The Bali Diaries: Two Sides of Aquarius

The yin to my yang, I figure.  We are two different men, but strikingly similar I'd say.  A brother of an old friend, he is.  Younger brother.  Which is funny to think because he is all taller and slimmer and sharper in the jaw than my dear old high school chum.  And he's striving for greatness, he is, writing letters of possible fellowship to professors, doctors and researchers at universities throughout the West States and Australia.  It's a passion of his, this research, this academia.  The PhD is just a sidenote he says.  Or in his words, "If you do it just for the title, it's probably not worth it."  It's hard work.  But it's hard work he wants.  And that is where we differ.  Well no, maybe not.  I think I'd quite like perhaps the work if it were brought on.

We differ in work ethic, I think.  In determination and laziness.  The work would be all right, rewarding even.  Stimulating in interest.  But the self-will to get the work, the prolonged concentration and goal-sight that he has is lost on me.  For something like that anyway.

Ah!  But alas, maybe I'm too hard on myself.  After all, the pessimist in me holds great sway.  I know this.  I'll give it a go perhaps when I return.  For now, I'll just write.  And write and write like I've been doing, always running away to far countries.  It's what I know, and it flows so freely (as the hairs fall on the page) with such release that I don't stop, even when the palm begins to ache.  It feels so good sometimes.  There's just that reluctant reality in the fact that there's no living in this, not that I see anyway.  Or there is, I just don't know how to get there.  Oh well, maybe I'll figure it out.  I mean look at Blake.  He's on such a path with a strong stride as he always has.  And he likes to write, and he writes like I do.  With passion and well words.

If only he were that way with the women.

(that's where we differ)

The Bali Diaries: Retrograde

I don't know why I do the things I do sometimes.  Like I don't why I told you I'd fallen in love with you over here.  Why would I ever?  What stupid mood was I in that to say that to you was a good idea?  Some ancient romanticism, I suppose.  Some silly ideal of perfection.  When I look back at it, the first thing that comes to mind is ew, what a sap I am.  What kind of little girl would find pleasure in reading that, some soak-stained morning passion in words of a boy that wakes up alone.  I think few hate it more than I do though, the empty bed.  Sure, there are mornings that it's nice, but most are met with a cringe and a thrust and a reach for someone that is not there.  Here in Bali I greet all days like this.


I think the heat's driving me crazy.  I think the lack of weed's writing me lazy.  But who knows really what it sounds like.  I haven't read any of it over yet.  This place though will find me dreaming of my return when I leave.  There's a magic here like no where else.  A magic that found me a bike so much like my car at home, broken and missing things and badass and fast, that from the moment I first rode it down Uluwatu's one road, I knew. I knew she was mine and I'd never want another, no matter how many times the clutch broke.

It's a powerful magic that tore me down with the death shits and cuts and scrapes and gouges in the worst (well not the worst) places.  A calculating fair judge of a power that warrants respect - broken boards, broken boards! - for it's ability to absolutely crush you when it wants to and, good graces permitting, have you flying above the thunder clouds in a soul-full bliss of all-understanding.  I've brushed the ghost-grey l'embrace du morde, I have.  I've seen such beauty, I've felt love like the very first time, Caroline.

The Bali Diaries: Third Time the Charm

"And a romantic table for three please."  Oh, Chris.  He has such a way with nostalgia and the sweet long good-bye.  We're on the beach in Jimbaran just before sunset.  It's a long stretch in front of the fish markets and they serve fresh seafood on the sand.  We picked it out, the seafood, just like at Bingin, but instead of about a dozen or so tables, there's hundreds maybe more and great throngs of Chinese tourists that had come in by the great chartered busload.  We sit farther down, way down at the end of the drag.  Away from the noise and frantic commotion that I guess comes with big Chinese dinners with the tables lined up long.

No, we're far from that, not quite at the fringe of all things, but right up there next to it.  A single small table, three chairs, and three large Bin Tangs that we cheers and sip serenly on in the bright red-orange maroon light of the sky and on the water and while we wait for our food to grill up.  Chris convinced us to take on a barracuda along with the usual; the king prawns, the calamari, and of course the red snapper.

He tells us about Oz, about home in Sydney, and about the absolutely beautiful woman of a Canadian he met while volunteering in Ubud.  He shows us pictures as he flips through dreamy-eyed.  She's stunning and silly and a treat by the looks of it. 

"I can't believe I'm going back, tomorrow already, and then she comes out with her friend and we'll drive up the coast, and well, I dunno, then I'll ask to marry her," he says leaning back running his hands through his hair.  He's not looking at us, he's watching the sky darken.  "She's gonna break my heart, I think."

"Nonsense!" says I.  "How old are you?"

"Thirty-three. But she's got to go back to Canada eventually."  He's a soft-spoken romantic, this guy.  When the food comes out,  the barracuda's delicious. 

After dinner, and a fucking dinner it was, a damned good one, we follow Chris out of Jimbaran and into the lion's den.  Kuta.  We meet again.  Chris has got a place picked out for us to stay.  He's been to it before, down a little alley just off Poppies II.  It's nice, 200,000 rupiah for the night in a fan room with two beds for Mike and I.  It's on the third floor, the very top.  The city's a chocked sea of concrete and curlicue roofs and wires and metal tanks and antennaes and lights and lights and lights. 

I lean on the railing in front of our door which is not so much a railing as it is a waist-high wall - it's wide, I could lay down on it.  Below is the silent pool in place of a courtyard, and Chris' plush air-conditioned single to the left on the floor below.  He's outside too, and like I, he's just showered.  "You boys all clean up there?"

"Just about. Mike's almost done. How far is this place?"
"Alley cats? You could throw a rock at it from here."

"How promising..."

Mike's done.  He busts out the door yelling, "You boys like Mexico?!" like some trailer trash redneck and with a rebel yell we're down the stairs and meet Chris in the alley. 

The rest we won't speak of. (maybe later)

Suffice to say, I woke up the next morning with blood everywhere, and Mike was missing.

The Bali Diaries: Full Moon Folly

But always, remember where you are, dear soul.  This isn't gay ole' Paris.  This is Bali.  No romantic comfort here.  Not on the swash-buckling side anyways, the eleven dollars a day side, the three dollars a meal side.  No kitchens, no AC, no refrigerator, just sweat stroking heat through the night and the day, even with the fan on.  I doesn't even oscillate.

It's difficult to think sitting perfectly still when you feel the beads squeezing out over your brow, feeling your arms and your back turn moist in the shade.  You can barely wonder how the local villagers manage with sweatshirts on walking around selling trinkets, hand-crafted wood pens, boot-leg DVDs, and what have you.  Or else they're breaking up rocks, setting stones, always building, building, building.  In the morning and the late afternoon and at night even by light.  This place is a wild place.  An untamed frontier.

There's an abandoned half-finished bar at the top of the cliffs overlooking all the peaks at Uluwatu.  You can see it from the water saying "RESPECT LOCALS" and "ULUWATU STREET BOYS" in big bold black letters.  It's covered in graffiti, everything from mystic looking symbols to threats and warnings to "wet pussy for free" to #liau.  A crooked rail's cemented to the floor among the clutter of loose sandstone and rebar and broken glass, between the bar and the stage, and there's stairs going up to the roof.  There are no outside walls, just support columns, but that's the way it's meant to be, that's how everything is here in Bali.

It's usually where I check the surf from if I want to surf Ulus, and it's here I found myself in the late night/early morning with two friends in their mid-thirties, Kellie and Robbie.  Aussies.  Not a couple, just friends themselves.  Kellie's a tall, tight bodied sexpot with hair that's long blonde, perfect handfuls for breasts, full handfuls, no bra, and big blue doe eyes.  I'm pretty sure we both wanted to fuck her.

I'm pretty sure she knew it too, but she stayed the straight line between us, relishing in the moment, and we talked and talked.  If you're wondering, yes, we were drunk.  Quite plastered really, with empty Bin-Tangs and half-packs of Samporenas scattered about.  This was after a dinner party at Kellie's, she lives here.

She's on that journey of independence.  Not to give, to our chagrin (more Robbie's than mine I imagine, I'm too drunk at this point), but to speak sermon on it.  A full moon sexual innuendo, legs bend laying down.  Knees touching, twisted to one side so her cut-off denim shorts pull tight and her perk bra-less breasts push through a loose singlet.  Her hands run with her hair past closed eyes as she tells all the things that women want.

"We're not having sex," she says.

But at sunrise she takes me home to the shower.  Robbie sleeps on the daybed.

The Bali Diaries: I Should Sleep This Off

With a cautious air, I will now tell you all the fears that sit, with standing room only, inside the affairs of my heart.  I will try to lay them all out in a slow sad parade that everyone knows to be so, but no one's come to see, and I'll try to make something more of it.

Is that possible?

First and foremost, no writer am I.  To be sure no fame shall ever come to me.  Age and my eyes reading other's words, and this depressing dirigible of sickness presiding over my head have taught me this simple fact: there is truly mad and mind deafening genius out there, not all alive, but they persist on in their works.  And then's there's me here on the magical isle of all things just trying to reach up and touch their reflections in the mirror sky.  There's no greatness in me.  Not now.  Now there is only a joint-aching and heavy-eyed defeat.

Across the world there are the vast oceans, et moi, I am not the great whale or the shark, or the luxury cruise-liner or the navy's aircraft carrier.  Non, pour moi, c'est la vie de l'eau.  One drop.  One crystalline tear shape that falls in and is forgotten.

But a weak smile dawns as I look out to that blue horizon, just past the red tile and spires and strange curlicues of Balinese roofs, and I see what I guess to myself that everyone sees.  The water, sure, some see the sea turtles and the killer whales and the little orange Nemo fish.  And sure, some see that all-inclusive getaway, and I'm sure there's much more.  But no matter who, I'm sure everyone sees that mighty blue.  That drip-drip-drop.  The water.

I'm no the big fish, but in that magnitude, the vastness and the might and the power, they see me, and what I write makes sense to them somehow.  Then what's greatness but just a swell stacked in the distance coming towards us.

After all, it comes in waves they say.

The second fear is simple: She doesn't love me.  Not much to that one really.  She's too good, and me, well, I'm me.

And that's it.  Those are them, as the lazy would say.  It's a two-seated affair, my heart.  Everything else in life is leaning on the walls or the railing for the show.

The Bali Diaries: The Addict and The Analyst

Maybe it's just the way I see things.  Me, personally.  The way I'm hard wired, an ingrained filter through which my mind has no other option but to see the world daily.  If so, I wonder what this place looks like to others who see through different lenses of their own devices, a subconscious grain and hue that's so inconsequential and slight (to some) that they fail to recognize any filter at all.  It's there though, trust me.  We've all tinkered and tweaked them as years pass to see things as we see them, not as someone else does.  It's what makes me see things in contrast, makes me maddening analyze every fiber of being.

It's what makes Nate so easy to slip into any routine that brings immediate pleasure.  Today he slipped out and we had a fuckin' wild ride up to Ubud.  To heatstroke and rice paddies.  He almost didn't, but Ulu's was too big to surf with the swell, so he kicked the habit for the day, hopped on his bike with his Hitler youth helmet on and no shirt like a mad Nazi ready to invade Poland, and joined Mike and I on the long and windy road to Ubud.  Come to think of it, I think most roads, save for the main highways, are windy.  Very windy with some untold secret behind each sharp turn, but that's not the point here.  It is funny though that our choke-point, a police checkpoint was on the main straight-away, just before Sanur.  Fuck the police here.  They squeezed 500,000 rp. out of us before giving back my license and Nate's registration.

Mike managed to scuttle away in the traffic.

The Bali Diaries: His Little Instruments

That angel at Mango Tree, an actual angel she is.  Not romantically, but in that Biblical sense.

"Pagi," I said to her.  Good morning.

And "pagi," she said to me.

"How is your day so far?"

"Busy!" she says, "Busy! Busy! Busy!"

"Oh, no! Already?" It's not yet 9:00 in the morning.

"Yes," she sighs. "Or just lately."  I touch her on the shoulder and tell her it will be all right, to just breath in deep and let it all go.  She takes a deep breath and smiles.  "How long are you here for?"

"Well, the blond guy leaves in a week, but me and my other friend are here 'til the end of October."

"Oh! Well, lucky you."  Her hands are already back to work sorting through bills.

I smile.  "Yeah, kinda. We're running out of money though," I say, and I manage a half laugh.  "Hence the hot water refill in my coffee," with Nate's old coffee cup raised.

She puts the bills down and before I turn to leave she puts her hand on my shoulder to say, "Listen, if you ever need a coffee just come ask or tell my staff it's free."

"Really? Oh, you don't have to do that."

"It's no problem. Really."

"Well, thank you. Terima Kasih." I mean it.  I hope she knows that.

As I turn to walk up the stairs to the top balcony where I like to write, she calls after me from the counter, "Brian! Remember this. Money is like a beard (she motions an Abe Lincoln fully), once it's gone it always come back."

The Bali Diaries: A Rooster Story

"Courage ain't nothin' but the belief that you have it."

It's a Western because why not.  But really it's all the same so it could be anything - an old 50's greaser tale, a modern dystopian, hell, even some way off in the future sci-fi.  I've always liked Westerns though.

I imagine many of the writers of old stories spent their time, or just some time at least, around animals.  Watching them.  Seeing them day to day and routining their actions.  Getting into their heads and into their thoughts (if they have those).  I don't know.  Maybe the old misers just gave them thoughts, but those animals definitely live out their stories.  And they're rough and real, and there's no filter or etiquette and no rules.  Nature's law reigns and the biggest and strongest and meanest always prevail.

That's why every story has a hero.  That X factor.  To raise up the weak and fight the status quo.  He's from out of town (it's a small setting).  He's Shane, he's the Man With No Name, or he's my personal favorite, Russell Crowe's Ben Wade.

Here's the players as I see them now before me in rooster form (their names will probably have to change):

There's Robert Redford. He's all salt and pepper so he looks older and maybe he is older.  He's the black sheep and he's smaller.  The other's pick on him, fuck with him, and try to separate him from his family because yes, he has (I think) the prettiest hen and a small flock of chicks.

Then there's Rex.  He's the big red one.  The head hauncho of the land, the big prick, the asshole.  And he's got two bitch hens too.

There's also Reginald.  He's the stupid French one with white spots on a black breast and a red neck.  He's about as big as Robert, but younger and devious and conniving in his scheming.  He's a loner, no hens, but when Rex is picking on Robert, so is Reginald.  He's a weak mind and a coward.  I fed him a couple times and then he'd crow everyday at our step expecting food pretentiously.  That's Reginald.  (Redford never crowed for food when we fed him; we mostly just feed the chicks now).

Finally, there's the outsiders, the out-of-towners, Mike and I.  We're un-natural beasts among chickens.  Mike likes to feed everyone, good or bad.  He's across the board, and wants everyone to like him and trust him in the chicken kingdom.  I try to bring some morality to a world without it, some balance.  When the roosters pick on Rob, I run out and roust them and I feed the chickies because they're cute and I want them to grow up strong and I want the best for the Redfords.

It's the standard outsider tale, I guess.  We come on a scene of injustice and out of, well, boredom sometimes we try to make things right as we see fit when we're around, and the Redfords are grateful and Rex is angry and vengeful eventually.  We can't stay forever though so we try to give Robert the heart he forgot he had and the courage to stand up to Rex for his family.  We make him a fighter, or at least try to, and hopefully he survives our departure.

The Bali Diaries: Fatima

A postscript means everything sometimes.  A short second afterthought, five words can change the tides and push the seas back into the soul to fill it once more with the life of the world.

Then one hears the soft wind through the leaves as it kisses the skin and the construction, the cars, the motorbikes, the loud music coming from the kitchen at Jiwa Juice are all a faded far-off background.  It brings an unexplainable, almost intangible feeling - not even a feeling really, but some sort of focus or filter that makes everything beautiful, even tremendous hardships and disappointment.  The worst of things are no longer chances of bad or good worthy of a woe-be-me, but simply a rock on the path to pick up and learn from.

Change pace.
Walk around it if need be.

A rock is not good or bad.  It can't make you sad, or mad or curse the stars unless you're not looking where you're going.  It's only a stone really, to be stepped on or stepped over, depending on the size, and if one takes the time to see it - really see it, all its porous grains or smooth sides, its rough edges and hard points - takes the time to feel its texture and judge its weight, then, as Lennon the Sorcerer once told me, that focus, the knowing of a thing - anything, a rock, a mountain range, a sunset, a stubbed toe, a quick wave, a callous tone, a sickness, a setback, anything - the knowing of that thing to be so can make you whole.  Just see it, see it's beauty (everything has a beauty about it, no matter how fucked or depraved, after all, Scarface is a beautiful movie, is it not?), understand it, understand its energy and draw from it with a deep breath.

The Bali Diaries: Science of Coincidence

Nate said something today at breakfast that was right along the lines of my thought as it (not this) happened.  He said, "It's funny - well, I guess not funny but... well, you know what I mean.  Its strange.  Yeah, strange that you should come here to write and have something spill on your laptop half-way through.  Isn't it?"

That's coincidence, I suppose.  Not it, but that just then.  Him saying that.  To have the same thought as I at the same moment when I'd all but forgotten.  Or maybe it's just like minds.  Or hell, maybe it's not coincidence at all, because now the more I think about it the more meaning there is in it.  I wouldn't be writing about it now if that weren't the case, and in coincidence there is no meaning, just silly afterthought.

Like seeing Woody Allen throw around the name Stravinsky quite randomly in the randomness that is Side Effects (the book I stole from Jordan), not a week after I'd spent two hours trying to name and place and process that ridiculous fountain by the Centre Pompidou.

Silly coincidence.

[I still have no idea who Stravinsky is other than he wrote some concert piece about springtime.]

The Bali Diaries: Lucky Strike

My mind hasn't been molded, really truly molded in quite some time.  I feel as if the older we get so too does the clay go dry and harden like ceramics.  But here in Bali there's always a sweat on the brow or a salt water wave breaking over it, and in that way maybe the clay stays moist and a little malleable, and a strong hand can still change its ways, still make a firm impression.  It has to be firm though because, after all, I'm not so young anymore.

The athletes on TV and the stars in the magazines are now younger than I am, some of them anyways.  There's no longer a dream to be them, only a will to see them succeed, or I guess crash and burn depending on the player and the team.

Fuckin' Steve.  These sports metaphors are all a product of his coffee, vodka, and Bin Tang high for the Dodger playoffs.  Game 1 in Atlanta, but here in Bali it's not yet 11:00 in the morning.  Still, he spats off play-by-plays from his phone with a crack happy whoop and a holler and a smile because the Dodgers are up in the 7th.  Mike's drinking a Bin Tang with him and Nate's on his fourth cup of coffee for the day and's already been surfing (it was shitty 3 ft. Ulus), and he's having his second breakfast to go with my first, and we're all set here at one of the square tables out front at Jiwa Juice.

I drink my tea and the glass of orange with slow deliberate swallows, trying to saturate the very top of my throat and the very back of my nasal passage because it has that dry sickly feeling I assume is from all the salt water getting way, way up there last time I surfed.  The Lucky Strikes I bought last night surely didn't help any though, because the phlegm my nose is flushing out isn't clear anymore.

Whatever, last night was a whirlwind of seafood BBQ and Bin Tangs and cigarettes and reggae music in Bingin and Polish girls, California girls, and Brazilian girls.  And in the wind of it all I got kicked out alone and biked home and nearly finished the Alchemist before I tried to sleep, through restless legs and midnight squats, and tossing and turning and pained breathing, and a sweat on my brow and my neck.  Sweat from all pores and the corners of my eyes.  A wet mind, most impressionable it's beginning to seem when under distress or duress or both, and with a strong hand like the Alchemist's I feel like I can turn to wind as well or at least wish I could feverishly so I could blow across the sea to see sweet Caroline.  And I wondered where exactly the treasure was.

I finished in the morning in bed and found out.  It wasn't at the end of it, but way back at the very beginning.  And at that there's her smile and a long look in her eyes and a kiss.  And bacon pancakes.

Maktub.

The Bali Diaries: Alchemist

"That's strange," said the boy, "I've been trying for two years to read this book and I never get past these first few pages."

How funny that this should be The Alchemist.  I must've read Part One three times since it was first handed to me in Paris.  [Keep writing even though there will be no typing this next month.  Just write, write, write, write.  About Paris, but also about everything, but don't forget to write about Paris.  It's this season's namesake].

For having just re-started it not but a few days ago, I've been strangely watchful for signs lately.  A meaning behind certain somethings.  I like to think that the way the universe works is, for each individual, that either everything means something, or everything means nothing.  We can't pick and choose our signs, we can only recognize them or miss them or not believe in them at all, in which case they don't exist.  Personally, I think they do, and they occur whenever things are starkly un-routine or out of the ordinary or even if something randomly should happen to just grab our attention.  It could be anything and it happens all the time.  Daily.  So keep a sharp eye and a sharp mind.  And for fuck's sake keep writing.

The Bali Diaries: Uluwatu

I feel as if I haven't written about surfing yet, and it's been a month nearly so I'll try and start now.

First and oh, so foremost at the western tip of the Bukit Peninsula is a menage of peaks that break off a wide reef affectionately known as Uluwatu.  I say affectionately out of charm, or cuteness, or whatever.  I'm not sure really, but the more appropriate word would be respectfully.

The waves at Uluwatu, all of them - Temples, Bombies, Outside Corner, Racetracks, and of course the Peak - all of them demand a certain respect.  It's a respect of all the water moving because at times and in certain places it can be a rushing rapids.  It's a respect for the shallow reef sitting serenely and razor sharp just below your toes in the line-up.  So serrated that when I tapped it with the top of my foot after foolishly pulling into a barrel form behind, I came up with a sharp pain, and when I looked down there were chunks of meat missing that showed white and lacerations through my toes.  Out of the water, the white and everything else turned rouge red with the blood streaming out.  Respect.  Pay it or pay for the lack thereof.  People get wrecked out there, so I always try to surf it on a higher tide (that means there's more water, and hence, the reef is deeper).

Don't get me wrong though, the wave's probably the best and most consistent in Bali and there's almost always guys out, and to surf there just before dusk is a thing of beauty.  The sun sets big and red out way off over the ocean and seems to be its biggest and most vibrant just before it leaves.

The waves weren't that epic for the one particular session, but it's one that I won't ever forget, waiting for Steve to get out with my feet still in the water in the cave, with the sun slowly fading, but not so slow because like that, it was gone, like a beautiful Keyser Soze sunset as Steve picks and slips his way across the low tide reef.