Tequila Mockingbird: Magic potion divinely inspired
The secret potion I revealed several months ago has proven a great success, in terms of interested visitors from around the world. And the world should rejoice, for yet another formula has recently come to me in a vision. Preliminary testing is complete. 
Tequila Mockingbird (serves 4-6)
Tequila 500ml
Dried & roasted hot chili peppers 4-5 or to taste
Chaser/antidote
Lime juice 500ml
Sugar 4 tblsps or to taste
Salt 2 tspns to mix in
Coarse salt enough to rime the rim of the glass
Crushed ice Whatever it takes
Preparation. Pour the tequila into a small saucepan (the smaller the surface area exposed, to a point, the less alcohol lost to the atmosphere). Pour gently so as not to offend the ancient spirits of the Aztecs by bruising this much under-rated liquor. Add the dried chili peppers. Only now should you turn on the heat, gradually warming the mixture till it’s about to simmer. As soon as you notice tiny bubbles ascending, turn the heat down slightly. Coddle the chilies for 3 minutes. Then turn the heat way up, watching carefully till you spot the first enthusiastic bubbles. Turn the heat off immediately and let the mixture sit for a few seconds. Remove the chilis and pour the liquid into pre-warmed old-fashioned glasses.
Administering it. Gaze mindfully at the elixir for a moment. Then andale, andale before it cools, slam it straight down the hatch. You can mutter ai cariba if you like. Clutch a handful of crushed ice to your forehead.
This next part is important. Don’t stop to wipe at your eyes (especially if you’ve been handling the chilis). Don’t say anything more. Just reach for the chaser and shoot it back, but don’t swallow any of it till you’ve swished it around a bit. Gargle if you feel like it. Then swallow.
Review the situation. Do you feel transformed? Or should you prepare another dose right away?
Post-elixir discipline. Adopt a secure and comfortable position where you can remain awake and alert while you attend mindfully to the ensuing mental, physical and, quite possibly, spiritual sensations. Recall the ying and yang of hot on your palate and cold on your forehead. Reflect on the persistent burr in mouth and throat, the sense of heightened preparedness for whatever other novelties your adjacent future might hold in store.
Consider the notion that, if the first dose has done this much good, a second dose therefore ought to be twice as beneficial. Hold this idea firmly in mind as you reflect on its sources and likely karmic effects, as well as on what your mother always told you about not being such a jackass.
Don’t try to operate heavy equipment for some hours after partaking of this stuff. Neither should you perform Morris dancing on icy surfaces.
After you opt for that second dose, reflect extra mindfully, with whatever mind remains at your disposal, on the potential merits of a third shot. You should wait at least half an hour, and possibly until your mother contacts you, before doing anything rash. If you’ve adopted a post-elixir meditative position higher than the floor, don’t fall off it.
Tests in progress. I have no formal medical training, and accept no liability for unforeseen consequences of imbibing this particular potion. But see the following comments from people who engaged in clinical trials at our dinner party last night:
“It’s good.” (The charming Carmen, a woman of keenly developed sensibilities and much discernment.)
“It’s making my throat burn.” (Ken, Carmen’s husband, an experienced journalist and editor with finely honed observational faculties.)
“I think I see something!” (Susan, novelist and connoisseur.)
“I don’t believe we can judge adequately from just one of these.” (Brad, Susan’s husband, a vastly experienced journalist and by
nature a careful man. Inspired by the elixir itself, Brad immediately dubbed this potion “Tequila Mockingbird”. And so it shall be called.)
“Hm.” (My Sara, her expression suggesting, to me at least, that she no longer thought I was quite the idiot she suspected I must be when first I proposed this concoction.)
All experimental subjects have reported in alive this morning, and claim to be enjoying this fine winter’s day in Bangkok, though they are reluctant to attribute the excellent weather itself to T. Mockingbird.
