No Fool Like an Old Fool

All our learning has failed us. Just as lost as our ignorant neighbors, we are perhaps more unhappy than most, for we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we were getting somewhere with all our studying when we were just wasting our time, squandering our youth. Now we are old and discouraged.

We have no one to blame but ourselves. The world is what it has always been and has never bothered to consult with us as in the first place. It is doing just fine without us. We, however, are not doing so well, and keep hoping that circumstances will soon change to our advantage. We are fooling ourselves in this regard.

There is no fool like an old fool.

Of course, we’re still full of plans. All sorts of plans for a better future, a life where we can finally relax and enjoy what we have accomplished, achieved, acquired. This life we anticipate is our reward for having been diligent, obedient, mindful of others but not enslaved by codependency. We have crossed uncharted waters and arrived at last at contentment. Or so we hope.

Well, maybe some of us have, some of the time. In general, for the most part, we are worried sick. We feel cheated, and are convinced deep down that we have no one to blame but ourselves for our miserable lot. Some are no longer worried but merely despondent. They have that far away stare. Like animals in a zoo that no longer notice the visitors, they gaze through the bars at nothing. Neither happy nor sad, they simply exist, waiting for a time when they no longer will.

Nothing they had hoped for ever really materialized. Once there were promising signs, but they proved to be mirages. Swamp gas. Static that could be mistaken for voices, but only through great feats of imagination and wishful thinking.

We, on the other hand, have not lost all hope. We still believe we have a chance at a better life. Sure, things aren’t so great now, but they could get better. Improvements of all kinds may be just around the corner.

Even in retrospect, we can’t explain why things got as bad as they did. When all was falling apart, we had no idea what was happening, let alone why everything we had worked so hard for was now in ruins. Fathers abandoned their families. Mothers watched TV instead of preparing meals. Everyone got sick, but it was a kind of sickness that fooled you into thinking you were healthier than ever. It wasn’t until you were at death’s door that you finally realized something was terribly wrong, and by then it was too late to seek a remedy.

When people died, they were often smiling. Sometimes the last noise they made was a guffaw. People laughed themselves to death. They snickered and were suddenly gone.

FOOLISH THINGS

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FOOLISH THINGS

Martin Luther wrote this to a friend in 1530: “Whenever the devil harasses you thus, seek the company of men, or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, aye, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles.”

As a boy on New Year’s Eve 1912, nine year-old Louis Armstrong snuck into his mother’s bedroom and borrowed a pistol from the pocket of one of her customers. His mother was a prostitute, his father had abandoned the family, and they lived in a rooming house in the Red Light district. Armstrong fired the gun at midnight to celebrate the New Year, but lucky for all of us a policeman happened to be standing nearby and arrested young Louis. A judge sent him to the Colored Waif’s Home. On the way there the driver said “Don’t look so sad, son. This is a good place. We have a band. What instrument would you like to play?” Armstrong’s eyes brightened. “The drums!” he said. “Well, we’ve already got plenty of drummers, but we need someone to play the bugle when we raise and lower the flag. You think that might interest you?”

Within a few years Louis Armstrong was playing trumpet in New Orleans brothels He was in the right place at the right time for it was there and then that Jazz pretty much took shape. He is certainly the person most responsible for its popularity across the globe. Bing Crosby, who was the most popular singer of the day said that he thought Armstrong was the best singer alive.

Billie Holiday sang like Armstrong played the trumpet. Jimi Hendrix said he wanted to play the guitar the way Little Richard used his voice.

In 1955 in New Orleans, Little Richard pretty much single-handedly invented Rock and Roll in much the same kind of way Armstrong had forty years earlier. His first big hit was a sanitized version of a dirty song he had been singing for years to entertain the kind of people he hung out with, prostitutes, drug dealers, and petty criminals.

Until he sang at a high school talent show, nobody at Hume High noticed Elvis. Before his appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, the Hillbilly Cat had been driving a truck. Elvis told interviewers that his singing idol was Dean Martin. Dino had obviously modeled much of his style on the crooning of Bing.

The real mystery is where did Bing come from?

