A Bowl of Stupid

The list of woes is far too thorny a thicket in which to venture here, but suffice to say that 2009 — and the entire Aughts — will go down as quite possibly one of the absolute worst eras in recent history.

For me personally, it’s been an absolute banner fucking year at the ol’ Bender household — despite my attempts to move on to another career path, a significant loss of accrued savings due to the financial meltdown has left me looking for full-time work again (and, dear God, legal work, at that). Plus, the seemingly worldwide hiring freeze resulting from that crisis doesn’t seen to offer any immediate respite, even in that industry.

That being said, given the Scuba diving and surfing pics adoring this site, I still can’t delude myself into thinking that my year was all that bad. I actually do consider myself to be one of the lucky ones. I sorta saw this whole thing coming and had the means to escape to Asia before I suffered any significant woes. I sold my property back in the States for a profit, was able to distance myself from my old gig with little issue and, unencumbered by any significant emotional entanglements, I’ve been able to traipse about Asia for the past several years.

However, as everyone obviously knows, many others haven’t fared even a fraction as well as I have. Indeed, countless millions have lost their life savings, their friendships, marriages and, thanks to that walking void who ran the store for the better part of the decade (cough, cough, George Bush, cough, cough), millions of others have lost their lives, as well.

I know far too many of these types myself — friends who have lost their jobs, homes savings and insurance to corporate malfeasance. Others who have separated or divorced (either directly or indirectly) due to the ’09 shitstorm. And others yet who still can’t find a decent gig even after years of involuntary under/unemployment.

Yes, it has been nice to be able to lend some comfort, either directly or by way of allowing them the means to live vicariously through me. But as one can tell simply by looking through this blog, it’s been getting harder and harder for me to comfort anyone from atop my self-aggrandized perch, even as my own world is contracting at an ever-increasing pace.

This being said, all I can hope for is that 2010, and the entirety of the next decade, will be far, far better than the last one. Well, that and a hearty ‘fuck you, good bye, and good riddance’ to 2009.

Wanderer, there is no path, you lay down a path in walking.
-Antonio Machado

I’m off for a few days, at least. I didn’t put things together very well (again) coming back from the States last month, so I’ve got to head to Kuala Lumpur for a few days to renew my Thai visa. Since there’s nothing going on here this late in the year — what with last weeks holidays here in Thailand and everyone else heading to their native lands for the Christmas holidays, I’m gonna make a trip out of it. Do some bus ridin’, do some train ridin’, do some divin’. All that kinda shit.

Should be back in several days, though. And I may update along the way, although — GASP — I’m not taking my laptop with me this time. We’ll see how it unfolds …

From the 8 December edition of the Chicago Tribune comes this gloriously ironic story, talking about how Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatres have become the new Fight Club. From the story:

in the past few years Chuck E. Cheese’s has developed a reputation as a sort of impromptu fight club, a place where fisticuffs break out almost as often as complaints about the pizza.

It apparently started after a Wall Street Journal story last December reported that a Chuck E. Cheese in Brookfield, Wis., had prompted more police calls in the previous year than any other restaurant in town. Now, The Obscure Store says that “Chuck E. Cheese brawls are so common they’re hardly ‘news.’”

Really, I got nothing. This is the kind of joke that just writes itself. The only thing I’m thinking of are the number of ways to insert the terms ‘Chuck E. Cheese’ and/or ‘Giant Rat’ into various Fight Club quotes. My top 5:

• I see the strongest and the smartest rats who have ever lived… and these vermin are singing happy birthday and waiting tables.
• I am the all-singing, all-dancing rat of this world…. I am the toxic waste by-product of God’s creation.
• Only in death are we no longer part of Project Playtime.
• The gyms you go to are crowded with mice trying to look like rats, as if being a rat means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.
• Fuck Chuck E. Cheese! Chuck E’s polishing the brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man.

Last week, I posted a video lecture about ‘Sixth-Sense Technology’ on TED, the brainchild of a remarkable Indian inventor, Pranav Mistry. I caught shit from a bunch of people back in the States about my comments regarding the general decline in American education and innovation.

I really don’t mean to sound like I’m America-bashing. I really don’t. And I really can’t help it if people don’t like hearing the truth. Nor can I help it if I wind up sounding like a broken record (assuming anyone still knows what a ‘record’ is). But the facts are the facts. And it seems like every week, there’s another story about how some other country or part of the world is just kicking the shit out of America in the fields of economics, the sciences, and technology.

