The First Casualties

pjdillon@attglobal.net
The sickening feeling started late Saturday evening as the first details started to march across the distracting red info ribbon that are so popular in the networks’ split screen universe.
Australian journalist believed killed by car bomb in Northern Iraq. Details to follow. Hours later: British authorities report ITN crew missing following incident outside Iraqi city of Basra. Details to follow.
And inevitably we share info amongst ourselves. I’m sending SMSs (Short Message Service, text messages keyed in and sent through the cellphone network for the uninitiated) to my friends, many of whom are at a birthday party at H2O, a Blok M bar, letting them know.
Over the next few hours, info starts to trickle back via telephone, e-mail and SMSs as we scour networks public and personal for names, agencies anything that will allow us to knock people off the mental casualty lists we’ve created.
I know several Ozy journos working along the Iran/Iraq border, part of the international media posse several dozen strong who’ve been chomping at the bit for the past six weeks. They’re the kind of hardnosed first responders who I’m sure were planning their routes to the town of Khormal the moment they heard the first Tomahawks had been fired into suspected paramilitary bases there, home to the hardline Islamist guerrillas of the Iranian-backed Asram al-Islam, who are the laughable best connection Bush Jr and the boys in the war room have been able to make between Saddam and bin-Laden.
I don’t believe I ever met Paul Moran. As it turns out, few of us here in Jakarta did because, though many ABC correspondents have rolled through Jakarta over the years, he was based in the Gulf. From what I understand he was 39 and, like the correspondent he was traveling with, has a six-month-old baby girl.
I’ve met numerous ITN crews over the past few years and the CNN interview with Daniel, a cameraman I crossed paths with in Quetta, Pakistan in the weeks after 9-11 was shocking. The full story has yet to be told but 24 hours later it sure does sound like they were killed by either British or American forces. Veteran reporter Terry Lloyd, his cameraman Fred Nerac and their companion Hussein Othman are missing and I’d be terribly surprised if they were not killed in the terrible salvo that tore through the thin skins of their Land Cruisers Saturday afternoon.
A friend told me he spent a great month shooting and smoking dope with Fred in some hostile environment a few years back and described Terry as the kind of journalist I admire most: keeps his ego under wraps and never forgets the kindness of strangers, repaying them a hundredfold. Othman is an unknown but obviously a brave, clever fellow to have secured the respect of journalists of their caliber.
It’s all very distressing, these deaths. The death of our friend Reuter’s cameraman Harry Burton on the Jalalabad Road in Nov 2001 is still a raw wound for many, the roads many of us have traveled are littered with dead and maimed colleagues and friends.
And of course there’s another round of wrestling with the fact that yes in fact, if the call came tomorrow and someone said they had a secure route into Baghdad, and the wallet was open and they wanted me to go, needed me to go, that my kit is ready and just give me 90 minutes and I’m at the airport.
The final unfortunate fucked up coincidence is the tale of the mission Tornado. Yeah, seems there’s a friend of mine – a bunch of us did the dim sum thing this afternoon – who has a friend who’s brother rides the beast outta some base in the UK. This evening, as the group of us sat watching the American death toll mount pondered how exactly a Patriot missile might be fired at a British attack jet, or what was going on in the mind of that fellow who tossed the grenades into the command tent of the 101st Airborne Regiment, my friend made a call to London.
What are the chances that out of all the thousands of Tornado flyboys piloting any of the thousands of aircraft involved in this war, that the only personal contact my Jakarta friend has in the British military is the father of three shot down and now missing somewhere in the desert border between Kuwait and Iraq? How fucked up is that? Here we have the missing man’s entire family sitting around their suburban London living room for hours after the man from the Royal Air Force knocked on their door with the message “be hopeful but prepare for the worst”, holding hands and waiting for the phone to ring.
Unlike the journalists, he was out there, ordered to 35,000 feet day after day, because of events far beyond his scope or ability to control. He was following orders. But, it is easy to forget that he made decisions in his life to train up as a killer, to enter into a relationship that to truly be consummated involved a flight crew attaching bombs and missiles to the belly of his aircraft and sending him out to kill and maim other men and women. It’s kinda hard-ass but if you’ve seen the amount of damage one of those bombs do, if you’ve heard their stories told during visits to the graves of the innocent or God forbid, watched broken bodies being separated from the remains of their homes and business, it becomes very hard to work up a lot of sweat over these kinds of combat deaths.
But it is early days in this campaign and the death toll among all involved is going to climb. I think there’s gonna be a lot of dead journos by the end of this campaign particularly among those like the first casualties not ‘embedded’ with the US or Brits, and by the sounds of it soldiers on both sides are giving it up for the home team. In both cases we’re talking about people paid to do what they do.
I doubt civilian dead directly attributable to bombing will hit the estimated 3,000 from the first round a dozen years ago (or similar number buried in Afghanistan), but if the US shows the kind of leadership and long term vision it has in Central Asia (sweet deals with a multiplicity of brutal, repressive military regimes; NO money in 2004 budget for Hamid Karzai and his Tajik buddies in Kabul) then we can wait for the newly free press in a post-Saddam Iraq to broadcast into our living rooms the images of famine wrought by tribal warfare and conflict between Shiite and Sunni.
We’ve got months more to sit and watch Rumsfeld and Bush (who said moments ago that he’s “Praying for God’s comfort and healing powers”) and Blair and Howard and the rest of the raptors tear-up for the cameras and talk about sacrifice and duty and honor and commitment to task and patriotism and dedication to higher ideals and all kinds of expensive words.
But it’s all worthwhile though because once the Iraqis are freed, Dubya tells us he’s got a secret plan to Solve The Israeli/Palestinian Troubles! Excellent! This guy and his friends Sharon, Bibi Netanyahu and the bright lights at the Heritage Foundation are going to solve the most intractable conflict in modern history. Cool. It’s a secret though so we’re gonna have to be patient.
I can’t wait to hear what’s next.

