Is suckful even a word? I read it in blog which described 2005 as a suckful kind of year. I agree , but for me 2006 is starting off on a “suckful” note.
The S.O. was sick Saturday. As in sick as a dog sick. I was so concerned about her I cancelled my golf game and stayed home because I was afraid I was going to have to take her to the doctor. She finally was able to keep some liquid down long enough to get some hydration back and fall asleep for most of the day. That meant I had nothing to do but watch TV, surf porn blogs, and sleep.
Its been bitterly cold here. On Sunday the S.O. was feeling better but still wanted to stick close to home, so I went and played golf by myself. “Suited up” and broke out the winter golf gloves. Actually was not too bad until #17 where the ground below the surface was so hard I could not get my tee to go all the way in…….Pulled out my 7 wood and smacked the s**t out of it just barely avoiding going out of bounds………….The Kanto plain (area around Tokyo) has received none of the snow that has been falling in record levels at places like here:
By yesterday the S.O. was strong enough to complain about me not cleaning the bathroom, so I am taking that as a sign she is going to make a full recovery. Sigh, I was just getting used to the peace and quiet.
Some of the things I noted while strolling around Bloggerville:
Stopped by and congratulated Mrs Bacon!
Envied Phil, who brought in the new year as I always wanted to, drinking beer and chasing hoon in Phuket.
Watched as Ariel Sharon’s condition got worse., then better.
I also got pummeled over at several blogs both left and right after naively trying to insert myself into the vain practice of self congratulation and patting one’s self on the back. Soundly ignored I sulked on back to my hole and dreamed of better times, wishing I was here:
Oh the places we could go!
After being challenged here on my own and another blog to grow up, I thought about writing a long witty reply trying to explain exactly what the appeal was of the overseas, expatriate, not so conventional lifestyle was. Then, quite by accident, I discovered that Fred has already done it for me:
We who live thus have our critics. They say that we have dark moods, that we drink too much, that we do not behave as we ought. …….. Yet perhaps they do not drink enough. The virtue of vice is everywhere underestimated. Something is wrong with those who are always proper, careful, and as they should be. I would rather talk to a bourbon-swilling correspondent in a bar in Manila, with a cigarette in his hand and a barmaid on his knee, than to the cleverest chemist at Yale, tamer of ketones…….
We are not always a happy lot, being restless, easily bored, and unable to bear routine. We have our good days when we sense the rightness of things on a sunny morning in God knows where for that is where we have spent much of our time. We have passed days without end in roadside diners, atop boxcars late at night on the seaboard rails, in honky-tonks in Austin. We have heard the Greezy Wheels. We knew BC Street in Koza, the street of the snake butchers in Wan Wha, in Taipei where the workers brothels were. We have hobnobbed with hookers, drunks, geniuses, psychopaths, mercenaries, transvestites, and the men of the fishing fleets. We have seen fresh squid draped like glistening pink gloves on fish carts.
Some will say that our lives constitute a sordid cohabitation with the ungodly. I hope so. Detritus we are, and detritus we will be. It suits us. The world, the part worth knowing, lives in the alleys. We have known the smoke and dimness of a thousand Asian bars, known them till they run together in the mind, and found the hookers morally preferable to the expensively suited criminals of good society, more engaging than the liars of the press conferences. There is more of life and humanity in the driver of a battered Ford who picks up a hitchhiker in the darkling valleys of Tennessee than in the moral fetor and vanity of Washington.
We are not entirely without ambition. Often I have seen a young lovely in Bangkok, on Patpong or Nana Plaza or Soi Cowboy, revolving without excessive clothing around a brass pole in a dim club with disco thumping in the murk and almond eyes watching for a flicker of interest. I do not want to be president, nor a Rothschild nor a computer magnate. But a brass pole in Bangkok, that I could be.
We are what we are. We can’t help it. In moments of desperation we have taken jobs in places with names like
the Civil ServiceFederal Computer Week, and sat in horror, muscles tensing in uncontrollable despair, waiting for lunch and a drink or a joint or something to get us through four more hours ofUSAF AMC bulls**tfederal contracts. I did that. A friend was a mortgage broker for a bit, another tried graduate school. One day it hits: fuggit-I’m-outta-here. We buy a ticket to Mexico City, or Kuala Lumpur, or Istanbul. Decide on the way to the airport. What the hellÂ?s in Mexico City? Find out when we get there. Somebody will know.
Here is to the road less traveled. See you in Phuket someday………..
Skippy-san
