An Intensive Study...

An Intensive Study of the Effects of Carbon Monoxide on the Cambodian Tourist with Respect to Cognitive Abilities and General Motor Function or Colten Breathes Next to an Exhaust Pipe.

Just this past day before yesterday, I had what I consider to be my first real day in Cambodia, followed by my second real day in Cambodia this past yesterday. I’m sure you’re wondering if they were fraught with lessons. Indeed they were. But lessons, like wicker furniture, should be hidden away deep in the dark recesses of the mind. Does that make any sense? No. But does it matter? Also, no. Why? Because yesterday I spent 45 minutes riding in the back of a truck on sacks of rice seated in front an exhaust that had been rerouted from the aft of the truck directly into my general head region. It wasn’t until half way through that 45 minute period that I noticed this juxtaposition of my face and noxious chemicals and began to feel what the Khmer people refer to as “funny.” My ability to make intelligent decisions regarding my own health and safety had been presumably lessened and so I decided to remain seated there, despite the fact that there were several other perfectly comfortable sacks of rice upon which to rest my copious buttocks. I rationalized, with my degraded cognitive faculties, that the damage had already been done and I was afraid that Cambodians might think it rude to scoff at the exhaust pipe seat. For all I knew it was a cherished delicacy, an honor to be where I was even though no one else seemed eager to switch spots. Plus the guy next to me was borrowing my pen. And it was my only pen.

But that was yesterday. And this is a story that begins the day before yesterday. So walk with me through the fabric of existence to this place in space-time and awake with me to the glorious sounds of a Cambodian morning. Cars and little motorcycles. But not just any cars and motorcycles. The kind of cars and motorcycles that occupy the roads of a country with lax emissions control. Think lawnmowers. Once the sleep had departed from my eyeglobes and they joined my earholes in delivering unto me the fullness of my sensory abilities, I was greeted by a spider, 8 inches across on the wall next to my head. I didn’t shriek. And anyone who says I did is a motherless liar. Being the conservationist that I am, I had no desire to harm my new little friend. I simply wanted to find out if it was poisonous, that I might take proper precautions in disposing of it. I queried the staff on this issue. But there was a translation issue. Somewhere between the words “Is it poisonous?” leaving my mouth and reaching the ears of the nice gentleman who was kind enough to assist me on this issue, he apparently heard something to the effect of “SMASH IT! SMASH IT! EEK! SMASH IT!” And so he smashed it...
...With the folder in the room that contains all of the colorful brochures touting the amenities of Siem Reap, none of which, I might add, mention anything about bionic man-eating head spiders or the cacophony of daily morning lawnmower races that take place on the streets of this fine city. After the man kindly wiped off the folder, rendering it once again free of spider spaghetti (translated literally from the Italian, spaghetti means: entrails from the family arachnidae, order chelicerata) he told me the spider bites, but it is a weak bite, like a mosquito. I mourned the loss of such a majestic creature, for about ten seconds, and then with great difficulty (ease) due to the weight of the death of my amply legged friend upon my head, I went about my day.

I walked downstairs to partake in what would turn out to be my first experience with traditional Cambodian cuisine. The next sensory organ to be assaulted by the sights, sounds, and you guessed it, smells of Cambodian culture was (if the smell clue wasn’t enough I’ll lay the last bricks of this description house for you) my nose. And what traditional Cambodian fare was it that titillated my olfactory zones this early morn? Eggs, bacon, french toast, and a glass of OJ. OJ is loosely translated to the English as orange juice and it’s pronounced o-jay. I would put one of those fancy long o symbols above the o as to follow proper pronunciation protocol, but I’m not that good with a computer and the task seems next to impossible. I was apprehensive at first, seeing such a strange and unconventional meal on my breakfast plate. The sheltered American part of my brain screamed run and filled my imagination with thoughts of the horrible ailments that might await me provided I partake in this mystery of culinary sorcery. It made sense. I mean, this breakfast seemed to be neither kid tested, nor mother approved. But I was in Cambodia. And the Khmer people have this saying. It starts off something like “When in Rome...” I can’t remember how it ends, but it was very eloquent and it inspired me to leave my comfort zone and give it a shot. At first it was difficult, but I managed to choke down a few bites. By the end, I even found myself enjoying the palatable nature of this thing called “French toast.” I was proud of myself, for I had put myself out there as Seoul had taught me to do, and I was living as the Cambodian lives.

Then at lunch I ate a few giant roasted crickets.

A group of children, much smaller than myself bought a bag of insects and were flat out going to town. I tried to explain to them that what they had in front of them was not a bag of Cheetos, which would merit such voracious consumption, but a bag of bugs.
Individually, they looked at me the way a person who doesn’t speak English looks at a person who is making a genuine plea for reason in that language, then popped crickets in their mouths as if they had no idea what I had been saying. They didn’t. Defeated and broken I searched my soul for a way to make good of this dark, dark situation. I realized that if nothing else, I could do it for America. You see, the ol’ US of A was long held in high esteem in the international community. We were heroes to many, and at the very least good people to the rest. But in the last 8 years or so, for some inexplicable reason, that seems to have changed. I don’t know why, but for some reason the figure of 8 years seems pertinent to the answer. We’ll leave that puzzle to the historians to sort out. So in an effort to restore my beloved homeland to greatness and redeem us in the eyes of the international community, I ate some crickets. Now all that has to happen for my plan to come to fruition is for those kids who witnessed said eating to come to high power political positions, remember me, and formulate policy based on their experience of a true American. Move over G.I. Joe. There’s a new hero in town. And he’s here to affect real change... one... meal... at a time.

The Road to Cambodia...

This trip, even in its early hours, is shaping up to be one fraught with important and life changing lessons. I use the word “fraught” because it sounds way more dangerous and exotic than “full of,” as in “I’m full of shit.” Staying true to this previous statement, in fact, being the inspiration for this is previous statement is that I’ve learned a couple things before even ever having had putten boots on Cambodian soil (sorry, no lessons about english grammar). For your own sake, please heed the following lessons. Heed them indeed.

Just because Cambodia is a tropical paradise, south of the equator with consistent 80 degree plus weather doesn’t mean that the stops made by airplanes in between are all tropical paradises, south of the equator with consistent 80 degree plus weather. This is important because when luggage is checked through on an international flight with a 12-hour layover in such an instance, its handy to have more than just a light sweatshirt with you. Thank you, Seoul, South Korea for teaching me this valuable lesson. And not only did you teach it, but you taught it with below freezing temperatures, and nice firm set of crosswinds that really drove the point home. Notice the Jackets in the following photo:
Also, I need to put myself out there a little more. You know who taught me that? That’s right, Seoul, South Korea again. And if you want to get a little more specific, and I know you do, it’s whoever is responsible for Seoul’s “English” advertising. I was afraid to even tell people thank you and hello in Korean for fear that I would butcher the language and they would all laugh uncontrollably at the hilarious gai jin (yes, that’s japanese, but I don’t know the Korean word for a white boy). So instead, I just spoke to them in the other language that I’m in the common habit of butchering, Spanish. It was a fear based decision to not use what little Korean I learned from the baggage locker guy at the airport as we both tried to figure out if 8 to 6 was more than 4 hours. And this fear was so unfounded as I was in a country that regularly took courageous leaps with their English in an effort to make me, the English-speaking consumer feel more at home. Apparently, unlike the internet, which has a staunch and efficient fact checking department, Korea doesn’t have a make-sure-our-English-translations-in-widespread-advertising-make-actual-sense-department. Am I being harsh? No. I’m simultaneously pointing out their fearlessness and my cowardice with respect to using foreign languages. If they’re gonna do something, they do it big, with gusto, with commitment. At a pizza place in a mall, for example, the storefront was plastered from floor to ceiling with hearts that contained the words “love for women.” Nothing else. Just that. Not once. Hundreds of times. Amen. And incidentally, there didn’t seem to be a slice of pizza or a woman in the place. Then there was the store appropriately called “Hunt Children.” The only way that could have been a more poignant social message is if they had ended the phrase with an exclamation point. But once again, amen. There were many others, including “Happy Everyday Forever” which appeared to be a childcare facility, perhaps sponsored by Xanax. But my personal favorite, which sort of lends itself as evidence to a Korean obsession with the concept of, not just “happy“, but English language “happy” and “everyday” now that I think about it, is as follows:

Create your most delicious happiness everyday.