US Treats Security Council "Like Ingrates Who Offend Our Princely Dignity By Lifting Their Heads From The Carpet.
The following is the text of a speech delivered to the US Senate Wednesday afternoon EDT by Senator John Byrd, the longest-serving member of the American Senate and author of an impassioned plea three weeks ago for further debate within the Senate prior to any attack on Iraq.
"I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.
But, today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.
Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.
We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.
After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.
The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.
There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The twin towers fell because a world-wide terrorist group, Al Qaeda, with cells in over 60 nations, struck at our wealth and our influence by turning our own planes into missiles, one of which would likely have slammed into the dome of this beautiful Capitol except for the brave sacrifice of the passengers on board.
The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses.
But, this Administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the twin towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But, he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war. If we attack Saddam Hussein, we will probably drive him from power. But, the zeal of our friends to assist our global war on terrorism may have already taken flight.
The general unease surrounding this war is not just due to "orange alert." There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered. How long will we be in Iraq? What will be the cost? What is the ultimate mission? How great is the danger at home?
A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.
What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?
Why can this President not seem to see that America's true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?
War appears inevitable. But, I continue to hope that the cloud will lift. Perhaps Saddam will yet turn tail and run. Perhaps reason will somehow still prevail. I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us."

Little George And FOX-y Gems

pjdillon@attglobal.net
He looks so earnest. He also looks tired and mildly constipated. Dubya is the man of the hour, he’s on the tube this morning when I wake up seven hours ahead of GMT and I expect he may well be back before I hit the sack tonight. His words are messianic and familiar and scary. The religious ideologues in the White House have won the day.
Weird thing is that the networks are all reporting that once he authorized that cruise missile attack and made his “gonna gedd’im” speech from the Oval office, he went to bed. More proof that Bush’s own religious beliefs that concluded his brand of Christian Fundamentalism Lite provides him comfort and support but no wisdom and little insight.
With the exception of the two hours I was in the gym beating the fill out of the heavy bag and negotiating the services of a personal trainer (I blush to admit I’m considering it but despite three and four-time weekly visits that have bulked me up topside these past two months, my gut continues on a messianic expansion of its own) I’ve been watching TV most of the day, flipping between BBC and CNN for news but when I’m looking for drama, I drift down to the far right of the dial to our friends at FOX (“All War, All The Time!”).
It’s a naughty little secret but I love FOX. I need to watch Ollie North, Bush’s kind of all-American hero, the kinda guy who’s ready to flip the finger at the very political institutions the US War of Independence was fought for in order to go and whack a bunch of Spanish-speaking proto-commies, geared up and good to go with the first Marine helicopters into Iraq (and later broadcasting from inside his chem.-suit); I’ve gotta have my fix of BeeBee or DeeDee or whatever her name is on the morning show, with the “fuck me” pumps, hoochie-chick slit skirts and, like, five flaxed-haired kids at home; I need their fetishistic roll-call of American weaponry, “two-thousand-pound, laser-guided bun-ker-bus-tin’ bombs” and “F-111A Stealth bomb-ers, and “Taw-ma-hawk cruise missiles which are almost invisible to the Eye-rakie radar” which are all part of the Pentagon’s “shock and awe invasion scheme”. Yum. Does that smell like the dream-weavers from Hill & Knowlton?
Tell me more about those Smart Bombs and Surgical Strikes I’ve been hearing so much about!
Here’s a sample of today’s offerings logged during a single 20 minute sitting.
“Saddam Hussein has killed more Moslems than anyone in history”
“Anyone who stirs up U.S. Marines better watch out.”
“The Patriot 3 PAC system is working like a charm.”
“This is the most ambitious foreign policy gamble an American president has made since the end of the Second World War.”
“We’ve got a gas mask here in the studio but not because we’ve got any fears of a chemical attack here in New York…”
“It’s a weird part of the world (Israel) and Saddam Hussein is one of the main reasons why”
The only thing that bums me out is there’s no clear answer to the question on everybody’s lips: “Where In The Heck Is Geraldo Rivera?”

