A Brave New "Working" World

I finally found a Filipino song I was looking for - Napakasakit Kuya Eddie, which came out in the early 80's.  It's a tragic song (untranslated into English as far as I know) about a remittence worker who has left his family behind in the Philippines and disappeared into the hot deserts of Arabia to find better work.

I know this much about the song: he's lonely, thinking of home, and his wife has taken up a new lover, and by the time he gets home, his kids are smoking marijuana, and everything has crashed and burned.  You can hear the plaintiveness in Raol Cortez's voice as he sings, even if you don't know the lyrics, and you can always pull up a version of it (there's a bunch of them) with a montage of photos of miserable people and hard lives.

Pain is universal, and multilingual.

Father's Day 2014: from Dan to Dad

How does the song "Sutter's Mill" lead all the way to memories of my dad, and of a board game played on winter nights?

Let me try to explain ... but I'll have to give you a tour of my messy brain, which works the way it does now in part because of the internet, the enabler of all information in this day and age.

So, this song, Dan Fogelberg's banjo-driven, country-westernish "Sutter's Mill" appears now and again in my aforementioned gray matter, darting through my synapses like a comet flashing through the sky.  The song comes unbidden, and leaves soon after it arrives.

The Endless Road

“The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.” ― William Saroyan, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot

There are souvenirs of memory from each and every road trip I've taken, slices of image and intensity that I carry about in my mind's eye, that remind me of the road, always the endless road ...

From my latest trip, only a week ago, these images are of flashes of lightning, on the horizon, that light up the Issan countryside, the low and distant grumble of thunder, and the pounding, ceaseless rain. It is the sensation I have of avoiding the left lane, where the puddles are forming so deep that they could cause us to hydroplane and throw us off the road.

And all along the way Tan and I are talking about family, and where we've grown up, the fights, the love, the feelings we've had, of growing up and going separate ways, of returning, of the ties that bind, as the rain pelts the windshield, as we surge deeper into the darkness.

Issan Map courtesy of The Isaan blog

Another flash of lightening illuminates the rice fields about us, and the low rumble of thunder follows some minutes later. We're not about to get hit anytime soon, but like any of heaven's fireworks displays, the threat is out there.

I feel like I've got to keep moving. Curfew, imposed by the military only that week, falls over the land at 10 p.m. All the 7-Elevens will be closed.

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