The Kuala Lumpur Airport

So,
I'm at the transit lounge here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with a long gap between the flight from Bangkok onward to Nagoya, Japan. In fact it is so long (5 hours), I decided to fork out the $18 US to take up the nice service the airport here offers, including this email message I am currently composing to you.

Among the other priviledges: hot shower, free food, movies, CDs and if I wanna feel a bit like Mike Weir (Tiger who?), I can practice my 30 foot birdie putts if I want on the mini putt green.

Just to think in a few days (Mar. 1 to be exact) I'll be doing the exact same thing only in the other direction, from Nagoya to Bangkok with this stopover in Kuala Lumpur...wow.

And why am I stopping over in Kuala Lumpur? Good question, and I'm glad you asked, so I'll answer it.

If you look at a map, Kuala Lumpur is in fact more south and out of the way from Bangkok; however, the stupid booking agency in Japan has this route as the cheapest ($560 US return). That, in a nutshell is the reason--it's a cheap flight using the usual Japanese logic--you really can't get things to go the way you would like them to go--in fact, there needs to be a little "pain" --that bit of discomfort--in order for it to work in Japan. Keeps the natives tame I guess.

I read some good stuff and not so good stuff on this trip. Funny, in the "good ol' days", I would content myself by meeting a whole lot of different people and going on various adventures, but this time, the nicest adventure I had was reading H.G. Wells. What a storyteller! Here's a tidbit:
...I had suddenly been cut adrift from all matter: all that was material to me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to earth with gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving in its wreaths of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter: where it parts form the garment of the flesh, there it remains, immovable in space. I was not leaving the earth, the earth was leaving me, and not only the earth but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!

--from "Under the Knife", January, 1896

Indeed. A release of the material to face the eternal immaterial. What thought!

Anyway, like I say, I tried reading Rush Limbaugh to get that side of heaven, but I really didn't find it... heaven that is. If anything, if the Florida vote wasn't "doped", one could lay claim the reason the Republicans have made it such a God-awful world in the last few years is because of his radio histrionics that really got that white trash vote out there seeing red for every dollar the government spent on saving a life in the United States. Yes, very simplisitic, but I'll stick with that version till proven otherwise (seems the notion of "proving innocence" is de rigeur these days...hmmm... wasn't it" innocent until proven guilty"--except in the case of Iraq? We're living in George Orwell's nightmare, folks). At any rate, I took as much as I could stomach, which was maybe 8 pages, and threw it away.

I was delighted with Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying"... Henry Miller was right in encouraging her on...what a voice for humankind! I thought it was going to be some slutty, trashy thing, but it was very intelligent and moving in all the right ways. Definitely worth a look.

Between the books there was sun, sand, swimming, beer and green leaves that only grow with a lot of light, who cull the light into their buds and this light can be ingested and make you feel sunny all over for the afternoon.

What a holiday!

I didn't see too many movies towards the end, but of them all, Adaptation is one that stuck with me (to Doug-- I think it worth more discussion after all).

More on all this later. Time to go take a shower here at the Kuala Lumpur Airport.

Your Gaga