Novelist in Paradise Redux

Well, everybody knows, the Chile quake and subsequent tsunami has been all over the news.

I happened to write a novel about a tsunami, so I’ve been riveted.

By the way, in 2004 when the tsunami struck Aceh and I was on the ground shortly after, the survivors and those in land had little idea what had struck them — they called it the “big ocean flooding.” Now there’s probably not a single person in Indonesia who doesn’t know what a tsunami is — such was the trauma of the event.

And yeah, I’ve been bad about posting to this blog. Because I’m hard at work, scribbling scribbling scribbling. But I’ll be back shortly.

Indonesia is big on the principle of musyawarah mufakat, which means coming to a decision via deliberation and mutual consensus.

Below is a quick cell phone photo of an intersection at the major four-lane thoroughfare near my house, a Jalan Protokoler as it is know, or Protocol Route for VIPs and even NVIPs (Not Very Important Persons). Here we see only a small part of the cars, vans, trucks and scooters who had gathered at the center of the intersection to deliberate and arrive at a mutual consensus as to who gets to go through first.

Like most things in Bali, a street intersection has two levels of meaning. One is the ordinary traffic sense, wherein all Balinese lose their senses and sharpen their F-1 instinct and timing. It’s everybody for themselves.

In the other sense of the unseen realms, intersections are places where nasty spirits like to hang out and cause problems; hence the many offerings you will see at crossroads But at these major ones, I think the spirits just sit back and enjoy watching. Why should they bedevil anyone when such chaos and selfishness is already on show?

When I was a boy, this was my reading chair. It was big enough and I was small enough for me to prop my legs up, feet on the edge of the seat and knees leaning against the arms, and get lost in a book. I read for hours and hours in this chair, ignoring the breeze calling me to play at the beach or the temple banyan, ignoring whatever my boring parents were doing, ignoring my brothers and sisters.

This chair has survived the years, and is presently in our guest bedroom, where I am typing this because the weather has turned stinking hot and this bedroom has the only air conditioner (we value our guests’ comforts more than we do our own). And as I write this, I’m not only writing this, but also intermittently checking email, or looking up the Internet surf report (small to tiny, or flattus maximus as we literate surfers say), or replying to text messages from my son who is in the room right next to me asking me if he can go play with friends.

In short, my life is becoming fractalized. Broken down into jagged segments. Sharp discontinuous turns. And there goes my cell phone text message again. I could keep writing this post, but….

Of course not. I had to read. A friend asking if there was any surf my way. Flattus maximus, dude.

In way, we’re retreating to our monkey roots. Have you ever watched a troop of monkeys? They get bored and distracted about as quickly as kids at church. That sort of micro-attention span really is our natural state, I think, and our current technology is allowing us to revert back to it. The ability to sit down and concentrate for hours at a time is a trait we acquired when technology was the Slow Stuff, like long wagon rides, or even before wheels, the lazy evenings around the cave fire with nothing to do but flake off spear points and listen to your cave mate tell the story about saving the hot babe from the saber tooth tiger, about the umpteenth time he’s told it, not that you’re counting, because you can’t count beyond ten.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing novels. Which, you know, is one long narrative. Continuous flow of words. If it’s hard for me to take the chunk of time to sit down and do the writing, which after is what I do to justify my existence even if it isn’t exactly a career that pays my bills, who, these days, really has the time to sit down and do the reading? Get lost in another world and linger there with its characters?

For that matter, when was the last time I the writer was really me the reader, the guy who could sit down in this reading chair and read for hours and hours and hours until some exasperated family member told me it was time for dinner?

I’ve just tried sitting in the chair with a big fat book, Follet’s “World without End.” Book without end, more like. The chair is cramped, uncomfortable. And my Instant Messaging chimed…

The solution is simple, though. Reacquire the trait. By simply doing it over and over again. Sit down, start reading, dude. The surf is flattus maximus anyway.

Here’s another classic example of Balinglish:

So I was hacked, see.

And then my host server’s Special Circumstances squad deactivated me without warning for having a virus and malware in my files.  These files were old and wonky and as full of bugs as a Bali dog, so I decided to wipe clean and start afresh.

I backed up my files.

But lo and behold, I cannot restore them. As my young son says, I am an Old Man, plodding down the Internet on my caveman’s oxcart*.   Thus it seems I have lost all my blog posts for the past few years.

Well, I wasn’t re-reading them.

* Dischronicity here:  an oxcart implies wheels and animal husbandry, which would have been beyond a caveman’s skills.