Resurrection at the End of the Paper Trail

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, August 25, 2010)

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.” – Frank Zappa

Paperwork, what joy! Anyone who lives overseas gets their double-fill of forms and filing requirements, which often seem to necessitate pulling up and retrieving documentation on every significant career and educational milestone since kindergarten.

I always feel like the powers that be want not only information but also to see how people respond when made to jump through regulatory hoops, with additional procedures for the torture and pain of those who hesitate – or, worse, who lose their cool and starting ranting about death, taxes and the immigration man.

Filling out forms and how one reacts to them – in the minds of officials at least – is as much a psychological fishing expedition as it is a search for the youthful infraction that might signify unworthiness for the honor or privilege sought. This is the time to exercise restraint and put into use the sweet smiles practiced in bathroom mirrors.

Confronted by paperwork myself, though, I usually descend into the lowest levels of the blue funk, where it is possible only to look in suicidal despair at a form that is 15 pages long and wants your and your wife’s medical history, the blood types of your children, and the full list of every illness, fever and fainting fit of your ancestors from your great-grandparents onwards.

So, recently, after staring at such a form for a matter of days – one that stood between me and an imagined everlasting happiness (or at least the peace and contentment that comes from having the duty done) – I did what any normal person would do. I complained.

No, not to the bureaucracy that gave me the form. Do you think I am an idiot? I picked up the headset and gave my more patient and practical younger brother a Skype buzz and ranted about officialdom.

And as often happens when I talk to people with whom I am accustomed to being my unadorned and unmasked self, just hearing my complaints spoken out loud made me realize how petty and silly I was being. My venting lost steam.

Then wise younger brother said: “Well, they don’t design it to be fun. Do it and forget it.”

He’s right, of course. Letting myself get worked up over a bit of paperwork is counterproductive and concedes too much power to paper-pushers and bean counters.

Are there really people who decide at university age -- when they should be thinking of adventure and unlimited possibilities -- that they want to specialize in bureaucracy and administration? Or do they just somehow end up there to atone for past sins? And if they are unrepentant do they keep being reborn as midlevel government and corporate officials, spending an eternity of lives counting out pebbles into a pouch to keep track of how many bushels of barley the village harvested in a given year, making marks with sticks in clay tablets to number the populations of conquered cities and then finally tracking the digital traces left by the citizens of the 21st century?

Or maybe the minor officials of every age are simply incompetent and incapable of doing anything other than keeping track of the comings and going of others, and they resent it so that they sourly determine to make the productive activity of others as painful as possible.

An uncharitable view, I suppose, but it also points to why Mr. Zappa would say that nostalgia is another way in which the world might end, because nostalgia is the longing for an idealized time gone by in which things were simpler and more morally clear, and when -- it almost goes without saying -- there was less paperwork. But confronted by immigration forms, insurance forms, tax forms and forms of all types and sizes at every turn, sooner or later we realize that there is no better, simpler time; that like the poor, bureaucrats and chartered accountants will always be with us, always have been with us, and the despair of the realization is too great and we lie down enervated by the thought of the reams of computer generated forms that stretch out into our, our children’s and our grandchildren’s futures. Then we exhale our last breath, barely rippling the forests of paper under which we are buried …

But then, oh bliss, oh rapture, a miracle! Two days after submitting the forms that have been the particular source of my own recent woe, I get the news that I have been weighed in the balance and judged worthy. I have been granted the keys of the kingdom and welcomed inside. Now, until the next time, I live again.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Strutting Across the Stage of Wisdom

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, August 11, 2010)

“To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.” – Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher

Americans of a particular political persuasion – at least the Americans who live mostly north of Mexico, south of Canada, and who now and then do something beside play computer games, log Facebook time and follow the intrigues of Lady G, LiLo and Paris – would have found delicious irony in the July announcement that right-wing radio and TV jock Glenn Beck may go blind from macular dystrophy.

I bear Beck no ill-will – although he is a confused, possibly deranged, con man and scam artist. There is just something irresistible about the thought of the man who claims he knows the way out of the American national morass being struck sightless. It brings a grim smile to my face. If this is divine justice, it comes with irrefutable evidence of a deific sense of humor.

