Cosmic Karma, Cosmo Kramer and Underpants Ecstasy

On Bali last week we had a tour guide, Darma (yes, as in Dharma), who had a lot of very insightful stories about growing up in a rustic Balinese village, the island’s traditional society, and the challenges and changes his island faces. For someone wearing a tight-fitting blue tracksuit and who seemed to be concealing a dark past in the Javanese cruise-ship industry, he was remarkably wise.

During our tour, in between un-called-for and frankly gut-wrenching attempts to get us to laugh at a ghastly pun which involved asserting that “BBC” stood for “bananas, bamboo and coconuts”, the puckish yet insightful Darma lucidly described the way that the close-knit village unit perpetuates and preserves traditional Balinese life and ritual, and it really got me thinking. What proportion of what we see as the great achievements of humanity was simply due to old-fashioned peer pressure?

In other words, would any human society, religion, or cultural system of any kind have been possible without the nosy neighbor? I’m not so sure. In fact if you think about it, until recently in almost every nation on Earth, the idea that one of the main points in life was not doing something which would shock the neighbors was the glue which kept the world running. It’s how pyramids and cathedrals got built. Shame. Guilt. Conformity. Religious obligation. Rituals. Holidays. Mass gatherings. Belonging. Ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, was also the birthplace of ostracism.

Now, however, mainstream American society is currently based on the idea that nosy neighbors should mind their own damn business, and in fact are liable to get a cap in their ass if they get too nosy. We were raised to believe that the other people around us have no right to tell us jack, and are simply useless lumps to be ignored, exploited or possibly pumped full of lead on our quest to become a President, a billionaire or both. We’re encouraged to think that each American citizen should personally invent his or her own entire outlook on life from scratch without consulting family or the neighbors at all.

As a lifelong ostracised oddball and someone who deeply, deeply detests conformity for conformity’s sake I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m starting to wonder if maybe a little more German-style shame wouldn’t be an improvement on the current US outlook. I’m not advocating a return to putting people in stocks or forcing them to wear the shame flute, but I am starting to think that there must be a happy medium in between the antisocial American “individualism at any cost” ideal and the Balinese-style community and religious web of obligations and rituals.

I sometimes wish I had more traditions in my life so I didn’t feel like the proper way to spend an afternoon off is to sit motionless in front of the TV in my underwear. But on the other side of the argument, there are probably thousands of Balinese people who wish with all their hearts they could renounce their majestic time-honored religion and colorful rituals and just sit around in their underwear all day. The answer probably lies somewhere in between, in that magical, elusive place where ancient superstitious ritual meets modern jockey shorts. I think that’s where I want to be.

The Pregnant Sheep

A Short, Short Story

Written as a writing process project for one of my graduate school classes.

The northern wind chafes my nose and ears. It’s bitter cold on the barren ridge. The rest of my group is clustered downhill, away near the bus. When the wind picks up, I can’t hear them at all. I will myself to believe that it’s two thousand years ago, that I’ve been assigned to guard this frontier against the barbarians. It doesn’t work. Sleepy, hungry and growing cold in spite of my sweater, I am undeniably here, now, in my head, with my thoughts – and my imagination is clearly out of order. Hadrian’s Wall, once a triumph of military engineering, is too low and mossy to seem anything other than quaint. I feel transfixed in the present, and it’s impossible to forget the rest of the group, or the bus. Picking my way unsteadily along the low, broad, jumbled top of the Wall – am I supposed to be doing this? – I move further from the group, and from Kim.

The muted, autumnal English countryside all around is beautiful, but I feel disappointed in the site, in my lack of imagination. This same feeling of curdled anticipation was even worse at Stonehenge earlier this year. I felt nothing looking at it. That’s not true – I felt betrayed. The rocks looked small and somehow artificial. This is less of a letdown, because the Wall isn’t as iconic a sight, but it’s a similar, familiar feeling. I know that berating myself for insufficient awe is absurd, that I should just relax and take everything in, but it’s no use. I’m so preoccupied with analyzing my own feelings and worrying about idiotic details, like a tooth that seems to be getting sensitive and a floating thing in one of my eyes, that I am unable to enjoy the moment. I look away from the bus, off into the fields and into the misty distance. It seems as if it might rain soon. The floating thing inside of my eye bobs up and down in agreement.

A small flock of sheep is grazing on the hillside, with the ancient Roman wall serving as boundary of their enclosure. I hop down from the wall because the next section is too dilapidated to walk upon, and I see a sheep, perhaps 15 feet away, sprawled motionless on its side. Its hindquarters are towards me, and I can see that it is giving birth. Part of a wet membraneous sac is protruding from the sheep, and as I approach I can see the damp folded limbs of the lamb inside. The mother sheep is breathing rapidly, and its eyes are rolling wildly in its head. I stand motionless and watch for a minute. I have never seen anything giving birth firsthand, at least not that I can remember. After some unproductive spasming the ewe’s breathing slows, and its head drops to the damp grass below. It’s clearly exhausted. Kim comes up and we watch together. Neither animal is moving very much, and the mother is breathing very slowly. I have no knowledge of ovine obstetrics but something about the resigned rise and fall of its ribs, the limp splay of its legs on the brownish turf, makes me think the mother sheep has been trapped here in the same position for quite some time. Perhaps hours. “Maybe I should pull out the baby or something – like they always do on TV,” I venture. “Maybe... I have no idea,” Kim says. I stare at the sheep for another minute.

This was my first trip to the north of England. We had all driven up that morning in the bus from Ambleside, in the Lake Country. I was studying abroad in London for the semester, and this was our big group trip. The lakes and Hadrian’s Wall. The Lake Country was beautiful, and we’d just seen Wordsworth’s cottage. These might have been boring destinations for most 20-year-olds, and indeed probably were for some of my classmates, but my girlfriend Kim was visiting and we were enjoying the time together. The long hours in the rented bus (or “coach,” as they called it), however, made me feel queasy and detached from everything. I had always been interested in Roman history, and Roman Britain in particular. Back in London I had sought out museums and sites with Roman remains. But it seemed like a chore to muster enthusiasm for Hadrian’s Wall.

I had trouble mustering enthusiasm for a lot of things that year, actually. Living and studying in London had been wonderful, but as the year had progressed I had been feeling more and more distant from the world around me. I was friends with several of the people on the program, but only up to a point. I enjoyed my classes and exploring London’s streets, but I also felt overwhelmed easily and spent a lot of time reading in my room. I had hardly taken any trips outside the city, and I felt guilty about not taking better advantage of being abroad. When I had free time I would take long walks through the city, usually ending up in a record store and often buying CDs, which was another occasion to feel guilty. They had CDs back in America.

Thus, on the trip to Hadrian’s Wall I was feeling very strange after several months of exciting, educational London life which was, somehow, becoming tainted by vague, creeping unease. The fact that Kim was there made me feel much, much better, but I still felt slightly odd, as if I were watching the world from behind a pane of glass. The long bus rides behind an actual pane of glass didn’t help.

I look at the panting sheep, unable to come to a decision. Aside from our group there’s no one in sight for miles around. I certainly don’t see a gruff farmer or kindly local vet. Kim looks up at me. A chain of thoughts rush in circles through my head.

The sheep seems to be having trouble giving birth.
Should I help in some way?
I have no idea.
I don’t want to get my sweater dirty.
What if I made things worse?
I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a dead lamb.
Better not to interfere.
Maybe I would pull too hard and pull its leg off or something.
And what if I got goop on my sweater?
I just bought this sweater.
It wasn’t an expensive sweater, but I’d have to first take it off.
And then my hair would get all messed up.
Or I could push up the sleeves...
But then wouldn’t the elastic on the wrists get stretched out?
Is this sweater wool?
Maybe I could sort of poke it with a branch, or...
No, it would have to be hands-on.
What is that stuff? Placenta?
Forget it. This is none of my business.
That’s just an excuse. You’re just scared.
But it’s none of my business.
I’ve seen several instances on TV where someone had to pull a baby farm animal out of the mother.
Shouldn’t I do that?
But I have no idea what to do or how to do it.
What would I do with my sweater?

I do not move. I do nothing. The mother sheep’s side slowly rises and falls as it labors to breathe.

As far as I know, I am sentencing both animals to death. Standing and thinking instead of helping. What’s wrong with me? Do other people have this problem? I get a nauseous feeling that tells me that somehow I’ve made the wrong choice, but I can’t make myself do it differently. I’m still standing just feet away but somehow it’s already too late. I had a choice, and I did nothing, simply because doing nothing was the easiest thing to do. I wonder if I saw a human being in need of help, if my nerve would fail me like this. How can I make myself do the right thing? My current method clearly needs work. I’m disgusted at my hesitation, but instead of spurring me to action the disgust makes me want to put the whole situation behind me.

A thought flashes: I haven’t turned away yet; maybe there’s still a chance. Forget the damn sweater and just pull on that baby lamb placenta or whatever that is. The moment passes. The pane of glass descends, the floating thing in my eye pirouettes with glee. It’s time to put this all behind us. As I turn away I feel a dull, toxic satisfaction in having taken the easy route, a poisonous contentment that blossoms black and oily within my brain. I begin to forget that I ever had a choice to make. There was nothing that could have been done. It was none of your business.

“Let’s go back to the bus,” I say to Kim. “I’m getting cold out here.”

