Fat Boy and The Battle of Anaconda
pjdillon@attglobal.net
A few weeks back I was blogging on at the gross of numbers and passwords that inhabit our everyday lives. Phone numbers, government numbers, website password alphanumeric combinations, addresses, ages and the like.
Today I’ve another series of numbers, gross on to add to the list.
After much emmming and ahhhing I’ve finally started on a regular routine with a personal trainer, I’ll call him The Pope, lead Inquisitor at The Club of Pain.
I know the whole personal trainer things is so, like, 1988 but I’ve always lolly-gaggled a couple blocks behind the cutting edge, admiring the view, making leaf dams above the sewer grates and taking he piss out of $1,000 Armani’s, automatic transmission and anything remotely Hollywood. So, the 15-year lag is nothing exceptional: I’m still waiting to catch Philip Glass in concert…. ooops.
Of all the numbers I’m now faced with there’s a single that rises above the rest, it’s a number that reflects, for the first time accurately, what exactly has been going on in my life for the past six months. For you slower kids (leave those soggy leaves alone and pull up a stump) who might not have been keeping track, back in November I came down with a wicked double dose of malaria, falciparum and vivax together, that kinda threw me for a loop. I’ve not written about the experience yet (see para above if you’re still confused as to why) but my friends will tell you I’ve bored them to tears with the whole experience, one shared by 10 per cent of humankind annually, though perhaps only a select few hundred thousand get a double whammy.
Since my close encounter with the other side, for I have it on the doctor’s authority that I was one chat away from a free trip to the great concrete half-pipe in the sky, I’ve discovered a renewed taste for life (ahem) and have vigorously applied myself to enjoying it. Which is to say that I’ve done little else but eat since the MDs cleared me to go home back in mid-November and the results are there for all to see.
And so there are two new numbers: the first is 104 kgs (230 lbs for any American Neanderthals out there), my body weight as of 1 pm Monday. And I was no Slim Jim before.
My second new, and terrifying number is 28.8. Actually, it’s 28.8 per cent. Body fat. As in, almost a third of my body is fat. I am in fact a walking, talking, blogging deep-fried, chocolate-coated banana. I should go on tour.
I am John Earl Hughes (check Guinness Book Of World Records… or Ripley’s). In six short months I’ve gained four pant sizes and frankly, even getting into the parachutes I’m wearing now is getting to be a chore. I have actually developed gravity: small objects like Bic lighters, cocktail peanuts and crack vials actually rise up to circle my moon as a pass, tiny pathetic satellites about a malevolent planetary body that might devour them given half the chance.
On a more personal note, I’ve noticed that as the size of one’s gut grows so the relative size and menace of one’s unit appears to shrink. Though I’m not one to obsess about this kind of things (editor: too many hours between the ages of 13 and 24 doing that, methinks!), I have noted a recent medical story that as men age, they can expect to see up to a 30 percent loss in, ummm, real estate, south of the border. Now, I’m no mathematician (or real estate agent) but the combination of tectonic shifts creating vast new tracts of land and shrinking ‘points of interest’ is troubling to my inner dirty-old-man.
I’m not sure how exactly it happened. I eat rice, fish and veggies, admittedly with some real tasty deep-fried items like tempe and perkadel jagung, almost exclusively. I drink beer, enough to account for a bit of a gut, but not the Anaconda wrapped about my waist at the moment. I even get exercise, and was hitting the gym fairly regularly, working my way up to half a dozen three-minute rounds with the heavy bag and pushing railcars worth of weight around several times a week, particularly through February and March, before tailing off.
Maybe it’s because I eat everything on my plate. Maybe because I use as that plate a serving dish fit for a suckling pig… kidding… and Mom taught us to finish our meals on account of the poor starving kids in Africa (editor: sure doughboy, blame yer mother).
More likely it’s the combination of eating really big portions, a lack of commitment to cardio workouts over those forgiving Universal weight contraptions, quitting smoking after two decades on the pipe stirred into a body that’s 38 and running a bit slower than the earlier 16-year-old model that used to wolf down an entire of loaf of bread and half a kg of cheese at a sitting.
