Thrombosis Again?

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I’m limping. And sulking about it. My lower left leg is lamed, and I’m afraid it might be a recurrence of the thrombosis I had a couple of years ago. If it becomes visibly swollen I will have to go to the doctor.

Not being able to walk, to fully stride out and wander, is a personal blow to my very identity. I am a walker, a rambler, and a wandering hiker by nature, and to not be able to freely walk about is like a prison sentence for me.

The previous thrombosis episode started the same way: I felt what I thought was a muscle cramp in my calf, but careful stretching didn’t help. It got worse and swelled up alarmingly.

The cause of this present lameness episode seems to be my inactivity last weekend, when for two whole days I sat and caught up with a huge backload of email correspondence and did nothing but sit and type. And beyond that, I spent a long spell in late October reading the great biography, "Mao: the untold story", and writing a review of it. Inactivity is poison. Activity is life.

I hope I’m wrong and that this crippling leg problem is not a thrombosis flare-up. But whatever the cause of it, I cannot wait to get back on my feet again.

-Zenwind.

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Hunger Games in Real Time

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The latest Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay – Part 1, started Thursday in Thai theaters, and some students have been using the “three-fingered salute” protest gesture – that in the films are targeted against the totalitarian Capitol – against the real life military government that is in place since the May 22 military coup. The students are arrested for it, but they are released after being held a while and talked to. The generals know that the world is watching them.

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Thursday was my monthly meet up with friends in the city, so I left early to get in two movies before evening. I didn’t see Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 because it is playing most places and will be around a while. (Maybe.) I saw Whiplash for the second time; it is one of the best movies I’ve seen recently, and the performance by J.K. Simmons is absolutely astonishing. I also saw Interstellar, which was one hell of a ride.

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Before leaving home I had read in local news reports that the Apex theater group (Lido and Scala theaters in the heart of Bangkok) was suddenly canceling their Thursday showing of Hunger Games at the Scala. Apparently someone was trying to buy up and distribute a huge number of tickets, possibly setting up a mass protest against our present system of martial law. Apex is said to have canceled the movie on its own with no order from the generals. I planned to see Whiplash at Lido, and I immediately saw military and police presence on the way there. No incidents happened that I know of. Friday, three students were arrested for flashing the three-fingered salute at Scala.

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I saw my second film at Siam Paragon theaters, and the place was swarming with military and police, with some VIP military folks under heavy escort. In the evening I got on the crowded Skytrain to go to my meeting place, and found myself standing face to face with a young Thai teenager in a Boy Scout uniform. I caught myself before I gave him the traditional Boy Scout salute – which is with three fingers, like the protest salute in Hunger Games!

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-Zenwind.

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Technical Problems

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Both of my main blogs will be silent for a while, until I sort out some of the blogs's bugs, some problems with appearance and line spacing that suddenly kicked up and ambushed me out of nowhere.

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Today was the first real sunshine day in many months, and I was roasted a bit while out walking. I look forward to the clear night when I can see stars.

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-Zenwind.

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Mozart, Radio, Hard Times, & the “Jupiter” Symphony

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This is why I love radio.  Radio is random, throwing unexpected and often unfamiliar music at me, and it educates me when radio DJs (who are called “hosts” on Classical stations) give me bits of historical background on composers and compositions. 

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I try to listen to streaming radio whenever possible, and the Classical station from MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) is one of my favorites as background when trying to think, read, and write.  Tonight (my Monday evening) I’m listening to MPR’s Monday morning show from their 7:00AM hour.  I’m 12 hours ahead of them. 

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Are you familiar with Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (No.41)?  Its first movement has hints of struggles but it cannot help breaking out into rousing triumphal glory.  It makes you want to just stand up and cheer, twist and shout.  Such strength, joy, and optimism! 

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The MPR host introduced the above movement from Mozart’s “Jupiter” by telling us how bleak Mozart’s personal world was at the time he composed it.  Austria was at war with the Ottomans, and no one was attending theaters for any operas or concerts.  Mozart and his wife had just lost a daughter who died before reaching one year of age, and they were too poor to pay the undertaker.  He couldn’t make money composing, and he could barely manage by teaching untalented students, an endeavor that always depressed him.  Hard times. 

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Yet somehow during this depressing period of Mozart’s life, he produced the wonderful “Jupiter” Symphony. 

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-Zenwind.

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Monsoon Turnover

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The rainy monsoon winds from the Indian Ocean are almost ending, and the dry monsoon winds from mainland Asia are beginning.  I felt it today when out walking.  The direct sun was hot, but the air had a different feel – drier. 

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On my walk to the store and back, half of the way was in shade and half in sun.  A truck came by hosing down the streets with water.  The street surfaces had been in the hot sun, and I crossed an intersection immediately after it had been dowsed with water.  The dense humidity that we are normally used to, from the rising steam, hit me with surprise, because the air elsewhere today was much drier.  But after crossing this area of humidity I entered a shady walkway, and the relief was striking.  

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Looking forward to our all-too-brief Cool season. 

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-Zenwind.

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Before the Rain ...

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My projects are half-completed
yet done so with great satisfaction,
by the time my back starts hurting,
terribly and inevitably.
So, it's time to call it a day,
because a big storm is rolling in. 

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I put my chair in the shade
where the best breezes flow,
and I pour cold beer over ice,
waiting for the cooler breezes,
and I open a book. 

