Stray Shot

This is interesting.  I got rid of the television and found that anything I want to watch is on the computer, without all the ads and by the segment I want to see.  Right now I am watching the coverage of hearings on Goldman Sachs and picking a guitar in a sort of absent way.  And because I’m watching this on my computer now it has moved into the background and my relationship to it has changed.  I can now watch the hearings and simultaneously write text on a shared screen.  You might ask how I’m writing this and picking a guitar at the same time.  I have my shoes off and am typing with my toes.

I am watching Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma.

This guy is like a hawk fluffing up in front of some chipmunks.   He has them nervous; the timing changed and the yuppie royal pacing went to hell.  I think it was when he told one kid, who was venturing into believing he’s as smart in front of these old men as in front of the man in the mirror,   to quit assuming they’re ignorant, and it hit home because it was already home.  It was a zen thing, where the arrow has already hit the mark congruent with the release.

Now it goes back to Levin.  It’s like tag team wrestling.  Levin has a really big head and he needs it for the brain.  Coburn slapped them around and now they have a different look about them.  It must be hard for these guys to get millions in bonuses and not think they are actually smarter than people who make a half million.  I remember watching the Watergate hearings, and there was no theater on Broadway with a more entertaining lead and supporting cast.

Levin is like the king who is visiting his gold.  He is rich in evidence that these guys were taking care of the company and not their customers.  The idea is to make money, not to have any particular ethical relationship with the society or even the American economy.  It is all about the firm, and these guys are  in a corporation so large it has its own culture.  Watching these hearings is like going on a  safari through corporate culture.   I remember when they released the tapes of the Enron traders celebrating the cornering of the utilities market.   The first step is always hiring some ex cops and paying off the ones on the beat, whether it’s the neighborhood or the nation.

Tourre is getting his ass kicked.  He was in the structured products division.  In a way I empathize with him because he feels that if he can give more context it won’t sound so bad as it does the way Levin presents it.  I suppose that’s like kids trying to explain things at the door of the woodshed.

This is interesting, to have the television on the screen with the word processor.  I can tune in and out of it because anybody with a computer and internet can do the same thing I’m doing, and pull them up on the network website.  I’m watching them on MSNBC.  Sometime before I go to bed I’ll go to Comedy Central and watch Stewart and Colbert.  I not only don’t miss having television separated off from the computer, I’m wondering why I didn’t see the central issue sooner.   No matter how many channels or how big and pretty the picture it renders the viewer passive.

Move the television back into the computer and it is just one more program running.  That works the way I watch it anyway because mostly I am interested in things like these hearings, which I can monitor while doing something else simultaneously, like this … writing at the same time on a page beside the picture.  Colburn is working one of these guys over again.  He’s the bad cop.  When he’s smacked them a couple of times it passes back to Levin.  Good cop.  And very smart cop.

What I like about this is watching really good lawyers … actually I think Coburn is a doctor so I should say, interrogators … work without resorting to torture.  They don’t need it.   Sam Ervin was 76 when he chaired the Watergate hearings, and he took Nixon’s boys to the woodshed.  He was the patriarch, like Walter Brennan,  and James Baker was Luke.  Peppino?  That was Lindsey Graham.  There was not a Hatfield left standing.

Got to go to In N Out Burger now.

Wherein we get to drive 100 mph with a textile designer, his Chinese wife, and a designer of containment rituals.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:30 — 3.0MB)

Today I took dad to Cottonwood to his cardiac fitness class and then to lunch.  There was a problem with the car — a hose came loose and spilled coolant onto the engine — and we had to wait together while it was fixed.  Dad began to tell the story of his prostate cancer, and I marveled, as usual, at how the construction is modular, and each module is fitted  to its appropriate slot, like a Rubic’s Cube seeking an entropy free state.

Sometimes I feel trapped in the story because I’ve heard it so many times, but on the other hand I can’t just tell him that, because at his age he might need to repeat these stories as a way to maintain the patterning function of his brain.  He does seem to maintain a relatively sharp mind.  It’s his feeling side that’s somewhat inexperienced, having found lodgings in his wife for more than sixty-three years.  He’s 92.

