Stumped Again

Here's what I know about free will.

If you have to write an in-class essay on a short story or a novel that you haven't read, state in your introductory paragraph that the protagonist's fatal flaw is his/her belief that free will, not fate, shapes our destiny. Then allude to the Greeks and toss in a reference about a great white whale. Chances are you'll scrape by with a B. Remember that your professors have a lot on their plates what with committee work, publish or perish, and juggling an affair with a student. They scan essays for key words. Trust me.

Last week, I successfully interviewed for a position with a national university about two hours from Abu Dhabi.

They want me to start ASAP. Yahoo! A stay-of-execution. No more juvenile deliquents! Sleep in till 8. Get home by 2. More vacation days. No time clock.

But. . .

I'd take a 20% pay cut.

Still, the housing is a three bedroom, two story villa in a quiet, residential university neighborhood, not on a heavily congested urban blighted street.

However, if I do start ASAP, I risk losing a hefty end-of-service gratuity because I am obligated to give up to sixty days notice to my present employer.

On the other hand, a private office with an Internet connection comes with the new job.

But then there's the move which is nightmarish just to think about.

And we have our lives wired in Abu Dhabi--five minutes to the supermarket, health clinic, vet's, health club. In the new city, there is a lot of construction going on and its traffic problems only recently surpassed that of Cairo's which had previously held the record for the worst place to drive in the Middle East.

Wife is no help. "It's up to you," she says. She is a Muslim, sort of, like a Unitarian is a Christian. 99% of dogma of her quote unquote faith is rubbish, according to her (and let's face it, any faith that would condemn you to eternal damnation for ordering a BLT is just plain loopy), yet she still lives her life according to an Islamic (or a 12 step program for that matter) principle that roughly translates into, "Yeah, shit happens, but whacha gonna do?"

Muslims, you see, believe all that's gone on and all that will come has already been scripted in some state-of-the-art programming language that's sort like God's own PHP. Unless you can gain God's user name and password, hack into his server and can access his mysql data base files, your life will always resolve itself according to the script (Your Death:?php echo $_POST["furtive_cancer_age_65"].

I am that protagonist who pays no never mind to the portents, the forebodings, the ominous words of the fool. My choices shape my destiny.

I'm fucked.

Constants. Variables. If. Else. Hidden forms with hyper references link one page to another. I, we, do not develop our lives. We can only browse them.


In the not too distant future, when Web 3.0 comes along, I hope to find an open source decision making tool in a .zip file that I can execute without giving it too much thought.

I'm Not Sure I Know What I Did Last Summer

I watched a lot of Animal Planet this summer and learned all about Meerkats. I found out that Desperate Housewives jumped the shark towards the end of its second season. I found a new bolt hole. Kathmandu is out. Siem Reap is in. Death dropped by to snag a street cat named Moskeena (Arabic for beggar) I'd had neutered and was feeding then he went to Louisiana to grab a formerly owned cat. Leela, that my sister Barb had adopted. I quickly threw up a geocities website for my bereaved nieces.

Oh, and we miscarried this weekend.

That's about it.

Ten months of work begin tomorrow morning. Last year, I compared it to an approaching firing squad. At the time, I expected not only the usual seven hours a day, five days a week, minute-to-minute confrontations with a classroom full of inbred, ADD'ed deliquents (and I don't use that as a perjorative but a statement of fact), I also had on my plate several other challenges that were sure to rub salt into the psychic wounds that are symptomatic of my most formidable taxing handicap--laziness.

Last year, this time, Mina was in Kuwait with our six cats and one overfed Yorkshire Terrier or Porkshire Terrier if you will. By the end of October, I would have to find suitable digs for one and all, buy a couple of truck loads of furniture and major appliances, import the zoo and send for Mina--all this while tending to nearly 70 beserk primates in the Abu Dhabi Earl Comp'ny's Technical Institute or technically a (mental) institution, if you will.

Done and done.

