Back on the Clock

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 25, 2007)

“Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going.
I’m glad I came, but just the same, I must be going.”
-- Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in the 1930 movie, Animal Crackers

This is good-bye. Two years I have been writing this column. Five years I have been staring at the rice fields contemplating life. Now it is time to punch in again. I’ve taken a job, you see. It is back to morning alarms, noon whistles and five o’clock bells.

Thank you to the readers that have let me know they enjoyed the writing. Thank you, too, to the people that have disagreed with me and took the time to tell me so. To the less appreciative and more abusive, well, you won’t have Lee Roy LeRoi to kick around anymore.

Five years ago I would have said I would never return to the regimented world. Dealing with it (badly) had just about done me in spiritually and physically. My soul had shrunk to pea-size. It knocked around in a husk hollowed by smoke, drink and corporate panic. A good portion of the cure was rest, diet and moderation. Bali had little to do with it. It could have been Oklahoma cow pastures or Rocky Mountain skylines that fed inspiration and smoothed wrinkled brows.

Weep not for me. There is nothing inherently harmful in returning to gainful employment. Its reputation as destroyer is exaggerated, and I want the steady money. The world is regimented, after all, even if only by the rise and set of the sun or the rhythm of the seasons. People naturally try to bring order to chaos, too. It is the way our minds work, the way we are made, the way the world is made, with planets, stars and men cycling through appointed paths. That is not an endorsement of astrology or predestination. The world moves; we must move in sync with it.

There is no other secret, no magic mantra that once grasped makes everything clear. Life is mostly washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, paying attention to social calendars, business agendas and travel itineraries. Life, not the devil, is in the details. Even those with an artistic temperament must pay their bills. They must pay attention to technique, timing, tastes and markets. And if they can’t govern their lives and their art, then they are probably just interesting people to talk to in a pub -- as they wait for someone else to buy the next round.

We may all be clowns, buffoons and baboons. That is no reason simply to drink and make merry and stick our heads in the urinals.

We have friends and families. We have each other. We have suicide bombers, presidents, painters, bluegrass musicians, composers, TV blondes, news anchors, preachers, missionaries and imams. There are rich folk, white folk, black folk, poor folk, brown and yellow folk. We hate each other, love each other, and are indifferent. We have each other, and nothing else, just we, the blind, leading the blind down the dale and over the cliff. We are all in this together, even if we aren’t all together. Even when we hate each other it is nice to have company.

Life is a lightning bolt in a twirling cosmos; it is infinity in the twinkle of a gnat’s eye. It is humongous and tiny, swift and slow. Blink and it is gone. Stare at it a lifetime, it does not move. It is impossible to reduce it from the unimaginably massive, or raise it from the incomprehensibly infinitesimal, to a human scale. Life overpowers, overwhelms and awes. Never trust anyone who wants to hand it to you in a convenient formulaic package. They are charlatans or fools. The universe is the single largest fact that we know, and must be accepted in its entirety. We creep along our little surface of it as an ant creeps along our own earth ball. On this kind of a scale, even our giants are only one baby step ahead of the rest of us, and less than a meter is sufficient to represent the progress we have made since stepping down from the trees.

So, weep not for me. I have gone back to work only. It does not matter a hill of mole beans, and it pays better than freelance.

My almost constant companion, the semi-adventurous Tropical Tramp, who writes Border Run, also wishes to convey his farewell and thanks to readers and to Bali Advertiser. TT says he has enjoyed it immensely and hopes he never gave anyone a bum steer. Past columns of Bali Skeptic and Border Run will be archived at baliskeptic.com. E-mail is leeroyleroi@yahoo.com.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

Marathon Men (and Hillary)

(First published in Bali Advertiser, April 11, 2007)

“Democracy is ever eager for rapid progress, and the only progress which can be rapid is progress down hill.” – Sir James Hopwood Jeans, English mathematician, physicist and astronomer

What do celebrations of Nyepi, Bali’s Day of Silence, have in common with U.S. presidential campaigns? Absolutely nothing. Nyepi celebrations are short, sweet, and silent. U.S. presidential campaigns are interminable, bitter, and cacophonous. Caca-phonous?

And if there is some slight resemblance of the U.S. election process to Nyepi Eve, when the ogoh-ogoh parade to chase off demons and a year’s accumulation of bad spirits and assorted evils, it is lost from lack of respite. Bali’s ogoh-ogoh make their annual appearances brief. America’s ogoh-ogoh, also called candidates, never cease to stalk and quiver and shake.