Admittedly, this time, it’s not India or China leading the charge. Rather, it’s the Swiss and French (which George Bush declared as irrelevant “Old Europe”). The NY Times/International Herald Tribune reported today, in an article entitled “Collider Sets Record, and Europe Takes U.S.’s Lead”:

Scientists said that the new Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile loop underneath the Swiss-French border, had accelerated protons to energies of 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece and then crashed them together, eclipsing a record for collisions held by an American machine, the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

This moment has been inevitable since fall 1993, when Congress canceled a behemoth project in Texas known as the Superconducting Supercollider, after estimated costs rose to $11 billion. … In the future, as the collider ramps up to seven trillion electron volts, the dateline for physics discoveries will be Geneva, not Batavia, Ill., the home of Fermilab.

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. In fact, I’m sure you paranoid idiots nice folks don’t want to waste good ammunition on lil’ ol’ me. Wouldn’t you much rather maintain your ever-increasing stocks of ammunition for President Obama’s impending socialist revolution?

P.S. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal’s crude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

The Fifth of December is a huge day here in Thailand — it’s the birthday of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest reigning monarch.

Known in Thai as ‘Wan Chalerm’. The King has a very special place in the hearts of the Thai people. He completely revitalized and redefined the country for the modern era. As a foreigner, it’s my view that the most important thing His Majesty has done is provide a firm foundation for the modern Thailand we know today, allowing it to weather, relatively unscathed, the turmoil that beset other countries in the region since the end of World War II.

In celebration of The Kings birthday, buildings and homes all over the country are elaborately adorned with flags and portraits of His Majesty, predominantly in the color yellow. On the evening of the holiday itself, the streets around Ratchadamnoen and Sanam Luang are closed to traffic and thousands of people take to the streets.

However, for anyone in town not familiar with HM the King’s birthday and the intermittent week-long holiday associated with it, you may get a slight ‘Twilight Zone’ twitch when you notice everyone but yourself wearing pink shirts and randomly throwing lit firecrackers into the street. It’s just another of the awesomely quirky things about Thailand (much like being caught on the BTS train here at 0800 or 1800 each day, when everyone simply stops moving — they just stop — for the duration of the Thai National Anthem).

Since the King’s actual birthday fell on a Saturday this year, the official state holiday was yesterday (7 December), while Constitution Day, another public holiday, is this Thursday (10 December) to commemorate the start of the constitution monarchy in 1932.

The result of all this is that it feels like a mixture of July 4th and Thanksgiving (back in the States) — there’s essentially a 2-day work week, with most people not even going that far. So it’s relatively quiet here in Bangers right now. It’s a welcome change of pace, and it’s another reminder of why Bangkok is such a great place to live.

Just last week, I was lamenting the general decline in American education with respect to the most recent embracement of Sarah Palin-esque ideals by many Americans. In all honesty, however, that kind of stuff is made in jest (for the most part).

Where the rubber really meets the road is the fact that, while Americans have been busy invading other countries, arguing over which is the true nonexistent God, and debating whether or not Lady Gaga is a man or not, other peoples around the globe have been making some truly INCREDIBLE technological advances.

The following is one of the most inspired, and inspiring, demonstrations of technological prowess that I’ve seen in a long time. Watch Pranav Mistry talk about the thrilling potential of SixthSense technology. It’s absolute genius.

While I obviously like to write as a means of self-expression, I’ve never professed to be a grand wordsmith. Or a poet, for that matter. My imagination just isn’t that expansive.

I have, however, always been a huge fan of poetry, and poetry readings, in general. Displays of the spoken word, however, are not all that abundant where I’ve been traveling for the past several years. And I miss them.

Admittedly, the lesser skilled readings may sometimes be tedious, but there are usually a few gems hidden that get your mind lubed up and cranking again — which is nice in light of the steady decline in general knowledge, and the growing disdain of unique self-expression and self-exploration.

HBO’s Def Poetry Jam has been a beacon. A rebirth. And, for many, an introduction to what poetry can be in the modern, urban world. Many of the poets they’ve managed to book have been simply sublime.

And while this particular poem may be somewhat dated (it originally aired on HBO on 25 April 2003, at the height of American post 9-11 paranoia, and the Bush Administration’s exploitation of same), it’s still one of my favorites. And it still holds true today. Perhaps even more so, given President Obama’s decision to “up-the-anty” in Afghanistan — sending an additional (ironically enough) 30,000 troops into that quagmire.

Fighting fire with fire doesn’t seen to be working anymore, perhaps it’s time to try something else?

Jonzi D — “3000 Casualties Of War”