It's been a long, long time

The funny thing about moving back to San Francisco has been the odd sensation that I don't know anything here any more. They have shut down, reopened and shut down (again) Dolores Park--two weeks before Pride. Huh? And there are condomonsterpieces lining Market Street and filling SoMa. Towers touting high-rise living threaten to throttle the freeway; we have a new bridge that was apparently broken before they opened it; more new technology has come to the city, only driving the prices ever higher. What to do?

Meanwhile, I have had my own collection of circumstances, woes, etc., and I am only barely starting to surface from all that. Ultimately, I would like to settle it all down and get back to my life--I have spent the last year agonizing over health issues and life-stuff and I am through. I just want to go back to work and toil away in ignominy for a little while. The kind of ignominy with a nice cubicle with a little bit of a view and coffee in a break room. Too much to ask? Perhaps. I can barely get ignored by online writing scabs, much less by a real firm with a real office.

We shall see what happens. But this is back. And up. And alive. More articles to come.

Namasté

Write or starve

I had the opportunity to help out some friends. It seems that Auntie was very ill, and she needed someone to come stay with her on the top of a mountain in the middle of Virginia. But everyone was, well, honestly? ...busy. In the middle of things. In the middle of an economy gone sour, selling houses (or not selling houses as the case may be) and trying to get by. Everyone could volunteer a little time here and there, and thoroughly upset the applecart of a craggy, cranky woman who didn't like a lot of fuss or company and thus lived on a mountain top. So her daughter, my best friend's cousin, was busy trying to fill in, do the caretaking and still manage her own life 1,000 miles away.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I was unemployed. I, too, had been here--too far away to help, but doing it anyway--and I thought, this is perfect! Don't pay some stranger, toss me a few shekels and I'll go help.

So, I dialed my best friend. Would this work? Would everyone be okay? I'm a bit of an interloper and I know y'all are a rather private family...but no, no, this is a good idea, he said. Let me see. Phones rang, exclamations of relief were heard across various valleys in California and Virginia and I was on a plane in three days.

The next thing I knew, I was ensconced in a mountain cabin in the Blue Ridge with a Subaru at my disposal and a very limited array of duties. This eyedrop, that pill, some ice cream, small meals. I cooked up an occasional small feast to rave reviews, and then we would sit and sip scotch and watch the day draw to a close.

Auntie was a writer, published and a damned good one. When I first walked in, I looked at the famous table and said, "so, this is where the magic happens." I got the eyebrow. She smirked when she realized I was being impudent. "Yeah, that's the place."

I said one afternoon, "Really...what did you *do*? How did you get here...a published author?"

As her biography lined the shelves in various collections of essays and a memoir, I knew most of her story, but she put it plainly: "I wasn't working. I had to work. I was alone, out of the house, not going to college, that wasn't for me. It was write or starve."

She had been through what I thought were more adult-making experiences than a lot of people should endure before 21, but no self-pity for her, write or starve was it. So she did. She worked for a department store, she wrote ad copy. At one point she was in enough demand in advertising that she took it with her...writing from abroad while following her artist husband, pregnant with the daughter I know, meeting very fascinating and important people in the art world in Europe. She would get the assignments by phone, I believe, and airmail them back.

Then the articles and books started. I asked how that happened. Best advice I've ever gotten:

"You get a little idea. Not a big one...that's too much to do in one sitting. Just a little thing. Something you'll follow and actually do. Then you nudge it along, a little bit every day. Next thing you know, you've got a big pile, and you work it up. Just like that."

I got it. And I watched. As she quieted down, she spent more and more time in her room. Finally, I was just bringing small meals and she wasn't moving much at all. "Bring some paper and a pen, will you please?" she asked one afternoon. I brought paper, pens, set up a table. I smiled, we muttered something about "the magic" to each other and the joke didn't materialize, but there she was, back at it. And she kept working.

By the time she died two years ago last week, she had eight or ten pages of something started. It was laid out in her hand, thoughts, ideas, a paragraph or two. But she never stopped. And I realized what I want to die doing.

Wow. A year? REALLY??

Yep, a whole year. And in the process, I've managed to get a job, work 9 months, be "let go" (just not a good "cultural fit" or somesuch) and now I'm back in the U.S.