It makes me long to be the citizen of some country with a sensible parliamentarian system, or maybe a country too new and too poor to spend so lavishly on the spectacle of American-style democracy. Perhaps I could become East Timorese in time to enjoy the bliss of presidential campaigns restricted to the two-and-a-half weeks prior to the vote on April 9. I don’t think I could stop smiling, even with Australian troops chasing guerrillas in the jungles. I’ll take guerillas in the jungles any day over the din and strain of the perpetual American electoral process.

No wonder the US screws up everything from Iraq to healthcare. No one has any time to govern, too busy raising money to feed the political machines that must traverse the unending election cycles. And then there is the ‘religion’ of politics – with every politician doing it like Jesus – followed by the wrapping up of everything in red, white and blue ribbons and bows. It is a nauseating mix, close-up or at a distance.

Other democracies may have riots in the streets and blow up a polling station or two, but riots are stresses of short duration. Elections in other countries are pin pricks. American elections are two years of water boarding. American politics is all pushing emotional buttons and image manipulation – all about saving prayer in schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust,” and marriages and families and babies; or about fighting terrorists and loving freedom and promoting democracy and guns and glory; or about protecting children, the elderly and forest creatures from the depredations of capitalists, petrochemical companies, Cheney and Rove.

Look no further to explain America’s low voter turnout – only 48.3 percent in the 26 elections from 1945 to 1998, ranking the U.S. 139 behind both established and new democracies, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Only the hardiest and dullest intellects can put up with the lack of substance for as long as it takes to decide an American election. By November of any voting year, the rest of us are whimpering in our closets, wondering when the air will clear and it will be safe to come out for a breath.

(No European country has average election turnouts lower than the U.S. Only three Asian countries, Thailand, Pakistan and Nauru, have poorer showings.)

Americans don’t vote in majority because they are shell-shocked by the time the polling booths open, stomachs, attentions and channels turned long ago, psyches hammered to surrender by the empty crossfire of Hannity and Colmes, the banality of Larry King, the bombast of Rush and O’Reilly, the bilgy bite of Coulter, the whinging twang of Carville, the shrill warnings of hosts of Jacksons and Falwells and Robertsons. No one needs this, Americans think, and flip to Paris, Madonna, Britney, and the latest episode of the newest spin-off of CSI: Law & Order.

We’re not yet halfway through 2007 and the 2008 election is already old news. Serious and not-so-serious candidates declared months ago. Tom Vilsack announced his intention to run the day after the 2006 mid-terms were over, and reporters and journalists have been breathlessly speculating since at least then about Barack and Hillary, Rudy and McCain. My former brothers and sisters in the press, I fear, have taken leave of their senses along with the rest of America. Can it really last for another year-and-a-half? It can and will.

American electoral campaigns are more excruciating than the annual Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season that takes hold of the country every September. How early is too early to put up a grinning skeleton in a Pilgrim hat and have him dance with Ole Saint Nick? How early is too early to declare for the 2012 campaigns and build up a positional juggernaut? How early is too early to talk of running mates and Southern strategies and bimbo eruptions? Is it too early to book tickets for the 2016 ‘Straight-Talk Express’?

Oi, the head pounds. To paraphrase the great Frank Zappa, I might be moving to Mongolia soon, to get a mighty little pony and ride beyond the reaches of Internet cables, mobile phones, GPS, telegrams, and television. But tell me first, who do you like for 2020?

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

Politics, Religion, and the Battle of Hastings

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, March 28, 2007)

“ … and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbor; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.” – Isaiah 19:2

My younger brother and I have been having one of our periodic e-mail discussions. It is curious for us both, and frustrating, to be so at odds over so many things. Now that we are men, we can’t agree on anything, if we ever did. Maybe we assumed when we were younger that we saw the world the same and just got on with our young man hi-jinks, more concerned with firecrackers, football, and the girls next door than any minor disagreement on philosophies and politics.

Nowadays, he says, “Rush,” and I say, “Bilge.” I say “Coulter,” and he says, “She’s not a freak.”

It’s fairly predictable how the exchange is going to go, but we keep at it, I suppose, to dig out some understanding of where the other fellow went wrong. We try to keep it civil, although sometimes we slip into the verbal roughhousing that is the privilege of brothers. I would say it’s probably better we leave the disagreements to e-mail, with distance and differing time zones keeping the exchanges from being in-our-face confrontations.

