After two years in this wonderful country, we are reluctantly leaving
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Saturday, February 9
Folding The Tent
Monday, December 10
A Fly, Dioramas and Schrödinger's Cat

It’s the small things. After spending years of hammering large things into bits of useless notions – pitch pots and yarn-wrapped coffee can projects a third grade teacher assured would please Mommy – the meanings and misunderstandings of life – obsessions with dissecting self and other’s motivations – drawings, paintings and words hopelessly looking for colors that might communicate something, anything, to anyone – meanings behind everything from God’s will, to Buddha’s teachings, to a unified theory, to synchronicity, to the inscrutability of greed, human cruelty, fuel prices, fashionable clothing and gravity – a fly lands on the edge of my plate of ginger chicken and noodles and, between sucks of savory oils off my plastic dish, nonchalantly explains it all to me in a tiny, clear voice.
“Find what you can, eat what you can,” it says, “That’s it.”
A fly surviving as it can. There is no more than that. The chafe is flying in the wind and I can turn off mind-mill. I need not write on. The feasting fly explained the whole of it. There is no more. But I am desperately vain. Despite the pesky insect’s wisdom, I still find it difficult to soot my mirror and look without rather than within. I write on. I am human and continue wrapping yarn around coffee cans, hoping to transform them into flower pots; so I muse along, but I also (too slowly) strain to wean myself from the weight of heady reflection – now at least aware of the futility of it all – awareness purchased through many years of stupidities, vivid, unattainable yearnings and irrelevant catastrophes. Nothing is the whole of it and the whole of it is nothing.
I'm visible. Sometimes I laugh loudly. It’s impossible to hide my tears. Private isolations, desolations and ecstasies are destined to be shared communally; not totally, not as I experience them, that’s impossible, but occasionally through subtle, temporary agreements between me and whatever accidental audience happens by. Solitude, reflection and knowledge always near, but never fully experienced and frustratingly impossible to share. So the whole of it is nothing and isn't nothing - it's Schrödinger's Cat.
Sunday, October 21
Dangerous Monkey Business

The above photo is from a BBC news website reporting how a group of rhesus macaques killed Delhi's Deputy Mayor yesterday. There also have been numerous cases of these monkeys biting and harassing visitors to the Krabi Tiger Cave Temple, which A recently visited. It is wise to be super wary of these cute and charming monkeys. We are edging them out of their habitat and they are doing what they must to adapt to ours.
I can see a Spielberg movie called THE MACAQUES, done in the style of Hitchcock's 1963 horror classic, THE BIRDS.
Thursday, October 18
Festival For The Recently Deceased

We deal with the discomfort of our awareness of our mortality in a variety of ways. Divergent religions and cultures provide an assortment of rites designed to honor the deceased and help to acknowledge the inevitability of death. Religious ceremonies, while dissimilar in appearance, all share a basic ingredient; the hope of an afterlife and the continuation of our id. The Mexican culture believes we die three times: Once when our heart stops, again when our bodies are interred and finally, when there is no one left on the planet who remembers us. Judy King, an expat living in
The second event in A’s Krabi holiday took place at a country temple ceremony intended to honor and connect to deceased spirits whose bodies died in the past year. It began with a procession from the village to the temple grounds.
Like fêtes such as this around the world, special foods are prepared for both the living and the dead.
Money trees also abound and every person who adds a leaf of money to a tree receives merit from the spirits.
After the ceremony inside the temple, in which the gifts are presented to the deceased spirits, the spirits in turn, return the offered gifts to the living. The offerings are then taken outside to the grounds and laid out, where members of the congregation sift through them and take what they want. They are now gifts from the spirits and not from other members of the community. (I believe the spirits hang on to the money though and charge it to the care of the monks who manage the temple.)
Monday, October 15
Krabi Tiger Cave Temple
A’s recent trip to Krabi with our friend, Pim, began with a stop at the
There are many statues of long-dead, revered monks in the entrances to the caves. These monks are Buddhist versions of saints and most Thai homes have small altars dedicated to them.
This unusual shrine is no doubt for the purpose of protecting travelers.
Saturday, October 13
Jim Howe - In Memoriam
I unexpectedly and prematurely lost a wonderful friend Friday and the world lost an incredible jazz bassist. Jim Howe's personality brought laughter and joy to everyone, but especially to the musicians he played with. He played with many of the greats and was a tireless promoter of jazz. He was a musician's musician and never settled for anything less than excellence. Our ears have lost his wonderful sounds, the world is darker without his glow and I can't bend my cheerless mind around the fact that I will never again feel the warmth of his hugs.
Thursday, October 11
Spirits Descend On Phuket
Thousands of people gathered at Chinese shrines around Phuket yesterday to participate in pole-raising ceremonies before for the Vegetarian Festival, which began today. Tall bamboo poles were raised at the auspicious time of 5.09 pm. Nine is the most auspicious number throughout
The Vegetarian Festival is a Chinese/Hindu celebration initiated 150 years ago when large numbers of people on the island of Phuket were dying from an unknown disease. This festival is unique to Phuket and not celebrated throughout Thailand. Fasting, resolutions of good behavior and self-sacrifices of various sorts were thought to have brought about the end of the epidemic, which, in all likelihood, had simply run its course. But the rituals and the holiday still survive, although some think it has evolved into a mere tourist attraction and gory carnival. Thais seem to enjoy big crowds and cacophonous noise. The Festival involves elaborate ceremonies at Chinese shrines, ear-shattering fireworks, parades and the infamous once-a-year (or once-only) fakirs that are into self-mutilation - like lacing bicycle handlebars through their cheeks and other fun tortures. Many believe that the mediums, who poke huge holes through their bodies achieve a spiritual, trance-like state and become vessels for the spirits that have come down the bamboo poles. (Now wait a minute. Let me think about that. Wouldn’t I have a glazed look in my eyes resembling a trance if I had just jabbed a spike through both my cheeks?) It’s thought that the mah-song are protected from pain and harm by the spirits temporarily inhabiting them, but ambulances are very busy carting young, "entranced" men to hospitals throughout the festival. It’s totally bizarre. It is a gruesome, voyeur's delight - a reality show that beats them all and it draws many tourists as well as honestly believing Thais. The specially prepared vegetarian festival food offered by the hundreds of stands along the parade routes is delicious (but a bit difficult to chew if you have a crowbar skewered through your cheeks).
There was a big kafuffle over one of the fakirs last year, because he paraded through town with a knife jabbed through his tongue and someone noticed that it was not his tongue at all. He purchased a pig’s tongue at a fresh market that morning, stuffed it into his mouth and stuck a knife through it. A crowd of people followed him back to his shack after the parade and proceeded to beat him severely. Policemen and monks stood by and did nothing to stop the thrashing, saying later, for the newspapers, that he got his just deserts for being a phony fakir. After he got out of the hospital, he was de-robed, or whatever it is they do to disgraced fakirs. Rumor has it that he is going to march in this year’s parade anyway, with knitting needles poked through his penis. (I think local owners of water buffaloes should check their beast’s undercarriages for missing parts.)