It's been quite the ride...and I have learned a lot. Like, for example, this:

Yes, there are people in Thailand who only like us "farangs" for one thing: our dollar$. Just pay the money and go away. That attitude gets really old in a hurry, but one gets used to it.

And, yes, like all places in the world, there are people who defy the odds, the culture, the prevailing winds, and act like perfect gentlemen and -women and treat others with respect, kindness and even a bit of affection. I've had to deal with both.

There are places people should not tread, and sometimes one has to tromp through it to learn that. Then, there are places where a person ought to be careful, but being watchful, learn something and discover something really great among the brambles and confusion. It's a very odd thing to be with a group of people for a short time, get to know so much about them and then leave. There's sort of a short, sharp shock aspect to the whole thing, but then again, it's also rather a relief to be over it when the discovery is made that it just isn't working. And it just wasn't working.

I have much to process about this, and I shall (boy, won't I....for a long, long time to come) but I won't be looking at work quite the same way ever again. I'm rather done with working for people unless I run the whole show. Going to do it my way, my delivery, my quality control, my schedule, my deadlines, my responsibility. Tired of being screwed over by pernicious little giggles in a back hallway that think it's cute to make the big, fat boy run and sweat a lot.

That's not an image I like and I won't be repeating it.

A Passover Reflection

I heard from friends in Japan and they survived the earthquake without injury. Their homes are another matter, but honestly, that was last thing on their minds. One friend was so busy attempting to secure the whereabouts of all the elderly ladies in his neighborhood that he refused to join his husband in the countryside until he was done. Another friend urged folks in his village to come up the hill to his house to get away from the coastline; thankfully, the angle of incidence was such that while the tsunami did indeed pass them, it also passed them by. Being at a right angle, it didn't come up the shore at all. How odd that something so large and terrible could silently pass by. Like the angel of death passing a lintel daubed with lamb's blood.

They have begun to put lives back together there, but very slowly. Another friend disappeared from the radar at approximately the same time, but in the rush to connect with many, I just didn't catch it. She popped up on my screen in the middle of the night a few days ago to tell me she had just returned from her godson's funeral in the Saami area of northern Scandinavia. He and his pregnant Japanese wife were visiting family in a small fishing village on the East coast of Japan. Sadly, it was his white 6'6" frame that made identification swift, and the news spread around the globe through the family. Plane tickets were procured and a funeral was organized. From a fishing village on the coast of Japan to a fishing village on the Arctic Ocean, the tragedy spread farther than any tsunami. The angle of incidence here was acute.

Looking at the Bangkok Post this morning, I saw photographs of tourists being evacuated from Surat Thani, a Thai phrase meaning "City of Good People." Just this morning (at 2:00 AM) we were picking up my friend from his return trip from San Francisco...and while strolling the airport in Bangkok, we passed a man with blond dreads and his brunette girlfriend who I swear was in red pants. They looked exhausted. And were apparently waiting for a flight, but they had no bags, no carry ons, nothing. As my friend has dreads, she and I both noticed him and he stuck in our minds. And here they are in the paper this morning.

And while the flooding (and the earthquakes and nuclear fallout) continue, our lovely hosts in Ban Phu Noi have had to rush off to a family emergency in the south country. It is grave and the outcome does not look good.

It might be easy from the distance of time and mileage to assign this to "just the way life is." When we aren't connected and it's 9,000 miles away, we have the horrible pangs of dread that come from "what if that happened here?" and then, depending on our values, we either put the newspaper down and go back to our lives, or we pick up the phone and call a loved one and check in, perhaps even come up with a plan for donations or getting involved. Some inspired few get on planes, go help, perform medical and financial miracles to bring aid to those in pain and need. But when the thing happening is happening to you it's different. It shouldn't be, I suppose, in a moral and enlightened world that we all might choose to create, but it is. When the radiation of an accident across the world's largest ocean passes over your head, when the damage of a quake in Asia hurts your family in Europe, when the people in disaster photos are sitting in front of you in an airport, and when your friends who have wrapped you in comfort and hospitality must leave you and disengage from all this disaster, even drive through it and tend to their family in private, it becomes personal.

Sometimes I feel guilty for the sensation of "there but for the grace of God go I," but as I clear my head, I realize I am there. I look at my life, I look at the torments, the epidemics and plagues, the deaths I have endured, the challenges visited upon my family, and I realize that just for today, the shadow has passed us by. I feel that helplessness others feel now; I have been there. I have been in the house visited on that dark night. Inasmuch as I have suffered at the hands of cruel fate, or vagaries of time and circumstance, I am more empathetic to those enduring it right this moment. That suffering makes us human, puts us in touch with each other and allows us the opportunity to engage each other in compassion, understanding and respect.

