friendly but professional doctor/client rapport. I explained, "South Dakota winters are tough."

When our time was up, leaving her only 35 minutes for lunch, I told her I'd see her in six months. She seemed surprised. "You don't want another appointment for six months?" she asked.

"I'm going away," I replied. "Someplace warm...for my mental health. South Dakota winters are tough."

___

"That was a long time ago, man," my friend said in my kitchen, implying that it was time to let it go. Well, you could say that about Wounded Knee, the Holocaust, the Wells Fargo guy riding shotgun who got shot with an arrow in the teeth, the treaty, birth on Earth, or any other traumatic event.

Good news is, there's treatment, except for the Wells Fargo guy. Recent research says you tell your story, find new activities to plunge into, and surround yourself with friends and a network of support. Exercise and eat right. Go shopping.

Bad news is, when you're in that space, you don't feel like doing any of that shit.

Good news was, there was cardiac recovery. Bad news was, the study control group was already all hospitalized.

___

Am I doing any writing? Like, a book? Yes and no. A manuscript in the works? Well, there's the screenplay, 'Stinky Boy', and the talking medicinal plant story that has the potential of becoming a major motion picture and viral box office hit, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail series that I uh..uh

am working on, and of course, there's that Big One out there, you know, like a trophy fish, just waiting to be caught, or in my case, to be written, since you said 'writing', but, ah, everything in it's own due time, right?

No, it's not...none of this is actually ON PAPER...HA..but they're ideas, and ideas are good, right? ideas while walking down the beach.

- end

*"How is he?" the nurses asked excitedly in the lower hallway of Building A, their eyes alive with the prospect of new gossip, "the new shrink."

"He isn't a he," I told them. "She's a she. And she's young. Just finished up her internship."

.

Not of This World / Only A Matter of Time

2009-12-20T12:39:00.011+05:00

12.28.09

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Stay gone from a place for six months, and you can expect just about anything to happen in your absence, the least of which is lizards and mice. Look what happened at Angkor Wat. The jungle prevailed for six centuries.

Same same here, land of a billion buddhas, south on the Isthmus of Kra, Tsunami-land, land of smiles.

They held the 5th year memorial ceremonies yesterday, the 26th, for all the lives lost here, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. Prayers, candles, lanterns, sent to the sky, along with police whistles and a major traffic jam at the site of 'The Police Boat', a national monument now, swept in a full kilometer from the beach, just across from the Bang Niang Saturday fresh market, where thousands of memorial attendees, some bused in, joined the usual throng, and at least one motorcycle accident, from what I could see when I went through the funnel earlier with thirty other honda riders. It was madhouse enough that I stayed home and revisited the grief through photos on the net.

No visit from royalty, no helicopters, no big deal for many people, five years on, now. The Real 3-D World, war, no job, and the renewed holiday prospect of missing an airport ETA has overshadowed any remote concern for anyone not directly affected, such as, me, or the governor of the province.

Being directly affected, that's what got me here in the first place, and here I am, still here now. And when here it's 97 sizzling degrees at midday, and Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Rapid City are in the deep freeze, that's what got a lot of those foreigners killed who came here for Christmas.

The Governor of the province? How would you like to preside over a disaster of unparalleled proportions? Whatshisname, Blanco, down in Katrina-land, the governor here in Tsunami-land, Bush in his two administrations, al-Bashir over in Darfur. No easy task.

Just saying it's a tough job. What are you going to do with all the bodies? It's already a crowded planet. If you're the guy, then you're the guy.

___

If you were wondering about 'The List' and why your name wasn't on it, or why it was so short, well, there's a longer list, much longer. How do you get on it? Easy, sort of. All you have to do is, visit me, pretty much, here or Slim Buttes, or pay the 499.99 for your aircraft.

That automatically puts you on The List, and you also, by virtue of being on The List, automatically become a member, a standing member of the Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Squadron.

In addition to the said aircraft and rank designation, 'Rookie/Cadet', you will also automatically receive the squadron bulletin, briefings, updates, and SITREPS (situaion reports) from the field, delivered live stream, text, cell, facebook, U Tube, blog, iphone, blackberry, and all other forms of automatic instant communication of insignificant minutiae to keep you and other third parties informed of detailed information you'd normally not be concerned with whatsoever.

___

Is It Just Me

Are my eyes just seeing things, or is it you, too?

The other night, Christmas Eve, I was riding my bike, a Honda 125, home from Carl's dinner party on the other side of the lake, down a rather spooky narrow lane, when in the headlight I caught a glimpse of something quite large, a big black...shape...darting back into the jungle.

Something like a big black square. A square with legs. I didn't get a real good look at it, because it was pitch black already, and I just caught it there in the light for a fraction of a second.

I kept going. I went right on by, but with a little bit of a shiver up my spine, if you know what I mean...like, I was thinking as I went by, 'what if whatever it was I saw would suddenly rush out of the jungle and...and...I don't know, knock me off the bike, or rip me to shreds or consume me in one bite or something.

Anyway, it could have been my imagination, but the shiver was real.

Well, ok, I could have dismissed all that, but today, just today, Claudia said to me and Damon, 'Did you see that?'

'Yeah,' said Damon.

"What?" I asked.

"Something up there in the trees. It's behind the leaves," she said, nodding across the road into the jungle at some higher branches, straining with concern to see it again. "A monkey or something," she said. "It was big."

I looked and didn't see anything. If it was big, then why couldn't you see it?

Damon said he saw it, too, out of the corner of his eye.

So it's not just me. Just like last summer, sitting there at my table with Bo and Misty and Tom and somebody else, I forget who, listening to Misty finishing up a ghost story when Bo described the same thing I had seen.

When he said that, it sent a shiver up my spine the same way that shape did the other night. Bo was talking about a...creature...he saw in the headlights on the side of the road, the same thing I had seen a month earlier and wasn't going to tell anyone about.

I was driving back to the rez from Colorado and had left so late it would have my arrival just at pre-dawn. In the hills just south of Chadron, NE when it was still black outside, I passed a dog standing on the side of the road that looked grey and mangy with a sort of humped back and long tail and sick eyes and long pointy ears, too long for a dog, and, hey, that's not a dog...that's a...a...must be a coyote...no...must be a...

What the hell WAS that thing? why didn't it move when I went by? didn't flinch. just stood there.

At first, I thought to turn around and return to check, drive by real slow, and then I got that shiver, gripped the wheel and stepped on the gas, thinking to put as much space as possible between me and whatever it was back there. "HELL, NO!" I thought, as a follow-up thought to going back there and checking.

It was identical to the animal Bo described. When I said he didn't move when I went by, Bo looked up slowly and said, "Yeahhh. Didn't move. Just stood there and looked at us when we went by. It was like something not of this world."

___

Only A Matter of Time

I knew it was only a matter of time. A person doesn't really own an idea. The ideas are out there. Floating around. Chances are, in fact, a high probability, if you 'came up with' an idea, somebody else somewhere has already thought of it, or is thinking of it at the same time as you, snatching it out of the atmosphere. Lookit the light bulb, aerial flight, the internal combustion engine, heliocentric theory, paranoid end-of-the-world delusion.

So, I had this idea, this idea that I was the only one in the world running a vintage bi-plane squadron, and cranking out planes at the rate of about twenty-five a year.

I know, that's slow, in production terms, far slower than Boeing, and that's what I told the Myanmar crew, that they were working too long on one plane, but over here, to save face, you can't just bitch people out the way we do in the States, like, 'in your face' is something that any American would know the meaning of.

So, the production story is something that will require some finessing, in addition to finding a new crew since most of them got deported, and trying to find the temperamental crew boss, Li An Song Nyu Ki, was like trying to hunt down a...a...Myanmar illegal immigrant in Thailand. People said they had 'seen her around some', but 'not lately'.

So, I've got to start over from scratch if I want to resume the production line, staying one step ahead of Wal-Mart by discontinuing the bi-plane Sopwiths and going exclusively with the tri-wing Fokker dual-plane mobiles.

And it appears I need to get going on it since I saw the cardboard cutout on the street in Bangkok while walking outside the Grand Palace with Rex, seeking out temple pants and buddha amulets.

"Hey. There's your plane," said Rex, pointing down at cut-out items at a street vendor. There it was, the bi-plane cut-out, along with a race car, a battle ship and an aircraft carrier. Yeah, they took the idea and saw how far they could run with it. Can you imagine an aircraft carrier cardboard cutout? How's it gonna float?

Sure enough, somebody had copied my idea, and I instantly thought of Li An's comment.
'Maybe I sell to Chinese', she had said in an eerily threatening email last summer. Looks like she carried through with it, and I wonder how much she got, although the model I saw was NO WHERE NEAR the quality of the 335th. You know how boxy and crude communist products are...except for that new sleek superfast train the Chinese just made.

'Thailand can copeee any thiiiing,' they will say. Rolex, Nike, DVDs, Adidas, your idea. The weird thing is, they will put up the same product right next door. So there it was, right on the street in Bangkok, my idea. Except for the price differential (they're selling theirs for 100 Thai Baht, about three bucks), they have no advantage over my one-of-a-kind, made in the USA (except for those produced here), and two other reasons I can't think of right now that makes the $499.99 asking price worth it.

"See?" I said to Rex, while flipping through the cripple's inventory. "They're all the same."

"You hab blue?" I asked the vendor.

"No," he replied. "All same same. Only hab Led."

I could see the flash, the light bulb go on in his eyes. Blue. 'Now, there's an idea.'

___

Mr., who got beat up at his grand opening 'Dead Man's Party' on Christmas Eve, was earlier running around saying he was two days behind schedule.

"I've got a million things to do," he said. "Got to go get supplies for everybody's nostrils and everybody's lungs," he had said.

Turned out that things became heated and out of control during the early hours of Christmas morning, and whaddaya know, Mr. became my first patient this year.

My second patient could have been the large German lady, when she and her husband pulled up on two bikes in front of the Honda shop. After stopping, she failed to remove her feet from the pegs and put them down, thus, as gravity would have it, fell over with the bike, and appeared to be fantastically stupid. I thought I was the only one to do that, but again, it isn't just me.

- end

.

Is It Worth It?

2009-10-11T01:42:00.002+07:00

Slim Buttes
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
10.09

Ever think, ‘Is he talking to everybody… or just me?’ The minister, the swami, the shaman, the medicine man, the public address at the train station, the airport. Yes and no.

What are they worth?

Is it worth it? I don’t know. It’s all relative, I suppose, entirely dependent upon the eye of the beholder, like everything.

Four ninety-nine ninety-nine might at first appear to be a bit exorbitant until you reflect upon the ways you’ve pissed away five hundred bucks in the past.

Yeah, just think about it for a moment.

Ok? Given that light, by comparison, a gift that’s going to keep on giving, down through the generations perhaps, each recipient automatically becoming a pilot and enrolled member of the Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Detachment, seems to be well worth my asking price of fourninetynineninetynine.