Whatever the reason (and if one more person suggests beer I’m gonna blow), it’s about to end. The Pope and I have gone to war with The Anaconda. It’s only Day Three but I’m pretty confident that an aggressive plan of attack, good intel about the snake’s plans and a commitment to keeping rice, deep-frieds and the like off the daily menu is going to make a different over the next few months.
I won’t blog you to death with my progress, this is not some friggin’ masculine version of Bridget Jones Diary, or an out-take from Details or Men’s Health (30 Days To Rock Hard Abs!!!) going on here, but I will on-pass the high points along the way.
Wish The Grinch luck.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Blogged Up On The Island Of The Gods
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Something went badly wrong last week while I was in Bali writing about the opening day of the Amrozi trial, the first of 33 conspirators believed responsible for the Sari Club bomb back on Oct. 12 of last year.
I actually blogged a couple of the stories I wrote, the first for The Globe & Mail and the second, for USA Today. For some reason, neither ended up sticking. Weird because my word-flow is usually sticky enough to adhere to even the most smooth and inhospitable of surfaces. So, in the interests of the public record, and to prove that I actually do work occasionally, here we go again.
NOTE: These are the versions scalped from their papers’ respective web sites. Each has been updated with a brief wire service update, a function of the papers both going to the printers before I’ve woken on this side of the Pacific.
The Globe story, which ran the day after the trial (13-05) is otherwise exactly the same as what I filed, while roughly 200 words have been shorn from the USA Today copy (12-05), mostly street interviews with local residents and tourists, as I’d been requested to do.
They begin below.
Bombing trial begins in Bali
By PAUL DILLON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - Page A15
DENPASAR, INDONESIA -- Two walls of Sisa DeJesus's office, which rests at the edge of a picture-postcard Balinese rice paddy, are covered with the painful memories of the children she works with, the youngest victims of the world's worst terrorist strike since Sept. 11, 2001.
In style, many of the paintings are indistinguishable from the crude products of kindergarten-aged children everywhere -- except that these are the horrific imaginings of youngsters whose parents were killed when Islamic militants detonated a massive car bomb outside a packed nightclub on the resort of Kuta's seedy Legian strip last Oct. 12.
"This little girl Dinda's mother was driving past the Sari Club to pick up her husband at the hotel where he worked when the bomb went off," says Ms. DeJesus, a transplanted New York native, pointing toward a painting that features a wild, airy web of brown spatter tightening to a densely packed riot of red and black at its base. "She told us it's a picture of Mommy's motorbike. She's three years old."
Yesterday marked the opening of the first trial in the Kuta bombing, at a special courtroom in nearby Denpasar, less than two kilometres from the office where Ms. DeJesus works. The court was packed with spectators and guarded by snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs as a police convoy brought the first suspect, Amrozi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, to answer administrative questions from a five-judge panel.
The short proceedings completed, the trial was adjourned until next Monday. But it was a far more significant event for the hundreds of spectators, most of whom watched on two large television screens set up outside the courthouse.
"Let's just kill him. He killed our friends after all," said Wayan Sumerta, a 35-year-old Balinese driver.
Elsewhere, streets were deserted as Balinese watched live on television, a people transfixed by the memories of last October's carnage, in which 202 people died, more than 350 were injured and the island's reputation as a peaceful tourist idyll was forever changed.
Today, there is little evidence that anything untoward happened at the intersection of Jalan Legian and Poppies Lane II, where the bombs went off. Buildings damaged by the blast are being rebuilt or renovated, and a solid green fence separates pedestrian traffic from the empty lot that once held the Sari Club.
There's talk of a memorial of some sort, but the the Kuta strip has slipped back into its seedy persona, a mix of bars and restaurants, high-end surf shops, low-rent T-shirt hawkers ("Osama don't Surf" is a big seller), beggars, hookers and drug dealers.
A middle-aged Balinese man in mirrored shades leaning against a van across the street from the Sari lot is fairly representative of the area's full-time street population. "Hey boss, you wanna buy some hashish, some good hashish?" he says by way of an opening line. "You want transport? You wanna buy a T-shirt? Marijuana?"
