Happy Halloween, spaghetti arms!

Spaghetti arms. That term stuck in my craw as a teenager. “I'm a runner, okay? Excess muscle is a detriment in this sport! Among my scrawny runner buddies I'm bulky!”

That illusion lasted until I went to college. I walked into my dorm room the first day to discover my roommate looked like an ancient Greek statue of Perseus. David? Theseus? You get my point.

I tried going to the gym, but dear looorrrrd that's boring! Stand in front of a mirror and watch myself, or watch other people watching each other? I'd rather go for a run. (Rowing was nice though, especially when a gay guy hit on me. “Why thank you! No thank you, but thank you!”)

I later tried rock climbing, since the exercise component there is incidental to the enjoyment. It was a lot of fun (if anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area wants to go rock climbing, give me a call) but I soon learned that the trick to rock climbing is to let your bones carry the weight, not your muscles, and to be careful with your center of balance.

No giant muscles erupted on my arms.

It was better while traveling, since most of the world doesn't have the leisure time to lift weights for no particular purpose, they're busy lifting actual things that need to be lifted. I remember in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, a local guy wanted to give me a hug hello, next to the construction site where he carried bags of concrete mix all day. He was of comparable dimensions to me, but when we clapped a Man Hug on each other, it felt like he was made of sandbags, not flesh.

I've bulked out a little since my runner days (I'm more of a fettuccine now) and have long since come to terms with never being a muscle man or a gym rat. But then a funny thing happened. I moved into a house...with a kickboxing gym in the back bedroom. Muay thai, really.

Yup. It's bachelortastic around here.

I'm still not going to bulk up, but I feel a whole lot better after an hour in there, jumping rope, punching the bag until my arms get too heavy (which happens remarkably fast) then kicking it until my breath burns in my throat (again, unexpectedly immediate).

It also serves as a great decompression space after a couple hours of trying to mentally-constipated attempts at writing, or if I'm, say, frustrated that I didn't come up with a costume for my first Halloween back in the US, nor a place to go tonight, and am feeling like a social failure and borderline loser.

I was moping (with punches!) about my lack of costume until I noticed...I was wearing hand-wraps, boxing gloves, and a borrowed pair of shiny boxing shorts that look absolutely ridiculous on me.

I still don't have any place to go tonight, but that's okay. I've been to parties, and the holiday I'm really looking forward to will be spent with family in four weeks. So there will be a muay thai fighter handing out candy to the neighborhood kids here tonight, and I'm looking forward to it.

(Nobody'd better try any “tricks” though, because I've been working on my right cross...)

Can I ask you a question? Am I an a**hole?

I'm not used to women in bars looking at me like I'm a complete a**hole.

Truth be told, I'm not used to women in bars looking at me at all, but here was this woman,

mouth twisted in disdain, staring at me with eyes dripping scorn. I wasn't expecting that reaction.

I've misplaced all my Scotland pics, so I'll
go with anonymously European ones

She'd asked me a familiar question, “Is it difficult being back in the US?” As I mentioned before, it is indeed pretty weird, including the strange sensation of being the same nationality as most other people and specifically: talking the same.

I suppose that's part of why I've been drifting over to accents from the UK more often lately.

Accents have always entertained me, since I was a wee lad who would occasionally talk like an Indian who thought he was Jamaican, often discussing who had “plump little bongos.” Nonsensical, but it seemed to entertain my family. I ask anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me to let me know when it gets annoying and I'll try to stop.

Yesterday I listened to a Freakonomics podcast about tipping, which included a woman who faked a French accent to get more tips. I've never done that. I have never used my play to try to gain anything, or deceive anyone in any way that feels exploitative. It's usually when I ask for directions, which I assume people would answer anyway, but this way they seem to do so with little more of a smile. Is that exploitative? Deceptive?

No harm done. Right?

This woman in the bar did not agree. When I told her that I've been faking accents occasionally, she found it a disgusting betrayal of a stranger's trust. “So you're basically making fun of everyone you fool, thinking you're better than them.”

Not in the slightest! I certainly never think less of anyone I speak to. But it tickled a question I've long had. Is it wrong? It is basically lying after all...is there such a thing as a victimless crime?

Is it unethical to fake an accent in casual conversation with strangers?

A: No way, it's a fun way to make a boring interaction a little more interesting for everyone.

B: Not as long as you're not trying to trick anyone into anything, like the tipping.

C: Yes, technically, but it's a harmless misbehavior.

D: Yes, it's lying and you should stop immediately.

(Vote on the poll on my wordpress version, which interfaces more easily with the polling program.)

