Neighborhood

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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-Zenwind.

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

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Many knew him mainly from his role as Chingachgook in the 1992 film Last of the Mohicans. 

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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.  
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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.

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-Zenwind. 

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Maybe No Flood for Us

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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. 

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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). 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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-Zenwind.

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Simple Pleasures: Cool Rain with a Breeze

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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. 

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Blessed coolness.  Zen delight. 

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-Zenwind.

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Flooded Again?

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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-Zenwind.
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Pain: Physical Pain as a Primary Aspect of Dukkha

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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.
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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.
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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).
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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-Zenwind.
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Lammas Day / Dharma Day

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Although the moon is full, we won’t see much of it tonight because of the thick clouds.
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-Zenwind.
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Saint Swithin’s Day 2012

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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.
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-Zenwind.
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Slow Going

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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-Zenwind.
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Writer’s Block

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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.
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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!).
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-Zenwind.
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