Yet the bombing's effects continue to reverberate in Bali, which has long been dependent on tourism. The hotel industry has been ravaged, with some hotels recording single-digit occupancy. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods.
"This bomb before and now SARS has destroyed the economy of Bali," said a Balinese bartender who gives his name as Willi. "For so many years, we were able to look forward to a regular paycheque -- so we had plenty of kids, bought motorbikes and cars and DVD machines. Now no one has any money and we try to sell our stuff to buy food."
It would have been worse but for the loyalty shown by a small core group of repeat visitors, such as Terry McNish and his family, Australians who have been visiting Bali on vacation for years.
"Look, if something is going to happen, mate, it's going to happen. But you can't live your life looking over your shoulder all the time," he said.
END
Bali bombing trial starts Monday
By Paul Dillon, special for USA TODAY
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Ayu Prihana-Dewi was six hours into a busy Saturday night shift as a cashier at the bustling Sari Club when a massive explosion blew out the front of the sprawling nightspot, tossing her across the room.
Terrorists had struck the softest of targets, a Bali nightclub packed with hundreds of vacationers. More than 200 people died, and 350 were injured in the attack Oct. 12. Among the dead: more than 80 Australians, 38 Indonesians and seven Americans.
Today, the first of 33 suspects in the Sari Club bombing will be tried. On the eve of the trial, the last of Prihana-Dewi's physical scars — third-degree burns on her left forearm — have finally healed. Mentally, too, the 22-year-old claims to be making a full recovery, though the prospect of attending the trials makes her shiver.
"For the first few months, if I'd met these terrorist people, I would have killed them," says Prihana-Dewi, who now works with an aid group assisting the families of Balinese victims of the blast. "I've come to understand that the law is there for a reason, so I'm happy to see the trials start."
Indonesian prosecutors will read out a 33-page indictment today against Amrozi bin Nushasim, a small town mechanic from East Java suspected of buying the vehicle and materials used to build the bomb and transporting them to Bali. The trial is expected to last almost five months. It is the long-awaited first phase of criminal proceedings against the 33 men, including two of Amrozi's brothers, suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group dedicated to creating a pan-Islamic state comprising the Philippines, the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.
Several suspects have reportedly confessed to their role in the bombing and said they carried out the operation to avenge the deaths of Muslims elsewhere in the world.
The attack on the Sari Club forced a reluctant Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, into the fight against Islamic extremism. Despite a history of religious tolerance and suspicion of fundamentalist preachers, the sprawling and politically unstable archipelago comprising more than 18,000 islands is seen as the ideal base of operations for regional terror groups — some linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The Indonesian security agency, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in Australia and the USA, rapidly identified and arrested dozens of alleged members of Jemaah Islamiyah. They included most but not all of the principal suspects in the Bali bombing.
Western analysts say Jemaah Islamiyah's ability to operate has been degraded, but it is still in operation. "I think they retain some capacity to network. But it's become very difficult to plan a major strike of the kind we saw in Bali, which involved many meetings in many different places, because now, almost inevitably, one of these meetings is going to be infiltrated," says Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group.
Jemaah Islamiyah's retreat has done little to help Bali. It is dependent on tourism, and the plummeting numbers of visitors has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indonesia also is struggling with separatist movements. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, the government says it will crush a 27-year rebellion despite a 5-month-old Swiss-brokered cease-fire.
Indonesia's military has been pouring troops into the area. It vows to renew fighting if the rebels refuse to meet government demands to put down their weapons and accept autonomy by today.
END
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Something went badly wrong last week while I was in Bali writing about the opening day of the Amrozi trial, the first of 33 conspirators believed responsible for the Sari Club bomb back on Oct. 12 of last year.
I actually blogged a couple of the stories I wrote, the first for The Globe & Mail and the second, for USA Today. For some reason, neither ended up sticking. Weird because my word-flow is usually sticky enough to adhere to even the most smooth and inhospitable of surfaces. So, in the interests of the public record, and to prove that I actually do work occasionally, here we go again.
