This is Benjamin

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Bowling and Human Failure

March 19th, 2009 | benjamin

I know I shouldn’t talk about Global Warming all the time. Its self-indulgent, and alarmist. But I couldn’t help myself, some urge, some dark neuron felt the impending calm that Laos brings and resisted. It wanted to upset and distort.

And so I told Stefan and Karl, our new German friends, of the horror global warming would bring. Famine, mass extinction of the human species, and it wasn’t going to be a glamorous apocalypse, no, no grand explosion to wipe us out once and for all, but slow, steady to decline into squalor, disease, suffering and decay.

They argued, that people are becoming responsive, I countered that there was not time. Monique groaned, probably praying that the Germans weren’t taking me too seriously. They didn’t, but argued vigorously.

The reason for this anecdote will become clearer later.

We parted to meet again at 8:30, beside the night market, at the foot steps leading the grand old temple that sits atop a hill in the middle of downtown. We took some cocktails, and some photos, they left us again to go market shopping. We moved to another bar, this time on a streetside location. We drank some more, grew merrier, closer I felt and as the bar’s in town closed one by one, their lights flickering out like eyes closing to sleep, it was decided we should go bowling.

Liquor licences in Luang Prabang only allow for trade to continue until about 11:00pm in the evening in normal circumstances. The exclusion to this rule is bowling alleys, which are allowed to operate through the night, and thus become the pseudo-night clubs of this ancient city.

This appeals to me, I’ll try to explain why. There’s some romantic about things, phenomena which are a byproduct of other decisions. I enjoy the lack of intentionality in such things and they acquire something that cannot reproduced deliberately. What is historically analogous? I’m trying to think. Soviet film culture, those vast symbolist epics that express themselves with a nuance that cannot be bought in a ‘free’ society. What else? Sex parties in Tehran, a desperate, free sexuality that would become crass and exploitative were it not for the repressive moral regime and the need for people to come to each other to no longer feel wholly subsumed in it.

It is as though from the clutter of structures, physical, mental, ideological, are productive in ways that are surplus to design. And it is this surplus that I savour.

Which is not to say that the bowling alley was some kind of paragon of culture. It was, it must be admitted, a dive, filled with indulgent backpackers. But it was wholly, wholly, out of this world.

One was either taking a game of bowling seriously, or, more likely, was clustered around one of the alleys two bars, the main reception where games could be organised and Beer Lao purchased, or another, more illuminated bar, a crawling mess of fairy lights, and liquor bottles, and unsteady on their feet westerners, served by Laos people with coy expressions.

I feverishly took photographs, trying to grasp and preserve something of this irreplaceable moment. One of the Laos girls stuck a beer bottle in the photo. Good for her. I smiled appreciatively. I mustn’t have been the first to feel that this was something entirely unique.

I floated around, talking, laughing, cataloguing. I had a photo taken with a policeman with a bag of something in my back pocket. I watched Monique with an Irishman who insisted that I was gay, an assessment whose consequence, if taken seriously, he perceived might be beneficial to his interests.

Someone painted my fingernail green, in honour of St Patrick’s day.

Karl and Stefan talked to pair of women, one German, one American, Stefan keeping a polite distance in honour of his absent partner.

We bowled, Stefan with the American, Karl with the Irishman, Monique and I joining our considerble athletic prowress.

I bowled respectably, knocking a pin off the corner now and then, suffering more than a few throws that landed in the gutter. In my peripheral vision a Laos man motions with his arms, trying to advise me as to how to bowl more effectively. My fingers did not even fit in the wholes of the light, pink ball I had chosen.

Monique and I cheered one another’s failures.

The American and the irishman bowled well, Stefan and Karl too. The game was at a close, with one ball left to bowl. The scores were something like 45, 60, 4.

The ball had just rolled into the gutter, and I watched the other teams began to act as though the game had finished. I decided a speech was in order.

As I gathered the fragments of my mind, I was not only thinking of the tragic, losing game Monique and I were playing. I remembered my earlier pessmism about our planet’s fortunes. It is entirely strange to fear something so calamitous that is also at the same time real, not a figment of our anxieties as is most often the case. It cannot be dismissed.

And yet this is not the end of the human story. Standing before the disinterested audience I reminded them that it was St Patrick’s day, ‘as such, I think you will agree that it is appropriate to quote from the emerald isle’s greatest playwright. I am talking, of course, about Samuel Beckett.’

I grew silent, to ensure that I held the attention of my audience The quote was ‘We will all fail’ and I looked each of the fellow players in the eye. ‘Each of us, yes we will all fail, but we must learn to fail better.’ And at that I turned and bowled. It skimmed the side and five pins fell.

Postscript:

I had wanted to end on that thought, but there are a couple of other incidences worth reminding.

I was cheered after my moderate success at the eleventh hour and the Irishman approached.

‘Well done, seems like Beckett helped you.’

‘Luck of the Irish’ was all I could think to reply.

‘No, no, no’ he said, my cliché had draining his enthusiasm. He walked away disturbed and furrowed.

The alley began to close and we then sat in that slovenly, purposeless way that drunken people do when there is no more alcohol. The staff floated around us grumpily, doing everything short of physically shoving us to compel us to leave.

Eventually, someone took the initiative and we obeyed, spilling out into the street.

Tuk-tuk drivers crowded around and we quickly negotiated a price back to downtown. A large, bald man joined us in the back. I never determined where he was from because he was so drunk he could hardly speak.

Stefan later insisted that he was ‘A Russian neo-nazi.’ Or maybe it was Karl.

‘He is a neo-nazi, can’t you tell from his shaved head?”

‘If he was a neo-nazi, why would he be in a Laos. Would a German neo-nazi holiday in Laos.’

‘No perhaps not.’

‘No, he’d go to Saxony or something.’

A driver approached the man and insisted that he had failed to pay for his drive to the bowling alley earlier. The man could hardly answer.

The Irishman approached to mediate.

‘You didn’t pay the man. Pay him now.’

‘Wh?’

‘You didn’t pay for your drive. You owe this man twenty kip.’

The German woman from earlier was seated next to him.

‘I don’t think he has any money. Take out your wallet,’ she ordered him.

The man fumbled around in his pants and pulled out a wallet.

‘Now take out twenty.’ I was impressed by the Prussian efficiency of her actions

His fat hands curled around the notes, drawing them up to his eyes and then returning them to their leather home. He would then look around at us bemused.

‘You owe this man 20 kip’, the Irishman repeated with irritation.

‘He has US dollars. Give him three US dollars. One…’ she counted with him ‘two, three.’

All the while the Irishman stood over this man and I began to wonder exactly what his agenda was. I couldn’t recall when we met him, where he came from, and how we started to bowl with him. Maybe he was working for someone. Was this some sort of a conspiracy?

Eventually, he took out the required funds and the tuk-tuk driver disappeared. But why hadn’t he followed him into the alley for payment? Why wait outside. Scenes of the earlier mayhem flashed before my eyes. I began to understand.

It emerged that the Irishman was not going to travel with us.

‘Alright mate,’ I said. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Maybe we should have coffee tomorrow.’

‘Sound’s great, where are you staying?’

Not remembering the name of the guesthouse, and not wanting to remember I said non-committally,

‘I’m not sure, one of the places on the main street.’

There must be at least fifty. The Irishman said nothing and walked away, stepping into a white car that had mysteriously pulled up beside the tuk-tuk. He sped away.

Laos PDR

March 12th, 2009 | benjamin

PDR = POLICE DON’T READ, as such, I am able to access my blog.

Expect more, from me, from life, from everything.