[Phnom Penh, 3/9/23] Very early tomorrow, I’ll take a $15 bus to Stung Treng, a town no one has heard of. Even those who live there are shocked to learn its name. “You mean this isn’t Cleveland, Ohio?! We wasted all these decades rooting for the cursed Cavaliers, with some of us spending much time and money tracking down memorabilia of the Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro League. We all have a Lebron James jersey, though the name is always misspelled and the colors wrong.”
Your photographs of children are always enjoyable, and sometimes very moving. The little girl doing her homework is priceless. Thank you especially for that one.
Hope and inspiration, yes, you have shown them well.
Please stay safe and well during your travels. Your missives are blessings to your readers.
Sitting here in the cool of evening drinking a white wine while my children are preparing dinner in the house nearby - I take the chance to reread your column and see the beautiful photos on my laptop instead of the cramped phone screen - they are so beautiful again, especially the young girls -the angle of the shot, the purity of their eyes. I hope Laos works for you, I imagine you are there by now. Fall is approaching in the southern hemisphere - I saw the first red leaves on the tippy top of a maple tree I planted down by the creek. A week of calm, moderate weather ahead. Sometimes I read people writing about Australia as being a shithole and I am frankly astonished. What are they talking about? The past, the future? Surely not right now. This is heaven.
Nice poem. Reminds me of the Paul Thorn song Everythings gonna be alright. The first line is Eating fried chicken and mama's corn bread....got a v8 ford that's cherry red, heard a little voice inside my head everything's gonna be alright.
"Wrote it in Certaldo, Italy in 2003." Is fried chicken popular in Italy too? I know it is in Japan and most of Asia, but Italians used to have their own traditional chicken dishes. But I've read now that since 2014 they opened more restaurants and now have a total 49 KFC fast food places in all of Italy. Maybe not in Certaldo. Yet. Globalization marches on.
In the second of four photos at the end of your essay, that is a gigantic baby the smiling or perhaps laughing boy is holding. If there is one thing everyone loves it is a fat baby.
that fried chicken poem of yours was thought-provoking - [and speaking of chicken, i ate a chicken salad sandwich for lunch today - presumably the chicken in question lived and died without ever seeing the sky, a prisoner serving hard time all its life] - i read part of the discussion of that poem at the poetry foundation website also - it was hypothesized that your mention of apples and meat brought in religious issues: "apples being the christian problem and the jewish problem, and meat being the hindu problem that has caused wars"
i read about stung treng [river of reeds] and have found khmer music by sinn sisamouth on youtube - truly we live in a world of wonders
a world of wonders, and also horrors, of course - but love lures life on, and the body wants to breathe and eat - there is a saying that a self-reflective sentient being inevitably faces four existential questions
1/where did i come from
2/why am i here
3/where am i going
4/what's for lunch
i see from the wikivoyage entry about stung treng that if you are crossing to laos there is a visa fee which depends on your passport - do you have more than 1? i have two, but haven't used the second one yet - i got it from a country that my father emigrated from, and i am by virtue of his birth there a citizen - i got it last year but haven't crossed a national border since and don't know if i will again
FYI, 5 star chicken is a chain from India and we have a lot of them in Thailand. Better usually than KFC but not near as loved by Thai youth and falangs.
"Street level violence is allowed to happen to distract the masses from what’s done to all of them from above" the most brilliant and wildly successful tactic ever employed.
Your photographs of children are always enjoyable, and sometimes very moving. The little girl doing her homework is priceless. Thank you especially for that one.
Hope and inspiration, yes, you have shown them well.
Please stay safe and well during your travels. Your missives are blessings to your readers.
Sitting here in the cool of evening drinking a white wine while my children are preparing dinner in the house nearby - I take the chance to reread your column and see the beautiful photos on my laptop instead of the cramped phone screen - they are so beautiful again, especially the young girls -the angle of the shot, the purity of their eyes. I hope Laos works for you, I imagine you are there by now. Fall is approaching in the southern hemisphere - I saw the first red leaves on the tippy top of a maple tree I planted down by the creek. A week of calm, moderate weather ahead. Sometimes I read people writing about Australia as being a shithole and I am frankly astonished. What are they talking about? The past, the future? Surely not right now. This is heaven.
Nice poem. Reminds me of the Paul Thorn song Everythings gonna be alright. The first line is Eating fried chicken and mama's corn bread....got a v8 ford that's cherry red, heard a little voice inside my head everything's gonna be alright.
"Wrote it in Certaldo, Italy in 2003." Is fried chicken popular in Italy too? I know it is in Japan and most of Asia, but Italians used to have their own traditional chicken dishes. But I've read now that since 2014 they opened more restaurants and now have a total 49 KFC fast food places in all of Italy. Maybe not in Certaldo. Yet. Globalization marches on.
In the second of four photos at the end of your essay, that is a gigantic baby the smiling or perhaps laughing boy is holding. If there is one thing everyone loves it is a fat baby.
that fried chicken poem of yours was thought-provoking - [and speaking of chicken, i ate a chicken salad sandwich for lunch today - presumably the chicken in question lived and died without ever seeing the sky, a prisoner serving hard time all its life] - i read part of the discussion of that poem at the poetry foundation website also - it was hypothesized that your mention of apples and meat brought in religious issues: "apples being the christian problem and the jewish problem, and meat being the hindu problem that has caused wars"
i read about stung treng [river of reeds] and have found khmer music by sinn sisamouth on youtube - truly we live in a world of wonders
a world of wonders, and also horrors, of course - but love lures life on, and the body wants to breathe and eat - there is a saying that a self-reflective sentient being inevitably faces four existential questions
1/where did i come from
2/why am i here
3/where am i going
4/what's for lunch
i see from the wikivoyage entry about stung treng that if you are crossing to laos there is a visa fee which depends on your passport - do you have more than 1? i have two, but haven't used the second one yet - i got it from a country that my father emigrated from, and i am by virtue of his birth there a citizen - i got it last year but haven't crossed a national border since and don't know if i will again
FYI, 5 star chicken is a chain from India and we have a lot of them in Thailand. Better usually than KFC but not near as loved by Thai youth and falangs.
"Street level violence is allowed to happen to distract the masses from what’s done to all of them from above" the most brilliant and wildly successful tactic ever employed.