I recall Don Juan telling Carlos that he needed to find the  stories from his life which have a universal application.  I am wondering about the prostate cancer story.  It seems to lack universal application, and be more locked into memory because of the simultaneity of strong emotion:  fear.  I think of other stories which seem more worth saving, such as one in which he and a friend used trotlines to recover the body of a young girl who’d drowned in the Tennessee River, while the bread was being cast on the waters by larger boats.   They brought her up and  propped her upright in the boat, a snow white corpse, while they  rowed back to shore.  They had aboard with them a minister, who behaved as if he was afraid of putting his hands on the corpse.

Ministers often play a shadow role in his stories, when they appear, though there are also good ones.  He tells of his grandfather’s funeral.  In earlier days, he and the old man walked all around their little Tennessee town together,  dad packing the tools.  While great grandfather Euton  was a master carpenter, he couldn’t read, and his schoolteacher wife would read the paper to him in the mornings while he had his coffee.  He was a man who was not trifled with for fear of the consequences.  Dad loved him fiercely, and after he retired as a surveyor, dad returned to fine woodworking.

When the old man died, according to dad’s story, the Baptist preacher was there to preach the funeral, because the women in the family belonged to that church.  Dad’s father was Scottish Presbyterian.  But great grandfather did not go to church and had no interest in going.  So the minister called this to the attention of his family, and, sadly, informed them that as he was not a member of the Baptist church, Brother Euton would not be allowed into heaven.

There was a stunned silence, broken when dad asked the bearer of these bad tidings if he could have a private word with him on the porch.   He relives,  with great satisfaction, that moment, which is the climax of the story, when he said, “If you open your mouth I’ll kick your ass all the way back to whatever rock you crawled out from under, and if you ever see me again you cross to the other side of the street.”   Dad was prone to fits of violence after he came back from combat in the Pacific theater.

The ending of the story was that he went back inside and called on a retired minister and friend of the family to speak a few words over Grandpa Euton’s remains.  He wisely opined that the old man would make it into Paradise.

I don’t know for sure which of dad’s stories have universal application.  He has to choose his stories, as I have to choose mine.  If they are universal, then they are built over an archetypal pattern, and will hold energy when the vessel is gone.  One hopes so anyway.  Don Juan said that a sorcerer is an empty man except for this collection of stories, each with an archetypal core.

Sometimes he needs to talk about mother.  When he does I can feel the pain that’s in him.  It’s the pain that caused his breathing to go wrong and left him wheezing.  He spent two nights in the hospital last week, getting breathing treatments to clear his bronchial tubes and was sent home with supplementary oxygen.  He wears a nosepiece when he’s sleeping or driving or just sitting in his recliner.  Today he seemed much improved.  Maybe he’s over the worst body shock.

A friend told me that after her mother died she felt her there, very close, but that after awhile that feeling went away.   “Enjoy it while it’s there,” she advised.   What I feel now is less intense than last week, and it is still not painful.  It is more like process.  I don’t feel a need to hold on to anything.  I just experience how different it is to be in the house when she’s not there anymore.  Dad and I relate differently, because it’s just two men hanging out together.

When mom was there I had to pay attention all the time.  If I coughed she would pounce on it as a symptom of illness, and if I was going to drive home she would try to locate by what means I would be killed on the way.   “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to rain?”

“I fully expect it to rain, and the roads will become slick and dangerous.  Normally that would be okay but I am high and my reflexes are slow.”  And I would exaggerate it until all she could do was laugh at it.  And if I stayed overnight she would fret about how many blankets I might need.  Would I be too hot or too cold?

She wanted to take care of me, still, and me an old man.  She was a mother … my mother.  As dad said, “She’s the only mother you’ve got.”   Now I have no mother but I had one when I needed one, and long afterwards.  The neighbor who helped look after her didn’t approve of my often calling my mom by her first name.   It was a way to set Ruby free, so that she could find the rest of her story.  She and a sister  close to her in age seemed to be opposites, though in some way they were very much alike.  What was on the surface in one was often hidden beneath it in the other.   My older sister said that when mom died, she saw Ruth come to get her.  She saw Ruth’s face appear in mother’s face.  It was the return of what had been lost.  What was whole and was split apart was whole again.

There’s nothing to do, really, but accept the nature of things, and remember what Satchel Page said.  Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.

I’d heard about Reverend Jenkins, who was just as often referred to as Preacher John.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention except when dad mentioned he rode his bicycle across the United States when he was in his fifties.  His wife went along the route in a camper or motor home — the details would make a more clear picture but you’ll have to settle for an abstract — and now, he is eighty … snow white hair and eyes made kind from seeing clearly.