There is always pleasure when designated leaders of whatever kind are shown to be fallible and foolish. It is the basis on which news agencies log every foible and track every disaster of celebrity and politician alike, with the sure knowledge that the reading and viewing public cannot resist headlines and lead-ins that tease of scandal and incompetence.

We take perverse joy in learning that religious heads sometimes don’t know which direction we should pray, that CEOs and other suits cannot prevent market crashes or correctly operate blow out preventers, that politicians and TV news folk really are just pretty talking faces who like the look and sound of their mouths as they form around particular turns of phrase.

The question is why – amid so much evidence that no one has anymore of clue than anyone else about what it’s all about – do we keep dogging after imposters and snake-oil salesman in enough numbers that what they say has weight and consequence? Perhaps it is some fundamental flaw of humanity, or maybe just an unshakeable residual childhood belief that surely our parents or some other grownups know best. It seems an assumption that we cannot overcome, this hopeful belief that somewhere out there is someone or something that is a reliable guide, an all-knowing and benevolent patron who will lead us through all trouble and strife to safe shores and gentle tides.

Over the course of my almost five decades, I have trusted in the Judeo-Christian god, several father and brother figures, a few women, an organizer and day-planner or two, and various other deities, manifestations, belief systems and sports teams. There has been a 100-percent failure rate. No entity, nobody, no creed has all the answers to all the questions; yet I, we, perversely keep assigning omnipotence to one thing after another, always expecting to find that magical mantra or person that will bring clear skies and smooth sailing for ever after.

Why do we persist? Why do we keep putting our faith in things we know are going to fail? Computers, weathermen, the prognostications of last year’s stock whiz, daily horoscopes.

The only real answer I see is that we are afraid of the Socratic admittance of ignorance. We don’t know what it’s all about, we don’t know what will keep our children safe at night, we don’t know how much longer the earth – or at least humanity’s participation in it – can last given the extent to which we’ve been fouling our only nest, we don’t know what’s coming next or what to do about it if we did.

We see “I don’t know” as being the answer of the powerless. The power, we think, is being “in the know,” having the skinny and the scoop … and that’s where strength could possibly lie, only that no one is really in the know, no one has the sanctified inside track that leads without fail to comfort and glory.

After the first few minutes of panic when you discover that the men and women on the watch are fools, that they have no idea what’s coming next anymore than you do, and that there may be no guiding, all-powerful, competent hand at the switch after all, then it is possible to sit back, relax and enjoy the wonderful jokes we play on one another when we take on airs of knowledge.

And there may be some consolation in the great leveling power of mutual ignorance, in knowing that from the lowest of us to the highest, we are bewildered when confronted with the great shell game of the cosmos and the hidden pea of truth. It is a great relief when we notice that this game is rigged and that it’s best not to play.

You and I, we know nothing, so brighten up and let’s enjoy the day.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Monkey, Get Off’a My Back!

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, July 28, 2010)

“Tobacco is a dirty weed, I like it. It satisfies no normal need, I like it. It makes you thin, it makes you lean, it takes the hair right off your bean. It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen. I like it.”
                                                            -- Graham Lee Hemminger, November 1915

This is a dangerous undertaking. Whenever I have written to blow my horn about beating an addiction, there is something in the act that triggers a relapse. Way back in March of 2007 when I wrote for the first time about quitting the cigarette habit for a year … a week later I was out celebrating the come-clean anniversary with a pack of smokes in a Jalan Jaksa pub in Jakarta.

After that little celebratory display of fuming (improbably and embarrassingly witnessed by somebody who had read my column crowing about beating tobacco), I lasted another 16 weeks before the stresses of a new job in Bangkok drove me back into the arms of the demon weed on a more than temporary basis. And for the next couple of years, I was an on and off smoker, mostly on, but never (or seldom) puffing on more than a few sticks a day. Better than before, but still enough to kill me.

Now I have been on the no-ciggie kick for another year – just shy of a couple of weeks at current writing – and tempting fate again by bleating about it. Strangely, at times during the past few weeks as we approach the year-marking date of Aug. 5, it has been more difficult to stick with the no-smoke regimen than it was in the first few weeks of going without last year – and then I was in another high-stress job that had many people in the newsroom out in the car park for a few puffs every hour.