To me, this is the message of Passover, this is the tight place from which I must emerge. I must shed a slavery to a false ideal of everything being "okay." A sentimentalized notion that things were better once, and that it is no longer true. In fact, things are better now because I know what I know and can handle it better, and occurrences--events--have ceased to be sources of trauma as much as opportunities for me to engage with life and be present for all of it.

The Heat of the Day Is Easing

I sit on the open patio-cum-room between the staircase and the bedroom on the second floor. It is a spacious half-enclosed veranda looking out over the yard and onto the cliffs above the house. Open beam ceilings and overhangs give it a very cantilevered feel. Well after dark now, the crickets and frogs are singing. The wind riffles through the banana leaves and sounds like a gentle shuffling of cards. The occasional car or moped hums past in the night. From down the road, a gentle monotone of chanting comes magnified by a PA system. Someone, a young man, is reciting sutras or text of some form.

Earlier today, before nightfall, there was a slow procession on the main road toward this house set back in the trees. It barely moved. Two groups of men carried yellow, fringed umbrellas and a group on a truck played drums and sang into microphones in a droning, rhythmic danceable style. Another truck carried speakers. There was an electric guitar doing some ornate licks that sounded like Robin Trower playing a Balkan melody. They moved so slow that a small group of people sat in the middle and swayed on the ground, tired from their dancing, as others danced around them. But then they got up, dancing again, and the group, umbrella men, musician truck, dancers, speaker truck and three official looking men in yellow vests (guiding traffic, but dancing as well) all moved a few more feet and stopped again. I rode past slowly on my moped and the official at the center of the group waved at me, playing with me with synchronized waving motions.

Their destination was a house about 200 meters up the road. This evening, when I began to hear the chanting, I had to go look. I hopped on my moped and as I neared the drive that goes into this house, I saw stands of light. Tall sticks of flourescent light bulbs in yellow, green and white, in that order, top to bottom. Spaced every 30 feet or so, they looked like something out of a David Lynch film, but they were only there to indicate the location. I neared the entry road, looked down it and heard a man chanting what to my ears was unmistakably a sutra or a tale. It had that rhythm of "and then the Buddha said this to Shariputra: do this, and then that, and then this..." That cadenced rhythm of recitation to a tone, with variations and movement, but still centering on a focal note. Whether it's listening to the mass sung or hearing a muezzin call to prayer, its unmistakable. As I've studied the sutras and tried to at least transliterate or side-by-side them in their "native" tongues, I recognize the form.

The symphony of night forest as a backdrop gives the chant bouncing off the nearby cliffs a haunting eloquence, embellished by the chant phasing in and out as the wind shifts direction. Tokay geckos announce their "uh-oh" and the little ones here in the house click to each other. Everyone chimes in for this recitation.

I am reminded of the spring of 2001 when I went with a friend to Merida during what turned out to be Semana Santa, or the holy week between Palm Sunday and Easter. We landed Palm Sunday evening, so we missed the kick off. Not realizing the time, it took us by surprise. The town was lit up with locals. People go home for Holy Week much like Americans go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. So, there were college students with parents, families of large size shuttling around town to restaurants, and much business to be engaged in the Plaza Grande in front of what is the oldest cathedral in the North America.

Shaved ice, churros, trinkets, sparkly and shiney things for children abound and can be had. All the shops on the plaza stay busy, and the coffee shop on the zocalo was our stop. Very early one morning, after we had figured out which week it was, we arose and scurried to the plaza for some very excellent croissants with coffee. We watched the city wake up; street cleaners in their city uniforms sweeping up the streets and the plaza, shopkeepers and cafe owners putting out tables, stands, portable acoutrements of business began their day. In a short sixty minutes we went from being alone on the plaza to be two among many faces enjoying a very busy and brisk day.