Clinical trials are ongoing. In the meantime, both Jeff the Giant Anthropologist and Bill the Mathematician agree that therapeutic effects might well include the triggering of endorphins by the capsaicin in the chili peppers, while the alcohol surely opens the capillaries and pores and things to that and all manner of other beneficial effects emanating from both your internal and external environments (potentially, e.g., the auras of people who earlier seemed less attractive). The vitamin C in the lime can’t hurt, while the combination of salt and sugar tastes good, especially to people accustomed to drinking Thai nam menow, the refreshing local lime juice concoction. Both the acid in the lime and the salt also react chemically to help neutralize the chili heat. (Reduce the salt in proportion to the extent you’ve been living in Thailand or maybe Mexico and hence wish to conserve the chili heat, addicted as you are to the accompanying endorphin rush.)
Do not drive a vehicle under the influence of this potion. Don’t even think about it.
Happy holidays.
Pale precursors to T. Mockingbird, I discover, include "Devils Water" seven pepper-infused tequila, although this is neither prepared over heat nor served hot.
I love this compendium of tequila's therapeutic effects. (No doubt you’ve all heard it before; it has been floating around the Web for a year or two.)
Second & third thoughts re. scuba wisdom
This week I’ve been reading On Dialogue, by the late, great physicist-philosopher-neuropsychologist David Bohm. In this book, he presents, among other things, a useful notion he describes as the “proprioception of thought.” I now see that, once again, I’ve reinvented the wheel, though my scuba-wisdom version is pretty primitive compared to Bohm’s.
Never mind that Bill the Mathematician had already asked me how my stop-breathe-think fix differed from counting to ten, an idea that has been around awhile. So here I’ve re-emerged onto land, triumphant, only to find I’ve reinvented the bicycle.
Further reflection, however, leads me to wonder to what extent Bohm himself hadn’t also reinvented a wheel—i.e. a relatively primitive version of what Buddhism, an ancient and sophisticated psychology, has accomplished in part by way of disciplined mindfulness, for instance vipassana meditation.
More on that later.
Proprioceptors, in case you didn’t know, are internal nervous-system sensors that tell you how you and your various bits are disposed at any given time. Those of my inner ear (among others) even now tell me I’m sitting upright here in my chair instead of lying on the floor. Proprioceptors in my hand, meanwhile, inform me that it is right there at the end of my arm safely wrapped around this glass of wine and not, e.g., out in the kitchen rummaging around for something that might complement a passable Chardonnay. … Excuse me—my hand is now back on the keyboard, preparing to bring this blather to a conclusion.
Bohm’s notion of developing a parallel“proprioception of thought” is well worth considering. (With both the latter idea and with vipassana, the process leads inevitably to reflections on our embeddedness in larger associations of minds and on our relations and responsibilities within such. Or so I’m going to maintain, and you can blame the Chardonnay if I’m wrong.)
Note the balloon glass, Sara's crystal balloon glass that has gone all out of focus at the mere touch of a merely passable Chardonnay. Or is that me that's gone out of focus? My proprioceptors remain neutral in this matter.
Starbucks and the social construction of reality
Sara and I are having breakfast at Starbucks. Being a kee niaow species of curmudgeon, I’m complaining about everything from the prices to the clonish docking of people and their digital devices. Discerning impatience in her manner, I eventually desist.
“Give me a break,” she says, going on to explain that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; it sells a lifestyle experience, and I should dummy up about it, she’s trying to relax.
Ah, I reply. So we’re banking some sort of lifestyle karma here, and it’s probably cheap at the price.
Sara says I have a talent for turning what should be a simple cup of coffee and a dose of lifestyle experience into a mountain of mumbo-jumbo and a pain in the ass, and I believe she could be right. Nevertheless.
Speeding away on caffeine, I tell her that reality is a social construct. Once people start to recognize this, even only tacitly, then the construction of social reality becomes big business, with advertising, public relations, politicians and special interest groups all packaging and selling their own realities. The mass of the people are consumers, then, of realities. Reality is basically a range of supermarket commodities, and you just stroll along picking glitzy packages off the shelves. Choosing our “lifestyles” and personalities du jour is part of this. (Consumerism-infused New Age thinking is no exception.)
