We view the past with a microscope from the present,

city fuckers viewing the ‘primitives’ with disdain, as though our fat bellies and haute coiffures were the essence of civilization. Even worse would be to glorify the primmies, of course, as though their stargazing was somehow superior to Hubble’s simply on principle. At one point, it wasn’t even clear that the ‘Indians’ were real people, and that chimpanzees weren’t. Things that just seem so patently obvious now weren’t necessarily obvious at all in the past. It wasn’t even obvious that men should seek sexual pleasure in the arms of their wives until the Greeks experimented long and hard, and played both sides of the fence. Of course then the Romans cultivated the art. They’re so romantic. The subject-verb-object word order of modern English and all analytic, isolating languages is a system that is found to work, not something innate or obvious. In a mysterious world of supernatural events, things are acted upon without clear antecedents, yielding an O-V-S order with no apologies. If the S-V-O word order was obvious to the Chinese, then that may be as much to their credit as, and ultimately related to, movable print, paper, and sweet-and-sour pork. They never had a zero, of course, nor positional notation, until they got it from the Hindus via the Arabs just like the rest of us, all except for the Mayas, that is. The Mayas apparently even had something else that very few great civilizations ever had: an appreciation of great ceremonial centers as places to congregate and corresponding disdain for large cities as places to live. Apparently it doesn’t occur to most modern historians that mega-cities are not only not the archetype of civilization, but are downright unhealthy.

Tang and I are getting along just swimmingly,

whatever that means (I hope it’s not like the salmon in Eagle Creek lying dead after the 1000-mile trip upriver just to drop trou and lay some eggs). The Food Fights (FFI & FFII) have nearly ended and an eerie peace settles over the land. Thank God for other people’s mothers. It was touch-and-go for a while. I knew when she called in her mother that the tide would soon turn in my favor. Mama don’t bite the hand that feeds. We almost split over irreconcilable similarities- selfishness, stubbornness, childish expectations, etc. It could have been another case for the epicanthic folder, file it away and try to forget. We now realize we’re made for each other, I the blue-eyed lightning to her brown-eyed earth. Understanding comes little by little, though theoretical physics would probably be easier. At least there’s no three-body problem here. She doesn’t even get jealous now unless I flirt with Death. That’s her turf (Forego the antibiotics until you need them. You can kiss a TB victim on the lips in her deathbed and still not get it if you play good defense). So finally we signed our own little Treaty of Tortillas of 2547 (Buddhist Era), based on Spain and Portugal. Basically, she gets Time and I get Space. I get to work on projects on four continents without a moment to spare. She gets a three-bedroom house in Chiang Rai with all the time in the world. Hell of a deal. She gets egg fritata in a tortilla a la Espanola; I get corn flour hydrochloride in tortillas a la Mexicana. Talk about papal bull… We meet at the crossroads in the hypothetical fourth spatial dimension of a flat universe curled up over itself in the shape of a torus, also known as the Krispy Kreme theory of the universe. I guess it’s better than an anniversary dinner at Stapleton airport in DEN while taking mutual stopovers on separate flights, like with one of my previous exes. People ask me how I can dabble in the UK while working in the US while staying in Mexico and living in Thailand; my only answer is, “practice.” Hopefully I can insinuate myself into a side-trip to Turkey and maybe dip down to Greece next year (hold the Macedonia) if I can play my frequent-flyer cards right. Hey, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The combination of cheap flights and vanishing oil and lingering traction-era-phlebitis in my right foot (soon to be a major motion picture) sends a clear signal to me.

I love my wife, though I don’t mind being gone half the time.

That keeps it fresh. Hunger makes the food taste real good. If I’m there all the time then it degenerates into that husband-and-wife behind-the-scenes sort of fussing-and-fighting that they never showed on Ozzie and Harriet, tending to favor smiles and sighs and bedroom eyes, while the kids become rock stars in imitation of real life. In very few species does the dad actually hang around with the wife and kids after the consummation of the marriage, so I figure I’m way ahead of the curve. Thai women are more obsessed with security than they are with finding the ultimate soul mate anyway. So Thailand works for my sci-fi style of life. Stupid me, I had to learn the language. Big Mistake. Normal Farangs live with their Thai wives in a state of eternal bliss, speaking Pidgin Shit and drinking beer. Farangs are Westerners, white ones. The term is a Thai pronunciation of the name that started off as ‘Franks’ and dates back to the Crusades era, when all white men were known as ‘Franks’ in the Middle East and Byzantium. It seems we’re on a new crusade now, and Thailand is the Promised Land that needs rescuing. Older Western guys running short on erections get to spend their remaining days with a beautiful younger Thai woman, full of smiles and spice and everything nice. Japanese and other wealthy Asians opt for the same retirement plan, and more than a few Arabs, too. There’s something for everybody.

My dear is caught in the glare of her own headlights,

signals sent to an approaching hunter, too scared to flee approaching danger, too glad to be noticed in the passing crowd. Asian women are born to bear and bred to breed, the weight of centuries pinning them down to the bed of forgiveness. Tang is in way over her head with a husband trying to inspire her to self-fulfillment and professional achievement in a country where the highest goal of most women is to be a housewife. It’s a time warp, like ‘Pleasantville’ or something; wives stay at home and so do many of the men, too, if they’ve got activities they can do there. It’s not like there’s zoning or anything fancy like that. The cost of living is so low that middle-class Thais can hide behind their locking fences playing with their kids like fat cats playing with their chew toys. Their only problem is me, expecting life to have some meaning or something, a path to glory, or at least a life’s work, or something. Everybody’s scared to take initiative for fear of what everyone else will think, so everyone copies everyone else’s work rather than create something new. It’s almost like Tang doesn’t even see herself as an actor in her own life, as if she were watching a movie about herself. Conformity may save Asia a lot of Latino heartache, like protests in the street and revolutions per minute, but at what cost? Asia has cast its lot with business at the expense of politics, while Latin America wrestles with the decision, looking with alternate jealousy and disgust at Mexico, sleeping with the enemy US and the FTA Fresh Tits Agreement, to see who gets fucked and who gets sex.

Push-button people push buttons to get a response

even where no buttons exist. Familiarity breeds contempt in one world as surely as Asians breed rice in another. I think Europeans and their like thrive on individualism and discord, whereas Asians and their like thrive on conformity and order, the closer the better. Westerners like ‘their space’. Asians hate to be alone more than anything else in the world. For me the goal is to have a mobile phone that works anywhere in the world and never have to use it. For a Thai the goal is to travel with as many people as possible. Problems in Asia only arise when the pecking order is not clearly established. Marriage is a special case in both hemispheres. Offspring and their parents are typically closer than the spouses themselves in Asia, the blood connection speaking louder than promises that can be broken. In the end it’s no different in the West when things fall apart; the kids are the fruit that endures the uncertainties of transient attraction. Still, though blood is thicker than water, sperm is thicker than blood. The hand I play is more important than the hand I’m dealt. The people I choose are more important than the people I’m stuck with.

When the day’s all done, you’re still and always alone;

the only question is to what extent and by what design. Is it of your own making or a death sentence? Little by little you build your empires one brick at the time, wall by wall, room by room, just to watch it all fall down in one broad sweep of the cosmic broom. If you don’t tear it down yourself, then someone will do it for you. Love is scary, staring into the great unknown, big brown eyes connected to infinity. It’s that falling feeling that I crave, that bottomless pit in the stomach, that sudden drop on the roller-coaster ride of life, that lack of center, that makes me feel most alive. Machines and their machinations only delay the inevitable. Space is comprised of singularities, impure and infinitely dividable, recombining at random with anonymous partners. Still mechanical sex is only as good as the mechanics behind it, and nothing compares with that tractor beam of pure attraction between two would-be lovers making the leap from conditional tense to indicative. That’s the force that maintains the race, to reproduce and evolve, by bits and pieces, little ones crawling underfoot and reeking.

The love between a man and woman can’t be trusted.

Asians have long known that. The only love that can trusted is essentially that between blood relatives, particularly between mother and child. You don’t trust your choices; you trust your fate, whether cruel or not. Sex implies possession as much as it inspires love as if the very act of penetration were as much a birthday bow as a ribbon tied, a gift-wrapped prison. Every penetration is a key inserted and turned, whether to the right or left, open or closed, is left to chance and the dance of the dice. But possession is only a contract, real or imagined. Blood is your self, interpolated and extrapolated, from the past into the future, like a poker hand laid out to show. We look at the past with the microscope of the present as if men had always thought the same way, as if they’d always loved their wives and kids or anything else long considered sacred. They didn’t; it had to be learned just like everything else. The thing a man wants most in a wife is a good girl who also gives good head, and likes it, a Brownie who knows who to use her brownies, a woman equally at home with her biscuits in the oven or her buns in bed. Many a prostitute can polish a mean knob, of course, but that doesn’t count, not in the modern day and age of democracy and free enterprise.

Never give more than half of your self to someone else

or she just might take it all, and not even give change. Half a love is plenty, especially when you’ve got nothing. Sometimes it’s hard to ‘break up’ even when the situation seems like it has a limited future. You can’t make it better, and you can’t shut it down, so what do you do? If you’re a traveling man, and creative to boot, you make it a part-time gig, as long as the little lady’s cool with the deal and as long as you still enjoy the sex. If there’s nothing else on which to base a decision, and money is not an issue, then let it be sex. That’s only natural. Couples that ‘stick it out’ long after the physical love is gone are accomplishing less than they could otherwise. ‘Sticking it in’ is more important. The couple that lays together, stays together. The sexual act is penetration of another dimension, natural selection in process, the choice of life.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the wife, the kid, the three-car garage.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it having the microwave, the DVD, the five-liter fridge. I sleep best with a ‘vacancy’ sign flashing outside my window and the roar of the freeway in the distance. I feel best at about five hundred miles an hour, not looking down but looking up, beyond atmosphere and trivial pursuits, to the level where the sky fades to black, just like some predictable movie selling soap to bored house husbands. I need love but not in my face. Just knowing it is there is usually enough. Once it descends into the Hell of internecine squabbling and righteous indignation, then I’d rather be alone, just me and the elements, air earth fire water. I just need to know it’s out there, waiting for me, just like I’m waiting for it. It doesn’t have to be reduced to chores and snores, shopping lists and rent receipts, and jockeying for bathroom rights. Love’s better than that. Save love for the sublime and the subliminal aspects of existence, the passage of solids into vapor without the intermediate phase of liquid, the passage of matter into spirit without the intermediate phase of thought, bodies making love in mid-air without so much as a glance downward, suspension of disbelief. Let the idle mind do the dirty work of handling liquids and scrubbing cracks. Let the hired hands change the tires and splice the wires. Let the experts fix the clocks and deal the stocks. Love should be pure and powerful, a force to be reckoned with, not a force to reckon with. Lovers should meet under waterfalls and rainbows, not under storm and stress. Lovers should meet between silk sheets and satin shirts, not between rushed dinners and hushed desserts. Love should be placed right on the pedestal where the Romans put it, posed and poised, romantic to a fault.

I depend on the kindness of strangers

for the love to sustain me, not sex, but love. Alone for years, I got my love from dogs and children, memories and speculation. Recollecting a long lost incident would send shivers up my spine. Kids are great in any language, not yet hard and cold like the cities we build them. I could extract the love from a rock. This is rapture of the deep, the euphoria of terminal decadence, the smile of a man who knows that death is near. The walls that surround me have doors that open out to worlds beyond. I’m at odds with the world but getting even with Nature, killing time before it kills me. I’m learning to crawl again as growing pains fade at 50 and rigor mortis sets in like a Flagstaff winter, cold and hard, the stiffening that comes with age, an old baguette ready to be starch for the soup.