A Wee Wobbler In The Works And The Grinch’s Birthday Font Funk
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Happy St. Patrick’s Day all!! The only celebratory day of the year when you can set your watch to my feeling like I wanna get on a plane and head back to Montreal. Sunday was the annual parade, No. 138 or something like that, an event I attended every year after reaching the age of majority and one of North America’s great civic piss-ups.
Jakarta offers poor competition – weird living in a city with so few Irishmen – and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one listening to The Pogues and The Dubliners morning to night.
However, my lovely leprechaun and I are off to Flanagan’s Pub in the Sari Pan Pacific Hotel later this evening for a wee dram (or as it says on the back of one of my James Squire beer coasters: “I’m off for a quiet pint - followed by fifteen noisy ones” : Gareth Chilcott). I’ve heard it’s disappointing but the name is kinda Irish and with any luck it won’t have Styrofoam menhirs, tiled Druidic circles and wall-sized paintings of guys with horned helmets, more Norse than Celt methinks.

Anyway, it’s my birthday Tuesday and time for radical changes.
First, I figured I’d go and get a full makeover: Head shaved and goatee shorn and maybe re-punch that left earring hole as my hair and wannabe Van Dyke are getting uncomfortably long and I haven’t worn a hoop in a couple of years. Then I looked in the mirror and thought, “Nah, I’ll make me look like a big ol’ fag.”
Then, I figured a new wardrobe. Met a fellow at the new whitey bar in the Mandarin a week back – yeah, I went back even though the clueless heathens put ice and water in my $7 single malt the first time ‘round – and met a fellow dressed in a light black suit and tie-less white shirt with a cigar plugged in his mouth and thought he looked every inch the cool operator (which of course he may well be, nudge, nudge, wink, wink). But I looked in the mirror and thought, “Nah, I’ll make me look like a big ol’ fag gigolo.”
I thought about maybe rewriting the lifestyle script with a rewarding NGO job: Imagine, Grinch The Good as the poverty- and oppression-beating aid worker in the midst of a funding squeeze even as he builds bridges between cultures, developing local capacities and empowering stakeholders! But alas, the needle on my irony meter buried itself in the red and that was the last we spoke of it.
But, I think I’m on the right track now.
I’m trying to do something that’ll be subtly noticed but won’t take the edge off – “You’ve done something with your INSERT WORD Mr. Grinch but it certainly doesn’t make you look remotely like a big ol’ fag” – something that reflects the newly acquired wisdom of the 38-year-old Grinch without succumbing to the affected world-weariness of some fellow travelers, assertive yet calm, dynamic but understated, modest n proud. Yeah.
So, I’ve decided to change my font.
For years now, since I broke with that accented version of Typewriter Ancient on the old chunk of metal I used for school projects, I’ve been hooked on various versions of Times New Roman. In part this is because, if I’m not mistaken – I’m working on memory here so bear with me you anal retentives who know better – the original Macintosh Apple II we had at home used it.
Later, when a thousand fonts became easily available, I stuck by TNR because it’s classic sticks hooks and bends give words an air of newspaper-of-record authenticity and if one is searching for anything as a young journalist, it is to be authentic.
Since that time, I’ve occasionally strayed. There were the months of boxy Courier New when I was redesigning “Good Health” magazine but that was never my idea of a good time, and a brief fling with the staid and serious Garamond which wanted commitment before I was ready. There was the impetuous Georgia which grew more seductive the more you let out the tracking, and a tight-assed and claustrophobic Tacoma; there were Arial’s windy landscapes and ages it seems with Century, but inevitably I ended up back with patient, stolid TNR.
Now’s the time to strike! I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about this font conundrum but I do remember sweet days of mountain air several thousand feet above the Bow Valley, a place where the rams crashed heads and elk attacked industrial-sized garbage cans in the haze of their rut. It was there by the shores of the Tokien-esque glacier-fed emerald green lakes at the base of Chinaman’s Peak that I first set eyes on the spirited Palatino.
I know now that I wasn’t mature enough at the time – gosh, was it really 1992? - to deal with its demands for space. After years of TNR predictability, the way Palatino marched off screen and refused to hyphenate properly despite the tender ministrations of those early versions of QuarkXPress kept me awake nights, chain-smoking and muttering over bitter instant coffee in a dimly lit backroom of the Banff Crag & Canyon.
No I’m not drunk! You who knew me then, you saw the obsession, the permanently red eyes of the sleep-deprived. And you’ll have heard rumours of that ugly incident with the Xacto-knife in the composing room. Lies and exaggerations! The workings of evil, small-minded resort town gossips with nothing better to do with their time. You’ll also remember the RCMP never charged me and that the therapist said I was okay. Remember?
Ahhh yes, the Palatino years. Perhaps now I’ve the patience to let her come to me rather than forever stalking, I mean, searching for her, the maturity to surrender control in the interests of a long term relationship.
Yes. Yes, I’m thinking Palatino. Palatino. Wherefore Art Thou Palatino?