After a couple days visiting ruins, with a day in between to rest, we got up on Friday and considered walking the Merida version of Park Avenue, a long street with many grand houses from the halcyon days when Merida was the world center of the rope trade because of the abundance of henequen and sisal and the area's natural affinity for their cultivation. As we walked toward the center of town, slow drum beats were heard down the street. Large drums. Ominous drums. My friend and I looked at each other and recognition washed over us....this is Good Friday and that is a procession. Without speaking we took off toward the noise and rounded a corner to find the full procession, Roman soldiers, Mary and the weeping women, apostles, everyone reading their parts, all attending carefully to their lines, with the responsorial done by someone over a loud speaker to guide the followers holding their candles and prayer books singing the response. We watched the entire procession as it progressed up the street, stopping at the appropriate places for prayers as the fourteen stations of the cross were completely played out. This was ritual reenactment; this was theatre. These people were living the passion, in full costume, with the real script coming from their lips with vital engagement and power.

What struck me was that it wasn't "solemn." It was beyond reverent. It was just....the passion. It needed no extra acting, just tell the story. And the power and connection among the people was palpable. They processed into the church for the service, and we left them to it, as this was a neighborhood church. There were similar processions all over the city, and one could hear them completing their circuits as they entered their houses of worship as well.

We went to lunch during the service, and after it let out, everyone was solemnly returning home. Good Friday is a contemplative event. But in the evening, people began to come out for dinner again, heading to each other's homes or maybe to the restaurants that were open. I could feel the fellowship, the community surrounding me. Easter is a joyous time Sunday morning, but during the Easter Vigil beforehand it's time to reflect. That inward motion among these joyful people on a grand scale is a monumental feeling to be immersed in; the intimacy between people that is revealed takes ones breath away.

Today was the same. This little village where I'm living has its connections and ties, but today was a busy day, one of preparation and festivity. The market across the street was on today, a Saturday, which is not its normal day. I am thinking it won't be on tomorrow--the regular day--because everyone will be resting after tonight's festival.

Much like a week or so ago, when the day started with bangs of fireworks or explosives, this day did as well. So, I think this is another celebration of someone entering the monastic life or something like it. I will find out.

Just now a sutra finished and another man joined in, took over and sang a finishing line, hovering back and forth over the break in his voice, again, like a west Asian man might do calling from a tower. And I could hear cheers at another section completed. Now, there are more booms, but they are fireworks. The celebration (or the louder part of it) is complete. Now the sounds of the night--the crickets, the frogs, the wind--take over the response and sing me to sleep.

Godzilla

History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of men.

"Godzilla" - Blue Oyster Cult, 1977

What's amazing to me is that we keep coming back to this. No matter how spiffy we bow tied primates think we are, we still run right up against the intractability of time, tide and nature.

Godzilla was created in the mid '50s not as a response to Hiroshima, but to the furtherance of nuclear weaponry, the testing of which was occurring in the South Pacific. In 1954, the United States was testing on the infamous Bikini Atoll, in Operation Castle Bravo. The Lucky Dragon 7, a Japanese fishing boat within fallout distance of the atoll, had the misfortune of being close enough to the 15 megaton bomb to endure radioactive fallout. The Eisenhower-era Atomic Energy Commission and military operations attempted to cover up what had happened to the fishermen (one died, many others sickened) but that genie was out of the bottle. In the country with the only collective memory of radiation sickness, fallout and the long-term affects, the story became a cultural "meme," if you will, and eight months later, the film "Godzilla" hit the theatres.

Much of the kaiju eiga phenomenon was, in fact, a response to the nuclear threat and cold war activities of the era. As a child of the cold war, I have a very visceral and affectionate memory of the movies. Watching them on Saturday afternoons diffused fears I couldn't explain at 10, 11 and 12 years of age.

I remember Duck and Cover, the preposterous, red-scare propaganda film we watched as children. I remember watching news of the escalation of nuclear armaments on TV. I remember preachers using it as fodder for their millenialist predictions from the pulpit, but more importantly, over coffee in the cool of the afternoon later around curious teenagers. People discussing nuclear war and armaments and technology as if it were not only winnable, but a viable alternative, a by-God-they're-not-gonna-get-me thought process that would keep us Americans strong. Cuz if we didn't win, we'd go down trying.

But at 14 I discovered the effects of nuclear explosions on architecture, people and the environment. I found a book that a teacher had. I babysat for him and he let me peruse his library, thinking I'd latch onto one of his numerous history texts. I began to read with interest, then with horror, about just what would happen during and after a blast. Very explicit descriptions of the effects at the Nevada test site, on the ships and such at Bikini Atoll, on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--they were all spelled out in cold, dry but very clear text. The simple medical descriptions of the effects of radiation, mostly all ending in death, chilled me to the bone.