NOTE: These are the versions scalped from their papers’ respective web sites. Each has been updated with a brief wire service update, a function of the papers both going to the printers before I’ve woken on this side of the Pacific.
The Globe story, which ran the day after the trial (13-05) is otherwise exactly the same as what I filed, while roughly 200 words have been shorn from the USA Today copy (12-05), mostly street interviews with local residents and tourists, as I’d been requested to do.
They begin below.
Bombing trial begins in Bali
By PAUL DILLON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - Page A15
DENPASAR, INDONESIA -- Two walls of Sisa DeJesus's office, which rests at the edge of a picture-postcard Balinese rice paddy, are covered with the painful memories of the children she works with, the youngest victims of the world's worst terrorist strike since Sept. 11, 2001.
In style, many of the paintings are indistinguishable from the crude products of kindergarten-aged children everywhere -- except that these are the horrific imaginings of youngsters whose parents were killed when Islamic militants detonated a massive car bomb outside a packed nightclub on the resort of Kuta's seedy Legian strip last Oct. 12.
"This little girl Dinda's mother was driving past the Sari Club to pick up her husband at the hotel where he worked when the bomb went off," says Ms. DeJesus, a transplanted New York native, pointing toward a painting that features a wild, airy web of brown spatter tightening to a densely packed riot of red and black at its base. "She told us it's a picture of Mommy's motorbike. She's three years old."
Yesterday marked the opening of the first trial in the Kuta bombing, at a special courtroom in nearby Denpasar, less than two kilometres from the office where Ms. DeJesus works. The court was packed with spectators and guarded by snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs as a police convoy brought the first suspect, Amrozi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, to answer administrative questions from a five-judge panel.
The short proceedings completed, the trial was adjourned until next Monday. But it was a far more significant event for the hundreds of spectators, most of whom watched on two large television screens set up outside the courthouse.
"Let's just kill him. He killed our friends after all," said Wayan Sumerta, a 35-year-old Balinese driver.
Elsewhere, streets were deserted as Balinese watched live on television, a people transfixed by the memories of last October's carnage, in which 202 people died, more than 350 were injured and the island's reputation as a peaceful tourist idyll was forever changed.
Today, there is little evidence that anything untoward happened at the intersection of Jalan Legian and Poppies Lane II, where the bombs went off. Buildings damaged by the blast are being rebuilt or renovated, and a solid green fence separates pedestrian traffic from the empty lot that once held the Sari Club.
There's talk of a memorial of some sort, but the the Kuta strip has slipped back into its seedy persona, a mix of bars and restaurants, high-end surf shops, low-rent T-shirt hawkers ("Osama don't Surf" is a big seller), beggars, hookers and drug dealers.
A middle-aged Balinese man in mirrored shades leaning against a van across the street from the Sari lot is fairly representative of the area's full-time street population. "Hey boss, you wanna buy some hashish, some good hashish?" he says by way of an opening line. "You want transport? You wanna buy a T-shirt? Marijuana?"
Yet the bombing's effects continue to reverberate in Bali, which has long been dependent on tourism. The hotel industry has been ravaged, with some hotels recording single-digit occupancy. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods.
"This bomb before and now SARS has destroyed the economy of Bali," said a Balinese bartender who gives his name as Willi. "For so many years, we were able to look forward to a regular paycheque -- so we had plenty of kids, bought motorbikes and cars and DVD machines. Now no one has any money and we try to sell our stuff to buy food."
It would have been worse but for the loyalty shown by a small core group of repeat visitors, such as Terry McNish and his family, Australians who have been visiting Bali on vacation for years.
"Look, if something is going to happen, mate, it's going to happen. But you can't live your life looking over your shoulder all the time," he said.
END
Bali bombing trial starts Monday
By Paul Dillon, special for USA TODAY
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Ayu Prihana-Dewi was six hours into a busy Saturday night shift as a cashier at the bustling Sari Club when a massive explosion blew out the front of the sprawling nightspot, tossing her across the room.
Terrorists had struck the softest of targets, a Bali nightclub packed with hundreds of vacationers. More than 200 people died, and 350 were injured in the attack Oct. 12. Among the dead: more than 80 Australians, 38 Indonesians and seven Americans.
Today, the first of 33 suspects in the Sari Club bombing will be tried. On the eve of the trial, the last of Prihana-Dewi's physical scars — third-degree burns on her left forearm — have finally healed. Mentally, too, the 22-year-old claims to be making a full recovery, though the prospect of attending the trials makes her shiver.
"For the first few months, if I'd met these terrorist people, I would have killed them," says Prihana-Dewi, who now works with an aid group assisting the families of Balinese victims of the blast. "I've come to understand that the law is there for a reason, so I'm happy to see the trials start."
Indonesian prosecutors will read out a 33-page indictment today against Amrozi bin Nushasim, a small town mechanic from East Java suspected of buying the vehicle and materials used to build the bomb and transporting them to Bali. The trial is expected to last almost five months. It is the long-awaited first phase of criminal proceedings against the 33 men, including two of Amrozi's brothers, suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group dedicated to creating a pan-Islamic state comprising the Philippines, the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.
Several suspects have reportedly confessed to their role in the bombing and said they carried out the operation to avenge the deaths of Muslims elsewhere in the world.
The attack on the Sari Club forced a reluctant Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, into the fight against Islamic extremism. Despite a history of religious tolerance and suspicion of fundamentalist preachers, the sprawling and politically unstable archipelago comprising more than 18,000 islands is seen as the ideal base of operations for regional terror groups — some linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The Indonesian security agency, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in Australia and the USA, rapidly identified and arrested dozens of alleged members of Jemaah Islamiyah. They included most but not all of the principal suspects in the Bali bombing.
Western analysts say Jemaah Islamiyah's ability to operate has been degraded, but it is still in operation. "I think they retain some capacity to network. But it's become very difficult to plan a major strike of the kind we saw in Bali, which involved many meetings in many different places, because now, almost inevitably, one of these meetings is going to be infiltrated," says Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group.
Jemaah Islamiyah's retreat has done little to help Bali. It is dependent on tourism, and the plummeting numbers of visitors has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indonesia also is struggling with separatist movements. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, the government says it will crush a 27-year rebellion despite a 5-month-old Swiss-brokered cease-fire.
Indonesia's military has been pouring troops into the area. It vows to renew fighting if the rebels refuse to meet government demands to put down their weapons and accept autonomy by today.
END
Monday, April 28, 2003
The Numbers Game And A Bombing Shame
email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.
email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.
Monday, April 14, 2003
Time For A Cut
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
It's The Vision Thing, Stupid
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
New Trick For An Ol Dawg And Hounds At The Gate
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
The Reason Why
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Bali nights and microb-bites
pjdillon@attlgobal.net
Marvelous to take a break from the war for a few days, kibitzing in the gardens of the Hyatt Sanur in Bali, a curriculum involving full-contact mid-afternoon naps, lounging poolside 4.0, and several advanced courses in stuffing one’s face with seafood under starry skies.
Barely left the manicured jungle with its swaying palms, wok-sized pink lotus blossoms, nimble sandpipers, and several curious species of obese, thong-wearing and amorous German tourists.
Did slip out after Sunday’s post-wedding reception plunge into a Java Sea warm as breast milk, to quaff a few beers and over-iced double Black Labels at a nearby and empty bar/resto. Just when Bali starts to climb back out of the pit dug by a couple hundreds keys of ammonium nitrate back in October, along comes a war (and this SARS) to empty out the planes from Sydney, Singapore and Amsterdam yet again.
Also got it together to hop a pre-packaged, air-conned magic bus for the hour’s drive up to the artist’s colony in Ubud, though I’m not sure it is still accurate to call it that as much of what you can see is more of the same, smiling wooden cats with black and white striped scarves, hairy Balinese masks and poor-quality cotton and silk dresses. Regardless, swanned about the shopping area oblivious to custom before collapsing in a heap at a little bistro for some rejuvenating chilly malt liquor rehydration products and a chat with Daniel and his formidable new, sloe-eyed beau Natalie, fresh from Canadian foreign affairs in TelAviv.