Received the following from a buddy of mine in Vancouver the other day and it struck a chord with me.
Belle is a hyper-active springer spaniel. I remember when my friend showed up in the newsroom at the Whistler Question newspaper with her the first time. Always reminded me of Tigger: all spring and no sense.

Dear Paul,
Sorry I haven't gotten back to you sooner, but I haven't been able to
concentrate much lately.
I've known for a while that this day would come too soon. This past weekend
, tumor on belle's stomach swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, and has
become painful for me to touch. I have tried lancing it and draining it, but
it just gets bigger.
She has been losing her hearing and her sight over the past couple of years,
and this isn't the only lump on her.
She had a similar tumor removed from her about a year and a half ago and I
was told that if it returned , she would have to have her mammory system
removed. She's going on 14 years old and the cost is more than I can justify
spending on her at her age.
I have been trying to make peace with myself, that the decision I have made
is right, but have failed, I just feel wrong, but I can't let her go on like
this, as the swelling will only get larger and cause her more pain.
She still has more energy than any dog I have met at her age, I feel like I
am killing her, not putting her to sleep.
So I have taken friday off, and am taking her to a vet down the street from
me, and am ending her life. I will take her remains to a favorite fishing
spot at the old town site of Garibaldi. This has been a favorite spot for
us, she loved the moss covered forest, and was always a stop for us for
fishing. I will always be able to have her with me at this spot and she will
leave this world with my words to her "Where's the fish".
"Belle" November 1989-2003
Love who found me

Journalism 101 or, How I Found A Woman’s Big Toe In My Glass Of Gin And Learned To Love It.

I remember the first journalism class I ever had back in the winter of 1987. Lindsay Chrysler (whose name I’m pretty sure I’ve not spelt correctly once, ever), the head of Concordia’s J school, had a roomful of apple-cheeked wannabe reporters pair up, do a quicky face-to-face interview and show up a couple days later with the results.
I don’t remember how I fared in the young woman’s hands but part of me wishes I’d kept a copy of her story just to be reminded of how easily your reality can be co-opted, bent and mutilated by some gormless hack.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. EVERY story fucks with reality, space and time. But today, we’re talking about my reality.
A guy who spent a couple weeks in my house two years ago has been writing travelogues about his time in Asia and elsewhere from the comfort of his sofa in LA and now, North Carolina. It was mentioned to me quite some time ago but life is short and suffice to say I’d not logged on to http://www.sobsey.com/ .
So I get mail yesterday, an on-pass note from Adam via a mutual friend saying “Tell Paul to have a look.”
I did and, well, now I wish I hadn’t. Let’s just say that the parts of the story where I actually featured bore little resemblance to what I experienced, my best friend, a brave and complicated bear of a man was rendered unrecognizable (and almost hypocritical) and the general tenor of life in The Big Durian reduced to a couple of pithy comments about ex-pats and their relationship with Indonesia and its people. I’m glad he didn’t take a crack at the love of my life because then I might have to actually get angry.
Among other things, Adam tells the story about the funky (well, I think it’s funky) old carved Balinese door holding up a wall in my front yard. The stripped down version is that he, my roomie and I went trolling for old wood at a Madurese guy’s shop down among the overpriced antique wood- yards in Cipute. She’d been down once and fallen in lust with a cool lime green door, frame and shutter set and wanted me to have a boo at it.
These dealers are all cut from the same cloth. Their presence is announced by giant rain-beaten ANTIQUE signs on the side of barns in upper Washington state filled with rusting plows and reconditioned floor-model version of Centipede and Space Invaders. Their toney Westmount “galleries” (‘cause no self-respecting Montreal antique dealer would call it a “shop” or “store”) are frequented by Guatemalan-poncho-wearing BMW owners who’ve left the kids with the English nanny up the hill. And, they use six-year-olds stolen away from their dirt-farmer Hazara to work Kabul’s Chicken Street, hawking burquas to female aid workers and “antique” firearms to bull-necked Dutch gunnery sergeants.
The Madurese was no different, having spent years separating people from their money, laughing all the way to the bank. To cut a long story short he tried to pull a fast one, replacing at time of delivery the fine, solid teak piece I’d negotiated down to $300, with a shiny, crudely wrought piece of particle-board I’d expect to find in some Chinese timber baron’s Burmese border love-shack.
When we met the next day – note to rookies: never pay in advance – he offered me the junk piece in exchange for the one I wanted. Then he offered to sell it to me for half the price we’d agreed for the real McCoy. This was followed by a protracted explanation about how he wasn’t actually allowed to sell the one I wanted for the price we’d agreed upon because it was a consignment job and didn’t meet the minimum price the real owner wanted. There may have been other explanations, I just don’t remember.
The basic message was: “I fucked up. You’re a rich foreigner. So, you should give it back to me so I can turn around and screw someone else.”
Bottom line was that, slippery as he was, the Madurese had no wriggle room. I had a door, albeit the wrong one, he had no money and we’d reached an impasse that could only end one of three ways: I’d keep the cheesy piece of shit in my yard and try and unload it on someone else, Indonesia being ripe with Chinese timber barons I wasn’t expecting any problems in that regard; he could bring a bunch of goons over and reclaim it by force in which case I’d have no recourse whatsoever because, while the Indo legal system screws regular folk a hundred ways before lunch, there is a special place reserved for foreigners with the audacity to try and get justice; finally, he could admit defeat and deliver on our deal. Fortunately for all concerned that’s exactly what happened.
Right now I’m in pondering mode. Ponder, ponder, ponder. Is Adam just foolish (unlikely), lazy (doesn’t fit), and shallow (ditto)? Or is it true that even at our best writers can be relied upon to get details right like 60 per cent of the time, and that even if you get the facts right, distance and dislocation and a different set of eyes doom the project, so why bother pretending?
I did pretty well in communications theory back there at Concordia. I treated it like someone you sleep with because you’ve nothing better to do with your life, which is to say I refused to take it seriously, treated the lecturer with distain and perhaps because I distained it so successfully, I scored well and often: don’t Foucault with me. But, I suppose after years of cocking up in my own very fallible way I was overdue for a reality check. Makes me wonder where the girl from that first J class ended up…
And, by the way and for the record in case you decide to check out the Sobsey piece: I did not pay the Madurese a dime more than what we’d agreed upon.