If I can quit then, surrounded by all that peer encouragement, why should it be so difficult now, when I’m working out of the rice fields and mostly setting my own schedule?

I do not know, but it is clear that it is a strong and evil habit to break. And most smokers know they should quit even if they won’t admit it to anyone. Feel only pity for them as they slink into the choking air of the smoking booths at airports … and, feel anger, too, for the smokers in Indonesia who cannot find the courteous will not to smoke in restaurants, malls and other public places. But remember that they are ill and getting sicker all the time.

By now, many of the increased health risks that I incurred during a 25-year habit have significantly dropped backed toward those of non-smoker. My risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker, for instance, and I no longer suffer from easy shortness of breath. Exercise activities – riding my bike down to Ubud and back or even longer rides on the circuits around town – are fights against muscle endurance and creaking joints and not gasping, wheezing struggles for oxygen.

As another quitter, English humorist A.P. Herbert, put it: “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again! ... God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”

Also, by now, the increased oxygen that has been making it to my lungs for the past year has helped to repair dry skin and heal premature wrinkles. Stains on fingers and teeth are gone, and should the missus and I decide to try for yet a third child, my little swimmers and skimmers are healthier and more abundant.

Of course, it’s a bit long now for me to still blame any of my natural moody irritableness on having quit smoking; I still do have the odd cravings that hit me sometime – sometimes but not always during moments of stress. Sometimes I would just like to retreat to the balcony for a light-up and a long, slow drag over a cup of coffee or while sipping an ice-cold beer.

That would really be a pleasure, I think, but giving in only crosses my mind for a moment, and then I remember some friends exiting Ngurah Rai after a long air journey from London. Before reaching us as they pushed their trolley forward they were already digging out their cigarettes and pulling off nicotine patches, several each. And I recall my own many times of running out of smokes in the middle of the night and hunting through ashtrays and trash cans for butts long enough to smoke. (Bathroom graffiti: “Please don’t throw your cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light.”)

Nicotine, old cursed friend and tormentor, this time, I hope and pray, I’ve got you licked.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Maybe There Is, Maybe There Isn’t

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, July 14, 2010.)

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” – Psalm 14:1

There comes a time in almost every religious ceremony or service I attend – be it Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Islamic – when my rational mind rebels and I start cursing the tyranny of belief.

In this frame of mind it is near impossible for me to assume any tolerant live-and-let-live attitude. I can see in the most benign of pastors and priests only a “generation of vipers” who prey on the people, enslaving them to rites and rituals that are economic, psychological and spiritual burdens.

So it is not surprising that in the midst of the three-month ceremony for my youngest son I would suddenly get a scoffing fit and have difficulty in controlling my impatience with the whole “primitive” – as I tend to think in the midst of an attack – rigmarole of incense, offering and holy water.

This sort of attitude, if known to its fullest extent, would not go down well with the in-laws. Usually, when not right in the middle of things – when I can contemplate in the abstract the meaning of a chicken pecking rice off my son’s baby-bald pate and then being passed under two bridged stacks of stones -- I can appreciate the woven offerings, the effigies that no one seems to know what they represent, just about anything really. It is when theory gives way to practice that I find myself hot, bothered by smoke, and cramped from sitting long minutes in positions my middle-aged joints can no longer handle.

It’s not necessarily that I don’t have the heart and mind for belief, you see; I don’t have the back and knees for it. Even in earlier days I didn’t have the physical stamina for weekly praise and hoopla and was usually dozing by the time the singing was over and the sermon had begun.

So it was interesting to come away from an experimental session with one of Ubud’s healing tribe without an immediate rejection of the hocus-pocus. And this was one of those full-on sessions with chanting and crystals and a song-induced trance -- after which the healer said I had, in some alternate reality, handed her a piece of my soul for her to hold for a while.

I am still not certain what to make of all of it, and have been keeping a close eye on things in case there was some witch doctoring involved that will have me baying and prancing at every full moon. And now it occurs to me that I didn’t ask the woman if she gave that piece of my soul back.