Second Life Kind Of Sucks

I have been hearing about this online multiplayer thing called Second Life for a while, and I thought I’d check it out. Big mistake. It goes VERY VERY slowly, at least on my connection, and the program crashes about once every ten minutes. But it seems interesting enough that I keep wanting to try to get it running again, so I get trapped in a hellish, tantalising cycle of waiting and crashing and more crashing and then even more further crashing and rebooting the likes of which have not been seen since I tried to run Rebel Assault on my old 486.

The idea is, people can buy virtual real estate for ten bucks a month or whatever and sublet it, and also create any sort of items they want in the simulation and try to sell them to other people, so the bottom line is the thing supposedly has a GNP of 64 million $US. Seems interesting. I’m not sure I see how the economy works yet. People being what they are, I assume people have found some way to use the simulation for pretend sex while pretending to be various furry animals.

But as I say, it hardly works on my computer. At this point, I’ve got all the graphics options turned as far down as I can get them, and I seem to be barely able to inch my little guy around at a snail’s pace. Half the time he keeps walking in one direction forever and ends up at the bottom of the sea. And then I get booted out of the program. So if you have a fast intarweb connection and a good graphics card, please check the thing out and report back to me. It’s free to create a little character guy. Mine looks more or less like me when I’m dressed for work, except for the tiny details that he doesn’t have glasses and I have him CARRYING A MUTHAFREAKIN SWORD. I really wish the program worked better for me, because strolling around as a virtual version of myself with a goddamned sword is pretty much my lifelong dream.

ease myself into... a body bag

There’s a scene from the movie The Fly that burned itself into my brain. I assume the same thing happened to many of you. You know the scene I mean. Try as hard as I might, I haven’t been able to forget it. It’s the thrilling moment when Jeff Goldblum shows off his wardrobe to the girl. It’s full of several copies of the same outfit, and he says some probably made-up thing about how Einstein wore the same suit every day to save brain power, and that that’s what he does as well.

Whether or not that b.s. about Einstein was true didn’t matter. I immediately felt a connection to the Seth Brundle theory of sartorial simplicity. I wanted to wear the same thing every day. I wanted a uniform. Preferably some sort of ninja costume.

“To save brain power” would be the official reason. The actual reason would be so that I could sleep later and not have to spend time rummaging through annoying piles of itchy, heavy fabric in the morning. I knew that that time could be better used for sleeping. And I can’t stand rummaging. If stuff is on hangers, I always somehow knock it off, and from somewhere along the rod something gives way and all my ties slither onto the floor and shoot off in all directions like a Biblical plague. If the clothes are in piles, the sh*t I want is always far, far towards the bottom, and rummaging through the piles unfolds all the other stuff, and the pile is now somehow half a foot higher than before, and the damn drawer won’t close. I don’t know about you but I’d rather be sleeping than full body wrestling a floppy heap of textiles, thanks. Not to mention that having an official outfit would save me the humiliation of that yearly trip to Bob’s with mom to buy new jams or parachute pants or what have you.

It’s 15 or 20 years later and the dream has not died. Sure, some elements have changed. For example, I now know that Steve Jobs has used a similar approach to clothing, and there’s just something so annoying about Steve Jobs that it almost ruins the monoutfit concept. Also, with the passing years the annual back-to-school shopping trip has turned into a shameful biannual screaming match where Kim tries to convince me that I should buy this or that, and I try to convince her that I am doing just fine with my old clothes. Often I am so violently outraged at having to take off my pants in a shopping mall and carefully measure how much fatter, in inches, I’ve gotten since the last shopping trip, and then pay someone for the honor, that Kim will actually have to buy the clothes for me. I usually end up liking the new clothes eventually, but shopping is such a disgusting ordeal that in the store I am always convinced that no horrible little scraps of fabric are worth that humiliation. Or that money. I’d rather stick with my old clothes. Even if they have worn so thin that the fabric at the knees and crotch is essentially a cobweb or the sheerest of fairy gossamer.

Another compelling reason which I’ve added to my one-outfit theory over recent years: I want some dignity, dammit. Let me explain. First off, I’ve never been a very dignified person. I do not always know which fork to use. I do not carry myself with poise or hauteur. I have been known to slip on icy pavement, walk into glass doors and I have repeatedly picked violent fights with old men in public. And I have worn a t-shirt, jeans and sneakers on most of the days of my life. Nothing wrong with that. But, secondly, living and travelling in other countries has sort of shown me that there’s something I’m lacking. As are most Americans. We have no clothing dignity. We’re slobs in random ugly clothing. Many of us in fact wear only items of clothing with the prefix “sweat-”. If you look at people in the Middle East for example, a lot of them have clothing dignity coming out their ears. A white robe topped with a turban or headscarf makes any random dinar-less schmuck on the street look like the Pope.