Finally, an update. Kev, Frank and Andy were scheduled to hit the trail outta Dawson City today, on the first leg of their six-week, 2,100 km bike journey up the Yukon River and across the heart of Alaska. But, Kevin writes at www.bikesonice.com not before they joined the Sour Toe Cocktail Club. When in Newfoundland you kiss the cod: up in Yukon Territory you slam back a jigger of gin containing a leathery big toe, a gift from some unknown woman two years ago. No word as to how she “lost” it. Gonna have to talk to that boy about the fundamentals of journalism…

Talking Pictures And Memories In Motion
Got this great birthday gift from my niece the other day, a talking – or in her case, babbling – picture frame.
She’s coming up on her 15th birthday (months that is) and so maybe her mum and dad had something to do with it, like going out, choosing the frame, inserting the picture, trying to coax something out of her once presented with the present, wrapping and then sending it….. but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?
I’m thinking that by the time I’m put in the ground we’ll probably had holographic picture frames with dozens of poses and interactive conversations that can be updated minute-by-minute from our wrist-phone/video-still camera/web browsing devices, which will be great because then we won’t actually have to have any face-to-face or verbal communication with anyone. Ever! Great, yeah?
Yes ladies, its true, the clock is ticking on the soon-to-be obsolete 37-year-old model, eight days and counting now. Wacky. I never figured I’d make it this long, or maybe that’s some bitchy 21-year-old talking shit after one too many pints of Kokanee Gold at Tapley’s in Whistler, at that time the kind of work-a-day tavern where an ignorant and world-weary twenty-something could talk shit without being hauled outside by a table of loggers and throttled till his eyes popped.
Those were some curious days though. My father driving me off the island of Montreal to the wicked big turn where the Trans-Canada kissed off the 417, one heading southwest to Cornwall and Toronto, the later following the Ottawa River to the capitol before the pair, inevitably reconnected somewhere around Sudbury if I’m not mistaken. Or is the Sault?
I wonder if I’d have it to watch my 20-year-old son wander off with a pack on his back onto the ribbon of asphalt cinching together (roughly) St John’s, Newfoundland, and Victoria, BC, 7000+ kms to the west?
Long rides those cool, still-short days in early May. To a North Bay campsite that first giddy night when me and a newly-bought dome tent (this was the first generation of the free standing tents that everyone takes for granted today), a footlong pizza sub, half a dozen Snickers and I almost got blown into the river like a giant blue and grey nylon tumbleweed.
There was the horrible piss smell and the sight of the nicotine yellowed and chronic 70-year-old street alkies naked in the showers at the Sally Ann in Sudbury the next night, where I learned that the men have to bathe and listen to a sermon before they’re allowed to eat. A couple of lost days that included the dreaded trudge up that long hill into Wawa, and the inevitable initials carved into the base of the three-storey-high Canada Goose that stands watch over that shitty little town. The back of the goose is covered with names written, carved and stamped, words, poetry, stories, tales of woe, predictions of madness and early death and always, somewhere, the question, “When Will Someone Stop To Pick Me Up?” Wawa has the distinction – or at least it did back then – of having its place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the place location of the longest hitchhiking layover… seven years if memory serves.
Then Dave from Tennessee picked me up after a bleary night shacked up in the bush a few kms outside of Thunder Bay. Almost didn’t stick my thumb out as there was a diner up the road and I was on the way for coffee and a doughnut before I got too far into the day. We drove together across the deadlands of northern Ontario, a thousand miles of pine forests and Lake Superior, grey skies, fishing lodges – Kenora’s 50-foot fiberglass Muskie – and six-wheeled Ford pick-ups. Over the next four days – the second leg of the break-in process for his new (Japanese-built!!!) pickup with the .45 tucked under the seat, a return trip between Tennessee and Alaska – we worked our way through multiple flats of Coors beer, half a case of Wild Turkey bourbon while getting an education about the nuances of Hank Williams Sr.’s music (all David’s), and a few skins of hash, a bottle of Courvoisier cognac and the nuances of Another Overnight Sensation including a Dynamo Humm sing-along tribute to Frank Zappa (courtesy of me).
It was a blast.
I tried to match his stories of life as a barge pilot on the Mississippi River (and how Southern gals are wild for that Huck Finn shtick) with tales of my previous year’s working travels in Europe and the sexual proclivities of Montreal university girls. Somewhere along the way we may even have brushed up against the truth.
Dave and I split up after something like 4,500 kms together and final beers at a Prince George, B.C. peeler bar, though to this day I regret not taking him up on the offer to head up to the Yukon and Alaska, places I’ve not been to this day.
Those were plenty simple days.
Eventually drifted into Vancouver where I pitched my tent in Stanley Park, spent some time in late summer picking fruit on a farm in the Okanogan where, among other things, I had all my kit stolen and got bit by a rattlesnake, bilked social services out of a September welfare cheque worth $450 – still can’t believe how easy that was – to get me back to Montreal for the start of semester. But, not before a big, blowout weekend party at the Whistler resort, right?
It was 18 months before I saw home again.