What are the implications of someone else walking around with a piece of my soul? Can she turn me into a zombie slave at will? How many other pieces of peoples’ souls does she have locked away in some device of black magic? Once she gets some critical non-mass together will she have the power to rule the world and plunge it into eternal darkness?

Actually, she was such a nice person, that if anything she would – if she could – plunge the world into some bright and shiny place so lovely and full of love that even curmudgeons would regularly smile, not only grimly, but with real joy. The thought of it gives me the shivers – oh, the horror!

The real problem with belief, though, is not so much the theatrical shows of pomp and ritual. These are mere play, and probably should be treated as such by many more people than they are.

In the realms of belief, the people who are the real trouble are the fanatics and the fanatical scoffers, both insisting that spiritual or religious affairs are life and death issues. They want everyone to take the questions of belief dead seriously, and they throw the most awful fits when they think people are ignoring them, which, for the most part, sensible people are doing.

The fanatics and the scoffers -- thinking that belief or unbelief is so important that they must persuade everyone to one or the other -- aren’t willing to accept that the choice is not as central to existence as a sense of peace and well-being; it seems too easy to them that happiness trumps hair-shirted misery, with or without a supposedly comforting god.

Whether or not there is a God or something else beside the here and now of our physical senses is the fundamental mystery of life; we miss it when we adopt an easy certainty about it for or against. But it just seems too hard at times to teach or learn the wisdom of awe and reverence for a divine ambiguity.



Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Too Much

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, June 30, 2010)

“Dear Lord, please send us another oil boom, and we promise that this time we won’t piss it away.” – Yet another Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker from the oil bust of the 1980s

The music didn’t stop until after 3 a.m. It never does. You’ve heard it, same as me, with that thumping bass that comes across the rice fields at night from some near or distant hamlet. Maybe it’s a youth bazaar, maybe some enterprising young man has set up a café in a nearby village to give poor Javanese girls a place of employment (out of the kindness of his heart, you understand).

The first night, Friday, I thought maybe a banjar was having an outdoor screening of the World Cup competition and had a band playing between the matches. But Saturday the music kept pounding right through the late game hours, on toward 4 o’clock.

The problem, of course, is that there aren’t any real enforceable zoning laws for noise or much of anything else. If you are on good terms with the local village pecalang constabulary, sometimes they can be of assistance; if the musical disturbance can be identified only as coming from “over there somewhere,” quiet, sleepless rage is the futile option.

Pity the couple that flies in for a quick romantic getaway from Perth or Singapore only to find that their idyllic bungalow is across the river from the desa where that weekend’s dance never stops.

Add this to the list of complaints that make frequent appearances in the letters section of the local English-language press, alongside gripes about roadside trash dumps, hours-long arrival queues, venal taxi drivers, the high price of alcohol and daily traffic jams. It would seem that even after 40 years of an economy committed to tourism that government officials on every level still struggle to manage the competing wants and needs of local villages and businesses and the expectations of the paying clientele.

The full consequences of this mismanagement aren’t just handfuls of upset tourists and malcontent resident expatriates, as pointed out in the mouthful of a booklet, “Rapid Assessment on Climate Change: Potential Threats and Impact on Bali’s Economy and Community, Livelihoods and the Role of the Tourism Industry” – which was reviewed by Toku Buku in the previous edition of Bali Advertiser (Google “Muriel Ydo climate change” for an online version).

Poor management of solid and household wastes, agricultural land and villa development, transportation infrastructure, energy use, and coastal areas and waterways, when not causing possibly unfixable problems on its own, is exacerbating environmental degradation caused by global climate change.

And in the midst of a tourism boom that has arrival numbers at unprecedented levels and growing in double digits, no one is seen on the horizon with the political will or the commercial courage to put on the brakes and stop the happy-days-are-here-again madness.

How else to explain that sick and queasy feeling I have in my stomach? It’s the same feeling I get when watching the home team in the midst of a late-in-the-game rally, but with the knowledge that ultimately my side will fall, victim of out-of-date coaching strategies and the unsteadiness of post-expiry-date veterans.

Think that I and other commentators (for one, Anak Agung Gde Agung, the social affairs minister under former president Abdurrahman Wahid, in the Jakarta Post on June 9) are deluded doomsayers?