Suddenly, the trailer was full the other night, people pulling up left and right, with Digger and Devin* up from Colorado, bringing the truck I’ve been awaiting all summer, and Bo and Misty and Kassel and Manuel around the table, the conversation turning to SitReps, Situation Reports, conditions of aircraft and props and wing struts and landing gear and promotions.

It was confusing, with several excited conversations going on at once, and we went over the four reasons again that justify the asking price.

“Made in America, that’s one,” I said, holding up one finger, Misty looking up from her scissor-carving, the only one who seemed to be paying attention.

“Limited edition,” I said, flashing two fingers. “That makes it a collector’s item.”

“Uh…what’s the third?” I asked.

Misty just looked up, didn’t say anything. “One-of-a-kind,” said Digger.

“Right. One-of-a-kind, each individually unique. What’s the fourth, Bo?”

We couldn’t think of a fourth reason right then, because too many other thoughts were flying through the air and the conversation went five, six other places, but there is one, a fourth. I’ll come up with it later.

Slim Buttes, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
10.09

Six, Seven Days Later

How long can you play out an airplane story?

I don’t know, but really, other than landscaping, the Lord’s Work, and the L.A. Times crossword puzzle, it’s the only thing going on. If you’ve been here in October, you know what I’m talking about. Snowed last night, artic hawk pushing down our necks, mice coming inside.

Didn’t bother going to bi-weekly sweat lodge, even right after six of ‘the boys’ stopped in here for coffee, asking me if I was coming. I told them I was, a lie. Too cold. Too windy. Too dark. Stayed here and fed the stove.

It’s all coming back to me now. ‘You’ve gotta do more than just clock in, clock out. You can’t be just sittin’ around, waiting for slots to open up.’ Like that? If you see it in a movie script, you’ll know where it came from. Like, five years after it’s creation, people in mainstream media, print, televised, and live, are using ‘a whole ‘nuther’ as an acceptable usage of grammar, as in, ‘that’s a whole ‘nuther ball game.’ Notice? The phrase ‘went viral’ after Nina Tottenburg used it on NPR. Maybe I already told you.

You heard enough of ‘uptick’ and ‘ratchet up’ yet? Those aren’t mine…some other yoyo’s…economic forecasters. We’ll all be sick of it soon enough. ‘Outside the box’? When they say that…‘think outside the box’, are they talking about, ‘beyond your tv set’?

__

Made in America (except for those made in Thailand, of course), One-of-a-kind, Limited Edition, uh…there’s a fourth reason.

There’s a fourth reason why fourninetynineninetynine is a good asking price. You gotta think of more than just cardboard cutout and toothpicks. You gotta remember those girls. Each one of ‘em has a family. Each one of them has kids. All of them have momma go to hospital, papa sick.

They closed up shop on me, the Myanmar crew, stopping the production at eighty-six. Apparently, they all up and walked out, leaving me with a lot of explaining to do. You got the gist of Li An’s letter. Li An, Li An Song Nu Kyi, the crew boss. Maybe you met her. A communication breakdown, a language barrier. We’ll get things up and running when I get back.

Anyway, with two planes going out to N. Carolina last week to Rick and Pat, the folks from the permaculture workshop, one yesterday to aviation enthusiast Gene at ‘Gene’s Machine’ shop in Chadron, and two more last night to Stanley Good Voice Elk and his 12 yr. old son, Garrett, the on-location, in-the-field squadron strength has dropped precariously to eight, our lowest number of active duty in four years.

You can do the math. Eight from eighty-six is what? Seventy-five? That’s how many pilots are out there, my friends. Active pilots, most of them still flying.

“You know anybody else who’s doing this?”** I asked, looking at Stan and Lupe’. They shook their heads no. Matthew, Warren, Garrett, whatever his name was, was the perfect target candidate for rookie/cadet when he came in here last night with his dad and six of ‘the boys’, shaking off the shivers and huddling around the wood stove.

Twelve years old, the perfect age. All the men sat down over coffee, but he stood, wandering around and staring at all the aircraft.

“You want to join?” I asked him. “You become a pilot in the Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Squadron. Take your pick.”

I explained to him all the ins and outs of rank and pay grade and combat missions and everything…the rookie pilot orientation, y’know, but I don’t think he caught any of it, being absorbed in first one plane, then another, and finally settling on a green tri-wing with guns.

Stanley took one, too, for his younger boy, four years old. “Remember, it’s not a toy,” I told them. “Keep it up, flying. If you don’t, next thing, you’ll be in the maintenance hanger, talking about needing new landing gear, new tail, new prop.”

Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Chachee Esparza, a sumo-size 14 shoe, here with his dad, Lupe’, sat here and asked me if I assembled the planes from a kit. “You make these from a kit?” he asked. Tom and Jack Red Cloud laughed at his question as I recoiled in disbelief.

“What, from Wal-Mart?” I asked. “No, man. These are all hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind,” I told him.

“Cut’s ‘em out of cardboard,” said Tom, making a scissor-cutting motion with his fingers. “Made in America,” he added. “Fourninetynineninetynine.”

He went on to explain to how we, er, the Germans, figured out how to shoot through the propeller, and everybody understood triggers and camshafts, here on the rez. After that, they left, saying see ya later.

The 335th. That’s a poor man’s reservation-version Skull & Bones Society. You don’t have to be a Yale grad to become a member. A twelve-year old could be your wing man. A six-year old could be your flight leader.

end

____

*Devin, stopped in CO one night by a cop who inquired about the four-foot bong in the back seat. Devin told him it was a dijeridu. “I know a bong when I see one,” said the cop. “No. It’s a dijeridu,” Devin insisted.

“Ok,” said the cop. “If it’s a dijeridu, then play it for me.”

Devin took the bong and proceeded to WA WAAAA, WOO WOO, WA WAAAAA, and the cop let him go.

**the 4th reason.

No More Automatic Promotions

2009-09-25T01:48:00.002+07:00

Slim Buttes
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, SD
USA 9.09

This fall, when promotion time rolls around, some of you…many of you…well, all of you…are going to wonder why the ‘automatic’ principle doesn’t still apply.

Reason is, is because you simply don’t deserve it. Tell me what you’ve done to deserve it. Go head. Tell me. I want to hear it.

The automatic principle does, in fact, still apply for your wings…16, 16, or six…those who’ve flown 1600 hours, sixteen months, or six shoot-downs, you or them, and you automatically advance from rookie/cadet to full-blown pilot.

That’s standard flight rank/status designation, standard SOP, standard operating procedure. That hasn’t changed. 16, 16, or six, whichever comes first, and you’ve earned your wings.

What has changed, however, is the criteria determining whether or not you advance in pay grade. That’s a whole another story. To advance in pay grade, you must first distinguish yourselves through the performance of meritorious voluntary service to God and your country, in the capacity of ‘combat pilot’* in the Slim Buttes 335th Aviation Detachment.**

Any questions?

Ain’t gonna be no more automatic pay increases like before, just for rolling in for routine maintenance, oil change, lube job, reserve Air National Guard duty, governor, and maybe go on to become president. Those days are over. Just because people die and slots open up, don’t mean you’re automatically getting a promotion.

You might ask why we’re still flying cardboard bi-planes into combat in an age of rockets, shiny robots on Mars, and all kinds of other super-fast shit whizzing in orbit around the earth.

Good question.

Manny always used to say you’ve got to work with what you’ve got, and if you haven’t got any God-given natural talent, you’ve got to buckle down and work hard, and if you’re a lazy-ass, then you’ve got to depend entirely on luck.

If you’re out of luck, or down on your luck, born under a bad sign, or the only luck you’ve got is bad, then you’ve got to go with who you know, or your name. If you don’t know nobody, and your name is mud, then your only option is to go with what you’ve got, or try something else, he used to say.

Does that answer why we’re flying bi-planes?

Ok, then…well, when they flew…back in the day when they flew the machine you’re so fortunate to be flying today, the pilots were cut of a certain uncommon cloth, possessing a certain flair, a certain élan, a certain esprit de corps, a certain elite eche’lon superieur, an esprit de cal, an elle’ gance…an…you get the picture…a whole bunch of French words that describe a pretentious, pompous, affected style.

And that’s why many of you…almost all, I’d say, aren’t receiving a promotion.

No, not because of no style. Wanna know why? Ok. When’s the last time any of you asked about our squadron strength? How many of you asked about those guys who went down? Our guys, not theirs - the Germans, Holtz, or those guys up in Wisconsin working on the trigger mechanism – these were our guys, the 335th, at the air show, and the other two, playing tag. Have I seen any of your names lately on Daily Mission Ops?

Need I say more?

Yeah. So when you’re looking at that pay check, saying, “Hey. I’ve been flying for over a year. Why isn’t it reflected in my pay check?” well, Charlie, you’ve got to do more than barnstorm the family picnic and do kiddie rides at State Fairs.

Or you might say, “Those guys died. The slots were open. I should’ve had the promotion. I was here a full year before Carlson!”

Don’t matter no more. You gotta see the big picture. You gotta look at the war effort, the squadron, the company, the command, the country, inner self, the trees, the forest, the whole mission, beyond your own skin, predicament, what it means for our allies, the other guy.

You gotta do more than just clock in, clock out. You can’t just be sitting around, waiting for slots to open up. You gotta have the drive, the OVERdrive, gotta have ‘what it takes’, the right ‘stuff’, get yo’ mojo working, café latte, double chocolate def wish, double doberman cappuccino, wound up, hopped up, wired, whattimeizzit, meechuatnoon, Go-get-‘em style.

In addition to the necessary combat missions, you must begin to demonstrate an interest in the company. We need ‘company people’ here. We need team players, game-changers. You can ask yourself, ‘am I a team player, or am I out there, a loner, loser, loose cannon floating around in the universe, government salary, flying my little cardboard toy, spinning on a thread?”

UP2U. Gravy train’s over. Get on board.

You might ask, what has any of this to do with style? And you may wonder about the discordant association of cannons, loose or otherwise, to floating. Cannons don’t float. Cannons are found on ramparts, museum displays, and seabeds.

Style?

Well, the style went with a certain artistry. A ballet up there. Spinning and diving and climbing in a spiraling love/hate duel, sometimes two-on-one. You could feel the air, smell the engine, hear the rattle of the guns, cumulus fog on the goggles, sometimes a hot brass bullet casing searing into your flesh.

The very first combat aviators. We actually attended the services for the fallen. And that was the enemy. We knew who we were up against. We could see them. They looked like us.

-end

*As any good self-serving journalist or military officer knows, to advance your career, you need a good war. Not just a skirmish or an obscure and irrelevant military intervention. Peace-keeping force doesn’t cut it. You gotta have a good war.

**abbr. officially, ‘Slim Buttes 335th Post-Modern Contemporary Symmetrical Aviation Detachment, USAF.’

Trigger Gizmo Solved

2009-09-11T01:22:00.001+07:00

Pine Ridge, SD
August 2009

Heyyyy Brrrrro,

How do you like your new aircraft? Pretty nice, huh? You can see we worked out your problem with the guns shooting through the propeller. Now you won’t have any more of your people shooting themselves down out of the sky, nor all those wood splinters and bullets ricocheting back at your pilots.