That was everywhere. And I couldn’t agree more. Gracias Seoul, South Korea. Gracias very much. I’m a better person for having knew ye.

Scared Shitless in Seattle (read: Phoenix)

$4.00 a gallon gas sucks. But there's something that sucks even worse than that. "What could suck worse than $4.00 a gallon gas?" you ask, argrutely (read: shrewdly, and if you don't believe me, click the link. Google taught it to me and Google knows all.), with the inflection of a person eager to consider new and exciting new (redundancy intentional for emphasis) information. What sucks worse is when gas prices suddenly drop from $4.00 to $1.55 as if someone pressed a button and made it so.

It sort of seems impossible that it could happen of its own accord. It sort of implies that some asshole did, in fact, press a button, literally (read: figuratively).

I will, at this point, admit a certain profound ignorance to the intricacies of global economy. But I did take economics in high school, and I even paid attention once... maybe twice. The basics say that inflation is a nearly constant and nearly unavoidable factor of economics when measured against the passage of time. The rate of inflation may change according to the aforementioned intricacies, but inflation does happen. The take home lesson: Twinkies will never be a nickel again. So armed with this formidable and all-encompassing understanding, I'm going to make an intellectual leap: there is no way that price of gas should or could reduce itself to the levels enjoyed (lamented at the time) in the mid 90's unless there was some artificial influence (read: asshole button presser) exerting it's insidious force on the market. It was like a real life Christmas Miracle when it happened a few weeks ago. I refer to it as a Christmas miracle, instead of a more accurately descriptive Christmas Coincidence because I want my sarcasm to shine bright. And it shines more brightly from the bulb of the former phrase. Plus, it wasn't even a coincidence. Calling it that is a bit generous. It was probably an engineered variable change. But it is, after all, the Christmas season. And generosity is the name of the game. So Christmas Miracle it is.

Time to connect the dots. Time to sound like an overly paranoid, mentally deficient, hyper-impressionable, crackpot jerk. Retailers generally do as much business during the Christmas season as they do all the rest of the year combined. Since we live in a consumer society, this season is as vital to our existence as Americans (in the sense that completely superfluous objects are vital) as oxygen is to our existence as mammals. See what I did there? With the pseudo-comparison. I took biology in high school, too. And oxygen is important to our survival. But they never mentioned anything about a Wii Fit or Louis Vutton purses being integral to any life sustaining process. I digress. Without this boon of commercial support, major corporations, small businesses, our lifestlyes, essentially this country as we know it would cease to exist. This year, way earlier this year, that intravenous money injection appeared as if it might run dry and might end up being an underdose. Economic turmoil had descended upon the mega-rich and the larger-than-imaginable corporations. News outlets reported the story with a fervor and drama usually reserved for natural disasters that involve people dying in the streets. But these weren't people, these were just corporations. Institutions. Imaginary constructs of the creative (read: greedy) human mind. Financial bailouts followed, many of which involved those seeking the bailout flying to the negotiations in private planes. Again, only a high school economics guy here, but aren't those planes... what's the scientific word Mr. Barsanti taught us... expensive. And not to go off on too much of a tangent, but the amount of just one of the larger bailouts would have been enough to rebuild a pretty big chunk of New Orleans, where people had been, very recently, dying in the streets, literally (not figuratively). So those we trust to make good decisions on our behalf, in their infinite wisdom, decided to give a few extra billions to a group of people who couldn't make intelligent enough decisions to maintain solvency with their original billions. Imagine this scenario. Suddenly, I feel like I should go open a beeper store. If it fails, which I doubt, I'm just gonna live off my fat government bailout checks for the rest of my life. But I digress again.

Offering insta-temporary-solvency to megacorps didn't do anything for the average person. And as financial crises tend to do, the problems had already trickled down the class ladder until the people who got hit the hardest were the people who were already suffering the most. I'm not even talking about the middle class. Below (so to speak) the middle class are people who are dependent upon social programs for survival. So when tens of billions of dollars are promised to the groups at the top, its usually social programs, which draw a minute fraction of money by comparison, that feel the brunt of the money shift. Take $100 from a budget of $500 and that's a big deal. Add $80 billion to a an existing budget of $900 billion, and well, what's the difference. It's still just a really high score in a game of pinball. Only the pinballs were people's lives, and the flippers were... I have no idea where to go with this metaphor.

Ultimately, when the Christmas season rolled around this year (which was like July or something cause I vaguely recall purchasing a tube of 80 spf sunscreen to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer) the middle class wasn't spending like they normally did. Then gas prices dropped. It was a Christmas Coincidence. For Wal-Mart. Which was the only major US retailer that met their Black Friday projections this year. And thank god. Because the 84 bajillion dollars they generate each year isn't enough to feed the board member's families. Gasoline, which has in recent years, become the largest monthly expense for most families saw a decrease of more than 50%... a decrease that seemed to ignore the "fact" that inflation "must" happen. Its almost as if the oil market was spitting in the face of hundreds of years of economic dogma the same way that babies spit in the face of decency. So it couldn't have been a coincidence. I am now required by my own stringent moral code and journalistic integrity to retract all that stuff I said about miracles and coincidences. The semantic battle I had at the beginning of this piece almost seems pointless in retrospect.

A more educated person, perhaps someone with a degree pertaining to global economics who might have written a dissertation on oil production and its consumer markets might say something like "There are complex global forces at work with fluctuations in the supply and blah blah blah..." A less educated person, with no degree, perhaps someone prone to wild conjecture, imagination, a bit of common sense, and a lot of free time might say something like, "Bullshit." I (that less educated person I described was me) would then call the more educated person an econerd, pronounced ee-kah-nerd not ee-ko-nerd, and then knock his glasses on the ground. I'm tough.

There is this quaint little North American village referred to by some as "The Seven Headed Beast of Gethsemane," "Scourge of Allah," or by those of us who live here, "The United States," where we have no choice but to consume oil. This is because once the great American automobile (once with a controlling interest in federal policy, now just another fledgling industry) made its debut, entire cities were restructured and new ones built in such a fashion as to facilitate their use. Add to that the innumerable other reasons we have found to employ the oil resource and we find ourselves apparently stuck in this relationship, much like Tina Turner found herself "stuck" in her relationship with Ike. If you noticed the quotation marks around the word stuck and think that alludes to something, read on dear reader, you're in for a surprise. So this makes gasoline price a perfect variable to change if one wanted to perform an experiment to extrapolate how the spending habits of the average American consumer might change when faced with certain unavoidable financial pressures. Skyrocketing gas prices don't affect people who make 6 figures or more per year, as indicated by the private plane/bailout thing. Skyrocketing gas prices have a lesser effect on the class of people who couldn't really afford to drive in the first place. But sudden changes in gas prices have a substantial effect on the (disappearing) middle class. And now, thanks to whatever insidious force is behind these fluctuations, that effect, aside from being just substantial, is also a bit more predictable. But only to those looking down from above.

Someone is looking at the American populace through a microscope. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that guy is a total jerk. Someone finds it to be an acceptable diversion, nay, occupation to toy with our lives. Only a concerted and swift revolutionary undertaking can rectify this disparity. And so, in closing, I have a suggestion: if I may once more invoke the name of Tina Turner, it might be time for all of us to orchestrate a bit of unpredictability and leave Ike's broke ass behind.

Note: Most, not all, but most of the assertions in this word thingy what been just wrote by my mindgrapes have sources. I left them out intentionally. This move was motivated by my penchant for laziness and because if you are so inclined, you might search out the sources on your own, either to refute what has been said or support it. And I welcome either. Who knows what knowledge the search might bring by accident.