Well, back in another life, when I was a financial journalist covering the oil markets for a living, the price of a barrel of crude oil shot up to US$150 in mid-2008, and market analysts said it was a new day, that the market was different this time, that this time we’d never see oil below US$100 a barrel again. Then they explained it with charts, double-speak and surging demand from China -- and before the end of the year oil was right back down at US$40 a barrel.

It’s just natural that busts follow booms, and that’s as true with commodity tourism as it is with oil futures.

So, somebody – officially or unofficially – had better start paying attention to the complaints of unhappy customers and the myriad warning signs being given off by the overtaxing of resources and the environment, because soon, what used to be thought of as an it-can-only-go-up market will become a nowhere-to-go-but-down market, and hotel, bungalow, restaurant and spa owners will be standing around looking at one another and wondering what happened, where did everybody go?

And right about then the full scale of the problems caused by Bali’s unsustainable development will become too obvious to ignore any longer, only there won’t be any money to put toward fixing the mess.

When that time comes, call me. I’ve got the bumper stickers already made.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Overpaid, Oversexed, Over Here

(First published in Bali Advertiser, June 16, 2010)

“I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors, all of us against the foreigner.”
                                                                          – Bedouin proverb

Some ideas should die at inception – Donald Trump’s comb-over, any Pamela Anderson movie, using large concrete balls to plug up a mud volcano – and it is often difficult to understand why some concepts too cornball to survive serious scrutiny, actually do.

Indonesia’s own most recent one – in a long line of grand beauts – is the still-not-dead idea of requiring foreign men wanting to marry Indonesian women to pay a “security guarantee” of 500 million rupiah ($55,000). A further stipulation in the proposed marriage reform law that contains this clause is that the deposit would apply only if the bride is a Muslim woman, and not if she is Christian, Buddhist or Hindu. If a couple is still together after 10 years, they can claim back the money as joint property; if they divorce or the husband leaves, the money goes to the woman.

This enlightened idea – promoted by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Islamic clerics as protection for women and their children from “foreign” men that might abandon them – is destined to be voted on by parliament by the end of the year, according to a May 31 Agence France-Presse story.

Once one has done laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of the proposal, though, the thought has to come: They won’t actually go through with this insanity, will they?

Here is a paragraph from a Reuters news story after the country’s anti-porn bill was passed in 2008: “The anti-porn bill was pushed by a small group of Islamist parties in predominantly Muslim, but officially secular, Indonesia. Minority groups, especially Christians and Hindus, said the bill was a threat to artistic, religious, and cultural freedom. But despite big protests in Jakarta, Bali and Papua, the bill was eventually passed by parliament.”

That is, there is every possibility this bill will pass into law, and then we’ll have some real fun with all sorts of unintended consequences. The fallback position for most Western man-Muslim woman marriages in Southeast Asia has always been for the man to convert, even if only nominally. Will Indonesian Muslim women now start converting to other religions for the sake of “foreign” love and to save their men the dosh? Will couples resort to “living in sin” or going overseas for marriage, in both instances giving the women and any children from the unions less protection than they would have had otherwise?

Over the next few months running up to any vote, there is going to be a growing realization – as there was with the anti-porn bill – that the bill’s sponsors are going to keep trying to push it through, that they won’t desist, and that no politician or media pundit is going to be able do anything to dissuade them.

And as with the anti-porn bill, the elected members of parliament are going to be too afraid to be seen going against anything supported by the religious authorities, all notions of secularism aside.

Now, let’s not fault the bill’s supporters purely on religious grounds. Every society and religion in the world has always tried to protect its women from the real or perceived depredations of foreign men. Think not only of the Brits and Australians and their attitude toward the American “Yanks” during World War II, but of traditional resistance to most marriages that cross religious, racial or national lines.

Even during the 90s, my brother – an American working for an oil company in Perth, Australia – still ran into the charge that he was “stealing our women” when he was dating his current wife, and likely any Caucasian man anywhere in Asia is familiar with the sentiment in one form or another. It isn’t then a prejudice that is restricted to Muslim clerics holed up in their pesantrens.