He could see the spirit moving on the faces, some stricken, some observant, of those gathered to witness the return of the body to a hole in the ground.   There are silent watchers over the graveyard, and while some may be angels, skittering in and out of existence, one that never flies away is a backhoe.  It comes to life only when you maintain it, fuel it, and fire it up.  Then you have to develop a touch for making it an extension of your hand.   Scooping delicately beside the graveled trail through the old Pioneer Cemetery,  Preacher John gathered some dirt in his hand.  He put it on the casket and pronounced, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

He had checked with dad, first, to make sure there was no objection to his doing the closing ritual releasing dust back to dust.   Dad said, “That’s the way we always did it.  We had to lay the body on a cooling board and then dig a grave and bury it ourselves.”

You bury the body yourself so as to not let death get too far removed from the gravedigger.   Preacher John mentioned that we all have to pass this way, that he was eighty, and Ruby was eighty-eight.  Eight years behind the death on this day is Preacher John, who ritually tosses the earth onto the casket —  suspended there — above the grave.

The cemetery is small, and surrounded by a rock wall.  The two plots reserved for Ruby and George have a rock wall around them, about a foot and a half high.  The air smells fresh because it is the first clear day following a series of storms.  The sky is clear and slate blue.  The air is cool but the sun is warming it up.

Around a big black hearse there is a three man crew of funeral directors.  They are respectful and efficient, though a constant dealing with death strips it of the natural solemnity of rare events.  Death is not a rare event at the mortuary.

Around the grave there are flowers, in bunches and sprays.  Gradually the flowers will die and the containers will be thrown away.  The backhoe operator will come over and bury the casket.  And I will be at home, drinking wine, when the feelings I have held back are given permission to congregate freely.

What else was there?  And of course it was Ruby, but not old and enfeebled, looking around her in baffled wonder at those cheering her on toward nothing they could define, beyond another day like today.  It was Ruby younger and more filled with life.  I tried to explain what I was feeling, but Linda already understood it.  She lost her mother many years ago, when she was fairly young.  ”You get your mother back,” she said.  ”But the way she used to be, when she was young.”

One of my clients wrote that we all have to face death, and he asked if I am ready.  I said, “Sure; just let me use the bathroom first.”  And he wrote back he was serious, whereupon I replied so was I.   He wrote back with a quote from Woody Allen:  ”I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Amen to that.

Later in the afternoon dad wanted me to drive him over to see John Jenkins.  He wanted to give him a card with some money in it.  I knew he was needing to take care of things, stay busy with what needs to be done.  And when he’s done with the details he will open to find out what else is there.

(From “The Gates of the Forest,” by Elie Wiesel):

“the body has time; it moves slowly and prudently, step by step, in obedience to laws of gravity, but the soul brushes time and laws aside; it wants to push forward, regardless of the cost in pain, or intoxication or even madness.  that is the only way it has of raising itself to god.  on your way through life you’ll meet men who cling to reason, but reason gropes like a blind man with a white cane, stumbling over every pebble, and when it comes up against a wall it stops short, and tries to tear it down brick by brick, quite ineffectually, because an invisible hand builds it up again, higher and thicker than ever.  We on the other hand, believe in the power of faith and ecstasy, and no wall can stand against us; with our fists and our songs we bring it crashing down.  Gates do not frighten us.  because, my child, listen to this:  other people can open their eyes wide to see god but we close them.  yet these others attract darkness while while we laugh at it, until it follows rather than precedes us.”

Yesterday we drove in the rain down the main street of a one horse town.  The highway has bypassed it but there’s a business district with a grade school, cafe, a couple of trading posts,  shops where nothing is very expensive, and the little tendrils of insurance giants.  Toward the end of the main drag there’s the nicest restaurant in the valley.  It has been closed down for years so it’s just a vacant place with windows opening onto a view to the north, and San Francisco Peaks.  It used to have a bar with a band and a steakhouse.

We drove alongside the ghost of a good time,  past small houses,  to a mortuary which, dad said, had been fixed up and looked really good since the new owners took over.  The mortuary director was named Ben, and he was big enough to be half a defensive line all by himself.  He was showing us caskets, headstones, and packages.  He had just come from church, he said, and he provided his family bona fides in Camp Verde.