Rent-a-cop Follies and PlayDough Dollies

pjdillon@attglobal.net
Much will be written about this story in the days and weeks to come, analysts sifting through the chaff looking for “Capitol M” meaning, critics of contemporary American society will hang windy drafts off it and college campus radio will spoof it again and again. For those unfamiliar with events in rural New York last week, here’s the text as stripped from Saturday’s Times:

Shooting the messenger: lawyer arrested over anti-war T-shirt
FROM ELAINE MONAGHAN IN WASHINGTON
POLICE have arrested a 60-year-old lawyer wearing a T-shirt saying “Give Peace A Chance”. A judge charged Stephen Downs with trespassing after he politely declined to leave the Crossgates Mall in a suburb of Albany, New York State, on Monday evening, or remove his top, which he had had printed there. Mr Downs pleaded not guilty and cited his right to free speech. He could face up to a year in prison. His son, Roger, 31, avoided arrest by removing a T-shirt saying “No War With Iraq” on one side and “Let Inspections Work” on the other. His father’s second offending message was: “Peace On Earth.” “We weren’t talking to people or handing out leaflets,” Mr Downs Jr told a local newspaper. “My point was I’m not trying to convert anybody,” his father said. Most Americans support President Bush’s war plans, but many Democrat voters oppose them. James Murley, the local police chief, told The Times that his office had been inundated with complaints since the arrest. “We’re getting all kinds of e-mails, some of them rather nasty,” he said. Chief Murley said that one of his officers had tried for an hour to persuade Mr Downs to end a stand-off with two security guards who stopped him and his son after a shopper reported a confrontation with passers-by that she thought might turn nasty. But, as one guard pointed out three times in his deposition to police, he did so “in a nice way”. The other guard took a tougher line, alleging that the men were “bothering” shoppers by telling them why they opposed the “pending war with Iraq”. Chief Murley said that the shopping centre had signs advising customers that the “wearing of apparel likely to provoke disturbances” was banned. Paul A. Clyne, the District Attorney, also said that it was up to the mall to choose its clients. However, Mr Downs may have an ace up his sleeve when he appears in court on March 17, with no jury. He is the director of the local office of a state commission that investigates complaints against judges and imposes punishments. END

What can you say about that? Okay, if the guy is wearing a giant red swastika on his chest then you might expect that people would take issue and perhaps he’d end up with his head caved in or in cuffs for creating a public disturbance. But a lick from a John Lennon song? Ummm, perhaps not.
If the cops had any courage they would have arrested the mall manager for wasting their time and bitch slapped the two rent-a-cops so’s they don’t ring up with frivolous crap like this again. The really frightening thing is that given the extent of proliferating privately funded, legally sanctioned militias in the U.S. – mall walkers, armed security patrolling gated communities and businesses, transit cops with search and seizure powers and their own SWAT teams (as in NYC and LA) – and you realize that lawyer is lucky he didn’t end up pepper-sprayed at the least or tazered – 50,000 volts administered via cattle prod – by some doughnut-eating wannabe Soldier of Fortune.
You wonder what kind of world Tim and Aji’s little snapper Imaji is inheriting. Jihan and I attended her third birthday party today. Funny little girl who’ll blather your ear off one day and won’t open her mouth the next. I think she’ll be okay though. Don and Tuti (and 13-month-old Harry) gave her a New Generation Barbie dressed in some sort of opulent emerald colored wrap over an ankle length kilt. The anorexic strip of flesh-hued plastic wasn’t out of the box five minutes and she’d stripped it naked (by the way, nothing gets between Barbie and her kilt) and taken it to the bathroom for a thorough bath.
She spent quite some time and care drying her Barbie before laying it out on the couch and carefully, painstakingly ‘dressing’ her in purple playdough, even trying to knead it into Barbie’s kinky blond hair. Who knows what’s goes on in a kid’s head but if today is any indication, that little girl is going to settle in just fine.