The morning of their wedding, Dian and Josh performed the cleansing ritual known as Siraman beneath festive red and yellow umbrellas inside one of the hotel’s open-air spa rooms. I understand Siraman is practiced throughout Java though each regency has a slightly different twist, in their case of the Sundanese variety as that is Dian’s heritage.
Josh sat bare-chested in a fine red batik sarong waiting for his bride who entered walking on a length of cloth scattered with flower petals, her father in front holding a five-part candelabra “lighting the way to the future” followed by Dian, who was held close by and bound by a length of batik cloth to her mother. Together mum and dad lead Dian in meet her husband. She was wearing a sarong and beaded blouse with a “vest” made of woven, aromatic melati (jasmine) flower buds.
Together Josh and Dian bowed at their parent’s feet to ask for their blessings and then washed their feet, which sounds kinda cheesy but in fact was quite touching, revealing or perhaps creating the closeness and bond that’s often only found in ritual, divorced from the crash and bang of the ‘real’ world.
Once their parent’s feet were toweled off, the couple took their seats and one-by-one, from the nuclear center outwards to aunts and cousins, members of both families ‘bathed’ the pair with a simple coconut shell ladle dipped into a water and flower-filled pot (seven blossoms by custom).
Once the families had bathed them, Josh and Dian were deemed ready for the wedding proper, a stripped down Catholic affair on the beach at sunset, presided over by a Indonesian Jesuit priest.
Very nice, gentle affair in keeping with the couple’s low-key way. We ate, danced a bit and once the newlyweds booked for the evening, headed for a moonlight dip in the Java Sea.
Monday, J and I hung poolside, played a bit of ping-pong and got ready to head back to the Big Durian.
Though greatly looking forward to hooking up with my former work colleague of three years, Dave, (see www.surreyleader.com) who has been doing some swanning of his own these past five months, traveling throughout Asia on an ever diminishing leave-of-absence, yesterday’s return trip was sobered by the realization ground-staff in Jakarta were wearing white paper masks against the SARS being transported in by wealthy Singaporeans on their weekend sex and sun holidays on the Island of the Gods.
No small irony in the fact that the fear here in Indonesia is that infected businessmen from the Matrix-esque city state (stare at the steel and glass highrises long enough and they’ll start to shimmer and bend, ultimately disappearing to reveal Singapore’s true nature, methinks) are going to spread a virus that this country is simply not equipped to deal with. Of course, the same Singaporean businessmen and their local cronies are principally responsible for raping this country’s natural resources over the past thirty years so that they’re bringing another blight upon Indonesia might have been anticipated.
True to form, the government won’t respond until it’s too late ('Emergency response plan is ready and… will be announced in a few days' to paraphrase the Health Minister’s recent announcement) possibly giving the disease all the time it’ll need tear a hole in the most populous island on the planet.
The warnings gained new urgency today with the news that the first SARS victim to manifest in Jakarta – a Singaporean teacher – has died in the past few hours. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic. The epidemiologists and bug-hunters at the Center for Disease Control said a while ago that without immediate and drastic action (the slaughter of millions of fowl) the chicken flu in Hong Kong (1996, 97?) would have mutated beyond recognition very rapidly, for the first time raising the whole spectre of a global epidemic similar to that of the pneumonia winters of 1917 and 1918 when literally hundreds of thousands died in the space of a few weeks as the disease broke like consecutive waves across Central and South Asia. We’ve seen those grainy b/w pix from Philadelphia and Boston: hundreds of blanketed bodies stacked like cordwood in parks.
Am I the only one who’s got that queasy feeling we might be looking at a similar thing here?
Monday, March 24, 2003
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.
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.
Thursday, March 20, 2003
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?”
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?”
Monday, March 17, 2003
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?
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?
Sunday, March 16, 2003
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
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
Thursday, March 13, 2003
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…
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…
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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.
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.
Saturday, March 08, 2003
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.
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.
Thursday, March 06, 2003
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.
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.
Monday, March 03, 2003
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"
Romesh Gunesekera
"Reef"
Saturday, March 01, 2003
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.
(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.
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