Fire-breathing dragons and go-go dancers at Glow

The Dragons of Eden, by Lucy Hosking, more info here

Among the aging hippies, LED-addicted Burners, and baby-toting Generation X/Y/Zers at last weekend's “Glow: A festival of fire and light”, the fan favorite had to be the dragon. It polled well among those less prone to caricature too.

The bus length shiny silver body like a segmented wyrm built on top of a mobile home chassis (and headed by a multifaceted glass ball where the driver sits like the villain in the end-of-level robo-monster) was certainly eye-catching when it came around the corner, but it was the seven sharp-toothed dragon heads that really got your attention. As if that wasn't enough, closer inspection revealed the open-ended propane canisters lurking like tongues in each head's mouth. That really, ahem, fired the imagination.

“Does the dragon breathe fire?” asked wide-eyed children throughout the night. Parents lifted speculative gazes to the heads, then ran worried looks over the surrounding flora and fauna, all of which looked suddenly flammable.

“I think so, honey. Let's not stand right here, okay?”

Casey Gerstle, the Lightwalker

Nervous parents edging away from draconic destruction got help from the magnetic pull of flickering flames, four-storey projections, and eerie sounds coming from the crowd clustered in the courtyard nearby. I followed them over.

Fire spun on brass pipes, dragonflies cut from Volkswagens looked at me with hubcap eyes, and a line of exuberant artists shot flames into the air on a surreal arsenal of flame throwers. The crowd migrated between the attractions brought together by the Museum of Art and History, joined by the “Lightwalker”, who peered down with relentless amiability at children, adults, and flocking photographers alike. And at an event designed to showcase the skills and work of Santa Cruz's resident contributors to the annual Burning Man phenomenon, there were as many cameras as flames.

Lucy Hosking playing Satan's Calliope

Explosions back on the street created a current of bodies to surround “Satan's Calliope”, a Jetson's-style car, pyromaniacal pipe organ, and marvelous means of musical mayhem, all in one. The same remarkable woman who made the dragon created it, and this one she got to play with. Literally. It was connected to a keyboard, and as her fingers tickled the ivories, flames and explosions blared from the trumpets and pipes with screams like the devil's bagpipes.

It was fantastic.

Some Dancetronauts observe, some boogie

Flames flare and die, but the sternum-popping bass of the Dancetronauts never dwindled. On their bizarre Bowie-esque trailer and rising spaceship thingy, the DJs stood in astronaut bodysuits while scantily clad go-go dancers (is there any other type?) did their thing to the sides... It was weird. Here were all these artists on one hand, and an instant neon frat party on the other.

It all seemed slightly scandalous until I passed one mother who stooped down, pointed her child's attention to the booty-shaking and said “Look honey, those are called go-go dancers.” Very educational evening. Besides, our inner monkeys love bass, and the world's even more multifaceted than the driver-chamber of the dragon-thing, where a succession of people sat and waved their hands in front of the motion detectors that snapped the heads' jaws open and closed.

Santa Cruz is a groovy town but it knows its bedtime, and not long after 9:00 the Dancetronauts played their last song...but there was one more act to go. Samba music, dancing on stilts, burlesque choreography, fire eating, and leather corsets. Maybe it was five acts.

Whatever it was, the Samba Stilt Circus was incredible. The crowd gathered around and four-thousand eyeballs could not look away.

I can't recall ever seeing as large a group of humans in so good of a collective mood, grins and shaking hips across the generations, and in the end, no one noticed that the dragon heads never did spew their fire. Rest easy, moms.

And bring the kids back tomorrow night, they're going to like Part 2 even more...

The system's out of order, this lad's opinion, and the fire hasn't even started yet.

“Well, I guess that's what we get for unplugging for a few hours,” said the businessman, relaxed on his bench outside the shuttered BART train station. “They must have decided to go on strike late last night. My office hasn't decided what they want me to do about it yet.” He leaned back, no frown on his face as it angled towards the morning sun, his loafers tapping slightly to a beat only he could hear.

Here was a man at peace with the problem. The bag lady down the row to his left looked at him without expression.

In a parallel universe I took them both out for breakfast, heard their stories and watched them fall in unlikely love (Joaquin Phoenix and Susan Sarandon for the movie adaptation?), but I was itching to get to Santa Cruz. The fire and light festival started in eleven hours, and I had plans for lunch, then aspired to a full afternoon helping without getting in the way.