What worries me is that our disagreements are over many of the issues and personalities separating political and cultural sides in America today, and if even brothers can see things at such extremes – I won’t say opposites – it gives little hope of any pragmatic compromise that will mend the rifts in the American landscape. We two, at least, will stop somewhere short of bloodshed, but not all siblings and families restrain themselves, and it is increasingly difficult to believe that mere American countrymen will stop short of tearing each other limb from limb.

One problem between my brother and me is that it is a family trait that none of the LeRois are ever wrong. If not infallible, we are correct 99.99 percent of the time. It is insufferable of us, I know, but trust me on this: we are almost always right. And even if I’m agnostic, and unsure of what it is possible to know, and doubt it possible to be right about anything at all, one thing of which I’m absolutely sure is that I’m right to be agnostic. Maybe you can see how it goes.

That’s certainly how it goes in American today, with snorts and sighs and eye-rolls replacing argument and counter-argument, because one side’s assumptions are so antithetical to what the other side believes. For two sides to argue intelligently and intelligibly, there has to be some mutual axiomatic groundwork and a common logic. And in America now, there is neither, leaving each side only the innate ability to send the other into howling, rabid madness – and then both sides claim it is the other that is fit for straightjacket and Bedlam, and the other guys always started it first anyway, and took it to new depths of slime-slinging and vitriol, and don’t have a sense of humor about these things in any case.

Lest anyone make the complaint that I am only complaining without offering any solutions, I now outline my plan for the reconciliation of America.

First, Americans must be made to understand this is not reality TV. They will have to turn off their TVs, computers, laptops, Palm Pilots and Blackberrys, and leave their digital cameras, hand-phones, and video camcorders at home. Then all across America, people will be required to meet in their town parks and village squares and the other common areas hardly anybody uses anymore (I might require them to walk to the parks). Local police will be on hand to screen citizens for guns, knives, and other American necessities and accessories to keep the exercise as safe as possible.

The sides will be chosen up. It is not really important how or by what criterion, only that the sides are roughly equal, much like the split in the popular voting in the last few presidential elections. And if there aren’t enough Blues in some Red districts, or enough pagans in a Southern Baptist town, or enough whatever wherever, then we could have a whatever town in, say, Texas, line up against a something-else village of equal size in, say, Rhode Island (or even against Rhode Island if it is a rather large Texas town).

Then, with the sides lined up in equal numbers, and the mud pit deemed ready by the authorities, an honoree, preferably a veteran, will blow the whistle and the two teams will re-enact the Battle of Hastings a la Monty Python. Handbags are allowed only as long as they aren’t full of bricks.

I’m not 100 percent certain it will work, even being a LeRoi, but it is the only logical course of action to relieve the tension and suspicion that has crept into even the mildest of political and cultural disagreements in America. And if Americans are worried it would make them look silly in the eyes of the world, I’ve got news for them.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

Don’t Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette!

(First published in Bali Advertister, March 14, 2007)

“Ciga-reets and whiskey and wild, wild women, they’ll drive you crazy, they’ll drive you insane.”

I wrote in August 2005 about smoking my last cigarette from my last pack. It was a damned lie. The last cigarette didn’t come until March 7 of 2006, and it has been a year now since I’ve ingested any nicotine from any ‘delivery device’ that I was personally smoking.

I have passed all the tests. The brothers have come for a visit. I have been out with old drinking buddies who still smoke like Sumatran forest fires. I have been in pubs where nobody knew me, where nobody knew I had quit smoking, and where I could have had a cigarette or two or a pack and nobody in my circle (or my wife) would have been the wiser. I didn’t light up.

Urges still hit me, but it’s enough to stop me just thinking of having to reset the count to day one. And, yes, I really do mark off each day without a cigarette with a big fat ‘zero’, adding the days up into weeks and months, counting down the days to the one-year mark on my calendar. Sometimes, it’s enough to redeem a day in which nothing has been accomplished just to think, “I made it through another day not smoking.”

I like not smoking. I can get on the bike for a pedal into Ubud, and come back up the rising roads to home without collapsing on arrival. My clothes do not smell like an ashtray; my wife says neither does my breath. She says I look healthier and ‘fresh’. Maybe quitting won’t make me live any longer, but I enjoy life more and it costs me less – especially since a drop in alcohol intake has come along with the no-smoking policy with no extra effort.