There really isn’t much you can do when somebody dies, other than handle it yourself, and bury the person within the time limit for non embalmed bodies, I think 24 hours, or turn it over to a funeral director.  Once it’s being handled by a funeral director it’s just a matter of choosing times and products and services:  working out the details so the director can make it work smoothly for you.

For example, Bueler showed dad the kind of stone, or brass, the Veteran’s Administration will provide for his grave, which he is quick to point out he’s in no hurry to get into.  “You see here where you can put the rank you achieved …”  He was showing how mom’s stone could be matched to it, and what would go in that space.

“I didn’t achieve much rank; I was in the guardhouse too much,” dad said.

“He was in the war,” one of my sisters offered.”

“A machine gunner,” I said, poking dad in the leg.  “A cleaner.”

The other sister said my name aloud, as if I needed to be called back from where I had ventured.  The moment passed.  But after we left and went to the local cafe for lunch, for the first time I heard him say out loud what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story.”  He’d mentioned pieces of it.  Japanese troops put ashore at the wrong place.  Somebody made a mistake about where the Japanese line was.   And they were all blissfully unaware, on the beach, in the gunsights.  And they were all mowed down by machine gun fire, until the beach was a sea of corpses.  Now dad finally stepped into the scene as an actor and not an observer, describing how they had just started at the outer edges and worked inward.

It was something new for him to own what scared him so much when he was still worried about heaven and hell.  I think he’s past that now.  He’s showing emotion openly, there in the space where Ruby is missing.  It is a space which produces surprises.  For example, my older sister irritates the hell out of me with some of her lame jokes.  But as we were driving away from the mortuary I mentioned how big Ben Bueler is.  “Nobody’s gonna give him any grief,” she said.  It was brilliant.  What in the hell was going on?  Dad finally owning what had always weighed so heavily on his mind, and — even more astonishing — Pat making a joke I found brilliant?

Back at the house, I pulled out my guitar and began to play and sing a song without being self-conscious about it.  A black cloak slipped off my shoulders and onto the floor.  There it writhed around animated by whatever dark lord it calls master, then formed itself into a small black dog which went to the front door, sat down,  and looked back as if waiting to be let out.

The doctor was slender and very black, his accent suggested he is African.  He seemed hidden behind thick glasses and his doctor’s smock.  “I know you want to have her in the hospital for three days so medicare will pay for rehabilitation,” he said.  “If I can find something that qualifies under the Medicare guidelines I will admit her.”  But he didn’t find anything.  The old woman had been unable to get out of bed or stand so she was brought to the hospital.  Now she had to be carried back home and put in diapers.  It was a week after that when we realized she’d had a heart attack.  Somehow he missed that.  And the blood infection.  He missed that as well.

“I would like to admit her, but there’s nothing I can do under the Medicare guidelines.”

He seemed a nervous little doctor, and  spoke as if he was reciting, like a telephone solicitor who is told to stay to the script and not leave any air in the conversation for questions.  On his chest there was a tight grouping of .38s from my father’s eyes.  This was the same doctor who had tried to send her home because there was nothing wrong with her awhile back.  Another doctor came in, fortunately, and swabbed her nose.  She had a particularly virulent case of flu.  Now the nervous little man with the shifting eyes was once again sending her away, but there was nobody else on duty to countermand it this time.

The old woman being shuffled around was my mother, not an unwilling participant in the death process, her health having failed steadily since a stroke left her unable to walk without a walker about five years ago.  She took physical therapy and was almost walking again when she got the flu.  As she was recovering from the flu she was left in an examining room and told she could sit on the table.  She climbed up, on to the covering of slick paper, then she slid off, badly slashing her leg on a protruding metal part.  After that she was mostly confined to a wheelchair, watching reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, or doing crossword puzzles.   “I’m just waiting to die, now,” she said, “but you can’t just make it happen.”

She died last night when no family was there.  The report was that she died peacefully, in her sleep.  My sister wondered aloud if they might have put something in the drip, like a muscle relaxant.  I had wondered the same thing.  A little valium maybe.  Just enough to ease the heart into stopping for the last time.  Maybe or maybe not, but we hope it is true that she passed peacefully, in her sleep, because that is how she wanted to go.

After my little sister arrived, we had a coffee at Starbucks, and shared our feelings of confusion and even guilt that we are not more upset by mother’s dying.  We both feel it was her time and she was ready and even eager to leave.  We are aware that others around us might find us unfeeling.  Her death is no tragedy for us, but what should be at this time.