Remember, no shooting over 6,000 rpms. Anything beyond that, and the whole technology goes out the window, and your plane goes down with a prop.

We can’t take credit for the breakthrough, however. Unlike us or the French, the Germans did all their chickenshit testing on the ground, as opposed to live combat, and figured out the mechanics, and then the Brits got it from the Germans when Friedrich Holtz, the Baron’s wing man, got shot down over Alsace, and then we naturally got it from the Brits finally after they naturally sat on the designs for six months. I guess our governments are going to naturally let the French figure it out for themselves.

They, the Germans, synced, sync-ed, sync’d, sinked, synchro…coordinated the engine camshaft and blade with the trigger mechanism gizmo so the guns will fire only when the prop blade is in the horizontal position. What a novel idea! Why didn’t we think of that? I still feel sorry for all your guys. I guess you could call them the original test pilots. Somebody should do something for their families.

We learned that some of your aeroplanes fell into a state of disrepair after impact with the earth, so given the terms of your contract, we can provide supplemental support for your wings, struts, fuselage, and landing gear, but as you know, the one-year, 5,000-hour engine and drive-train warranty has expired.

Anyway, uh, somebody suggested…well…claimed outright that the $499.99 price we were asking for a ‘singleton’ was a bit overpriced. Well, hugely overpriced. They all laughed, the focus group, when I said how much they were. What’s your take on it?

The way I see it, they’re limited edition, right? Gonna stop at 500. That’ll make ‘em more valuable, a future hot ticket item on Craig’s List, say, or among aviation enthusiasts.

“You serious?” Tom asked, seriously, when I told him the production cap at 500,* maybe display ‘em all at once in a big air show, art show, like a big gallery or something, then sell ‘em off, auction ‘em off in a charity event or something. Probably not, though. A children’s hospital or something. They all, the people I ran the idea by, the focus group, looked skeptical when I voiced the concept.

“Nobody’s gonna give you five hundred dollars for one of these,” Tom said, derisively.

“Four ninety-nine, ninety-nine. You know anybody else who’s doing this?” I asked. He and everybody else here at the time all shook their heads no. Manuel, Louie, Bo, Misty, the White Drifter.

“Right!” I exclaimed. “Nobody. I gotta flood the market with these originals before the Chinese get a hold of the design and undercut me at Wal-Mart. These’r made in America, by God! When’s the last time you seen that?”

“That’s four good reasons, isn’t it, Bo?” I asked. “Made in America…one of a kind…limited edition…flood the…what’s the fourth?” I asked, holding up three fingers.

The people sitting here drinking coffee, raised their eyebrows and nodded, like it was worthy of consideration. Tom was wondering how flooding the market would get me my asking price. Bo said he’d give ‘ten, twenty dollars’ for one, a tri-plane, the blue one.

That’s bullshit. That’s ridiculous, don’t you think? The crew is already five bucks under minimum wage. Plasticized cardboard or not, you’ve still got production and shipping costs. Despite NAFTA and a Myanmar refugee labor force, you can’t turn a profit like that.

So, after taking into consideration the feedback, we adjusted the promotional offer so now it’s either $499.99**……or free.*** Most folks, almost everybody…well, everybody, has chosen the second, consumer-friendly option, with one buyer/owner saying he’d get back to us later with the full sticker price, yea.

“I’ll get back to you later with the full sticker price,” he said, going out, flying a brand new Fokker tri-plane, all black. John, a friend of Ted’s. Vietnam vet. Navy man. Pilot, I think. No. He was on river patrol down in the Delta. Now he’s a pilot.

$499.99. That’s for one of our ‘singles’, the singletons. A bi-plane; Sopwiths, DeHavilands and Malibus. The LaRois are out of production, so already, the folks holding one of those have got a little nest egg for their grandkids. Don’t know yet what kind of figure to fix on the Fokker tri-planes or two-plane deals. Gotta be more, right? They’re more than twice as cool.

Last month in a call with Li An Song Nu Kyi, our Myanmar crew boss, you might have met her, I told her, “from now on, we’re going to go strictly with the bi/bi-plane,**** dual, double, two-plane production arrangement,” and she asked, “You say we work two time now, same pay?”

I told her yes.

“Now make two prane for onee one pay?”

I told her yes. She grew quiet as a stone, and shortly thereafter terminated the conversation. It could be problematic later, like, when I get back, especially since the company isn’t picking up the crew lunch anymore, and she’ll have to tell them what I said.

Anyway, half our inventory, except for the Pizza Hut plane, went out this past week, mostly for grandchildren. One adult. And one toddler who probably won’t be able to fly or appreciate it for many years.

Since those horrific but spectacular accidents at the air show, we’re focusing on re-building the squadron back up to strength and getting these punk rookie pilots combat- ready. Did you see the video? The memorial services are on Sunday, if you want to fly in, otherwise I’ll tell the widows the flowers are from all of us.

Later,

Lt. Col. Brovic
Squadron Commander
335th U.S. Aviation Detachment
Slim Buttes, Oglala BIA 41 S.
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

*500 is the target numerical from the concept boys in the front office, saying we can hit that figure in two years, but just last month the Myanmar crew were rumored to be murmuring about already ‘being sick’ of the project.

**Four ninety-nine ninety-nine. Sounds good, doesn’t it? One potential almost buyer, reaching for his wallet, said, “Sure, I’ll give you five bucks for one of those.” I laughed. “Aha, Sir…” I told him, clearing my throat, “Perhaps you misunderstood. That’s four hundred, ninety nine…dollars, ninety-nine cents.” He decided to take one for free.

***It’s not such a wild idea. The flowers do what they do for free. The birds sing for free. These meadowlarks out here aren’t asking anything for what they do.

****what would you call two bi-planes together? For production crew jargon, we’re saying something like, ‘We need four more bi-plane dualies out here!” but for marketing purposes, something like ‘dual bi-plane mobiles’ would work, don’t you think? They’re telling me I can get my asking price down in Colorado. “OH YEAH! The yuppies will eat this shit up!” Devon, a Boulder resident, said.

Ps. Hey, get a load of Li An’s note:

‘Sawadee Ka, Mr. Big Boss,

When you comeback? I hab someting to tell you already. Reason I goto my home in country papa sick. Close and lock shop already. crew people glap home already same same me being sick. say big boss ding dong. want 2 plane for onee one pay. same same sa-nake. I hab idea already. maybe I nosee you longtime maybe copy idea to China to much. You remember plane pattern I make in dirt? Leum? When you comeback? I hate you already.

Love,

Li An

Nong Sa helf me with letter toyou her say hi.

___

When you say, or hear, ‘mid-air collision’, you sort of naturally think the worst, right? like two aircraft, airliners, impacting one another head-on at five hundred miles an hour. That would be bad. Even the passengers back in the rear wouldn’t make it.

Or maybe getting T-boned by a jet fighter, slicing your 737 wide-body passenger compartment in half. “HEYYYYAAA. WHAT WAS THAT?” That would be bad, too. In fact, almost everything that happens up there is bad. Bad food. Bad seat. Bad air. Bad service. Can’t smoke.

We had one before, and another at the air show, mid-airs. We couldn’t really call them mid-air collisions, per se, even though they were. It was more like a mid-air ‘mishap’, or mid-air ‘encounter’, neither of which by the way, you would want to experience, either as a pilot, or as a passenger.

A mid-air mishap or encounter is just as bad and messy as a collision, and going down in a ball of flame, though spectacular, results in the same end as a loss of power, loss of a wing or tail rudder, fluttering down in a whining spiral, then poof.

Although quite theatrical, having it occur at the air show is embarrassing and not nearly as heroic and final as a clean-cut battle death. There’s always a whale more explaining to do, to many, many more people than just the immediate family. Like, investigators.

Investigators and military aviation authorities. Always got ‘em in a non-combat related aerial mishap, and in this case, two days before the show, a couple of our young punk new guys were horse-assing around playing tag with their girlfriend’s scarves attached to their tail rudders.

The guy who was ‘it’ would chase the other and cut the scarf sheet with his prop. Zzzzzzzzt, “You’re it!”

Well, who knows what really happened up there, but the chase guy chewed up the tail rudder of his buddy and shredded his prop in the process, so they both went down in a tangle. Chewed up and screwed up. These things happen from time to time. Non-combat related aerial fatality. It happens all the time.

Same in the navy. Man overboard. “Go back and get him, Skipper?”

“Screw him. He’s not critical to the mission. You know what it costs to turn an aircraft carrier around?”

But we’re not the navy, and each of our guys, whether they’re married with kids or not, is critical to our mission, not to mention the aircraft they were horse-assing around with.

The other two at the air-show, pilot error, not horse-assing, was really bad, partly because it involved numerous spectators (it’s not entirely our fault. They came to the show, didn’t they?)* and lawsuits, but like I said, these things happen from time to time.

Lookit the Blue Angels. Best in the world. Again, pilot error. Leader took the whole six-bird formation straight into the ground. Lookit Columbia on liftoff and the other one, on re-entry. Same with the Russians. How many guys did they lose? And the French. How many spectators have they killed at their air shows?

Every time you turn around, the French are killing spectators at air shows. You got a better chance running the bulls in Barcelona on a skateboard.

Anyway, a lot of stuff can happen up there in the air…just ask Niel Armstrong and Sergei Whathisname, so it’s not just us, and most of it you can’t blame on the Baron, though we’d like to attribute to him all elements of evil and misfortune, and implicate him as source of all our own stupidity and blunder.

Four aircraft and as many pilots in three days. Bunch of civilians. I don’t know what they came up with for the final tally.

Later.

-end

No Floatation Device Under Seat

2009-07-30T00:34:00.002+07:00

Pine Ridge, SD
July 2009

Heyyyy Bro,

Your aircraft is just about ready to roll out of the factory, and when I say ‘just about’, I mean, all we’re waiting for are the tires.

She’s ready to fly, man. Beautiful lines. The crew did a nice job on the paint job. Looks cool. Incorporated new design changes to a seamless fuselage construction at the suggestion of the Myanmar crew leader,* and major structural changes in the tail. I think you’ll like it.

Frankel brought his plane in for a thorough overhaul and rehab, after he laughingly said it had crashed. Everybody knows a plane doesn’t survive a crash…there might be a few usable parts, but most of it is scrap, much smaller than a breadbox, so you just can imagine the crew in the maintenance hangar shaking their heads when they saw the old first edition BV33 being dragged in.

Total rehab from head to toe, prop to rudder; new beefed up engine, new landing gear, new rubber, new wing struts, new cowling, rear landing gear, weapons platform, guns,** and new paint job.

I asked him, ‘Do you have any idea of what this is going to cost you?’ and he said to proceed forthright, the sky’s the limit, you know, so that’s what I told the team, and they did a helluva job. You wouldn’t recognize it. Sumbitch is fast.

Well, in the process of firing up the maintenance hangar for Frankel’s extensive rehab job, the crew got started on a couple new planes, primarily because of a recent spike in demand. You remember Alonzo, who shocked me last year by shrugging off an offer for a free, take your pick, plane?

Yeah. Stays with Bo and Misty. Jolted me bolt upright in the seat, causing me to exclaim loudly, “WHAT?”

He sees me this year, and first thing he asks is if I still have the planes.

“Yeah,” I told him. “I still got ‘em.”

And Dewayne, up in Porcupine, he wants one, too. This is after refusing an offer for a plane last year, saying, ‘Nah, I could do that.’

Funny. The two onliest guys who ever refused our aircraft turned around and ended up ordering one a year later.

After countless flight hours amassed over one year, we brought the two LaRois in for routine maintenance, tune up, lube job, wash and wax, armaments check, and new wing supports for one of them.

They looked cool in the squadron lineup with six of the newer Solaris and two Lao Poste ‘close air support’ models,*** sort of like the Pearl Harbor flight line before the attack. Except they’re biplanes, of course. I’ll send a photo.

So, after wrapping up Frankel’s rush job immediately after the sun dance, the crew began construction of a new model with new materials, sleeker and faster, with bigger engines and bigger guns. You’ll see them at the air show.

-end

*Li An Song Nu Kyi. Holding her position only because of her limited knowledge of English, spontaneously came up with the idea of seamless fuselage construction, after constructing several dozen aircraft.

“Maybe can sabe ti,’ she said, squatting, drawing a template in the dirt with her index finger.

“Ahhhh, yeah,” I told her dismissively, thinking that basically, Li An was ignorant of anything close to aeronautical design, having grown up with little schooling in a small village in the sticks where her father carved coral aquarium sea dragons for a living, and had only come to the aircraft factory for the job opportunity.

Also, I didn’t want to relent my superior social standing as Big Boss by acknowledging that she might actually may have something valuable to offer, so I told her to go ahead and have the crew do things the way we always have, since by doing so, admitting she had an idea, would have caused severe loss of face, for me, a terrible thing in Asia, and everyone, the whole crew, was right there, eating and watching. She showed me during their lunch break.

I didn’t have time for bird signs or drawings in the dirt. I needed to fake the appearance of a busy man, and wondered why it appeared the crew was watching us so intently and apparently taking bets.

When she hired on, I asked her where she learned her English already, and she just nodded and smiled with a vacant, unfocused, incomprehensible expression that clearly indicated she was faking it, and kept pointing at the dog. The neighbor told me
later she was asking for one of the pups.

“Pups? She don’t have no pups,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he said. “When she has pups. When she has pups, she wants one.”

Anyway, when I got home, here, I traced out that pattern she showed me one night out of boredom, and for crying out loud, we tried it, and she was right, it saves time. The planes are more stable, stronger, and easier to construct, cutting the production time by a third. We should have been doing it this way from the start, sixty aircraft ago.

Same way with the tail section. Suddenly, the solution to an inherent and historical design flaw was astonishing and excruciatingly apparent, just today during the construction of a Solari. “Hold it!” I told the crew. “Hold everything.”

Everybody put down their cutting torches and just stood there. Me too. I just stood there.

**You might ask, ‘Why’s he gotta have guns?’

Are you kidding? Everybody up there has got a gun. What are you gonna do, send him out there without a gun???

***That’s ‘one Solari, two Solaris’, a sleek version of the old LaRois (that’s one LaRoi, two LaRois). The Lao Poste is the ‘workhorse’ of the squadron; slower, heavier, and more cumbersome than the fighter aircraft, but reliable, so far.

Unfortunately, shortly after the photo of the lineup, one of the Solaris was damaged in a near mid-air...if there is such a thing…sure, you can ALMOST have a mid-air, but in this case, it wasn’t head-on, but rather, the wing tips touching ever so slightly in close formation during preparation for the show, just enough to cause one of the team of Solaris, flown by one of our young punk cadets, flying cover for the Lao Poste aircraft, to spin out of control and go crashing to the ground. Officially, we’re saying the accident is still under investigation, but we know already what happened.

Did the pilot survive the crash? Well, technically, yes and no. You know, of course, we’re prop-to-rudder legit, so, no, there aren’t any parachutes.

_____

So now, we’re just training the new punk cadets and working on getting the squadron back up to strength, which in our case means about fourteen, sixteen aircraft. That way, when you lose one or two during operations, you can bounce back next day without missing a beat.

Not the same as when there’s only a half dozen guys in the air. Guy calls in for air support, and the only thing you can tell him is you’re stretched to the limit, your guys are flying on four hour’s sleep, half your birds are shot up, and he’ll need to tell his troops to hunker down and order more body bags.

With a dozen or more aircraft on station and operational, you take a couple of hits, a couple of guys go down, you attend the funeral services, get drunk, tell a few 'remember when' jokes about the deceased, go silent for a while, coulda been you, and next day you’re back up flying missions, get back on the horse that bit you. You got a nation to defend. Baron’s still up there. You think the Baron is taking the day off?

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Ants Come Marching

2009-05-31T07:59:00.002+07:00

30.05.09

KHUK KHAK, Thailand

Rainy season
Ants come marching
Read a book
Leave no crumbs

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More on Shoes

2009-05-25T18:38:00.004+07:00

25.05.09

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Some of you responded to the shoes topic, so clearly, I'm not the only one who has thought about it.

I meant to ask, how many pairs do you have?

Do you have jogging shoes? Do you have 'everyday' shoes, tennis shoes, ski boots? Do you have 'nice' shoes to go with 'nice' clothes? Do you have shoes to go with this, and shoes to go with that?

What about work shoes? Play shoes. Do you have 'outside shoes' for the garden or barnyard, and 'inside shoes' for around the house, a house shoe? You got a shoe for mowing the yard?

Do you own a snow shoe or boots for winter? Do you own a shoe that goes over another shoe? Do you have more than one of...one pair...of any kind of shoe, like, two or three pairs of golf cleats?

You got a hiking boot?

Do you have dancing shoes, club shoes, or moccasins? You ever own a pair of those calf-high leather mocs? Anybody ever give you a pair of beaded moccasins? Do you have a shoe that you bought just before going on vacation, like one day before?

'Honey, I've got to get some new shoes.'

'Honey, the kids are gonna need new shoes.'

You wearing sandals? Flip-flops or velcro straps? Leather, plastic, or rubber?

You got ice skates? Hockey skates? Figure?

You got a shoe rack, or 'shoe place'?

You ever own an Earth Shoe? Crocs? What color'd you get?

When you think 'Shoes', you think, 'Imelda Marcos', right? You can see how thinking more than one or two or five or a dozen pairs might lead you down that road.

Did you ever wonder, 'Where we going to put all these shoes?' And when you're done with a shoe, what do you do? Throw 'em out, both of them? Get them re-soled? Give them to Goodwill? Put 'em out at a yard sale?

I know, I know, it's a lot of questions about shoes. I was just wondering. I could tell you how many pairs I have, but I'm not going to. You might think...I don't know what you might think.

It's probably funny. Tell me. Go count. Go see.

-end

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Couldn't Cry Till I Got Home

2009-05-23T20:41:00.005+07:00

23.05.09

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Be Prepared. Motto of the Boy Scouts. For the first time in a long time, I was prepared, carrying my kit bag beneath my seat.

Just at 5 pm, rush hour for Saturday market in Bang Niang, an ocean of Thai and farang collecting fresh meat and vegetables, the highway a converging hornets' nest of motorbikes, trucks, and speeding vans heading north, the orange cones not slowing them down.

For some reason, I went south toward Khao Lak with my goods in the basket, instead of north to Khuk Khak. A mile down the road, a cluster of people were on the edge of the road.

"Uh oh. I hope this isn't what I think it is."

Three women on a bike, patients #6, 7, and 8, this year, looked to be a grandma, her daughter probably driving, and maybe a granddaughter, about fourteen. The daughter had struck the pavement with her head and a man was holding a towel on it. She was conscious, sitting up, bleeding from her face, and dialing a number on her cell phone. The bike was laying on her legs.

The grandma was sitting up a few feet away, scrapes on her legs, a deep laceration on her heel. The young girl was bruised and scraped on her hands, arms, and legs, sitting up, nervously aware of the growing crowd, afraid to cry, but it hurt anyway. She nodded when I asked her if she was ok.

We used the all baby wipes, gauze bandages and roller gauze on the head patient, and loaded her on the first ambulance, her long black hair matted with blood. Before they closed the door, I told her she was going to be ok.

But her face will never be the same. A deep laceration to her forehead down to the skull, about five inches long. Nasty. A couple inches higher would have peeled back her scalp, but cosmetically more appealing. Relative to her head injury, a concussion probably, her other cuts and scrapes were minimal.

The grandma was okay as long as she kept direct pressure on her wound and stopped looking at it. The young girl was already in the second ambulance when we loaded the old lady. Off they went.

Just one bike. "Probably a dog," said Damon, when I told him about it later.

I never asked what happened, nor hung around the 50-strong crowd there at the scene. Got my gear, shook hands with the two guys who were part of the on-the-scene onlooker instant medical staff, and went back to my bike. I said thanks. They did, too.

With the seat up on my bike, my wallet was exposed, right there. Won't say how much was in it, but it was bigger than a breadbasket, but smaller than a plane ticket. All those folks standing around, nobobdy bothered it.

I never cried for any of my patients in Vietnam. Couldn't. Wouldn't let me. Not until I got home. Not until much, much later, like thirty-five years. After the initial suppression of shock and dismay, the rush of immediate involuntary response treatment, composing the patient, sending them off where somebody else will do the REAL work, there's a gully-wash of adrenaline that a smoke or a drink might calm, and then when you grow quiet and settle down, there's even time for a whimper and a tear.

-end

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Heaven Through Your Garden

2009-05-23T19:15:00.003+07:00

23.05.09

KHUK KHAK, Thailand - Is refinement possible without comb, court, and attendants, Brahmin headdress, advanced practice, country club membership, or decade in a cave?
Would time and austerity justify accomplishment of the inevitable?

Couldn't we just read the book about the guy who did? Were there any angry gods? Can it found within the heart of an earthworm, the lotus blossum, the spectrum of your laughter?

Multiple lifetimes renouncing the world, fortunate birth, admission purchased with a Pilgrim's Prayer, hang from a cross, pull skulls, adorned with gold in a mummy's silence.

Address to the council, spiral through a black hole of doubt and pity, escape the claws of the raptor, king atop a mountain of bones, wake in a horrified sweat. Flames at your back, leap into the void.

Ionized, charging through the ectoplasm, psyche in the stratosphere, oblivious to destiny, the work in-progress, the well-trod path vaporizing in the heart of the woods, footprints swallowed in desert dune, high tide erasing existence, looking outward, looking in.

Those birds sing so merrily at dawn, the ferns so quietly collecting the dew.

-end

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Man Discovers 47- Million Year Old 'Missing Link' Fossil in Basement

2009-05-20T22:26:00.004+07:00

20.05.09

'We never noticed it until just the other day,' says.

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