.
Summer
solstice, Midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere.
I miss the bonfire nights there.
Here
the differences between daylight hours and dark ones are always small, still
almost half-and-half. And there is no
twilight. Dark falls quickly, and dawn
springs up suddenly.
At
noon this time of year, the sun is north of us! That is confusing – if one doesn’t have their
compass at hand!
I
did my 90-day-report of address to Immigration in person yesterday. We hire an old retired taxi driver to take us
there. He is a happy friendly guy and a
real treat to ride with. When Tuk is
along they jabber and laugh about things in Thai.
There
was just him and I yesterday, and we have quite a language barrier. I used the Thai/English talking dictionary on
my phone to communicate a few key words to him.
I explained that my hearing is not good, due in part to Vietnam
experience. He tried to tell me
something about himself related to Vietnam, but I couldn’t follow. (Tuk will straighten that out at some later
time.) He did somehow communicate that he
valued my Vietnam service, as Thai people generally appreciated the US help to
keep communism at bay. They knew what
horrors their neighboring countries experienced.
I
told him that my father was a farmer – something that most Thais really relate
to and respect. He was curious about our
farm, and I told him we always had two dozen head of dairy cows and 200
chickens. We traveled through miles and
miles of countryside to and from Immigration, and I so enjoy seeing the rice
fields, farms, and tiny villages. I don’t
get out much, especially to the countryside.
I
have not been into the city much either. But I did get in to see two movies of the
Bangkok Silent Film Festival. (I wanted
to see more films, but travel kicks the shit out of me, and I was just too much
in pain to go more often.) I saw the
master filmmaker Fritz Lang’s 1921 Destiny, which was amazing in its
drama and visual imagery.
The
1920 The Mark of Zorro was one I especially wanted to see, and it was
worth the effort to get into town for.
Douglas Fairbanks was an astoundingly acrobatic actor – jumping,
climbing, riding, swashbuckling, outclassing numerically superior adversaries at
every turn, and laughing in their faces!
He defined Zorro in that film.
Zorro
was one of my earliest heroes, in the 1957-58 Disney TV show. He was a lone individualist with a strong
sense of justice, and he was always against tyranny. He accepted outlaw status and bore his
illegality with pride. He loved the night
and the full moon.
Ayn
Rand, as a teenager in Russia’s Bolshevik slaughterhouse, saw Western films
such as this 1920 The Mark of Zorro, and she said these romantic movies saved
her from having her spirit extinguished by the brutal horror all around her. When I read Rand’s novels and then found out
she was a Zorro fan like me, I thought, “Of course!” A kinship of a heroic “sense of life.”
I
will stop here and post this. A big
windy rainstorm has just hit at the fall of darkness, and I’ve been tying down
windows blown open. I need to inspect
the rest of the house.
-Zenwind.
.