Maybe we will feel differently later, at the funeral, when mother’s body is there, and we  have to say goodbye.  But now we both  feel curiously proud of her for living her life until it became untenable to sustain it, and then exiting in peace.  I saw what her body had become, the one that died.  It was in pain.  The lumbar spine was compressed and  her legs were in pain.   The heart was weak.  The skin was blotched and bruised from blood thinners.  Her upper back had humped outward.  The digestive system wasn’t working well.  And finally she was unable to stand, and had to wear diapers.

That was what died.

What remains is relieved of that leaky old vessel, and the spirit fills me at times with energetic memory of when she was young, and hopeful, and though she could not use  many of her gifts,  was limited by her status and gender,   she gave some of them to me for safekeeping.  She gave me a sense of joy and fun and irreverence.  I passed them along to my daughter.  What is denied in women is passed along to new generations of women.

I do not miss mother, because I do not find her missing.  If anything the escape from that broken body brought her more fully and delightfully into my awareness.  I am thinking of what my friend and client, Letticia, said on Thursday, after the doctor had called me and told me my mother was dying.  Lettie said, “I think of my dad every day, Dan.  And you know, I didn’t think of him every day when he was alive.  But now, I do.”  I started back on Friday morning.

While I was driving,  I talked to my dad and he said mom was doing better and had been talking and eating.  The crisis had passed he said, and she would be moving to a nursing home soon.  That was just four or five hours before he called me again and told me she passed away.  His voice was often overwhelmed by emotion.

Sometimes emotion comes which freezes me in time, waiting for enough composure to continue a thought.  I am in no hurry.  I will stay in that space so long as it holds me.  Interestingly, it was in that moment of knowing death had come, that life, also, asserted itself.  Linda and I spoke of the children and of the grandchildren.  We agreed that our son is amazing to us.  We both see him as having an extraordinary blend of qualities.

We spoke of each child, each grandchild, in turn, and we shared our joys and our fears as regards them.  It is a time of blessing, and one of those rare moment in which one can bless, and be blessed.  And above the blessing there is a spirit, now free.  We will ritually deal with the remains, and celebrate what is contained in a life, in its time.

I’m home alone, Linda having gone to a conference of some sort.  I should recall what it’s about, other than just something to do with insurers and the insured in construction industries.  Sometimes she’s the only woman at one of these things, which she handles easily, having grown up the only girl among four brothers.  On the other hand her mother was the matriarch of the family, and between her southern lands and the patriarch just north, there was an international zone check post, where Interzone police checked the  papers of all traffic in and out.

I on the other hand was between two sisters, one four years older and one eight years younger.   I was protector of one and needed protection from the other.  It’s an interesting pattern, and like any other pattern, varying in presentation by the quality of the script and of the acting.  The patterns are the most obvious things in the world, because they are the archetypes, what everything else is built over.  But they are hard to see like water is hard for a fish to see.

For the friends who are at this time holding memorials for Brugh Joy, the gifts are beginning to come in.   Each one of us had a special relationship with him, and when I think of that, I recall his talking about his mother’s funeral.  Each of the children got up and gave a little talk at her memorial service, oldest to youngest.  Brugh was one of the youngest if not the youngest.  And as he listened he was wondering, “Who are they talking about?  That’s not my mother.”  And having the exceptional mind he had, Brugh grasped that none of them really knew the mother, and that none of us can ever really know our own mother.

I have been watching my mother get increasingly frail.  On Saturday morning she was taken to the hospital because she could not get out of bed.  The doctors could not admit her to the hospital because there was no diagnosis allowed by the insurance carrier which they could make, and she had already been in a wheelchair.  So she was taken back home where my older sister has come to look after her.

And of course I know that there is a pattern between my sister and her mother, and I know what it is, but I won’t say.  It’s none of my business.  Brugh got to a place where he realized he couldn’t just tell people what their patterns are, and watch the light lift them out of darkness.  We have to see it ourselves when it’s okay with us to look at it.

When I felt in the mood to write this evening, I was thinking of something Jung wrote and was wanting to find it again.  I could not get the quote fashioned in my head.  It was something to the effect that everything is balance, and he described the balance of structure and nonsense as the sweet spot.  I had already discovered that.

The Christmas before last, Derrick and Kierra bought me a coffee cup with a quote from Dr. Seuss on it:  ”I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.”   They realized that about half of what I say is nonsense.  I think they are relieved to know that I know how much nonsense I speak.  It could be a worry if I did not.  Sometimes I make nonsense out of sense, and sometimes the other way around.

