Flashback: Ko Tao

The train pulled into Chumphon just before five in the morning, an hour later than scheduled. I waited in a flourescent-lit bus depot with a number of other foreigners and their big backpacks. An hour later a "digital bus" took us to the ferry, which then motored for three hours across a calm sea. Representatives of diving outfits courted the foreigners on board. I was not bothered by anyone other than a Brit named Guy; the Thais seem to believe that the Asian foreigners speak no English and, in any case, have had their tour all booked in advance.

On the ride out to Chalok Ban Kao beach I decided I would get my advanced open water certification while on Ko Tao. I was tired, dirty and hungry. It was the path of least resistance.

I spent the rest of the day getting clean and walking around a bit. By the end of the day I felt miserable and a little lonely. Then I fell asleep and had my first full night's sleep since arriving in Thailand. Once I had slept for thirteen hours I felt superb.

Back in Bangkok, I had seen a toad on the sidewalk and taken it as a sign of the latitude. On Ko Tao, while attempting a shower in the morning, I was greeted by a spider the size of my hand. When I tried to kill it, the beast demonstrated supernatural speed and went away into a corner in the shower. Its size was such that its movements could be heard. I then saw a foot-long gecko next to the spider.

The next day a second spider of similar stature turned up in another corner. Later that afternoon the two joined above the sink in apparent copulation. This was too much to bear. I switched rooms.

And now, as I type this, there are ants coming out of my keyboard with each keystroke. If this is biodiversity, then let the earth be damned.

Flashback: MBK Center

I spent my last day in Bangkok confined to a gigantic shopping mall called MBK Center.

I had earlier left my backpack at the train station and then visited Chinatown, only to find that it was simply too hot and that it was, well, a Chinatown. MBK Center promised air conditioning and an authentic Bangkok experience, because modern Bangkokers who can afford it spend their time in big malls.

Unless the people here figure out how to air-condition the whole of Bangkok, I'm afraid this mall thing will continue to thrive. I killed four hours shopping for a pair of cheap sunglasses. I managed one for 99 baht, but by then the six-floor mall had completely defeated this hardened semi-native of New Jersey. I then left the mall and stepped into the dense steam outside. I lost liters of sweat in minutes. It was raining, but I swear the raindrops were just forming in place and sticking to my body. I got the hell back to the train station and waited for my ride out of the city.

Recent developments in this world

A Wall Street firm managed to orchestrate among its counterparties a sudden and complete loss of faith in its financial health, and found itself dead in the water overnight. Capitalism revealed itself (again) to be a religion supported mostly by faith. I propose we begin working on an economy based on hope, or love.

Alex's father recently passed away from pancreatic cancer. In all he had only two weeks to ready himself. Four weeks ago there was the news, reluctantly received through his son Alex, who had practically dragged him to the hospital. Then there was a rapid decline, followed by a short but labored passing that Alex found difficult to witness.

May Egon rest in peace.

Live Free, Die Hard: A Synopsis

Bruce Willis steps into a high-but-not-high-enough-budget film fathered by a deadbeat Apple commercial and reared by the Department of Homeland Security before being sent away to boring school in New Hampshire. Death and destruction follow in Detective McLane's footsteps. A Ryan Seacrest-lookalike cyberterrorist employs a trailer full of dorks who hack into the central systems of major national and global institutions, much to the dismay of the dorks manning the stadium-sized control rooms. South Asians are hard to spot among the actors playing the dorks, and this reminds the audience that they are watching fiction. Everything else in the movie is convincingly realistic. Macintosh overcomes his innate pussiness, but PC is nowhere to be found. It turns out that McLane's daughter was once spared a horrible death by a vivid premonition of a roller coaster accident, but you can't cheat death, you see; it will take you one way or another to the Final Destination 4.

What? Oh yes. I did not last until the end.

February 27

I apologize to the moon, whose effect on this world is subtle, and cerebral.

February 25

Dear Diary,
I did not leave my apartment today, choosing instead to observe the world from the safety of a wooden platform. And, oh my, what a world it was. The forty-yard dash and the Wonderlic. Clinton urging us for honor and shame. A blur of daily personal responsibility. Sunlight peeking over the southern roofline of W. 90th and into my kitchen. Visitors from the world across the river. A mild awakening in the repopulated heart. In this right state of mind it is possible to believe that there is a pattern to a string of events both local and otherwise. It follows then that the pattern must mean something, not only to the world at large but to me. This should be reason for joy, but all I can muster is a nod and a pot of coffee. The joy may come yet; maybe tomorrow, maybe next year.

Some people tend to measure a sentence or a stretch of discourse against the yardstick of depression, but what I am trying to communicate has nothing to do with that. Dear reader (all three of you) -- understand that I am constantly trying to talk around things that cannot be explained, because things that can be explained by inferior minds are always at peril of becoming untrue, and I am in the business of truth. I urge you to try it as well -- there is real fulfillment, not emptiness, in discarding the desire to understand and to explain.

The rarely seen

I climbed out of the 86th B/C station around ten and was walking over to Columbus when I saw that everyone else was standing still and looking up at something high over my shoulder. When I turned around I saw the shadow of our own planet cast upon the moon.

Did I expect vampires? Werewolves, unicorns? Yes, yes and don't be silly.

I nearly took a picture but I didn't. "Look everyone, see this brown dot in the sky."

In the end I kept walking. It might be more interesting from the other end to witness what would be an earth-induced solar eclipse.

The Repopulated Heart

"Using SDS, a detergent that will be intimately familiar to anyone who has carried out a western blot, the scientists were able to decellularize the old rat hearts, leaving just the extracellular matrices, but no endothelial cells, cardiomyocytes, or other cell types one would expect to find in a normal heart.

Once this technique of decellularization was perfected, the next step was to repopulate the organ with new cells, obtained from newborn rat hearts. When the repopulated ECM was continuously perfused with a culture medium supplying nutrients and oxygen, the repopulated hearts showed spontaneous contractions on day four, and by day eight were able to pump."

Ars Technica

Your chopsticks hover over my California rolls

Your chopsticks hover over my California rolls
that lie configured against the cold blue porcelain;
The table beneath reveals a rough, gnarled grain.

Your elbow enables your shoulder, which anchors
the turn of your neck, which directs your gaze to the window,
outside which stand a twisted tree, a street lamp. Go, go.

2007 RiskBall World Champions, Da West Side Nasty Riddims

Here's what happened: my team was okay. I talked some trash. My team became awesome. I crushed all of my opponents. I will spare you the details of how awesome my roster played in the Super Bowl, but Jesus may have been throwing to Anquan Boldin.

Da West Side Nasty Riddims: Born Champions

In a television interview Ji-Soo Park responded thoughtfully to the question: Do you think that your fantasy football team, Da West Side Nasty Riddims, truly belongs in the postseason, given that its roster is headed by a lackluster Peyton Manning and is otherwise composed of inconsistent has-beens?

"If our squad resembles a bunch of pretenders, we offer this defense: we, the royal first person plural, have squeezed every drop out of that squad. We have barely outscored our opponents by a total of 4.3 points the entire season (1182.8 to 1178.5), and yet managed to pull off a 9-and-4 record. We fielded Kenton Keith for all of his breakout games, and had the balls to pick up and play Kenny Watson from free agency when no one had heard of him. We found Nick Folk off waivers and saw more points from him than some top running backs on other teams. In the wildcard round, we are starting the unknown Fred Jackson (Buf) at running back and Bryant Johnson (Ari) at wide receiver. We are finely tuned to the celestial harmony and confluence of injuries to regular starters, the politics of a season close to its end, and other beautiful circumstances that can lead to a miraculous performance. You will watch SC and marvel at this "unexpected" performance. You may bother to look him up in the league, and see that we have already invested, and have already enjoyed the returns. We will dissect your hopes and burn your dreams, because LaDanian Tomlinson is going to the bench in the third quarter near the postseason, and you will watch helplessly as I play Kyle Boller (playing for Manning, also benched for the playoffs) for four hundred yards, three passing and four rushing touchdowns against the Dolphins."

License to be really abstract

In a radio broadcast Rothko responded thoughtfully to the question: Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles?

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance....Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves--more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the ideas rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience....The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life."

I give thanks for a tropical future

Predictably the night air is chilly, though later this year than usual. We are tempted to suggest global warming. We are promised a divine climate, though not soon. This is a present to our many descendants. Right now, we still have autumn, and soon, the end of life as we know it -- winter.

Well this will make perfect sense

A question of necessity, maybe. Killing time,
in the eyes of some. My mouth calls it sleep.
When possible you will transmit the message
corporeal, carrying a presence and a distinct smell,
marked by fine pores that invite counting.
The recipients will know why we are here.
We are here for now, and for good.

Inspire this

SAE

Anita, Swedish Nymphet: A Synopsis

Anita is a tortured soul. She offers herself up to nearly every man she passes on the steet, but these encounters yield her no pleasure. The Johns turn out to be minutemen, averse to commitment and occasionally abusive. She wants nothing more than to stop, but she cannot. Slut is a powerful addiction.

Only one man understands. He encourages her to fulfill her urge. She finds a crack/heroin den full of degenerate men, takes off her clothes, and proceeds to know entire neighborhoods of men and women.

I hate to ruin the ending for the few out there who have yet to see this masterpiece, but Anita's wanton slut binge cures her of her addiction. And when she finally lies with the genius who suggested the rumspringa, she has the gall to claim that this is like her first time.

Anita, virgin is not a state of mind.

Small creatures underfoot
hold still in the sudden light.
Apocalypse comes to a paradise of dirt:
the dome of heaven lifted open,
shadows cast under boulders known unseen.

Which leggy visionary among them saw this coming?
Whose name will they invoke as
they cry the loss of kin and
explain my malevolence?