For the most part, I do not play the part of the righteous reformed smoker. It doesn’t bother me if smokers smoke in my presence – as long as they don’t do so while I am eating, as long as they don’t fire up in my house before I have a chance to steer them to the garden. I never smoked in non-smoker’s houses when I was a smoker and don’t mean to allow anyone to smoke in mine. I also never smoked around children, and I expect people to show my son the same courtesy.

I do recognize that some people can smoke sensibly. One of my brothers for instance has smoked one or two cigarettes daily for years, and a big night for him in a pub might mean three cigarettes. I can’t do that. The only sensible option for me was to quit, and (Glory Hallelujah!) I have now been smoke-free for 12 months. Let the non-smoking celebratory dance begin. (Look, Ma, no wheezing!)

Below are some suggestions that might help any smokers trying to quit. They are tricks I found useful.

Make up your mind that you are a non-smoker. Don’t be swayed from this idea by a relapse or two or three. I became a non-smoker in August of 2005. It just didn’t take complete hold until March 8 of 2006.
Keep a daily count of the number of cigarettes you smoke. Don’t make a big thing out of it. Don’t tell yourself that because you smoked three yesterday, you have to smoke only two today. Just keep a count of how many sticks you smoke, and how much you spend on cigarettes. If you’ve really made up your mind to quit, the numbers will go down.
Talk to people who have quit and managed to stay quit. They will encourage you.
When you do smoke, go hide in the garden like you should be ashamed. You should.
If you have kids, consider whether you want them growing up thinking that smoking is a cool thing that Mommy or Daddy does.
Don’t fool yourself that you can limit it to weekends, to pubs, to trips away from home, to one cigarette a day. Most people can’t.
Most importantly, just stop, and keep stopping, for as long as you can, after each cigarette, after each pack, until you’ve finally quit for good.

I had my first cigarette when I was in the second grade. A neighbor caught my older brother and me smoking on the roof of the house and traumatized us with the fact that “your parents may not know, but God knows.” I then had a few cigarettes in the seventh grade, and sensibly quit again until I was 25, when I took it up again ‘only’ to keep me awake while driving a truck for an oil company. I ended up smoking an average of 10 cigarettes a day for 20 years.

Now I’ve quit again and stuck with it for a year. You do the same.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

Some of My Best Friends ...

(First published in Bali Advertister, February 28, 2007)

“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” – Groucho Marx

E-mail from a British friend says that his “chum Ian, a bridal wear designer, has been commissioned to make the wedding dress for the future Mrs. Wayne Rooney, and for a number of other famous footballers’ floosies.”

That would be a great secondhand connection to fame except for this: How do you brag in a London pub about knowing the guy who’s to make the wedding dress for the bride of England’s most famous footballer, without having to head butt somebody every time you say “my chum Ian, a bridal wear designer”?

It raises some other troubling questions, too: How many famous footballers ever marry their floosies? If they do marry their floosies, on average, how many floosies do they marry over the course of a career? And, not least, how many times can I mention footballers’ floosies in this column before a mob of them fly here from the UK and practice drop kicks with me head?

How many groups of people have I insulted so far? I count five. Those counting at home may come up with different totals due to rounding errors. Should I call a press conference and apologize to anyone that might have been offended? Do I need to hire a therapist and a counselor to help me understand my ‘hatred’ for particular groups? Do I need an agent?

If you follow tabloid entertainment news, you know the names and quotes that come up next: Mel Gibson – “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”, Michael Richards – “We’d have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass”, Isaiah Washington – “I’m not your little faggot”, Jade Goody – “I’m not a racist”, and Tim Hardaway – “I hate gay people”.

Or, if your tastes run more to the political, we could go with Robert Ford and George Allen. Ford, a South Carolina state senator and a black American himself, said having African-American Barack Obama at the top of a U.S. Democratic ticket in 2008 would result in an across the board defeat for the Democratic Party. Ford then apologized to anybody he had caused pain, strangely including himself. Allen lost his bid for re-election to the US Senate after calling a man of Indian ancestry ‘macaca’ during a campaign stop in Virginia last year.

None of these episodes are particularly flattering to the people involved. I’m almost certain, though, that the round of apologies and the struggle-session press conferences that go with them are a broader offense. The idea seems to be that we who are not Mel, Michael, Isaiah, Jade, Tim, Robert, or George, would never harbor prejudicial feelings or thoughts about anyone based on race or other grouping, that only abnormal people could harbor such prejudicial feelings, and that those people need to be corrected by doctors of the mind so they can become normal like the rest of us, who don’t hate anybody.

But we do all harbor such feelings, even if we mask them in most situations, even if for particular individuals, we have been able to move past the general to the specific. We love to think that having one or two friends of such-and-so group means we have overcome our underlying prejudices for all such-and-sos in general. It doesn’t. Having one friend that is gay, Muslim, Jewish, or black, doesn’t mean we have overcome stereotypical images built over a lifetime – just as not liking one particular gay, Muslim, Jewish, or black person doesn’t mean we are committed racist neo-Nazis ready to start sending all such persons to the gas chambers and ovens.

Group recognition is a trait we all share, a defense system developed when we needed quickly to determine friend from foe, and we still habitually classify many, if not most, of the people we come across in a day according to the most convenient tribal grouping at hand. We simply don’t have time to get down to the specifics of every person that crosses our paths. In most cases, that is fine, unless we can’t move from the general to the specific when we need to, or unless we use the most convenient tribal grouping to choose who gets the promotion, who our daughters and sons can date and marry, who makes the team, who gets our vote, who lives, who dies.

It would seem to me that we’d be better off forgoing the reflexive genuflection of tearful apology every time a celebrity publicly crosses the gods of political correctness, and instead just be open about how racially and group minded we all are. We can’t help dividing the world into “we” and “they”. Once we accept that, we can better guard against our own prejudices when dealing with persons individually. And if some 15-minute-famer does slip and make an ass of him or herself, please, let the apologies be done in private and let’s stop wasting ink and airtime on them. Teary-eyed celebrities offend me.

But, uh, excuse me a moment, some footballers’ floosies and their bridal wear designers are at the door demanding an apology.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

War! Huh! What Is It Good For?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 31, 2007)

“And some are very, very bad.
Why are they
sad and glad and bad?
I do not know.
Go ask your dad.”
– Dr. Seuss

Sam, the only son of a childhood family friend, is a U.S. soldier in Iraq. I have never met him. I guess he’s the usual age of young men who go to fight America’s – or any country’s – wars. Sam’s father, Ben David, was a teenager when I was in kindergarten and was famously banished from the LeRoi house in 1967, because of the many merry adventures – some of which became minor legend – he’d lead my brothers and me on, along with his own younger brother and sisters.

Later, Sam’s grandfather, Ben, was my high school basketball coach. His grandmother, Betty, among many other things she did and I remember, met me with hot chocolate one drizzly Taipei winter day when I arrived home from school and she was watching the children while other missionary parents met in our house. I’ve played soccer with one of Sam’s uncle, volleyball and basketball with his aunts, and I have been thinking about him in Iraq ever since Ben and Betty said in October that Ben David had asked “everyone to pray really hard” for Sam.

The question in the title, from the 1970 song by Edwin Starr, isn’t profound. If Mr. Starr himself is to be believed, the song wasn’t even an anti-war anthem; it was a song about the personal battles between people, “the war people wage against each other on a day-to-day basis. All the words are applicable to neighbors who fight with each other,” he said in a profile posted on www.superseventies.com. (Mr. Starr died in 2003 at age 61.)

What good is it anyway to say war isn’t good for anything when sometimes it is absolutely necessary, or if not necessary, unavoidable? You’ve got to do something besides stand and bleed if someone keeps punching you in the nose, and some people just won’t stop doing so until they – or you – are dead. The practical question is what do we personally do once war is here and underway? Join up? Head for the hills? Howl at the moon? Invest in steel and munitions? What do we do when the dogs of war won’t lie down and get along?

It’s not a question that can be honestly answered in the abstract. Most of us – me, people reading this newspaper, most Americans, the majority of Europeans in the last 60 years – haven’t had to think seriously about war. War is never on top of us. If it threatens, we have the means to escape. We don’t have to face the choice of which child to save from a bomb or a bullet, which to trust to God and luck. We don’t have to choose between personal dignity and getting enough to eat, between following orders and facing a firing squad. We can sit relaxed in our armchairs – feet crossed, fire roaring, cat curled on the hearth – while we decide if we are ‘fur it or agin it’.

For us, war is an idle topic of discussion at the dinner table or over beers after work. No matter what the death toll was for the day, we still go home to a warm bed, a warm, living bed partner, and warm, happy, breathing children. We’ve got no blood riding on the outcome. Does it even do any good to anguish about it? Does anguish ever overcome what is, at heart, our indifference as long as we and ours are safe?

Just what do we do then when the dogs of war refuse to cease to howl? Wear sackcloth and bathe in ashes? Gnash our teeth and pull our hair? Stalk presidents, picket military bases, spit on generals, paint flowers on war machines and peace signs on heroes’ statues?

In all the history of wars and war protests, none of it’s ever done one bit of good, has seldom stopped a war in progress, has never stopped the next war from coming, has never stopped war from being a daily, on-going event somewhere in the world, round-the-clock, week after week, year in and out, a display of the same bloody-minded ferocity that we have time and again proven lies deep – and sometimes not so deep – inside all of us.

So, unless you’ve got some magic potion that will turn all us war mongers into peace lovers ready to lie down with lions and sheep, please, bow your head and pray to whatever God or gods you pray to, and pray for Sam. Pray really hard. Because it looks like it’s going to get worse.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

Have We Anything Resembling a Plan?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 17, 2007)

“I never planned anything in my life.” – Lucas ‘Luke’ Jackson (Paul Newman) in the 1967 movie ‘Cool Hand Luke’

Anyone who has built or renovated a house in Indonesia is probably not surprised that planes fall out of the sky and ferries break up and sink with alarming frequency – not to equate a villa builder’s frustration at crooked tiles and paint smudges on the woodwork with the death that can come with hurried maintenance checks and lackadaisical enforcement of carrying capacities.

But the two areas are not unrelated, and when discussing either safety or construction, Westerners often resort to the use of “they”, meaning collectively the people living in the country surround them: “They” don’t care enough to do it right, not like “we” do it. “They” don’t think in the long-term, whereas “we” always act with foresight approaching the clairvoyant. “They” don’t think precisely, while “we” never resort to fuzzy numbers and back-of-the-envelope figuring.

What strikes me in my calmer moments these days – when I am not apoplectic over a poorly fitted window or random placement of bathroom fixtures – is how Western “we” expatriates remain, sometimes after decades living away from home, and how Indonesians and Asians, to “us”, seldom become more than the outside “other”. We choose – dispensing with the quotation marks – for one reason or another to live in Bali, and yet the majority of us refuse to live like the Balinese. We want Western-style kitchens, Western-style bathrooms, Western-style beds, and no chickens scratching in the garden – not stopping to ask if Bali would have the same drawing power and attraction if everyone, Balinese included, lived in villas and Western-style homes, shopped for groceries at supermarkets, and bought all home maintenance supplies at Ace.

Looking over some of my 19th-century travel histories – such as Alfred R. Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago – it is surprising how easily some supposedly uptight Victorian English (admittedly not common travelers) adapted to living in two-room bamboo shacks. In days of different hygienic standards, when draft and small farm animals still roamed and shat in the streets of all major cities, and when people in Western countries still did their own ‘business’ in out buildings, it was probably easier for them to adjust to living among the ‘heathen’. The main practical – as opposed to social and cultural – adjustments would have been in accepting flimsier building construction and a different diet. Personal ablutions, for instance, would have been only slightly different, perhaps more exposed, in the days before widespread indoor plumbing, and most everyday, non-specialist technology would have been familiar, if possibly from a not-too-distant past.

The Western world has come ‘far’ since then, to the point where American and European homes are so free of ordinary germs and bacteria that some doctors blame weaker immune systems and more common allergies on defense systems hardly ever tested by household dirt; to where every product comes with at least one warning, even if it is only to advise not to eat the wrappings; where children and many adults have little idea of the origin of foods beyond the freezer section of their local warehouse superstore; and where – so far from living in the moment – insurance, palmtops, actuarial tables, and risk analysis help us to prepare for every contingency we can think of and even some we can’t.

Americans and Europeans are living in the twenty-first century and striving for the twenty-second, while much of the rest of the world is stuck in the first half of the twentieth, if not further behind. We are peoples in love with precision and exactness and cleanliness – except in our rebel movie heroes – which is a good thing when dealing with planes, trains, and automobiles, among other things. But it is not such a good thing in other areas, mostly because the only hard edges in life – other than the difference between life and death – are the ones that we make and impose.

Life beyond timetables and connectivity is dirty and coarse and played by rule of thumb and seat of pants, or should be, if we would only let it. There is a sort of karmic lesson in the Westerner who comes to build a dream home in the Bali paradise and then waxes wroth for a year, browbeating workers and contractors and driving himself to drink fixating on minor flaws.

Paradise may not be so much about the perfectly ideal as about letting go of any idea of the perfect and accepting things as they are. It’s certainly a good lesson to learn in dealing with people, and it may make villa building less stressful for owner and worker … as long as we can be sure flipping a light switch won’t electrocute us and the first 4.0 earthquake won’t bring the roof down on our heads. But that’s the department of our new BA colleague, Phil Wilson, in Fixed Abode. I just wish he had started writing before I got my own renovation project underway.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi

We Have a Rendezvous with Death

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 3, 2007)

“The bastards got me, but they won’t get everybody.” – Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy turned Kremlin critic, shortly before his death, according to friend Andrei Nekrasov in a November 25 Associated Press story

“Everybody wants to have an upscale funeral.” – Howard D. Catchings of Catchings Insurance Agency in Jackson, Mississippi, on burial insurance, New York Times, December 3

We may never know what actually happened in the spy-thriller death of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, but he’s got a great deathbed quote no matter who killed him. And if it turns out he accidentally killed himself while handling one of his radioactive material smuggling schemes – not part of his speaker-of-truth-to-power media image – then not only is it a great quote, it’s a great brazen quote.

Yes, in keeping with the last few lighthearted columns, the subject is death: He, She, It, is coming for us all, and, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, there ain’t nothing we can do about it. We can quit smoking, quit drinking, stop eating fatty foods; eat only vegetables, tofu, tempeh, and fruits, drink only bottled water, and still, one day, the Reaper will call. Death, unlike the bastards that done in Litvinenko, does indeed get everybody.

What death does not get is the everyday attention it deserves. Death is the central fact of life, the one sure thing that follows from being born. Yet people do not like to think about it without prettifying it in some way. People don’t die, they pass on, through a door, going to the next realm, the beyond, the happy hunting grounds, the big, long sleep. Atheists would probably attract less antagonism if they would allow for any life after death consisting of more than being worm food and fertilizer. God’s death, we can accept. We must go on, and we don’t like to think of it as being only in the continued existence of the atoms that make up our currently contiguous parts.

This tiny nuclear bit at the tip of my nose that was once part of a mastodon doesn’t really say much about the mastodon. It doesn’t tell me whether he was a good mastodon or bad, how he treated his lovers and babies, whether he ever had any thoughts worth remembering. And sadly – no, not sadly, it’s just the way it is – it will be the same with all of us living now, human, fish, fowl, mammal, insect, or nematode. Maybe a future columnist will someday muse, too, over our scattered tiny bits, wondering what manner of creatures they once formed and how they lived.

Even if we do wake to find ourselves in a ‘happy’ place, or otherwise, it won’t matter one hill of magic beans to whatever goes on here – in the only world we have ever known – after we are gone. Those who are left will get on with it, most of them without ever stopping to think about our passing or even being aware of our existence in the first place.

And why doesn’t that just stun us to slack-jawed inactivity, the idea that one day we will not be? How are we – we assume the only beings on the planet able to contemplate their own demise – able to put away the idea that one day we will cease to live and breed, and get on with living?

Procrastination! We’ve got other more pressing things, earlier deadlines to meet. We don’t have time. We’ve lost the car keys, baby needs shoes, a spouse feels neglected, the boss is asking for tomorrow’s news and projections. And anyway, yes, we all die, but it’s not going to happen today, is it? It can’t happen today, because we don’t have time, and we don’t think about it, and don’t think about it, and somehow still, we are always thinking about it.

No wonder most people are screwed up. They are forever glossing over the most important fact of life, which is that death comes to all, and that it may be the end, and so you’d better get all you can of life while the getting is good. Time truly is wasting, and no matter how bad it gets here, it’s a lot better than molding in the ground or being burned back to ashes and a few boney chunks.

Come on, then, let’s go for a walk, let’s go for a bike ride, let’s make love, let’s give the children a hug and wrestle them to the floor. Let’s get rich, too, if we can without working too hard, and buy a boat and go for a cruise, because each ticking moment may be the last, with God, the Devil, and Death around the corner ready to pounce and devour and spit nothing out.

Yes, we all die one day. Just you try and get over it, or around it. Then have a swell funeral.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi