Eight Feet Deep

Perhaps it is the prescription drug that is fogging my mind but I had forgotten that the phrase “Better Living Through Chemistry” actually paraphrased the slogan Dow Chemical used for many years: “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry.” Either way the better living part all depends on how that chemistry is used. At the moment,  the chemistry in my brain that I am using as the doctor told me to has left me a bit on the wobbly side.

I was prescribed the drug gabapentin, commonly known as Neurontin, yesterday for what my doctor suspects as some kind of neuropathy, or nerve pain that has been causing both of my feet to hurt and become numb after what I think is limited use. I will have some tests to find out for sure if neuropathy is what I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got. Sorry I was thinking about a song. I’ve lost my train of thought. The train has left the station. Anyway, the point I am trying to make — so poorly — is that right now, clarity is not exactly my middle name. Of course, it never was.

Nevertheless, whatever  you do when you get prescribed a drug, don’t read about it. It will scare the living hell out of you. This one I am taking has a whole  host of possible side effects short of a condition known as hot dog finger. The most disturbing is this warning issued by the FDA for this entire class of drugs which were originally used in treating epilepsy. The notice, which warns of an increased risk of suicidal behavior,  kind of makes my cottonmouth and however you describe how I am feeling look insignificant.

And my toes still hurt. It’s time for flip flops.

When Neil Armstrong took those first historic steps on the Moon I was a 13-year-old securely tucked behind the “Pine Curtain” of Southeast Texas. 

Things were fairly slow filtering through the cultural walls juxtaposed between the Old South and the Southwest. Yet due to the wonders of that little black and white box known as television, I was able to see Armstrong take those first few steps and proclaim mankind had taken a giant leap.

The world is pretty scary for kids. It is even more full of consternation for one entering into puberty. Given the context of the times — 1969 — the world made exceptionally less sense.

A war was raging in Southeast Asia. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were fresh in our minds. All kinds of  radicals lurked about. Less than a month after the Moon landing the so-called “Tate-LaBianca Murders” would take place and we would get a glimpse of that wild-eyed sociopath Charles Manson.

So, that man — specifically American man — had landed on the Moon for the first time was quite a respite for me from all the weirdness that was life.

Much has happened since that day, 40 years ago today. I am 53. Life is still strange and not all that much clearer in meaning. I am sitting here about to publish something over what’s called the Internet. My cell phone is sitting nearby. And then there is Starbucks.

Our last president up and decided we need to go back to the Moon. I never totally understood why we ever left. Perhaps it was a political thing. I suppose it is less easy for nations to get into a snit over territory when  one talks about something floating out in space as opposed to a base built on a natural satellite.

So now we talk about going back. But it appears that won’t happen until 2020. That’s about 11 years or so. It didn’t take that long to get there once we made up our mind to do it. We should have already been on Mars by now, one would think. Now people are bickering over whether we should go back to the Moon or travel to Mars. Maybe we should just bypass Mars altogether and land on Saturn. It looks a lot cooler what with the rings.

Wherever we, mankind, ends up going in space we will probably settle it and exploit whatever resources the body has to the best of our abilities. You will also probably see a Starbucks located at each and every pod on the planet. Grande Caffè Latte anyone?

When I hear people speak generically of their having visited “foreign” countries I am almost immediately tempted to ask: “How foreign were they?”

It should be obvious that some places away from one’s normal haunts exhibit more of an extrinsic feel than others. If you walk into a Starbucks in Vancouver, British Columbia, it would hardly be an alien experience especially if you had visited a Starbucks the day before in Seattle.

I was hardly a world traveler when I made a WestPac (Western Pacific) and Southern Pacific cruise in the Navy. Still it took quite a few port visits until I found a place that really struck me as foreign.

I had only made a couple of trips to Mexican border towns before deploying from San Diego on a destroyer for a year. And even though seeing a Col. Sanders with the brown hue of his Mexican hermanos at a KFC in Juarez, or marveling at a jackass painted with black stripes like a zebra outside a Tijuana bar, the border towns never struck me as being more alien than say a stroll down the French Quarter.

Even the off-base Philippines of Olangapo and Subic Bay, with its street vendors selling monkey meat on a stick or its cocky kids diving into the dark depths of Shit River to retrieve coins thrown in by passing sailors, seemed more an X-rated, hedonistic Disneyland for American sailors than a real foreign country.

Perhaps the one factor which separated alien from familiar was the frequency of spoken English.

My ship spent about two months of its cruise also playing war games with the Kiwis and Aussies and visiting its wonderful ports and people all over New Zealand and Australia.

Those two countries were foreign in one respect. That is the kind and civilized behavior could be so extreme at times as to be taken aback. And being from the South and from Texas, I always thought we were pretty friendly folks.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Jakarta — site of what appears to be the latest Jihadist attack on a pair of luxury hotels — that I found what really struck me as foreign.

The first day there found me on a bus with an Indonesian driver who apparently had no idea where he was supposed to take us. Then, he crossed into what seemed to be a lane for bicycles, sending one poor soul flying through the air. Luckily, I was seated and my vision was blocked by my fellow sailors who were standing who saw the whole sad spectacle. We never found out what happened to the biker. Apparently, the bus driver wasn’t concerned.

This was in 1978 and I am not sure of what was going on politically back then, or if this was just normal, but it seemed one didn’t have to look very far to see trucks carrying soldiers armed with automatic weapons combing the streets.

As memorable as that first day was in Jakarta, the second day would count as scary. I took off by myself for what I believed to be the city of Jakarta’s central business district. It took several hours to find, even in a bustling, cosmopolitan city such as Jakarta, someone who spoke English and who could tell me where I needed to go to get to my destination.

During the time that I visited, at least by State Department figures, Jakarta had somewhere in the vicinity of 5-6 million residents. Today, the population of the city itself is estimated at 8.5 million. It is Southeast Asia’s largest city, the 12th largest in the world and is part of the sixth largest metropolitan area.

Indonesia also has the largest Islamic population in the world and that was the case when I visited. Although I have not read anything as of yet which has sorted out the casualties from the bomb blasts in Jakarta along lines of Mulslim versus non-Muslim. It would seem the chances likely for those of the Islamic faith to suffer wounds from the blasts in what our culture calls in its euphemistic manner “collateral damage.”

What does all of this have to do with my musings on experiencing foreign and the not-so-foreign culture? Nothing at all really. Only, no matter how we walk down the street we are not really so different as to escape what is basically, pure evil. Call the perversion of religious beliefs religion if you want. But it doesn’t seem as if it would fit into much of the larger world’s understanding when it comes to those with individual religious leanings.

I am no religious man and by no means a holy man. But I can’t help but see such evil as foreign to the many who live decent lives in a good world.