Of course it’s hard to find a quote when you don’t know approximately where it is, so I soon found myself scanning other things and thinking, “Yes, I agree with that.  Not Just because you’re Jung, but because  I’m convinced it really is all about balance and counter balance.”

Brugh  is a part of the Conscious Circle of Humanity. I miss having him around, even if we didn’t quite know what to do with each other sometimes.   He was a teacher, and some of his heirs have already been reminding everyone that anything he said is their intellectual property.  Maybe Rex Ranch will be like Graceland and there will be platinum records on the wall:   “Brugh’s Greatest Hits.”  Two thespians will act out the dispute between brothers at high noon.

That’s both logic and nonsense, or an oscillation between them.

When I opened the Red Book to begin looking for the quote playing around with my brain, I also paid attention to the page to which I actually turned, and to where  my attention first focused.  I read this:

“Believe me, it is no teaching or instruction that I give you.  On what basis should I presume to teach you?  I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way.  My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you.  The way is within us, but not in gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws …  We betide those who live by way of examples.  Life is not with them.  If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself?”

I do not think of Brugh as an example, and I never did.  He was a particular and very individual man.  Sometimes I disagreed with him and it burned me that he simply acknowledged my not being able yet to bear to see it.   And yet it is the way with people that in what infuriated you about a man, also most humanized him and made him lovable.

His ability as a seer was astonishing.  I read that Jean-Martin Charcot was a seer.  He created the  field of neurology from where it was when he began his work:  ”crazy or not crazy.”  He would  have somebody brought into his office at Salpetriere, in Paris,  and left there while he worked.  After awhile he would have the one taken away and another  brought in.  He just observed the patients in this way.

At some point one of these patients would be standing there as usual and he would go, “I see.”  And he would see.  He would know the pattern behind the behavior.  All the cues coming from the person would be put together beneath the surface, and when the picture was complete, it would come to consciousness.  ”I see.”

Brugh had that gift.  Those of us who joined his seminars knew that he was seeing each of us, which was the good news and the bad news.  He could see us better than we could see ourselves.  By submitting ourselves to this process, we had a way to provide for ourselves an external, objective observer.

So I guess my Seer is coming back home.  He says, “You got no secrets,” and I say, “I do from people who mind their own business,” and he says, “I see.”  Because he knows I can’t argue with that.  All I can do is follow along the path between logic and nonsense, whistling past the graveyard.

The second visit to Hong Kong beats the first in spades, because instead of taking the tours and navigating the downtown financial district on foot, we went the other direction, into Soho and some of the back streets and alleys.  Of course once we got out of the downtown high rises the separation of the pedestrians from the street traffic was gone, and it was much easier to explore.

We started out together but after standing outside a store for a half hour I decided to go off on my own and meet Linda back at the hotel.  I explored some of the art galleries — commercial ones — to see what is hot in this market.   I’ve already seen some of the contemporary Vietnamese painters, and wish I had the bucks to collect some of it.  But not really.  You don’t have to own it to enjoy it.

I stopped into a Starbucks for some tea and a rest, and bought a girlie magazine in a 7-11 as a gift for a friend who, when I asked what he wants from Asia, said something with long silky hair and big brown eyes.  I wrote back that I had found him, and he said I’m a wise ass.  So I found him at least pictures of what he dreams of.

I’ve realized that everywhere I go I mention how beautiful the people are, and I’ve concluded that the older I get the more  beautiful people are everywhere, with the possible exception of Philadelphia.  One reason I’m feeling so good is that it’s cool in Hong Kong, like San Francisco weather, and it’s the weather I like best.

Last night we welcomed the New Year at the club on the top floor of the Conrad, for which we’d make reservations at the end of January.  When we had to leave Singapore early yesterday morning to get back for it, we thought we made a mistake.  But we were wrong,  What a feast it was.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that many different kinds of food so well prepared, and all available for my greedy consumption.  Wines were good as well, and of course there was the entertainment …

We dined between seven and eight, when the fireworks began on Hong Kong Bay, spread below our window table.  They were spectacular while they were visible.  After awhile the smoke from them began to drift upward and toward the island, and gradually there was a mixture of dark smoke in which the lights continued to flash and the fiery explosions blossom.