Run back to house to check for alternate route. Bus leaves in three minutes, back at station. Run back, intercept bus partway, disembark downtown Oakland where local TV crews were interviewing commuters standing in line for the replacement buses across the bridge. I chatted in a Scottish accent with the guy next to me in hopes of hooking an interview, but the woman in front of us had boobs.

Boobs trump Scotland, apparently.

Too bad, because I was all ready to give a foreigner's (sic) view of contemporary American democracy. “What do you think of the strike?” They would ask.

“Well, it's an essential part of your country, isn't it? Your Constitution was designed to protect ye from the government, but they're not really the main threat anymore, are they? Not since Reagan privatized the lot of it. No, it's the businesses, yer employers that've got the axe over yer heads now. The idea was that if ye were abused, ye could vote them out, but you canna vote for a new boss, can ye? So you've got the strike, it's the modern equivalent of the ballot, isn't it?”

They were right to go with the boobs.

Packed bus creeping across crammed bridge, tankers below, then puking us into an unfamiliar hub, clicking of flats, where frantic employees in florescent vests answered rapid-fire questions and held heavy flashlights in defensive positions, clip board shields. Next transport medium: I didn't even know San Francisco had an underground train.

The uniformed woman with hair extensions and long acrylic nails called me “hun” as she directed this poor lost tourist to the train, her coworker joining us in a threesome of “have a nice day” grins and well-wishing.

The guy in front of me was asleep in his Hawaiian shirt, but woke when we passed the baseball park and shuffled to the train station with me. “Sir, I'm afraid you can't take pictures of the equipment, for security reasons” said the employee who I recognized as the nice one from my last trip's Good Cop/Bad Cop experience. I'd already given one (mental) speech, so opted against lecturing him about the chronic and egocentric paranoia of the United States, instead going with more smiles and well-wishing.

I reached San Jose an hour and a half behind schedule, but well on my way to catching up on my This American Life and Radiolab podcasts. (David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell are geniuses. Genae.) I was already entertained, educated, and frustrated, and the best part of the day was yet to come...

No assassination attempts here, I'll take a desk job instead?

My cut in Myanmar was the only one
I took pictures in.

I'm rumbling along, too vaguely happy and scatterbrained to have much on my mind to share, unless I go a little further up and get all literal on you.

It's only been two months since the stern woman in Thailand mowed my head-lawn, but I was eager to try a haircut beyond the usual: make buzzing sounds while pointing at the sides and back, then point at the top and hold fingers an inch apart.

I took a seat in a real-deal modern hairdresser's chair, hardwood floors under orange and green-accented walls, and Bobbi asked what I wanted. Oh. Um. If not The Usual Haircut, then what? “You don't even know, you gonna leave it up to me,” he said.

Bobbi reminded me of another cool cat who had cut my hair so that was fine by me. 

The other two chairs held women whose conversations revealed long-term relationships with their hairdressers. They talked about how the vacation to Mexico went, husbands, and a misadventure with some paint. I tried to chat with Bobbi, and told him about the chiropractic work that comes with a cut in Nepal, but soon enough the pseudo-massage of getting my hair cut lulled me into silence.

Now that was a chair.

The hypercolor zebra-print pants of one of the other stylists sent me on a psychedelic trip that ended when another guy came in and asked when Bobbi would be ready for his next customer. “In about 45 seconds, soon as I get Mr. Tim ready for his engagement.”

But there was one other thing. “I have a pet peeve against ear hair,” Bobbi confided, as he jammed the buzzer into my flappers, “It's just a part of gettin' older, we start gettin' hair places we never expected to. I understand.” I admitted that I appreciated the help, it's getting jungly in there in my old age.

Then we were done and he held up the mirror so I could see. To be honest I was looking for something a little more...exciting; I kind of feel like I'm applying for an office job; but I guess that's today's lesson, if you're going to have preferences, you have to figure out what they are, even if you are scatterbrained and happy.

Schedule failure, belly tetris, and productive nothing

 That was a very worthwhile complete waste of time.

Didn't want to take my camera to SF,
so these are my neighborhood after I got back

As I mentioned before, I haven't needed to plan anything ahead of time for the last few years, an atrophied skill that has gifted me a few nice Friday nights home alone. That's fine, I'm too old and happy to get freaked out by that, but....you know. Enough is enough.

So when I heard about a book release last night it sounded perfect, even before I read about the free beer and pizza. Some guy wrote a book about his roadtrip up the West Coast. I had three questions:

1. How good is his book?
2. How did he get it published?
3. Who wants to go with me?

It was last minute, but I found three people to come along. Superb! I finally got the dogs, house, errands, and miscellaneous stupid sh** squared away with just enough time to realize how little I'd really gotten done, then it was time to start the journey.

Text: “Sorry dude, we couldn't get a babysitter who could stay late enough, so we can't make it tonight. We'll do something else soon.”

Thought: “Woah, I could almost fall asleep on this train, good thing my stop, Montgomery St, is next.”

Announcement as we pull in: “This is Powell St.”

Little boy on the street: “Donation.”

Me (in a Scottish accent): “For what?”

Boy: “My school.” Conversation happens. He's adorable and weird.

Me (Scottish throughout): “Does this bus actually come?”

Boy: “Uh...yeah...”

Wrong stop.

Me leaving message (no accent): “Sorry, I was at the wrong stop, I'll be there as soon as I can.” No response. Follow up texts and call: no response. My directions to the park led me only to city streets, no park or friend in sight.

The book release was full of friendships already established and conversations well underway, not a fellow solo bystander to be had. I walked in, around, and out again.

So my social night ended up being a wander through the streets of San Francisco, a city that's colder than I remember. I was hungry for a burrito until I watched a dude beat the living crap out of another guy on the street next to me, that kinda ruined my appetite. But it came back just in time for the game between Mexico and Panama, and though they didn't talk to me, I was part of the crowd while I played stomach tetris with beans, rice, pollo asado, and guacamole.

I won, and so did Mexico.

They did victory dances and I took a digestion stroll. The city was big and dark, smelled like urine sometimes and sounded like inner city words my skin color must never say. Headlights reflected off lane lines, laughter had many accents and one meaning, and a group saw the news of Mexico's victory and the crowd went wild.

I was tempted to feel down about my utter social failure, until I realized that there are far too many versions of Happy to put all those chips on one outcome. My solo night of walking with hands deep in my pockets, accents at will, observations relentless, and smile facing mostly inward...was great.

Two days in Tahoe

Several hives worth of buzzing words follow me around every day, but they are unruly little things, and refuse to fly out my fingertips when I ask them to. Instead, a few of them had taken to buzzing around inside my eyeballs, making my computer screen seem underwater. The cure? Trees. Mountain. Air. Cold water. Friends. Absence of screens.

I threw those keywords into a bowl, added two spoonfuls of serendipity and a quarter cup of flexible schedule, baked it with a few days' notice and when the timer dinged I stepped out of a rented hybrid in Tahoe. Magic.

We spent two days up by the lake that I will always think of as the liquid heart of the Sierra Nevada. It was three parts eating, two parts walking, and one part Romancing the Stone on a TV that was perfectly tiny, just the way I wanted.

Danny DeVito, man. Nice.

East Coasters sometimes hold seasonal leaf variation as a talking point against the West Coast, but wouldya look at that, yellow. Lots and lots of yellow, looking to the eyes the way the daytime sunlight felt to the skin.

The nights were chilly enough to make me grin with gritted teeth as the celestial gods of Tahoe reminded me of just how many stars there really are. Wow.

And just in case I hadn't realized this was perfect timing, how about a shooting star to say hello? Why yes, yes I will. Graag.

Fierce winds the first night put military formations of white caps storming the beach, and the next morning showed a corpse-ridden battlefield, though the crawdads never had a chance.

Jump in the frigid lake, because that's what you do, and stop off on the way out at Emerald Bay, where kids cuted, water lapped, and languages varied; Russian, German, Mandarin, and lots of French. Luckily there was some American in there too, or I would have grown depressed at our national ingratitude.

Tahoe is an easy place to spend a couple days, grow some friendships, and never consider checking off the To-Visit List. There's always more.

Blue Dragon

Should I tell you some of their stories?

Do you want to hear about the young boy whose mother died? About how his father was sent to jail and he was left to the care of an uncle? Do you want to hear about how the uncle sold him. SOLD him. To a circus.

That idea is so unimaginable, so unthinkable and untenable to most of our minds that if we heard it in a joke, it would be funny. No jokes today.

The stories of these kids are so horrible, so mind-rendingly awful, that I really don't need to tell them to you. You can imagine them already, though you don't want to. We don't want to get down into that misery, and honestly, I understand why. There are so many problems in the world today, so much suffering, that it's difficult for a caring soul to look without getting dragged down.

Luckily there are some among us who do get down into it. And they do make a difference.

Blue Dragon Children'sFoundation does it. And they do it well. They find kids who have been sold into slavery, working 16 hour days... And the other one. The one you've heard about, the one that makes the soul flinch back. The girls...

The people at Blue Dragon find them. They get to them. They bring them out. They give them support, counseling, and the chance to get their lives back. They help street kids, those whose families can't take care of them, children with disabilities.

Do you need to hear another anecdote? How about one more piece of that first one?

The people at Blue Dragon found that boy, sold by his uncle, and they brought him out of there. For three weeks they worked with him, trying to ease the suffering and damage done to this innocent child. Three weeks later, he was riding on the back of a bicycle, behind Blue Dragon's director, an Australian ex-teacher named Michael.

And he smiled. And it's the smile of a child. A smile of a happy child. I wish I could show you that smile, but to protect his identity I can't. But it's there, and it's beautiful.

Go to their website. Read about it. Support them if you can, pass it along if you can't. (Or both!) If you want more, can handle more, they have an amazing blog at http://vietnamstreets.blogspot.com/

There is so much suffering in the world today it's hard to know where to start. The Blue Dragon Children's Foundation is a great way to make a difference.

Here's one of my favorites from the videos on their site,

Is it weird being back in America?

Is it weird being back in America?

I wasn't sure how to answer that question. “Not...really.” Adjusting to Stateside norms was pretty easy; I did grow up here, after all. I can handle silverware and I never picked up on the whole spitting thing anyway. But as the last month has passed I've noticed a couple ways in which I am still adjusting after all.

Trishaw drivers know better than anyone how to survive
in the traffic in Yangon, Myanmar

Number One: crossing the street. In 90% of the world, as far as I can tell, moving around on the street is based on the principle of not making any sudden moves or changes of direction. If you can estimate everyone else's trajectory, you can move around them.

To cross the street overseas: start walking into traffic, not fast, not slow, no sharp directional adjustments. If possible, walk straight at the back of a passing car. It will continue moving, so when you reach it you will slide right into the space it just vacated. Continue this until you've Froggered your way across the street.

It's similar to the way you don't try to avoid the cockroaches, just trust that they'll avoid you.

But in America, if you do this, all the cars on the street do something extremely unexpected in the global mind: they stop. Or at least, they slow down and wave you across. Now, instead of sliding unobtrusively through traffic, you are blocking it. Dangit, Americans, stop being so polite!

So I have had to go back to obeying formal traffic rules. It's weird.

One need not make plans in the San Blas Archipelago

Number Two: I rarely planned anything more than a day or two in advance for the past few years. I would reach a town and stay there until I was done, during which time I'd hear about some other place within a six/seven hour bus ride. Go. I am not an itinerary sort of guy. But here, this means I don't get out much, since everyone else has social calendars booked weeks in advance.

Me: “Hey, you wanna do something?”

Friend: “Sure! Let's get sushi! When works for you?”

Me: “How about tonight?”

Friend: “I'm booked until January.”

I gotta get the hang of that. Anyone want to go get sushi...in January?

Does this dude in Kuala Lumpur seem worried about his image?

And finally, there's Image. I've made a career out of trying to resist this, probably as a means of coping with my lack of fashion passion (as my closet of blank-ass clothes will attest), but my skills were were honed overseas. In Nicaragua they described my sandals as “Jesus shoes” and I kept wearing them. In Sri Lanka I sewed up the entire left side of my shorts with the wrong color thread and thought no more about it. In Myanmar I could not have cared less when it was a woman's style bicycle I rode.

You can't be too picky about your image if you get your hair
cut in a saloon. Can I get a sarsaparilla with this perm?

I brought that all home with me. The friend moving out of my new room offered to loan me her woman's style bike and I accepted, no worries, who cares if people think I look silly? It's a bike. That ended up not working out, so I have my manly man ride after all, but whatever, it's shruggalicious.

And I had to smile in the grocery store as I bought a big bag of toilet paper, thinking about how poop-phobic Americans are, and remembering confessions of people who were humiliated to buy the stuff. “I buy it at Cosco in gigantic packs so that I don't have to do it very often.” Whatever! I'm not embarrassed by anything!

Can you guess what these Pa-O kids in a mountain village
in Myanmar think of our image concerns and poop-phobia?

But on the walk home, toilet paper casually under my arm on the busy street, I saw a bag of clothes hangers on the sidewalk. I inherited four hangers with the closet, but I now had seven shirts, with premonitions of more to come. I needed hangers. And here was a bag full of them, free on the sidewalk. We're also an intensely germaphobic nation, but the odds these hangers were actually infected and infested, scabies, hepatitis, bed bugs? Very slight.

But I walked right on past. What would people think if I was rummaging through the garbage on the street?

Oh.

Damn. That's disappointing.

It's weird being back in America.