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Winds rise, skies darken, thunder rumbles,
and the world scrambles in fear:
Pinkie the Cat runs in a
desperate comical low-crawl dash
to some outside retreat.
Silly Willy loses his nerve and goes inside. 

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Then the Black Dog, a fat old soi dog
with gray whiskers who often shows
up for food, waddles by.

He is afraid of me - though not
afraid of gentle Tuk when she's here.
I wave, say "Hi," and talk to him in friendly

nonsense phrases while I slowly push some tuna
that the cats didn't eat
through the fence for him.
I back off to give him space and courage to eat.

He eats it up; I approach again,

give him tuna, and again back off; he eats;

we repeat this dance until the

tuna is gone and he is happy. 

As he turns to go, we part as friends.

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Cosmic bodhisattva Black Dog,

thank you for enlightening my world. 

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-Zenwind.

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… Rain at Last

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Holding down the home fort in the
outside courtyard on a Buddha Day,
through the hot afternoon right through
to the rain before dark.
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I'm glad my phone is waterproof,
because I'm getting drizzled on
mightily by the blowing rain and spray
here under the meager eaves as I type this.
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The coolness of this downpour
is such a radical drop in temp
that I can hardly contain my joy. 
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Blessed Coolness. Zen Delight.
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-Zenwind. 
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Pain

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Chronic physical pain.  Acute, agonizing, excruciating, chronic, and intensely brutal continuing physical pain.  Pain that saps the very life right out of you.  My back hurts so bad that it hurts to even breathe.  Hell on earth. 

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It drives me down into the depths and makes me empathize with old Sisyphus as he goes through the endless and hopeless cyclical motions of his ancient curse.  (See Albert Camus’s essay on The Myth of Sisyphus to encounter what is actually a rather “cheerful” account of such existential predicaments.) 

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 It’s far worse if one’s painful condition is not uniformly recognized by the medical “establishment.”  Some doctors sympathize, but most just don’t understand how much it hurts.  Or give a shit.  They won’t give you legal (but controlled) pain relief medication that might help.  I most often see that very lack of remedy to be a despicable failing of the medical community.  Lack of caring (“for poor suffering creatures everywhere” – Jack Kerouac). 

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Here I am – feeling sorry for myself.  Poor, poor, pitiful me.  I get unbelievably ugly when I’m hurting.  Not a nice guy. 

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I admit that I don’t entirely know what medications would help relieve my acute pain.  I suppose that morphine or other narcotic pain-relievers would work in the short term, but how dangerous and addictive is that?  Sounds like bad complications.  Alcohol is the only legal short-term relief, but that’s an ancient one with its own complications. 

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I hurt my back in the early 1970s while doing farm work.  But really, I must ask:  is it a coincidence that my major acute FMS pain started its present intensity in early 1982 after I had stopped smoking the great cannabis herb (on New Year’s Day 1980) and also had become stupidly enmeshed within the most super-stressful relationship of my entire life shortly after that?  Worst decade of my entire life.  I cannot prove any of it, but I do know for sure that my physical agony started then, along with total mental anguish.  Self-sacrifice is so primitively brutal and self-destroying. 

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Dukkha happens.  That’s the way of it.  We are born; we live; we suffer; and we die.  But – importantly, intriguingly – in between those gates of pain we do have instances of grasping the precious gem and really living.  And we are (sometimes) rational animals who pilot our courses in astonishingly interesting directions.  That’s our glory.  We climb mountains and discover new worlds.  We have a poetic tradition of hope. 

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I don’t know what else to say.  The pain is still reverberating deep throughout my very bones, and my mind is completely exhausted. 

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-Zenwind.

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Monsoon

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Alone at noon in the courtyard shade.
Heretically, I'm "facing wine" on a Buddha Day.
I read the poetry of Han Shan and Shih te, 

contemplating the Taoist and Ch'an/Zen mountain traditions.
Silly Willy the Cat and I listen to birdsongs in wonder, 

and the occasional breeze is so unexpectedly fresh.

Then the rain.
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-Zenwind. 

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Finally, Justice for Khmer Rouge Leaders

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A Cambodian court, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (backed by the UN) has convicted two former Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to life in prison.  A bit late, but better than nothing. 

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The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot and his communist intellectual henchmen killed around two million Cambodians in their late-1970s attempt to engineer utopia.  The deaths were caused by a combination of starvation and disease, caused by insane economic and social engineering schemes, and outright execution of most educated Cambodians as well as those put on a hit list by someone’s whim.  Over 20,000 mass graves have been found, aka the Killing Fields, with evidence of nearly one-and-a-half million executions.  It was madness. 

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Nuon Chea studied in Bangkok.  He was known during the height of Khmer Rouge power as Brother Number Two (to Pol Pot’s position as Brother Number One).  I wrote about him a few years ago in a review of the movie “Enemies of the People” (2009), in which he was featured. 

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Khieu Samphan studied in Paris with Pol Pot and other Cambodian communist intellectuals in the 1950s, getting his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Paris in 1959.  During the red terror he was Cambodia’s head of state, yet under Pol Pot’s ultimate control. 

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Both men are in their 80s, so their lives in prison will not be long ones.  (Pol Pot died in 1998, never seeing trial.)  They both face an additional charge of genocide.  Stay tuned. 

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-Zenwind.

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