Modular mix and matching rools, OK! I am my iPhone, not to mention my Timberland shoes, Levi's 501 jeans and the Melody Gardot on my iPod. That’s this week. Maybe I’ll let Jack the Hack Shackaway be my lifestyle/personal image mentor next week, and wear a tie, maybe carry a nicely rumpled sports jacket in case I find myself subjected to Bangkok hi-so grade air-conditioning, ducking in to some flash establishment to seek shelter from the rain and not wanting then to die of exposure. Yeah, and that week I’ll be plugged in to Dion singing “St. Jerome the Thunderer” over and over again till I can’t get it out of my head even when I wrench the earphones out and moan and clasp my head with both hands.
“You always know best,” says Sara. “What makes you think you’re better?”
Son of iMac, spawn of the Devil
Some lads my age buy themselves a Harley, or a nice gun-metal Lamborghini. Instead, I’ve recently switched from PC to Apple and bought a secondhand state-of-the-art 27” iMac desktop.
I’ve suffered the transition to a new operating system, familiarized myself with 1,000 new key commands for a bunch of new programs, and learned interesting things such as how you really need a UPS and how incredibly expensive a UPS really is for this particular computer, and that, no matter how mature and savvy and well-versed in the pathology of consumerism and how it relates to the failure of the Western metaphysic and the hard-wired shitheadedness of the average specimen of Homo sapiens, I can still find myself in the position I am now in, with Sara saying I did the right thing, and I should just relax and enjoy it, and there, there, you aren’t really a moron, though I know she secretly believes I am, and delights in this circumstance.
Especially after I found how inconvenient it was to lug the 27” iMac along to the coffee shop with me. That’s right. So I pretty well had to buy a Mac Pro laptop as well, eh?
Hey, but now I’m the dude.
Crack-crazed butterflies in rampant botanical garden
The future of the book
"Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?"
1. Alice. To say I resemble a Ludditic old fart is too harsh, but I fear the “Alice”-type wave of the future will help to destroy both valuable reading habits and the commercial prospects for quality writing and publishing.
Okay, okay. I know. We’ve had thousands of years of whingeing ninnies who oppose technological innovation in information delivery. The doomsters see crisis at every turn. (Have a look at Neil Postman’s excellentTechnopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, e.g., especially Chapter Four.) More than 2,600 years ago, e.g., Socrates warned that the written word itself would destroy our native memories. Yadda-yadda, eh? But the move from a oral to a written culture went on to bring great benefits.
Then, about 570 years ago, many considered the printing press socially and politically subversive. To some extent, these worries were justified. But few today would deny the manifest proven advantages of the written word and popularly accessible printed information.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we can assume that change and novelty are in themselves somehow inevitably valuable. (Though many in our modern culture do. Our consumerist societies, it can be suggested, in fact depend on encouraging this already endemic attitude.) Biological evolution, e.g., is full of species that innovated themselves right out of luck. Brand-new features that seemed like a darned good idea in one context proved fatal to the whole species in another. Ask the dodo about the survival value of sauntering around the place all plump and congenial after Homo sapiens hits the beach. There’s no evidence that mutation and natural selection leads inevitably to more successful organisms. And there’s no more evidence that cultural and technological innovation necessarily means progress.
What are we left with when the novelty value of Alice wears off? My own attention already gets blown to bits by the demands of cell phone, e-mail, Facebook, a blog, this, that and the other. (See? The words elude me; multi-tasking and pathological levels of distraction have eaten my mind.) So I need books that have me flitting from place to place like a crack-crazed butterfly in some insanely efflorescent garden? I don’t think so.
2. Coupland. Then we’re given the genial, let’s-all-read-stuff-we-like-together-and-thereby-narrow-the-range-of-options Coupland literary current. (Can your e-book reader handle hypenated phrases of such grandeur?) This is something that may well carry us in directions opposite to those it promises.
Like a lot of other people, I’m finding myself swamped with things I feel I ought to read. I have a Kindle that already holds enough to keep me reading long after I’m dead of old age. I stand in danger of being crushed, here in my apartment, by avalanches of paper books that need reading or re-reading. Good friends lend me, as good friends will, new books every time they see me, no matter how much I tell them it may be my next turn on the Wheel before I get to read them. A long and growing list of favorite Internet sites tempt me daily with fascinating books, essays, articles and blogs, every one of these linked to many other interesting books, articles, videos and blogs. In short, I’m drowning in information, or at least in guilt at the ocean of information I feel I should somehow deal with.
Then along comes Coupland, offering to rationalize this maelstrom for me. Right. Now I can slip into reading groups where colleagues, fellow professionals, and social reading clubs list even more things I should really read or I’m not playing the requisite professional or social games. Whoa. Once again, virtual magic is just making my life better.
And I suspect this approach conceals a nasty authoritarian element. Too often we’ll feel compelled to at least skim or pretend to have read a lot of these booklists that precipitate around our work and and social lives, none of which we’ll have time for any more because we’re constantly browsing the magic digital mountain hoping to become truly engaged with some part of it, or else retreating into videos and games on our iPads, trying to dull the squirrely hysteria at all the informational goodies that need stashing.
3. Nelson. Judging by the comments on the site, there’s more tolerance for this approach, which could be useful for students and other researchers.
Whatever. Unless they’re already finanically secure one way or the other, writers are already doomed. For one thing, it’s being said, they need “platforms”—credible gangs of fans visiting their websites and blogs—or agents and publishers aren’t going to take them seriously. So there’s no time to write anyway, forget the issue of whether there’ll be any readers around to appreciate it.
I’m refraining from sauntering around looking plump and congenial, and I’m trying to discipline myself when it comes to the digital universe, but the barbarians are clearly at the gate, big time. And what am I doing? I’m sitting here, entirely distracted from the hard business of writing, wasting valuable time composing a post about being distracted.
Postmodern irony, or what? Sara claims it’s just bone-headedness.
Things fall apart redux
I sit in my office sweating.
The 27-inch iMac gazes blankly at me from inside its raincoat, the pair of us waiting for the air-conditioner repairmen to arrive. It all started when my old PC laptop clapped out, exposing me to attack by the consumerist virus waiting in ambush. Next thing I knew, I was the proudish owner of a nearly-new iMac super doodah. And now look. The world is disintegrating.
Long-slumbering volcano erupts in Sumatra. Floods in Pakistan, India and China. Floods upcountry here in Thailand, soon to strike at Bangkok. Everywhere there’s no flooding, there’s drought and desertification, except where you get pandemic condos and shopping malls instead. Decaying glaciers and icecaps, dying reefs, dying copyright protection for intellectual property. And in reserve you have your speeding asteroids, bulletproof infectious bacteria, a super-volcano swelling up from Earth’s molten core beneath Yosemite National Park, climatically catastrophic upwellings of methane from beneath the sea floor, Chinese mass tourism, still more Hollywood sequels and remakes, the threat of a Republican administration in the USA, the redshirt resurgence in Thailand… the list goes on.
Locally—on a lesser scale but clearly related—in the past week Sara’s car has needed new tires all around plus some kind of pulley, it must be made of platinum it cost so much. The electric kettle that keeps water ready for my tea cashed in its chips. The insulated drinking-water jug in the bedroom sprung an irreparable leak. Sara, for reasons that remain unclear to me, dropped her new 3Gs iPhone in a wee Tupperware container full of water. (All seems well, after she left 1,000 baht with a handy dude in MBK who administered CPR and replaced the microphone.) I blew the soles on my trusty running shoes. The building appears to be settling and the hall doorway doesn’t fit anymore. (I believe that’s a line from an old blues song.) The washing machine, in its spin cycle, sounds like a cement mixer full of bowling balls, and there’s another repair crew that’ll need waiting for. I fell asleep in the bath and drowned a copy of Twilight. (IQ test: find the one item in the above list that doesn’t belong.)
And now the air-conditioner in my office, right above my iMac supercomputer and stuff, is dripping water like a hard rain. Where will it all end?
These phenomena are probably related to the emergent random structural violence pandemic (RSVP). For sure, if you put all this shit on a graph, you can see things pretty precipitously plunging towards Armageddon. And did I mention alliteration? It’s everywhere; it’s everywhere.
… Ah. There’s the doorbell. It must be the air-con guys. Unless, of course, it’s terrorist gunmen or alien anthropophages.
For a contrarian view—an unfashionably optimistic, not to say utterly Pollyannaish antidote to prophets of doom such as myself—see Matt Ridley’s latest book:
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.
A review of this book on a site devoted to trashing books supportive of “libertarianism”.
One reason I’ve become a science-fiction writer, a glimmer of optimism in this dark, dark existence I call a life: Homage to Ray Bradbury video (some might find the language offensive, but no one I know personally).
Deep, dark secret lives
We really are all getting wired together. I let this one out into the wild a week ago, just to a couple of friends, and copies keep coming back to me by e-mail from increasingly unlikely sources. It's a little scary. I guess it's too late to decide my mining background should be a deep, dark secret (as mining-day secrets should be).
The photo was taken quite some time ago, if I may be coy about it (as hardrock miners typically are), with an 8mm "spy camera." A friend in Montreal with darkroom equipment and an old apartment with high ceilings stood a bed on end, placed the developer atop this piece of makeshift equipment and put the paper on the floor. The print spent the last umpteen years rolled up in a tube before I recently scanned it. 
Sara says I look the same today. Unfortunately. Same sense of sartorial splendor. The lot.
Hunted by dragons
"My girlfriend, the skipper’s wife and myself were standing atop a steep-sided limestone islet poking up just off a beach on Horseshoe Bay, Rinca Island, Komodo National Park. And more company was on its way. A hundred metres down the beach the way we had come, I noticed, a 2.5m dragon was following hot upon the flick-flick-flick of its tongue, moving toward us as though it were very late for lunch indeed."
Read the whole story: "Dragon's Dinner Manque."
Graham Abbott, a first-rate underwater photographic and natural history dive-cruise leader based in Bali, is off to Komodo National Park. In response to someone's note about watching out for the Komodo dragons, he compared these critters to big dogs. When I suggested they could resemble nasty big dogs, he said he'd like to hear my story. So here it is.
In fact, the experts proffer mixed opinions about how dangerous Komodo lizards are to humans. These opinions aside, I can testify that, properly appetized, they can indeed get interested in taking a piece out of you. Here's one from Komodo Island, fairly used to people and docile, as these things go.
But I don't want to over-dramatize matters. In fact it's easy to find closely related monitor lizards right here in Bangkok's canals and city parks. They're smaller, but not that much smaller. Here's a recent catch from Suan Rhotfai, just north of Chatujak Weekend Market (this specimen was about two meters long):
I've never heard of anyone being attacked, though that might be because Thais tend to detest big lizards so much, for reasons that have never been clarified for me, they never get close enough to be threatened.
Back to Komodo National Park, here we have Sara shooting a big lizard, never mind she's a Thai, getting right up close and personal.
In fact they went on to become good friends. 
Linus Pauling and the Energy Vortex rool, OK!
The flu season is here.
I was coming down with a massive cold yesterday. The signs arrived the night before—a fluey muzziness, a cough, soreness in the chest. Past experience suggested I’d have a ripping head cold and sinusitis by morning, fever and a sore throat the next day, and a fine honking case of bronchitis to follow.
My old friend Bibi Bulambowitz is a vastly intelligent, worldly, emotionally volatile individual who has been living too close for too long to a notorious cosmic energy vortex and its attendant mob of New Agers. So I have to take her advice with a grain of salt (itself a New Age practice among ancient Romans). Anyway, she said she knows I’m a skeptic, and bone-headed to boot, but here’s what I should do. I should take 4,000mm of vitamin C every four hours for two days. And this vitamin C of which she spoke should include bioflavonoids. Why? She wasn’t sure, but I should trust her in this matter. And no, it doesn’t work better at the crossroads in the full of the moon, she told me in answer to my query.