I told my teacher when he got home that night I had read it (I'm a confessor) and how disturbed I was. He reassured me that the book existed for just that reason--to preclude anything that drastic from happening. There were people, he told me, who thought about these things and were working with all their might to see that it wouldn't happen. Of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the US, he said in an almost cavalier manner, "one side's scared and the other's damn glad of it." Note I said "almost." I could sense a tiny quiver of fear even in him, my intellectual hero. He took me home, reassuring me all the way. He stayed on me, too, to his credit. It was an ongoing conversation throughout my high school years. But I still had nightmares about it for years.

The next time I babysat for him and his wife, the book was gone.

I've long been anti-nuclear anything. I'm even dubious about the 100% safety of nuclear medicine (after a story from my radiologist cousin about an X-ray machine left in a dump in Central America, only to be disemboweled and played with by children who thought the pretty blue powder was face paint. I wish that were an urban myth). A friend was issuing a salvo of responses on Facebook to a rather persistent debate partner who kept trying to extoll the virtues of Private Enterprise in its ability to manage things on its own, specifically, nuclear waste. The Market Will Prevail sort of rhetoric. But what he consistently (the opponent) would not answer was this:

1. How do we justify the usage of something like nuclear power for short term gain when we won't be around to clean it up?
2. How do expect something called "the free market" to manage something for 10,000 years (the half-life of nuclear waste) when they can't even manage bad debt without passing it on the taxpayer or the next generation (see Savings and Loan disaster, home mortgage derivatives.....need I go on?)

The interlocutor had no response. Since we always get to this point, and since we are facing one of three of the worst nuclear disasters in our history, isn't it time we started having discussions about nature?

Not just nature, Mother Nature, the natural world, the thing that will go on long after we've evolved back into some protoplasmic spume that dots the oceans. Not just the nature that somehow manages to adapt, with the slings and arrows (!) of asteroids, sun spot flares, evolved apes that treat the Earth like an ATM with no limits and a public toilet simultaneously.

No, I'm talking about human nature. What we humans do. We don't finish things. We don't clean things up. We don't think it through, we don't end it, we don't complete it....we don't, we don't, we don't. Name one "accomplishment" and I'll show you how it isn't finished.

The Pyramids. Great. Example not only of human ingenuity, but of planning and cooperation. Recent research shows that funding and managing slavery on that scale wasn't sustainable; consequently, it must have been a collective and cooperative endeavor. Great! Except that wasn't all they wanted....there were supposed to be several more. It has lasted, yes, but where is the religion and administration that was supposed to supervise and protect it through....well, just how long is eternity?

The Church. Yep, gotta bring it up, loathsome though it may be to some of you to pick on it. Great long term effort for what was originally intended for short term gain. Short term? SHORT TERM? Isn't eternity long enough for you, Mr. Holden? Well, no, I'm talking about Constantine realizing that there was this new faith where people were willing to sacrifice everything for an outcome they couldn't see, as opposed to Roman religion where everybody wanted something--*results* of all things. Yes, I'm that cynical, because he was. Has it outstripped it's original purpose and developed into a thing of love and light? Of course, but only in the hands of a small number. The rest of the history of this "church" is littered with dual purposes, manipulation of the populace and avarice in statecraft of the highest degree...not to mention child sexual molestation, absconded funds, personality cults and emotional and spiritual abuse of untold millions.

What about the Space Program? Or Democracy in America?

Please. You really want me to go there? See, we can't do anything for a long period of time because we lose interest. Our forebears hung out in trees and ate fruit. We ate the fruit of the tree. Then this really inconvenient thing happened. The climate changed. We got thrown OUT of the garden and had to wander to find food. Damned annoying, if you ask me. I like my food next to my bed. And here we are a million years later, looking for something (what was that again...??) and not knowing why we are. And we, with the attention span of a "what's our next meal" are to be expected to be the custodians of NUCLEAR WASTE FOR 10,000 YEARS?

And now there are three reactors in Japan that were put in the unthinkable (rhymes with "unsinkable".....look that up) position of losing all their electrical power after going through a 9.0 earthquake and not having any backup systems to engage that combination of problems.