Or look at Indian women and saris. They’re basically wearing ancient Roman togas – just a big sheet, really – except with noserings, and it gives an immense aura of importance. I’d just as soon mess with one of them as I’d talk back to Caesar’s wife. Yes, their love handles are hanging out, but darn it they’re hanging out with dignity. Another example – kids in school uniforms look civilized and studious, then when you see them in their normal clothes they look like little imbeciles and jerks. I guess that’s my point – I’m from a country where adults dress like kids who get to pick their own wardrobe. We have no traditions, no urge to dress a certain way, and that has its good aspects but detracts a lot from our clothing dignity.

Anyway, I have no point here except to say that I am trying to turn over a new bolt and am actively working to select and refine my uniform. It’s a work in progress. This summer at school I wore the same thing every day by necessity because I didn’t want to pack too much, but as it involved Converse high-tops and orange shorts, it wasn’t really the most dignified uniform. But it was a start. It is getting late and I’d better stop writing now. I had hoped to add pictures of my actual clothes to add to the excitement. Maybe later. Perhaps in future updates I will continue to elaborate on my unique and fascinating ideas about haberdashery. Now back to sewing my ninja costume.

My Beard of Bees

Indelicate as it might be for a prim young débutante like myself to broach the subject: I perspire rather a lot, here in the primaeval ur-walds of the Federated Malay Territories.

Actually, I don’t perspire. I sweat. Like a frickin hog. I sweat like Nixon’s jowls on debate night. I sweat like Lance Armstrong’s handsome, leather-bound Balzac. I sweat like a cold can of soda on a coasterless coffee table. I sweat so much that my droplets of sweat have tiny droplets of sweat. I sweat so much that by the end of the day the salt incrustations on my t-shirt look like a topographical chart of the Grand Tetons. I sweat constantly, from every pore, even when the fan’s on full blast. It pours off me in cascading sheets of salty, gelatinous filth. I sweat on the balcony. I sweat in the kitchen. I sweat in the bathroom. I sweat WHILE I’M SHOWERING. I hate it.

A lesser man than I, a man whose diet consisted of fewer deep-fried poultry appendages prepared according to the receipt of a certain Col. Harlan Sanders, might have lost weight after all this sweating, but I have not. I think I briefly did, right after we moved here, but it’s all back now, and it’s some kind of perverse vicious cycle because the more fatty folds and flaps I have, the more places for the sweat to seep from, and the more I feel like a Hutt under the merciless gaze of Tatooine’s twin suns.

If this keeps up all I’m going to be able to do is loll grotesquely in a rattan chair on some seedy veranda in a seersucker suit and straw hat, impotently fanning myself and grunting for the cabana boy to bring me another Pernod. Now I see how those guys get like that.

Anyway, for the first six to eight months of my Malaysian sojourn I tried to pay no heed to my incredibly amplified dampness. Water off a duck’s back, I told myself. And yet it was not water, and I was not a duck.

So a few months ago I started to develop a fiery itchiness in several key bodily areas, including the crook of my elbows, behind my ears, and – most tragically – the greasy folds of my neck. Was there a fungus among... me? I suspected so. This was more than simple heat rash. As someone with very little interest in bossing about menials and a blinding paranoia about having strangers in his apartment, I have been carrying out the duties of scullery wench this year, and one afternoon after mopping the apartment in an unbearable agony of sweat and heat, I felt as if my entire body were on fire. I itched, and scratched, and on and on the sweat poured like sweet salty honey from a really gross beehive. The next day, I was all red and puffy.

Thus began my long, slow acceptance of my heat rash, or fungus, or whatever the hell it is. I now try not to move at all, in order not to upset the fiery demon that slumbers within my own skin. My neck is especially itchy, and I spent over a month slathering antifungal crème on it – and now I think the only problem with my neck might have been that I was allergic to the antifungal crème. Either way, it’s itchin like the Dickens. I feel like I’m wearing some sort of mediaeval German neck shame chastity belt. When I walk down the street, I feel as if people can see my crimson, pulsating laryngeal hives from hundreds of yards away.

Yet the one time I went to the doctor to ask about my neck, it suddenly turned smooth and milky-white as a marble statue. She looked at me as if I were utterly barking mad. “I don’t see anything on your neck”, she drawled suspiciously, peering at me as if I were one of those Munchausen Neck Syndrome By Neck Proxy patients she’d heard about on 20/20. I retreated in shame, scratching feverishly at my blazingly inflamed neck-flesh.

And so I come to my present sad condition. Do I have a neck fungus? Probably not. Do I have a neck condition brought on by allergic reaction to neckily-applied antifungal crème? Possibly. All I know is that my frigging neck is really, really, REALLY ITCHY. And covered in sweat.