The real question here is where do the clerics get the idea that all “foreign” men, almost surely code for Caucasian males, have large wads of cash lying around? Have they never met a starving Jakarta-based English teacher whose only hope after paying the rent and other monthlies is that he’ll have enough left over for a couple of weekend Bintangs? Or how about the freelance writer trying to make ends meet editing corporate communication material and writing cheap advertorials for the country’s glossies?

There is such a naked combination of ignorance and greed revealed in the proposed law, one would think that soon the adults will show up and this particular item would be removed from the bill.

They won’t, and it won’t, so, quick, call your wedding planners and matchmakers before the cost of love soars.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

We All Get Down and Dirty

(First published in the Bali Advertiser on June 2, 2010)

“Please don’t tell my folks I work in the oil patch. They still think I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” – Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker

The men and companies who help keep this old world running – which it mostly does on coal, diesel, gasoline and jet fuel – aren’t having such a good few weeks. There is BP’s little problem in the Gulf of Mexico, the collision between two tankers on May 25 in Singapore, and then the series of recent mining accidents that remind us that thousands of miners die each year -- because of poor safety practices or just the plain misfortune of working in one of the world’s most dangerous industries.

It is easy to tsk-tsk the greed of the men and companies that go in search of black gold in liquid or chunk form and bring the stuff up from the ground for us to use in fuel tanks and power plants. But that’s forgetting that it is our demand for such products that drives the exploitation of the earth’s energy resources. There would be no need of it if we didn’t insist on the right to monthly budget flights to all points Asia, air-conditioned riding comfort on our way to yoga classes and farmer’s markets, and making day out of night for our reading, viewing and social pleasures after the sun goes down.

Only our frequent warm showers (produced by hot water heaters run on electricity from coal-fired power plants) help us forget that we are stained with the same black hydrocarbon that is now keeping pelicans and other water birds grounded in the marshes and wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Granted, and in the interest of full disclosure, the LeRois are an oil ‘bidness people from way back. Uncle Charles worked for 30 years for Amoco – bought by BP in 1998 – retiring as a vice president of offshore exploration long before the present troubles. An engineer brother works out of Australia in service to the oil division of a major commodity and mining company. My own first job out of university was with a small independent operator in the go-go oil fields of Oklahoma in the early 1980s, and other friends and family are scattered around the globe, if not making fortunes from oil, then making their living from it.

And it just isn’t justifiable to try and assign these folk – or even the CEOs and top executives of companies like Shell, BP, Exxon and Total – the sole blame for the results of our addiction to easy and convenient energy. That’s like blaming poor coca farmers in Columbia, Peru and Bolivia for the ravages of cocaine use among the celebrities and East and West Coast party hounds of North America.

No doubt there were many safety and regulatory lapses leading up to the disaster that continues to unfold in the southern waters of the United States, but the answer to getting America’s oil monkey off its back isn’t in the inevitable calls for a moratorium on offshore drilling. As with the production of illegal drugs, that just means the black energy the U.S. needs will be produced elsewhere – as most already is – and imported into the country to feed gas-guzzling SUVs and RVs.

The solution is only going to come when people -- in the U.S. and all around the world -- stop buying and using products either made from oil or produced using energy from oil and coal. But if you’ve been anywhere lately besides the old-hippie hangouts of Ubud, you’ll know that the buying hasn’t even slowed down, and even among the righteously clean and green you’ll find that they often have the latest in cell phone and computer technology – made of petroleum-based materials in oil-intensive processes and creating toxic waste disposal problems of their own because of the heavy metals used in their batteries and electronic components. Too, doesn’t traversing the hippie trail for the younger set consist mainly of hip-hopping around the globe on one long never-ending jet-fuel bender?

The problems and foul-ups such as what we are seeing now in the Gulf of Mexico aren’t going to end until each of us starts examining the way we live and the competition amongst us ceases to be about who can get more, but about who can get by with greater efficiency and less of everything – even if that means such hardship as eating rice, vegetables, chicken and pork instead of insisting that living in or even visiting Bali means we don’t have to give up Australian beef, French wines and cheeses, European beers and American junk food.

I’ll see you at the warung and the wet market, and we can compare the luster of our sheens.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi