11 December 2012

End of the World. Last Movies. Misty Mountain Hop


.
I have only experienced one sweat-free day during this “winter” season thus far, while the rest of the days are still too hot and dripping humid to bear.  I know that I sound like a broken record here, always complaining about the heat (after all, I moved here), but it is such an intense, immediate in-your-face fact:  it is agonizingly hot here, all the time, even in our “cool” season.  Expatriates sizzle in Hell. 
.
I’m grouchy.  Although I do not get out much, a recent trip to a shopping mall hit a seasonably sensitive nerve:  Christmas music!  It has followed me into the tropics like a hell-hound on my trail, and I fear I’ll never escape it.  Yes, I’m a classic Grinch, but the November/ December season always depressed me back there in the dark north.  It is unnerving to walk from the sunny, tropically humid outside heat into a pleasant a/c environment only to be hit with Christmas decorations everywhere and carols blaring loudly.  Why are Thais doing this?  They are less Christian than my most mercenary pet cat, Silly Willy.  It must be something about money. 
.
Well, relief may well come soon.  “It’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine.”  The ancient Mayan calendar is said (by some) to mark this upcoming 21 December 2012 as the end of the world.  End… period.  All over.  End of time.  On the eve of this ending of all time, on the 20th, I plan on meeting my libertarian friends downtown, so I will raise a glass with them as oblivion engulfs the world from the International Dateline on a westward march through the time zones. 
.
(Wait a minute!  Did the ancient Mayans know about the Earth’s sphericity, revolution and time zones?  Nevertheless, they did know something about the rise and fall of civilizations and, rationally, they did see their own decline as a coming inevitability.  I’ll give them that.  Perhaps it is healthy for long-ruling civilizations to occasionally imagine their catastrophic ruin.  It combats hubris and puts one in touch with the Timeless.)
.
One of my major regrets as the End nears is that I am not even partly through my reading list of both online readings and the piles of books I’ve squirreled away. 
.
Meanwhile, I have seen the movie Cloud Atlas, and I want to see it again if possible.  I did not read the novel, but had I read reviews that told of the story’s complex plot – complex in terms of time, space, character identities and narrative continuity.  Yes, it’s a weird one, not for everyone, but it is very interesting.  I prepped for the movie by reading online summaries of the novel and its plot – a kind of modern “Cliff’s Notes” approach to a book which one doesn’t have time to read.  The cast is all-star, and they portray multiple characters (often with heavy makeup that takes a minute to see through).  Definitely worth seeing again – if I can get downtown, if the nagas be willing, if the creeks don’t rise, and if the world doesn’t end too soon. 
.
Meanwhile, while waiting for Armageddon, I am eagerly anticipating the premiere this week of Part One of the film trilogy, The Hobbit.  I am rereading the novel and am using The Atlas of Middle-Earth that my sister gave me for cartographical, geographical, geological and mythological orientation.  After all, “Not all those who wander are lost.”  Some pages in that Atlas are detailed enough to call in artillery strikes, provided that the graphing of the terrain is ontologically sound. 
.
Bilbo Baggins is my all-time favorite Tolkien character, although others warrant my fond respect:  e.g., Gandalf intrigued me with his mysterious comings and goings seemingly backed by arcane knowledge and a traveler’s wisdom; and the early Strider, the Ranger of the North in The Fellowship of the Ring (before he became all kingly and prettified later), appeared to me as a brother in arms, grimly tramping alone up and down the wilds of the ruined vestiges of Arnor’s former glory.  Because the world will end so soon, I am sorry we will never see parts two and three of this very promising movie trilogy. 
.
Bilbo is my favorite character because he loved maps and (with some initial persuading) loved going on “adventures!”  He was an unlikely romantic, raised in the womb of Hobbit comfort but bitten by the wanderlust bug, always packin’ his bags for the Misty Mountains. 
.
-Zenwind.
.

23 November 2012

New Thai Political Storm?


Yesterday I took a boat into Bangkok to see the opening here of the movie The Master, and I made a special effort to see it now because by tomorrow we may see restricted travel in the city.  This weekend’s huge anti-government (anti-Thaksin) rally has worried those in power -- the pro-Thaksin red shirt folks -- enough to enact the Internal Security Act (ISA) for three central Bangkok districts. 
.
The ISA is just short of martial law and gives police massive emergency powers.  The protest rally’s leader has called for a military coup to oust the current democratically elected government, and many other groups may join in the protest.  Normally, the ISA would chiefly have the military involved in law enforcement, but this time it is the police who run the show, with military help only as a last resort.  Why?  The police are widely considered to be pro-Thaksin and the military had ousted Thaksin in the 2006 coup, thus the military is not trusted by those in power. 
.
The Master, a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, is not for everyone, but I wouldn’t miss it since I’m a news junkie for weird cult/religious behavior, and this movie was inspired in part by the Church of Scientology (CoS).  I have been following the weird news of the CoS for several years, especially now that the cult has been self-destructing recently, e.g., with massive defections of top leaders, with scandals hitting the news at least weekly, etc.  Watching The Master, I saw dozens of thinly-veiled references to the CoS that were unmistakable, and I’m sure that folks with even more knowledge of CoS could find scores, if not hundreds, of direct references to it. The acting was first rate, and the music very interesting.  Caveat:  not everyone will enjoy this exploration into the bizarre. 
.
-Zenwind.
.

19 November 2012

Neighborhood

.
It has been a while since I walked my neighborhood loop by the river, since I’ve instead been using the treadmill with the new and improved book holder that I devised for its top. 
.
I was a bit surprised to see booths and tables set up near the river already for the Loi Krathong festival, which isn’t until the next full moon on 28 November, over a week away.  There were no Loi Krathong celebrations last year in our area due to the floods.  Down by the river pier, they are now building the stage for song and dance performances, and many tables are ready to serve partyers out on the terrace between the stage and pier. 
.
In other years on Loi Krathong full moon evening, I have walked this same neighborhood loop amidst wall-to-wall people on the sidewalks and street.  It is a carnival atmosphere.  I plan to get out for this year’s festivities. 
.
-Zenwind.
.

23 October 2012

Russell Means (1939-2012) R.I.P.

.
Many knew him mainly from his role as Chingachgook in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans
.
I remember hearing of both Means and Ron Paul for the first time in news of the September 1987 Libertarian Party Convention as they competed for the nomination to be the LP candidate for the 1988 presidential election.  Ron Paul won the nomination, with Means second.  
.
I remember reading an account of that LP convention, especially when there was a panel discussion about decriminalizing drugs, and Means and some other LP folks on the panel sat on stage passing joints around during the discussion.  Ron Paul’s delegates were in suits and ties, and they sat in the audience a bit surprised at the culture they were entering.  Means publicly backed Paul for president in 2012.
.
-Zenwind. 
.

12 October 2012

Maybe No Flood for Us

.
Columbus Day 2012:  Our rains have slowed a bit – less intense and for less duration – so we may not be flooded at our home up here on the northern rim of greater Bangkok, unless a very wicked storm comes our way.  The problem is not an over-flowing river but slow drainage after hard downpours. 
.
Today I did a boat run into the city to get some meds I needed, and I only carried my small umbrella tucked away in my rucksack (no huge golf umbrella as was needed last week, and certainly no rain poncho). 
.
I saw the movie Argo (2012) while in town, a movie I highly recommend.  This fine film deals with a true event in the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 and is very well done.  Seeing it on Columbus Day made me feel extra patriotic today. 
.
This evening as I was feeding our cats, I heard a bird-song outside that caught my attention because I hadn’t heard this particular bird for a long, long time.  This means that birds are migrating here from northern Asia before winter hits up there.  Here it is their winter vacation/ breeding ground, and they will go back north in February/ March. 
.
These first-heard notes of newly arrived birds here are like March back in the northern temperate zone, when the first robins announce that they are back and that fair weather will eventually come.  In North America it means warmer weather after the big freeze; here it means a bit of cooling relief after the big sweat. 
.
-Zenwind.
.

04 October 2012

Simple Pleasures: Cool Rain with a Breeze


.
It is a mixed bag.  Typhoon Gaemi, from the Pacific, threatens to flood us this weekend, and we are on edge and alert.  Yet this evening’s cool rain relieved us after an afternoon of oppressively hot tropical sun.  When the hard rain started after sunset, I stepped out of our hot quarters to batten down the hatches (windows, doors, etc.) and bring in the laundry, and I was hit by not only the thunderous sound of torrential rain but also by the rush of fresh cool air as the cloudburst filled the air.  It was a shock, a very pleasant one, and I paused to relish it. 
.
Blessed coolness.  Zen delight. 
.
-Zenwind.
.

01 October 2012

Flooded Again?

.
We thought for the last couple of weeks that we might be flooded again. It still depends on how much rain falls – how hard it rains and how fast – for the rest of October.
.
The Chao Phraya River is not abnormally high, and, unlike last year, the dams upriver have kept their reservoirs low to allow room for September’s hard rains. So it all depends on how much hard sudden rain we get.
.
We did have one scary night last week when the drainage ditch out back of our place filled up completely during a long intense downpour, and our outdoor courtyard kitchen area was filled with water. The water came right to our front step, and another five inches or so higher would have come into our first floor. But it receded several hours after the rain stopped.
.
Rains have not been as hard as predicted for the last few days, although there is still typhoon activity in the South China Sea as well as strong monsoons from the Indian Ocean. The north of Thailand has been the hardest hit with floods this last month, and a lot of that water is still upstream from us. So we are still watchful.
.
-Zenwind.
.

02 September 2012

Pain: Physical Pain as a Primary Aspect of Dukkha

.
I have always believed in the constant minimizing of one’s pain medication doses, trying to wean oneself entirely from drugs or else stripping doses down to the bare-bones minimum. When it comes to reducing pain-killers or meds that combat pain, sometimes I cut the doses too radically and too quickly, and I end up in screaming pain. Like right now. Acute agony with no relief in sight.
.
My “zonkers”, i.e., amitriptyline (a tricyclic antidepressant), are the tried and true prescription to enforce deep Stage-4 sleep and heal my FMS (fibromyalgia syndrome). Over a series of weeks they start to ease the pain. The problem is that they are what I call “zonkers”; they zonk me out and leave me with the mentality of a zombie. But I must balance this zonk-out effect against the “brain-fog” zonk-out of untreated FMS (exhausting pain plus incredible fatigue plus brain-fog). In this delicate game of finding the right dose, my mental acuity often falls off one side or the other, leaving me an imbecile. Like right now.
.
When still living in the States, my zonker dose was from 50mg. to 100mg. – a huge dose. I cannot imagine how I functioned on so much (and, indeed, my teaching did trail off into the lower poor range, making it an embarrassing fraud if I had held on to a secure tenured teaching position for one more year while just going through the motions).
.
Here in Thailand zonkers (amitriptyline) are over-the-counter and cheap, so I can get them whenever I need them. But the same dilemma applies, should I take too little or too much? Where is the proper balance?
.
I have been taking 40mg. for a long, long time and maintaining a balance between pain and functionality. But, in concert with my lowest-dose target principle, I have recently reduced the doses down to 30mg. to 20mg. to 10mg. And suddenly I am in paralyzing screaming pain. Dukkha! Chronic and acute Dukkha to the very max! It feels like someone hit me in the center of my back (T-7) with a baseball bat – with a full-out homerun swing! Added to that, I am fatigued out and moving like a knuckle-dragging primitive hominid with an IQ way down the scale.
.
The FMS brain-fog is equivalent to the over-medication of zonkers. They both leave me a staggering half-wit, not good for much. I hate each of these mental fogs as much as I hate the acute pain, because I am unable to function normally in either state.
.
As a postscript, I will once again rage against those within the medical community who ignore acute pain. To prescribe over-the-counter “pain relief” placebos such as aspirin, Tylenol, Motrin, etc., for real pain is an insult to those who truly experience such pain. Such medication does not even begin to touch true pain. In my agony I find myself wishing that such doctors would experience, just for one full day, the pain I am feeling now so that they truly understand. While in a free society one could choose one’s medicine (and accept the consequences), most societies today are far less than free and they over-regulate and over-control pain relief (unless the elite regulators/ legislators need personal relief for themselves).
.
I hurt. I hurt right now as I type this. I am in acute pain. My life is stalled because of pain and fatigue, and I am in a horrendous rage.
.
-Zenwind.
.

02 August 2012

Lammas Day / Dharma Day

.
I love calendars, and I know I repeat myself often here. Yet calendars are so fascinating. The northern hemisphere’s First-Harvest festivals used to be celebrated around August 1 or 2. The Anglo-Saxons called it Lammas Day, and the Celts called it something like Lughnasadh. Summer has ripened up in the temperate zones, and I do miss those radical changes of season.
.
Lammas Day/Lughnasadh is directly opposite Imbolc (or Groundhog’s Day) in the yearly calendar, both of them being points hinting to major seasonal changes ahead. Lammas Day is halfway between the greening of Beltane/ May Day and the fall of greenery at Halloween – just as Groundhog Day is halfway between Halloween and May Day. Northern calendars are loaded with tradition.
.
Here we are enjoying a relative cooling because of the cloud cover and monsoon rains, but it is still too hot to wear a shirt. Today is Dharma Day, a full moon celebration (usually in July but depending on the moon’s cycles) of the Buddha’s First Discourse and the start of his teaching. Tomorrow starts the annual Rains Retreat for monks and lasts until October full moon. This tradition of monks staying put in a home monastery during the monsoon rains goes back all the way to Buddha and to the earlier Hindu traditions before him. It only applies to southern, Theravada/ Hinayana, lands in the monsoon pathways.
.
Although the moon is full, we won’t see much of it tonight because of the thick clouds.
.
-Zenwind.
.

15 July 2012

Saint Swithin’s Day 2012

.
Happy St. Swithin’s Day to everyone in the northern hemisphere temperate zone. I hope everyone has by now put their first crop of hay into the barn. Summer is half over, and winter is long.
.
-Zenwind.
.

05 July 2012

Slow Going

.
Brain fog, overheating computer, muggy weather, fatigue, and bodily aches and pains – it is hard to get much done these days. All my life I have alternated between meditative repose on the one hand versus big ambitions, high goals and intense action on the other. E.g., days of frantic climbing and then days spent lounging on a rock in the quiet forest. There has always been a rhythm to it, a natural timing of which mode is appropriate for me at certain moments. Listening to this rhythm (not trying to futilely fight against it) is the harmony of eudaimonia -- living according to and up to one’s “truest spirit” – mentioned by Aristotle as being “happiness”, the goal of the art of ethical endeavor.
.
Recently I had set too high of a scholarly objective with too close a deadline (and I’m terrible at deadlines): I wanted to finish reading Batman and Philosophy (2008) and write a review of it before the next Christopher Nolan Batman movie comes out this month. Philosophy has always been so much work for me, and I can never push it. Philosophy is a labor of love for me, but I must accept that there must be a balance and that I must rest sometimes. This review was a new goal from scratch, not a posting of a previously drafted document. What I will do is read the book, annotating the margins, and wait until a future time to come back to it and start writing.
.
I’ve been working out more regularly on our treadmill, and it will take time to get my strength built back up. (I had to stop lifting again because of back pain, so I’m working on my legs.) The trick to beating the boredom of treadmills is to have a TV/DVD system of some kind right in front of you. Also, have a good rig in place to have a book in front of you.
.
The treadmill workouts are exhausting me, but the time lengths of sessions are increasing with more ease than before, and the heart-rate monitor shows that it now takes more and more exertion (in both speed and incline steepness) to reach my optimal training heart-rate. My heart is getting stronger – I just wish my brain would become clearer.
.
My legs are sore today from long workouts. The stormy monsoon weather is making the barometer go up and down, making my spine ache. The computer is hot. Time to stop writing.
.
-Zenwind.
.

02 June 2012

Writer’s Block

.
The Muse has flown. I feel like my IQ has taken a sudden plunge into the low dullard range. My replies to emails and any work on writing projects are completely stalled out. Dead head.
.
I noticed it a few weeks ago with the change of season as the monsoon rains started. The barometric pressure has been erratically going up and down, and that encourages FMS symptoms: pain, fatigue and brain fog. Top that off with a bad head cold that hit me last week and I sit here Dazed and Confused (without any help from booze or drugs, which would be more fun!).
.
-Zenwind.
.

22 May 2012

Tropical Sun

.
The Northern Hemisphere moves closer to its solstice. We are still north of the Equator here, yet at 14-degrees N. latitude the Sun is north of us at noon. That always amazes me.
.
-Zenwind.
.

06 May 2012

A Cool Break

.
We had a mercifully cool break yesterday and last night as thunderstorms passed through. Clouds blocking out the blazing sun make a big difference, and the strong breezes are refreshing. This hot spell that we have been experiencing for so long is now said to be extreme even for Thailand’s Hot Season norm. So it wasn’t just my imagination after all.
.
-Zenwind.
.

27 April 2012

New Visa, Old Hot Weather

.
27 April: We successfully renewed my visa for another year, and this is always a nightmare, trying to scrape up enough money in our bank accounts to qualify and to get the paperwork right. But this morning we did it. Time for celebration.
.
The weather is another matter entirely. Brutally hot and humid. We must get new electrical wiring and then install a/c before next year’s Hot Season.
.
Yearning for a cool breeze.
.
-Zenwind.
.

11 April 2012

High and Dry Here

.
In case anyone wonders, we are okay here. Didn't even feel the quakes. Apparently there will not be any tsunami on southern Thai beach areas.
.
-Zenwind.
.

24 March 2012

Cold Steel Tanto

.
I have always tried to go with the “fast and light” ethos – in Boy Scouts, in the military, in hiking, and in backpacking and climbing. Strip all excess weight from pockets and packs. Cut every once. Especially in this heat, I don’t want anything that is not needed weighing me down when I go out on foot.
.
I have a great daypack here, a North Face “Recon.” I like it because it has enough compression straps to tighten it down into a very small capacity pack – and small packs do not temp you to fill them up with a lot of junk. “Simplify, simplify”, said Thoreau (and Yvon Chouinard). In a pinch, the Recon will expand to hold a respectable amount of extra stuff, and I only started using it as a bigger capacity pack during the floods when I was foraging for food. Since then, I have been regularly expanding it on food runs and shopping trips to bookstores. A great versatile pack.
.
And yet I have been wondering why this pack always feels so heavy when I am starting off from home with it empty. I go through the pockets again and again, dumping out any extra pens and paper, loose change, paperbacks, small flashlights, etc. Even though it is heavy-duty North Face construction, it still felt too heavy for their designers’ proven mountaineering roots. It didn’t make sense.
.
So I was astounded recently when for some reason I dug deep into the very bottom of the pack’s padded computer sleeve, which I only use once or twice a year. What is this at the very bottom? It was something I’d been searching for ever since the flooding in October, something I thought was lost downstairs when the water was knee-deep. There, wrapped in padding at the bottom of the sleeve, was my heavy knife, my Cold Steel 7-inch Tanto blade (a Magnum Tanto II) in a thick leather sheath. I had always kept it under my pillow, but I must have put it there in the bottom of the pack when I was packing “bale-out” bags in case the floods forced us to move out, and then I forgot about where I had put it.
.
Not only is this a very thick and heavy blade – much too heavy to carry around every day – but it is most probably very illegal here. I got it for home defense use only, because 7-inch blades (like the USMC’s traditional K-Bar) are combat knives with their deep penetration. Damn! I’m glad I didn’t try to visit the embassy with it.
.
-Zenwind.
.

07 March 2012

Hardware Meltdown. Offline

.
Sometimes I hate being right in my predictions. The terrible heat seems to have killed my computer, so I have no regular access to the internet.
.
-Zenwind.
.

03 March 2012

Too Hot to Compute

.
Our winter here is over, and we have gone straight into the Hot Season. Brutal temperatures and humidity. I am afraid to have my computer running for very long because I think the heat might kill it. So my postings here will be sporadic and usually made up of pieces of draft material that I never finished. I am not spending much time researching online or trying to polish my writing.
.
One of the reasons we are feeling the heat more than usual is that we now live in an upstairs room that heats up quickly. Before the floods we lived downstairs in a tiled room without windows, and it stayed relatively cooler there. Moving back down there is not a good idea since it was flooded for three weeks and that dampness will never leave.
.
One of our dreams is to someday have the house re-wired with a good, safe, grounded system. Then we could install air conditioning. Until then, it is Sweat City.
.
-Zenwind.
.

17 February 2012

Giordano Bruno Day

.
17 February: On this date in 1600 C.E. the great philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for having theologically incorrect theories on god, the universe and everything. Among the many ideas that got him into trouble, he taught that the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun, the Sun itself being just one of many other stars in the universe. Imagine that. His sarcasm did not help his cause, and he never suffered fools. But the fools burned him.
.
-Zenwind.
.

15 February 2012

Valentine’s Day

.
14 February: It is my 62nd birthday, and I still feel like an 18-year-old – except for the aches and pains. I went for a march in the midday sun and returned drenched in sweat and a bit sore. I must remember to stretch more carefully before going out.
.
Listened to the radio play Richard Strauss’s Also Spake Zarathustra, which he wrote in homage to the philosophical genius of Friedrich Nietzsche. This music is known by many as the opening music in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. That sure stirred up the heart of this old romantic!
.
15 February: There has been yet another travel warning for Bangkok after a few explosions in town yesterday. As always, we are cautious and keep a low profile. This latest episode seemed to involve amateurs, as one of them blew his own legs off.
.
Late afternoon: It just rained briefly, but not enough to bring coolness. It rained just enough to dampen everything so that, as the sun comes back out, steam rises. H-U-M-I-D-I-T-Y-!-!-!
.
-Zenwind.
.

31 January 2012

End of January Note

.
31 January: Today we took a trip to the Immigration office north of Bangkok for my routine 90-day check-in. This rather newer office was completely flooded and closed back in early November, and we had to go into Bangkok to the old office that was temporarily taking check-ins. So it had been half a year since we ventured north. Along the way we could see high-water marks from the flood, looking like dirty bathtub rings. The flood waters had been very high, and I’m still astonished at the wide-reaching devastation; that was a lot of water.
.
I have not been online much because I have been reading. I just finished reading The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (Part 1, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Part 2, The Girl Who Played with Fire; and Part 3, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest). Over 2,100 pages total. What a great story!
.
The plan this evening is to get a lot of sleep and visit bookstores tomorrow.
.
-Zenwind.
.

13 January 2012

Word of Caution

.
13 January: Friday the 13th. We have received a warning of possible dangers in the near future to Westerners who are in-country. The local government's efforts will probably be face-saving moves to down-grade the possible threats in order to not damage the tourist industry, so the best source of news is the embassy's announcements. They advise caution and keeping a low profile. Good advice.
.
-Zenwind.
.

09 January 2012

January Note

.
9 January: We have been enjoying our winter weather -- the only comfortable time of the year here. Temperatures are in the high 80s or low 90s F. during the day and the low 70s at night. The direct sunlight is hot, but the humidity is much lower than most of the year.
.
-Zenwind.
.