Tonight is our last night in Hong Kong, and the last night of the Asia trip.  Too bad; I’m just getting accustomed to Hong Kong.  I celebrated the end of the trip in Soho with New Zealand Pinot Noir, prosciutto pizza, and a cute Chinese waitress.  I finally figured out my true calling in life.  I was supposed to be an ex-pat.  But most likely I was evil in a past life.  Come to think of it, I’ve been something of an asshole in this one.  Karma’s a bitch.

We’re at the airport … way too early, having followed instructions from Jet Star for passengers with an extra bag to check.  It turns out this is merely punishment, a way to make people really sorry they are over the imposed limit.  I have been trying to alternate blogs:  one dealing with the outer reality and the next dealing with what is going on behind the curtain, in the dreaming.  Today I am just connecting the the last one I wrote, about Singapore, to expand on first impressions.

My first impression was based on walked through some expensive shopping areas, and predictably, it was a very flawed sample.  The designer goods and ridiculously expensive jewelry is to objectify the person, and objectified people behave according to rules of etiquette, which serve to keep anybody from moving up a class. There’s no point in being superior if you behave like a glad hander, so when the air is thick with that particular flavoring people are less likely to break into spontaneous song and dance.

Once I got away from the place where bank executives buy their luggage, things changed considerably.  My first impression of the people in Singapore as not obsequious was right; but they are friendly, open, and maybe the most democratic people on the face of the earth.  They just don’t need your money.  They have their own.  As the cab driver told me, begging or hustling money in Singapore is not allowed, and even though there are some poor people, nobody is desperate.  Everybody is provided food and shelter.

The people are very attractive, the population being composed of Chinese, Malaysians, Indians, Eurasians, and mixes thereof.  And my impression of order was correct, but maybe I assumed it had to be enforced order.  It is order secured by excellent planning for the future, and a public transportation system which keeps the traffic down.  On the bus I took around the city, there was a host who asked where I wanted to get off and informed me when I was at my stop.  Even people who stopped the bus mistakenly were treated with great courtesy and given information.

Singapore has a variety of religions, but there is very little tolerance for intolerance.  There was an article in the Sunday paper relating that a Christian evangelical minister had made some disparaging remarks about other religions and the entire community was upset.  He was apologizing, and there was a reminder that what makes Singapore such a wonderful place to live is that nobody judges anyone else.  People here, the paper reported, pay no negative attention to the habits, dress, or inclinations of others, and most don’t intend to change it.   Intolerance is divisive and stirs up trouble where there was none before.

Okay, I’m going to qualify the “very attractive” summation of the people here.  Some of them are drop dead gorgeous; and they are an advertisement for the benefits of democracy and elimination of gross poverty.  Singapore is so safe you can walk in the park at three in the morning without concern for your safety.  There was an article in the Sunday paper which gave me an idea of how little crime there is here.  The story, given a lot of space and with a photo, was about a man who came back to a public garage to get his car and found it on blocks, the wheels stolen.  This was so unusual as to cause a furor in the city, and grave concern.

Imagine a three column story in the New York Times about somebody’s wheels being stolen.  You can’t even get the police to take an interest in such a crime, not even if you know who did it and provide a name and address.   So my impression that so much order and absence of crime was accompanied by repression of some sort appears to be mistaken.  It seems people live this way because they like to have a clean, well ordered, prosperous and democratic society.  What a concept.  They don’t even pack heat in case somebody cuts them off in traffic.

And so we leave Singapore wishing we had planned a longer stay here.  On the other hand we can get here directly next time.  It’s worth renting a place and staying for awhile.

Singapore.  What a welcome sight after Saigon and Bangkok, packed with cars and endless hordes of people reaching for the cash.  By contrast this city spreads out in languid beauty, prosperous and sophisticated, with the traffic spare and flowing smoothly, at least as viewed from the top floor of the Conrad.  Of course it is Saturday … but even so the contrast with the other Asian cities is striking.  The cruise ended this morning, with many of us celebrating the last couple of days with a dose of food poisoning of some description.  I think this is traditional on cruises, and because it is only about as popular (with me at least) as black tie dining, is limited to about 48 hours.  It was thoughtfully wrapped up by debarkation time and I had tea and toast before our turning in the passenger I.D.s and walking the gangplank into Singapore.