This year approaches less like a death sentence and looms and hovers more like death itself. What lies ahead is inescapable and necessary; so it's best not to think about it. This much I know: the alarm clock will be set for six Am tonight.

"The rest", as Shakespeare says, "is silence".

Or "The rest", as Kinky Friedman says, "is a joke."

D'Horror D'Horror

"The men came off of the boat and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back to tell their tales. They were all for remaining on the island and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking of ever seeing home again. . .though they were in anguish when I forced them back to the boat." (Homer, The Odyssey, Book IX)

First by motor boat we spent the morning in a flourish of yellow light and a shadowy active ocean of sad sea green triple layered treetops making our way to the fishing village, Kompong Phluk. Then by paddling and poling dugout canoes, we toured the flooded forest.

In the film Apocalypse Now, as a US Navy Swift boat travels the Mekong from Vietnam to Cambodia, a sailor/former saucier from New Orleans encourages his skipper to stop the boat in order to find some mangoes to spruce up the crew's dinner. All a'sudden, a tiger leaps out of the jungle and terrifies the sailor who runs back to the boat yelling out the iconoclastic turn of phrase "never get off the boat, never get off the boat!".

This phrase has entered popular culture, on one level, as an allegorical warning to those who intrude upon other cultures intent on staying and perhaps imposing their own culture on the aboriginals.









Stay on the boat, visit, throw some money around, snap a few photos, then go home. Kurtz, of Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness(set in Africa) and of Coppola's film (set in Vietnam and Cambodia)got off the boat and refused to go home.

We got off the boat. We snapped a few pictures. We tossed around a few dollars. We pampered ourselves with a packed lunch. Then, sadly, we went home.

After touring the flooded forest and Tonle Sap (Lake), we left the boat, climbed a dozen or more creaking stairs leading to a house on stilts with bamboo-thatched walls and a corrugated tin roof. The grown ups of the house had gone fishing. Two barefoot teenage girls, wrapped in checkered khmer blouses and silk sarongs, both wearing ankle bracelets and an assortment of toe rings, occupied themselves baby-sitting and preparing a family dinner to be cooked on a wood-burning stove. Now and again, they came out of the kitchen to check on the sleeping infant, then retreated back to the kitchen, giggling.

A fat orange tabby cat with big balls came from another room to check out the sweaty barang. After making the rounds for some ceremonious head pats, he returned to his private quarters.

Mina, Kevin and I lulled about like lotus eaters for a couple of hours before we ate a lunch of lotus salad and skinless roasted chicken breasts in mango sauce, packed and prepared by the French chef, Olivier, who owned our three-star air conned guesthouse, the Eurasiane, where Mina and I, coincidentally, stayed in the Lotus room.

You know, Fuck Homer, Conrad and Coppola. Home is over rated.

Flush toilets, Medicare and early bird prime rib specials at the Steak and Ale are also over rated. When I retire--and may that day come sooner than later, I really, really do want to get off the boat then sink the boat and spend the rest of my years filling my belly with lotus leaves. If I have to throw around more than a few dollars to do it, well, you do what you got to do.

Babba Bazorq

The Rose and I have a code phrase for the rounded fellers--and by rounded I don't mean well versed in numerous arts and sciences--but the Thai holiday oil field trash who look like Butterball turkeys wearing hook-'em horn cowboy belt buckles and Peterbilt caps. You see these fellers waddling along places like Khao San Road with these size double zero chickadees, their rented companions during their stay in Bangkok. Babba Bazorq is Farsi for Grandfather. In Spanish I believe the phrase is Viejo Raho Verde. In American English, we simply call them cradle robbers.

Now Babba Bazorq has a secondary connotation. Me. I might possibly be getting too old to lug a sixty pound back pack through the tropics. The Rose, I must say, did just fine. As long as she was haggling in the open air markets trying to beat a sales person out of fifty cents on a two dollar skirt, she was having the time of her life. I'm proud of her.
The airport bus is heah. We're on our way back to Abu Dhabi.