Bing was not born in a brothel in New Orleans, but to an Irish working class family in Spokane, Washington. He was well-educated and briefly attended law school before deciding to drop out and become a musician. He played the drums pretty well, but his crooning and his intelligent use of the newly developed microphone was what set his apart from his peers.

Within a few months of arriving in Los Angeles he was the talk of the town. He easily transitioned from microphone to motion picture camera, and led the way for Sinatra and Presley to do the same. Even though modern day listeners think of him as a square, Bing thought of himself as a proto-hipster.

In retrospect, all these developments seem unlikely. Culture and new ideas leap in unpredictable spasms.Until Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Bing Crosby’s Christmas album was the highest selling album in history. Quincy Jones produced Thriller and it turns out he and Ray Charles had been roommates in Seattle, after the blind pianist arrived after getting as far away from Florida as he could by Greyhound Bus.

Decca records rejected the Beatles, deciding they had little to offer. George Martin proved otherwise. Aretha Franklin really took off artistically when Jerry Wexler of Atlantic records understood and appreciated the real depth of her talent. Otis Redding was working as a chauffeur when he wrote and recorded “Respect.” Two years later Aretha had the mega hit, but Otis did it proud, as well. Marvin Gaye was a session drummer at Motown in Detroit when one day he filled in for an absent singer.

There’s a line in the Bible, “God chooses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” Even if you don’t believe in God or the Bible, you’ve got to admit that the delightful surprises Fate unleashes as it twists and writhes its way through Space and Time give us cause for hope. Nobody has any idea of what’s really going on. We might as well expect to be pleasantly surprised.

EMPIRE AT ALL COSTS

The War on Terror continues into its fifteenth year, and may prove endless, for Terror shows no signs of surrendering. We like to tell ourselves that they started it, that Terrorists hated us for our freedoms and that’s why they attacked the Twin Towers. In the ensuing decade and a half, beginning with the Patriot Act and its many successors, we’ve lost many of those freedoms they supposedly begrudged us. Now live in the most tightly surveilled country in the history of mankind. Does this mean Terror may hate us a little less now that we’re not so glaringly free?

If it’s ever proven that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, a false flag event to justify perpetual war in the Middle East, it will be hard to accept not only the initial tragedy, but the loss of our image of ourself as a force for good in the world. It will be hard for forgive and forget.

I suppose if we could go back and interview any of the people we attempted to bomb into submission over the last sixty-six years, beginning with North Korea and ending with Syria, that they never believed we were the good guys. Today, there are plenty of more bad guys left to whom we could teach a lesson, and I’d be surprised if Libya and Iran don’t feature prominently in the comings months corrections. Iran must want war, otherwise why would they have placed their country right smack dab in the middle of so many of our military bases?

Maybe there really is a hell after death, and it consists of a lake of burning Napalm. During World War II we invented Napalm as a way to bomb civilians, to burn down cities, to demoralize whole populations and to eventually get them to sue for peace. It worked surprisingly well on our foes in Germany and Japan, but not so well in Korea, Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam.

We can be sure that our puppet in the Middle East, Israel, will soon occupy and colonize Syria’s Golan Heights. Then the Arabs in surrounding countries will ratchet up their hatred to the level North Korea already enjoys. We’ll do our best to bring Iran into the fray and then what evolves will justify our Perpetual State of War.

Evidently, a Terrorist is anyone who hates us and lacks a proper army. A Palestinian kid throwing a stone is a terrorist, but an Israeli soldier shooting him from a helicopter gunship is a soldier.

My Tummy Hurts

When I have an upset stomach, I don’t sleep well. My dreams are troubled, and the conundrums I’m wrestling with in dreamworld aren’t as easily understood or deciphered as a simple upset stomach. Likewise, in my waking hours I am constantly trying to blame or fix whatever I think is troubling me, but there I may also be way off base. The cause of my dissatisfaction may be hidden, or not what I think it is.

When I’m happy or content, I don’t waste a lot of energy wondering why, but when I’m not, then I start inventing complex scenarios. Sometimes it seems like YouTube is awash in people who are convinced that whatever they’re experiencing is somebody else’s fault. If only the Illuminati hadn’t started World War II and the Rothschild banks weren’t in charge of our political system, then I might stand a chance at being happy. But since they are, I’m doomed. We’re all doomed.

Seems like everyone with an online presence has got at least an upset stomach that’s causing them to dwell on the negative.

The problem with poo-pooing all conspiracy theories is that some of them are right on the money. One has to make great leaps of faith to believe even part of the 9/11 Commission report. The official explanation for what happened that day reads like a highly implausible tale invented on the spot by a madman.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before. Convenient how Lee Harvey Oswald, the supposed lone gunman in the Kennedy assassination, was gunned down only hours after his capture. Not much time there for a proper interview. There have been so many obvious false-flag events that have been unmasked after having served their purpose to justify invasions of sovereign states that it would almost take more effort to prove the reasons we bomb those weak enough to be bombed are real than not. Experience tells us we should assume we’re dealing with subterfuge unless proven otherwise.

But everybody likes to think that they’re sane and the people who they find most annoying are nincompoops. I like to post 9/11 conspiracy posts on Facebook, and then am amused by people who respond with “I’m so sick of reading this nonsense…” Then don’t read it, my man. Nobody’s forcing you to read my posts, much less comment on them. I suppose you’re either better informed or saner than I am. By all means, show me another picture of your cat. After all, this isn’t the nightly news. It’s Facebook.

Don’t Freak Out!

If one spends too much time online or tuning into the news in any format, one might well conclude the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It doesn’t matter where you look, everyone, everywhere is in crisis. Economists always remind us that markets are “skittish” and blame this or that crisis. For a while now it seems the markets are frozen in absolute terror.

I’ve been alive for sixty-six years now, and from the moment I started watching Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards and Huntley and Brinkley, I can tell you that the world has been awash in problems. It’s probably not worse today than before, but thanks to the Internet, we’re all aware of not only the news but everyone’s reaction to it every moment we’re online!

The country I’m currently a guest in is winding up its second year of a military dictatorship, who are arresting anyone who speaks up against this Sunday’s constitutional referendum vote. Fortunately, no one wants to hear my opinion on how they should run their country, and I’m smart enough not to offer one, or else I too could be taken away to the nearest military base for “attitude adjustment.” Meanwhile on the other side of the globe, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, seems to be insane and a man of shockingly low character. This is probably not really a novel development, but it seems to be, for I see his picture a thousand times a day as I scroll through Facebook.

The notion that the United States is exceptionally good, well-managed or offers a better life to its residents than most countries, seems to have lost its place in the sun. A couple of hours on Facebook and I’m convinced Uncle Sam is a demented lonely old guy living alone in a refrigerator box down near the railroad tracks. His striped trousers smell like pee and he keeps telling the same story over and over again, mumbling and then howling, his raspy voice lost in the traffic noise.

I’d like to think that this is all a “healing crisis.” The world is actually improving. Things are getting better. Chronic problems are coming to a head and being resolved. We’re all learning the true nature of what we would rather avoid looking at. The Truth is not always pretty, but at least you can do something about problems once you’ve faced them. Ignoring them or pretending them away leads you to places of real despair.

So don’t freak out! Don’t even waste a moment being sad or fearful. All this is just as it should be. We’re working it out, perhaps not elegantly or suavely, but these seemingly intractable problems are getting fixed.

What, if anything, might adoration teach us?

When I witness great beauty, I get all excited about the idea that it’s a doorway into even greater beauty. That’s it’s a portal to the transcendent. So when I hear a piece of music or see a painting or read a story that really knocks me out, I don’t just appreciate that in itself, I’m hoping that it’s the first taste to a much larger meal. I’m hoping it means something.

This desire to find import is hardwired into we humans, and if course like most instincts, they can far exceed their intended purpose and drive us and others crazy. When I find that my breath has been taken away by something outside myself, I get my hopes up. Just minutes before I was resigned to life being just this and no more, and suddenly it’s much, much more! It’s fantastic. I’m surrounded by things that are adorable!

When the Swiss scientist who first synthesized LSD left his lab and rode his bicycle home for lunch, he fell off the bike into a field of flowers and knew that he was not only tripping, but had made a great discovery. The world is more than what we thought it was.

Here are a few musical works that have given me a glimpse of the divine.

Bach Keyboard Concertos.

Chopin’s Ballade Number One and his Barcarole

Horowitz playing Lizt’s transcription of Wagner’s Liebestod.

Louis Armstrong playing “Strutting with some Barbecue”

Bix Biederbecke playing “Singing the Blues”

The Who playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

Anything by Elmore James

This is a short list of my faves, and I’m sure you have your own. There are Hopper paintings that not only take my breath away, but have the same reaction for tens and thousands of us. The hairs on the back of our necks stand up and salute the infinite.

This is adoration in progress. I want more of it. I want it at least every day. So how do I get there?

My intuition tells me it has something to do with getting out of myself long enough to really notice my surroundings. Stilling the chatter of the monkey brain. Looking for the good rather than finding fault.

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s a place to start. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that my life be more about laughing and rolling around in a field of flowers than planning and scheming to get what I think I want or need.

Does It Matter What We Believe?

As American anti-intellectualism rears is Trumpish head, more and more Americans are inclined to believe that they have a God-given, unalienable right to believe whatever they want, facts be damned. Most Americans don’t believe in evolution. After all, it’s only a theory, right? Theories are espoused by pointy-headed professors, the same ones who write books that nobody wants to read.

Most people would agree that belief in nonsense can have serious and dire consequences, but you’d have to assure them first that you’re not trying to define what’s nonsense. We all pretty much believe that actions speak louder than words, and because beliefs often determine actions, they might be important, too, but most important of all is my freedom to believe whatever I choose, because no pointy-headed professor is going to take away my right to delusion.

German science was the most advanced in the world until they let a charismatic fellow with a taste for amphetamines and a penchant to letting spirits guide him almost destroy that country and half the world along with it. Stalin put great faith in his favorite Soviet biologist Lysenko, who quickly took Soviet biology into the dark ages, from which it is still struggling to recover.

If you’re walking down the wrong path and the nagging suspicion that is so turns into a humbling admission that not only are you going to have to turn around and walk all the way back to where you made a wrong turn, and added to that the horrifying possibility that even then you might not even know the right path when you come across it, you’re ready to choke on humble pie. You’re preparing to make an extremely difficult admission. It’s almost easier to continue deluding yourself than it is to face facts and clean up the mess. At least in the short run, denying reality seems preferable to an open admission of error.

In rejecting the Scientific Method, we open the door to all sorts of dangers, but advertisers know that playing upon emotion is far more lucrative than appealing to reason. Young people are encouraged to believe that their shopping preferences are creative statements of their personalities. Your cell phone case says a lot about you!

Those averse to rigorous thought take solace in knowing that they are not alone, that most people think like and act like they do. It turns out this is why American education falls far short of most other advanced economies. We simply don’t value activities that are difficult or might be perceived as boring. We like sports. We like fun. We like expressing ourselves. As a talking Barbie doll once exclaimed after a button on her backside was pushed, “Math is hard!”

ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN

If there were ever a time to take action, it’s now. The time for normal score-keeping has elapsed, and we are now into Sudden Death Playoff. The next team to score wins the game. This may happen very soon, or after a while, but it will happen. The game will end.

If you’re a baby boomer who has always wanted to try something completely different once you’ve retired, then you have a limited amount of time to make that choice. Not choosing is a choice.

I’m not talking about going on vacation, but rather about relocating. Moving somewhere far away from your comfort zone in order to experience much more of the world before you die. You are going to die, right? I’m not suggesting you dwell on that fact, but being in denial about it isn’t going to get you where you want to go either.

Indeed, unless one is already content where one is, how does one choose and then get where one wants to go?

Through trial and error.

Chances are it will take some time and money, but that will be time and money well spent in the long run if you find someplace truly exceptional. Wouldn’t it be great to find a spot where you’d be glad to spend the rest of your days? More expensive than anything is wandering aimlessly, vaguely discontented and convinced there’s somewhere better just around the next bend in the road. Sure no place is perfect, but only you can determine what you want. A few years back I tried internet dating. I described myself as someone who enjoyed travel. I kept meeting women whose idea of travel meant taking cruises. I thought to myself, that would be absolute hell for me, everything I don’t like distilled, concentrated and pre-packaged.

So only your idea of fun will apply to you. That’s why you can’t easily and readily search it out without actually going places and finding what you don’t like. After one of my many trips to Nicaragua, I was back in the states playing Scrabble with friends, and telling stories about Central America, when a woman we were playing with asked me in all sincerity, “where do you go to the bathroom down there?” At first I thought she was joking, but then I realized from my descriptions of Nicaragua, it sounded like a place she wouldn’t be able to relax and go to the bathroom.

She wouldn’t have liked it there. She also had a miniature poodle that wouldn’t have liked it any better than she.

MY STORY

By the time I was in my mid-fifties, I realized that this was probably as good as it was going to be “career-wise.” I wasn’t ever going to be “discovered.” My hidden genius would never be revealed. Whatever good fortune had already come my way was maybe all I was due. OK, I could handle that. Now what?

So I started asking myself questions. If this wasn’t what I wanted, what did I want? If Iowa wasn’t where I wanted to end my days, where would I rather be?

I began by letting Internet travel sites show me cheap fares to exotic places. The first ticket I bought was to Nicaragua.

The flight from Des Moines to Managua was highly affordable and mercifully short. Compared to the flights I would end up taking to Asia, flying straight south four thousand miles from the Midwest was a walk in the park. I had traveled enough to realize that the capital cities which house airports are never the place you want to be, so I took a cab to the small city nearest city to the airport. This strategy has served me many time in many places.

I liked Nicaragua a lot. Affordable and interesting, not the least bit ruined by tourism, I found the people to be sweet-natured. Apart from Managua, it was safe, and although the developed areas were nothing to write home about, the natural beauty was often astounding, I ended up going there twelve more times before I was introduced to Thailand.

Thailand and Nicaragua have a lot in common, climate and vegetation-wise. They’re the kind of places where banana trees grow likes weeds in vacant lots. There are, of course, big differences. Nicaragua has volcanoes. Thailand has Thai massage. Nicaraguans eat red beans and rice, Thais eat the most amazing variety of foods I’ve ever sampled.

So I chose Thailand, where I live now. In the interim, I lived for a while in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. I like those places, too. I also visited Mexico, Peru and Ecuador, which I concluded were nice places to visit, but the place I chose to call home was and is Thailand.

It’s not perfect, and I have no intention of persuading anyone to move here. The main reason I’m here is because it’s much much much much more affordable than the United States, and that’s important to me. It might not be important to you. But there is probably someplace on this planet that trips your triggers, and unless you’re already there, it’s time to get shaking.

Places I could also dig living: the West Coast of Ireland, Bergen, Norway, the mountains of southern Chile and Argentina, Colombia, New Zealand, Tasmania, St. Petersburg, Russia but I’d have to do some serious planning to move there and since I’m not that motivated, I’ll probably just look at pictures. It’s amazing how many people with great cameras have recently visited these places. The Boomers are everywhere, snapping away with their top of the line Sony mirror-less cameras. Google images has it all, millions and millions of high-resolution, color photos. For free.

They’re the people who never prospered enough to get a real retirement account. Many of us are artists. Some of us got MFA degrees (Master of Fine Arts) which we knew at the time would not entitle us to tenure-track teaching jobs, but we didn’t care, because we thought we were going to “make it” as artists.

Few artists “make it,” at least financially. We are the MFA Boat People who have cast our fate to the winds and emigrated to foreign shores hoping for comfort mixed with adventure. We don’t want to be on Food Stamps back in the States.

Most of we MFA Boat People are working on a novel. All of us are writing blogs. Every person who has exiled himself from his home country seems to be writing a travel blog. I’m not sure if anyone is reading these blogs, but they’re being written. Google’s WordPress seems to host most of them. There’s no pressure to make money, because it’s free.

I am writing five different blogs, but for three of them I pay eighteen dollars a year so that I can own the domain. Those are geezersabroad.com, retirecheaply.com and dancoffeypost.com

I keep waiting for someone to contact me and offer me thousands of dollars for one of my web domains, but the longer I write these blogs, the less likely that is to happen. I attempt to drive traffic to the sites by linking to my Facebook account, but no matter how hard I flog my poor Facebook Friends, readership never soars above fifty souls. Google will not be sending me big money to put ads on my blogs.

But I write anyway. What else am I going to do?

This has got to be The Weirdest Thing That’s Happened To Me In Years.

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A few days ago I was driving around Northern Thailand on my motor scooter. For two months now there’s been little reason to do so, as the heat, smoke and drought have conspired to make this beautiful place ugly. Then a few rains came, the air was washed clean and a green fuzz has miraculously covered the ugly black and brown of burnt vegetation. So I decided to visit my favorite place about a half an hour north of here, on the way to Srilanna National Park. It’s a valley that looks like the Napa or Sonoma valleys near San Francisco.

As I was driving through a little town I noticed a flame tree in bloom, and stopped to photograph it. There was sign near the tree, on which was printed one of the few Thai words I recognize, “Massage” Price: 108 baht. I decided to investigate. Only a few yards away I found the place advertised, but it was a little temple, and instead of Buddhist images, it held Hindu statues, featuring lots of disembodied heads. Everything was unusually dirty and chaotic. I asked if I could take pictures. The lady in charge said yes, so I pulled in with my motorcycle, parking next to a big tree.

When I got off the bike, a a hundred red ants immediately swarmed over my feet, up my legs and into the clothes. These were large ants; the kind that bite.

So now I’m jumping around, swearing, trying to shake these ants off my feet and swat them out of my clothes. The three ladies there found this mildly amusing, but not surprising. Then the one who seemed to be in charge asked it I would be interested in massage. I checked my wallet and all I had was one hundred and ten baht (about $3.30). OK, I said.

The little temple was full of stuff, large pieces of furniture, maybe some appliances. I badly wanted to photograph the creepy heads they had scattered along every available surface, but my camera was still in the motorcycle, and not wanting to risk the biting ants, I waited while they moved furniture around to some purpose I couldn’t understand. The eldest lady brought me a glass of water. A younger woman, maybe in her twenties, who looked as though she might be mentally handicapped seemed to be my masseuse and after about ten minutes she lay down a bamboo mat on the only level ground that wasn’t crawling with ants and then tossed on it a dirty child’s plush toy that I surmised was to be my pillow. By now she had donned a turban about the size and shape of a waste paper basket. She motioned for me to lie down.

The thought occurred that this might be my last chance to run away.

I lay on my back, putting my head on the plush toy and trying not to think about the ants. Then she pulled out a large knife about the size of a Bowie knife. She asked me what parts of me hurt, and I told her my knees, which then prompted her to lay the knife on parts of my legs and while making limp massage motions with the other hand she began to loudly and repeatedly burp. These burps were deep and sounded surprisingly like a man talking.

This went on for about twenty minutes. She also began to sniffle from a runny nose, and sometimes would blow her nose in her hand and then fling the snot away, returning to massage my leg with that same hand. Every time I considered getting up and running away I remembered the ants. After about half an hour the boss-lady (her mother?) yelled something and that was it. The girl stopped burping. I handed her my hundred baht note, but could no longer find the ten baht coin. Perhaps it had fallen onto the ground. The girl said “no problem” and waved me away.

The girl went to her mother and knelt at her feet while the mother put her hand on the turban as in a blessing. No one was paying attention to me, so I m ade a run for the motor scooter, only picking up a few ants along the way. I raced around the tree and up to the road. It took me a few minutes to realize I was headed the wrong way, back the way I came, and when I turned around I briefly debated stopping again to photograph their weird temple, but decided against it. Besides, pictures wouldn’t help tell the story. It was one of those things you had to experience first-hand.

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dan coffey writes about whatever interests him

FOOLISH THINGS

This has got to be The Weirdest Thing That’s Happened To Me In Years.