Our first contact was with the porter who shepherded us from the ship to a taxi.  At one point, when we were standing in line to have the bags put through security, he looked back at another porter, put his fingers to his mouth, and formed a huge smile.  I looked back to see who was the receiver of this message and he was glum indeed, paying no attention to the suggestion.  At Linda’s insistence I shamelessly overtipped him.   After the last two days with the naked and the dying, she’s giddy around healthy young dudes.  Actually I didn’t realize how well I tipped until arriving at the hotel in a taxi and realizing it was less than eight dollars for the fare.  Because Linda has collected so many credit card points, she is in the Hilton Diamond Club, so we checked into the Conrad, and were given a room on the top floor.  I move between some cultural extremes; I recently wrote about slumming at the Best Motel in Mohave, where I hid the cash before walking to the liquor store.  Here there’s free drinks at the Executive Club.  I like all of it … ; )

There are some really cool touches in the suite.  For example, you insert the card key in a slot inside the door to turn on the lights.  This means that when you leave you know where your key is, and, the lights go off shortly after you leave!  What a great idea.  There is a panel  beside the bed with control buttons; for example, one you push for privacy and another you push for service, so it eliminates the need to put a sign on the door.  Another great idea.  One need never get out of bed but for the changing of the sheets.

As long as i was overtipping I overtipped the porter who brought up the bags, as I had no small bills left.  The problem with doing that is you have a hard time stopping.  I’m thinking of getting a cigar to chew on and maybe a white linen sport coat and a big handkerchief with which to obsessively wipe the perspiration off my brow.  “Tha’ah you ah son; take the missus out and get her dampened.”

I’m going to walk around awhile and will continue later, when I have taken a look around the neighborhood, which is mostly a very expensive shopping area for the guests at the major hotels.

Ohhhhkayyyy …. I’m back … and my shirt is wet.  This is a jungle city, and the reason there’s not many people on the streets is that, like Hong Kong, the pedestrian traffic moves largely above the streets so that both people and cars — natural enemies — are separated as much as practical.  The walkways flow into shopping malls where, if your watch isn’t working, you can pick up another one for, say, fifty thousand dollars.  Not that you can’t get a ridiculously expensive Rolex in the states, but the sidewalk doesn’t move past it very often.  You don’t want a bunch of winos puking on your treasures.

I saw one watch so tricked out it looked like a clock on a strap.  Who buys this crap?  Not somebody concerned with what time it is.   Maybe somebody trying to get beat up?  I just  wear my Timex and a t-shirt that reads:  “My other watch is a Rolex.”  I knew a guy who wore a real Rolex.  Parked at a McDonald’s in a Rolls Royce.  He had a pistol in his ribs before he could say “Super size me.”  When you go slumming you ought to dress down.

The thing you notice about the people here is that while they are friendly, they are not obsequious.  The British were here and they left behind their signature export — other than unbridled materialism — a polite  reserve.  In Britain the mark of good breeding is to display no gestures which might suggest an emotional response radiating from the belly outward. One contains chaotic  impulses with the patterned brain.  A proper Englishman doesn’t  wave his hands and jump up and down on encountering an old friend, for example.  The corners of his mouth might turn up but if the eyes wrinkle,  it is decorously.  “Hello old fruit.  Shame about your wife.”

“One  copes old sod.  She did cross against the light.”  A slight movement at the corner of the mouth.

“Rather slow.”  A twitch under the left eye, and the hilarity has passed.

Maybe they are just cautious, here, because, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, the cops don’t need you and man, they expect the same.  That’s what I’ve heard about Singapore, at least.  Don’t spit on the sidewalk because it’s illegal.  Don’t drop your cigarette butt on the sidewalk or piss on the wall or threaten somebody.  In general you want to contain yourself, the way the other people here contain themselves.  In exchange you get a spotless city with polite, efficient services and cab drivers who correct you if you try to pay too much.  I did overpay when we had to slip in the nearest air conditioned place to escape having a heat stroke, but that  was in O’Leary’s Bar, an American franchise.

We sat in O’Leary’s and studied some tours, deciding what we might want to see during the two days we have here.  Linda, being Linda, is reading reviews on the internet before committing.  She has downloaded some apps, such as a map of the city, and is fortified with a Singapore Sling, while I had something that won’t make me go blind:  a mimosa.

One copes.  A slight movement at the edge of the right eye, then in a bizarre and visually unpleasant episode  the right ear folds all the way forward and then flat against the skull in three full flexures.  Two policemen approach woodenly from behind a potted plant:  “Too much!  Too much!”