Brother Smithy Takes One For The Team

pjdillon@attglobal.net
I’m not going to say that I knew Milton Smith all that well because I didn’t.
We met once, about six weeks ago, across the bar at the Texas Bar-B-Q, a little-known buleh (albino) joint down at the hind’s teat of the frenetic Jl. Buncit Raya just as it slaps up against the controlled mayhem of the Jakarta ring road.
I can’t even tell you what his exact relationship is with the Texas Bar-B-Q though I’m told he was the owner of the place, that has somehow slipped below the general expat radar here in Eden. Sweet 16 oz sirloins, cold beer from the tap and a staff trained in the vagaries of dealing with a bunch of professional foreigners: hard to believe it took four years to end up in this friggin joint.
All’s I know is that when Nick the Suit and I were the only ones leaning over the Q’s U-shaped planks skulling pints of Bintang one recent Friday, that he was there, all hollowed out and hoarse-throated in a Harley shirt and jeans and, if my patchy post-malarial memory serves, drinking beer with a smoke in his hand.
Of course I may be wrong about the specifics because I wasn’t really watching him too closely as the after-work crowd, which runs from mallet-headed oil-patch workers to corporates whose suits that would set the average Indo back a year’s salary, started filing in. Always the voyeur I suppose.
The smoke and brew I picture might have been a lifetime’s nicotine-tainted negative, the flashed silhouettes of Hiroshima pedestrians thrown up a micro-second after the big blow, a shadow image, the result of protracted decades of abuse. How appropriate in the land of wayang kulit shadow puppets to be able to explain things away so simply.
Despite that air of spent-ness he croaked a “Hello” when Nick introduced me as the newest member of the ex-pat Harley Davidson-riding clan.
So, Smithy didn’t make it to the (Harley Owners Group) HOG-fest fundraiser a couple of weeks ago on account of being so ill, the first time he’d missed it, I’m told.
Died at about dinner time this evening. Cirrhosis. Been sick for a while.
I know he was a Texan, and I wish I had a few words of my own to offer to a drunk I didn’t know but I’m sitting at home and it’s rolling rapidly towards 2 a.m. and I made an executive decision not to roll down to the Q for the first wake because I’m not part of the inner circle.
So I’m gonna scalp some hard, outlaw words for the guy, from the intro to Malcolm Lowrie’s Under the Volcano, a book about a drunk. This is that merciless bastard and wannabe biker John Bunyan, writing in Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners in an age long before the V-twin:
“Now, I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw this and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was that I could not find with all me could that I did desire deliverance.”
It’s a bitch, the sendoff I chose for you Smithy, but we never got the chance to know more, and if I’ve take liberties, sue me. But I figured maybe you wouldn’t mind too much if I ran hard on the double-yellow and told the world to “Fuck Off” in your name.

And by the way, the rest of us are still here, dong, living and shit. Hooking up with Doggy Tim n his lovely wife lovely Aji, Clare and MP and Dave and the toastee, Ginny, who flies the coop Friday for life with the Jakarta mafia in Bangkok. This followed hard by a runner through northern Pakistan, the Chaman border crossing and a couple weeks in Afghanistan, the bitch. Yeah, it’s like a year ago now I was packing my bags for a protracted Kabul gig in a pre-Iraq-invasion-world and I’m a little envious about the road work. Damn. Peace out Ginny.

But are we not all refugees from something? Whether we stay or go or return, we all need refuge from the world beyond our fingertips at some time. When I was asked by a woman at the pub, "Have you come from Africa, away from that wicked Amin?" I said, "No, I am an explorer on a voyage of discovery," as I imagined my Mr. Salgado would have replied. The smoke was thick and heavy like a cloud of yeast spread everywhere. She laughed, touching my arm and moving closer in the dark. A warm Shetland jumper. A slack but yielding skin with patchouli behind the ears. I was learning that human history is always a story about someone else's diaspora: a struggle between those who expel, raid or curtail - possess, divide and rule - and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue.
Romesh Gunesekera
"Reef"

Gearheads, Virgin Trannies and an Arctic Circle Shout

(pjdillon@attglobal.net)
Got my feeble brain around the nuances of linking digi-pix on my can-do laptop with the new printer – big applause for the hp5550, an effin piece of printing excellence – and having a groovy time cranking out images to give my buddy Sasa when we hook up this evening.