The irony that this is happening in Japan is horrible. The fact that this technology was developed by the United States ought to escape no one right now. The responsibility for this, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl not too liberally, is all of ours. He said that Auschwitz showed us what man is capable of and Hiroshima showed us what's at stake. Now it appears that what's at stake and what we're capable of are the same. We are the authors of our entire destiny and need to own up to our simplest but most fatal flaws.

We can't do some of this stuff, so we should stop. We can't get blood out of a turnip, we can't make a dollar worth $1.01 and we can't 100% guarantee that nuclear energy will ever be safe.

And it took "nature" in the form of an earthquake to point it out. Aren't all storms perfect storms?

/rant

Eat, Pray, Drive

There are so many books published about finding yourself. Finding oneself. Epic journeys through foreign lands to wring out the ennui of daily American living and be left with "what's really important."

Like going to countries that all start with "I" in search of food, God and love. In that order. Oh, if it were only that recipe driven. If life were an alchemist's puzzle to be sorted out with access to the proper grimoire, it would all be so much simpler, wouldn't it? But it just ain't that neat.

The point is to get shoved out of ones comfort zone and see how one survives. Of course, my idea of being out of my comfort zone is running out of Peet's coffee and being stuck with some other brand until I find what I like.

Yeah, well, that's shattered.

I now hurtle down the road at 50 miles an hour on a vehicle that weighs less than me, surrounded by people who don't wear helmets and ride three or *four* to a bike....some of them sidesaddle.

Yes, I'm talking about mopeds.

I am driving on (what I consider to be) the wrong side of the road. You know the scene in "Absolutely Fabulous" where Eddie gets into the Fiat in farm country outside of Paris on the right side of the car, finds there's no steering wheel and pounds on the dashboard screaming "I HATE FRANCE!!!"? I live there now.

When I used to babysit, I was taken to a place called "upside-down land" or "backward land" where the words were backward, or I had to go through doorways backward or follow arbitrary rules "given" to a five-year-old who, in turn, taught them to me. All very cute and clever until the announcement that bed-time in "Backward Land" was 2 AM.

This is karmic payback, I know it. The old "wrong side of the road" meme is tired, but it's still a helluva challenge. I have a terrifying memory of the story of friends who summered in England during college and were in an awful head-on collision because after narrowly avoiding a different fracas, they returned to the road in the right lane out of habit, came around a right-turn corner and....yes. So, here I spend my days puttering around on a two wheeled death trap, turn right from a left lane and have a millisecond's panic as I try to remember which lane I'm supposed to be in. This is further complicated by the augmented bedevilment of being from the Bay Area where A) one way streets abound without reason and B) no one knows how to drive anyway. Consequently, my frame of reference is completely useless.

And one would think that as much as I complain about drivers back home, I wouldn't be fazed here.

Sadly, that's of no help. Here, they have their own rules which match nothing I've ever read, nor the silly little white and yellow lines on the highway.

One has to give in, soak up the culture, go native.

If observed very carefully, a method...no, a ballet emerges from this madness. Mopeds keep to the very left of the road. Then cars can pass on the inside, toward the centerline, as needed. Cars signal with the right turn signal to notify others that they are passing. We on our mopeds merely pay attention (pray for divine intervention, if needed) and let them pass. If there is a car going slower than the rest, the fast car will pass that as well, signaling dutifully, pulling right to go around and so forth. If one is walking, one walks into traffic so as to allow oncoming cars to see you. All this on a road 30% narrower than two lane roads in the United States, and mostly surrounded by a 1 to 1.5 meter ditch on either side full of really nasty and sharp looking bushes.

It's Buddhist country. Did I mention that? They aren't aggressive the way we are. When you pass, you pass, you'll get there. You don't floor it and get around, you just signal, toot the horn, pull around aaaaaaaand slowly pull back into the lane.

I am driving down the road and I see a man walking a cow heading toward me. And a moped is coming upon him from behind, on the appropriate "other" side of the road. Passing him is a slowly moving car which is now going to be passed by a full sized, load carrying 2 ton truck which dutifully beeps, signals, pulls still further out in the road. Facing me are two vehicles, a moped, a man and a cow. All the available modes of land-based transportation in Thailand bear down directly on me. There is a gap into which I can....and now must....drive. Which I do.

I close my eyes and think of England.

It's their fault these people drive on the wrong side of the road.