The photos came from an October trip to Sumba, a largely forgotten, desiccated island south of Flores (90 minutes southeast of Bali in a shiny new Pelita Airlines Dash-9) and the only blemish on the clean jaw-line of Indonesian islands – 18,018 now that the government has officially “discovered” more than 1,000 new ones – as it sweeps southeast from Sumatra.

For those gear-heads who give a damn about such things, the photos were taken on my co-habitating ugly second cousins, related in the same sense that a Lada and a Ferrari share ‘car-ness’: one the one hand, a battered three-year-old Sony DSC-S50 Cybershot shooting a max of 2.1 mega-pixels which is all the camera most hackers like I need; and on the other, my Formula-1 ride, a three-chip Sony pd-150 digital video cam, shooting vid that makes me look like an overexposed Warren Miller, and with a flip of a button banging off sneaky low rez pix (can you say “Three frames per sec?”).

I’m trying my hand at documentary film-making – among other things – part of the GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS reworking of work and play skills to take me over the rapidly approaching mid-life hump. A dozen years of journalism must be good for something, right? Redefining. Recalibrating. Rediscovering…. etc etc. I need a Hill & Knowlton to come in and spin my life for outside consumption ‘cause when I write it it seems kinda desperate and sad, no rooted concept of home, persistent wanderlust and no obvious pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow.

“Jumping Jehovahs’ Witnesses, Batman, what’re we gonna do for a pension?”
“Easy, Boy Wonder. Worst comes to worst you’ll fetch a handsome price from those khol-eyed Taliban pederasts in Northwest Frontier Province.”

The shots I ran off include one of Sasa draped floor-length thick cotton warp that does multiple duty as a sarong, sweater and sleeping bag, looking for all the world like the Virgin Mary as played by a bearded Spock-eared Balkan transvestite. Unfortunately, this low-rent Blog site does not permit photo posts otherwise…. The second is a moody dawn pic of two fog-shrouded youngsters curled up on top of a 35 ton black of limestone that’s been cut from a hillside, bound with thick vines and loaded on the ‘back’ of a sled made from two large logs, one topped with a carved horse’s head. All this in anticipation of the arrival later in the day of up to 1,000 local men who’ll grab hold of the vine tethers and haul the stone for more than a kilometer across the undulating, dried paddy fields to a future gravesite of a Dameka village traditionalist. The third and final, is my friend sitting up a tree with his long lense trying to get an aerial view of the stone-pullers. Being Indonesian however, the “Albino in the Tree” is wayyyy more interesting than work so he’s is surrounded by several hundred curious, laughing men who have been looking for an excuse not to work for quite some time.

Despite the ensuing Death Match struggles we both waged against varying types of malaria and other associated parasites, imbalances and nasties, it was an excellent, epic trip, one we’ll be using to bore folks to tears for many years to come. It is a beautiful moment.

(As a quick aside, I’m reminded writing here of that scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, after the fat guy explodes in the restaurant. The waiter speaks directly to the camera, inviting it to follow while he shows them ‘ve meaning of ze life.’ On and on we go, trapsing through city traffic, boarding buses – he’s got a white napkin over his forearm – until we are walking with him across a meadow and up a small hill. Below us is a timeless pastoral scene, a picturesque farmer’s cottage shrouded in mist, smoke is puffing merrily from the chimney and it looks warn and inviting. The waiter – was it Michael Palin? – turns to the camera and says, earnestly: ‘Vis iz ze place where I vas born…’ Obviously he is greeted by an incredulous movie audience and realizes immediately that they are mocking him. He gets defensive and attempts to draw us in: ‘Wellll, I know it iz not much but….” And finally sensing he’s the butt of all jokes: “Well zen, well, Fuck You!..” and sets off down the hill with his napkin still affixed to his arm, muttering and swearing to himself in French.)

I wanted to take a moment to send a very special shout out to the Monkeyman, Wolfy, Andy and Dave who leave from Vancouver today, March 1, on the first leg of a six week trip that will see them as early as next week begin the extraordinarily dangerous bicycle trip across more than one thousand kilometers of central Alaska in the dead of winter, the first serious attempt to re-run a trip done by a turn-of-the-century goldrusher, following the Yukon river, then overland to the Bering sea. You can follow all the action and weekly posts on Kev’s expedition website, www.bikesonice.com or by tapping into the websites of the Vancouver Sun (http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/) or Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In what can only be described as a Grinchtour-sanctioned reality check, the biggest challenge the boys face is the weather: IT IS TOO WARM. The hard-pack they would be riding on is starting to turn to elephant snot and the Yukon is threatening to break up early, something that would scuttle the whole project and, very likely, sweep the team downriver in a most unpleasant manner. So guys, here’s hoping the weather is absolutely friggin frigid for you over the next couple of weeks. Peace out and remember: Moose and Elk have the right of way.