Linus Pauling lives! But I wasn’t in the mood for flu/bronchitis/the whole shtick. A doctor would merely tell me to take some aspirin, drink a lot of fluids. Rest. And I’d still have bronchitis next month. So I thought what the heck, eh? I took 12 big tabs of vit. C (with bioflavonoids and stuff) yesterday, and another four upon rising this morning. And guess what? It worked. This malarkey got right past my skeptical defenses, I’m embarrassed to say, and cured me.
I don’t feel really excellent, something I rarely do anyway. But I have no head cold, no more sinusitis than your average Bangkokian experiences every day of his life. My chest feels normal. Prognosis generally positive, in fact, except now I can find no justification for goofing off for a day or two. The down side of health.
What’s that? Oh, yeah.
Sara has just reminded me of a recent lecture I gave her on the placebo effect, when she was taking capsules full of some green powder that a colleague had dealt her, claiming this would cure the common cold, prevent osteoporosis, and generally keep her motor humming to a ripe old age.
Yeah, but, I tell her. This is different. It works. Don’t ask me how.
Bibi really knows her placebos, says Sara.
What’s a bioflavonoid?
No iMac for me, no sirree.
I’m not going to buy the iMac. (See my earlier post 26 July: "Make yourself feel better and save $200,000 to boot".)
I recognize the syndrome. The world is going to hell all around me, and I haven’t won any literary prizes this week. My girl don’t love me and my chickens all ran away, not to mention my cotton won’t grow (© Mad Max iMac McGinty), and I sit here singing the blues and wondering what would make me feel better.
This is what leads grown suburbanite men to buy cabin cruisers and then park them in their driveways as a handy place to sit and drink beer with friends and wear their Tilly hats and talk about fishing. (Far lesser fits of existential angst merely leads Sara to go to a department store and buy a new blouse or skirt. Of course, this is a far lesser pressure on the budget, and a blouse at least keeps the chill off.)
What I’m saying is that the Mac-lust is merely a nearly universal human tendency, first of all, to want to leave some mark on the world—some tangible evidence we exist, a sign that says “I have passed this way.” It’s also a status thing, a bit like wolves pissing on the boundaries of their territory but arguably more polite. Most basically these days, however, it’s a symptom of the consumerist virus that infects the mind with insane urges to buy things that you don’t need. (Here’s an juliet schor interview2 - JCC that explores this syndrome in some detail.)
As the Lord Buddha, for one, clearly saw—this behavior will only leave you unhappy again, once the initial buzz wears off and you hear that some even fancier item is now available, and one of them even now rests with the Jones in the apartment next door. Yeah. Next thing you know there’s a new iMac that’s powerful enough you can use it to fly whole communities, maybe even the entire Tea Party, across vast interstellar distances to other galaxies. And you’ll just have to have this thing, even though all you’ll do with it is string words together and then change them around this way and that till you get tired of it. (That’s if you’re a wordsmith, which I claim to be.)
Just buy it, says Sara. Stop talking about it and buy it. It’ll be good for you.
And this, and that, but there’s no way I’m going to buy the iMac, no matter how half-price it might be, and no matter how enormous the pile of money I’ll therefore save. Okay? Geez.
Balloon glasses & Buddhist Lent
Khao Phansa—roughly, “Buddhist Lent,” also known as the Rains Retreat, a time of spiritual renewal—began yesterday.
Sara came home late from a post-workday shopping excursion with Ms. Kook, her chief mentor in all things consumerist. They went to Siam Paragon Center, where many items were “70-80 percent off.” And what did she buy? A bunch of leaded crystal balloon glasses from the Czech Republic.
“Just look at all the money I saved,” she says, with a knowing grin. Just a little one. “The original price was very high.” And she names a figure that, if you shave 80 percent off it, still leaves your average starving writer gasping for breath.
“Whoa!” I reply. “I was only talking about the half-price iMac I-will-supersede-the-human-race computer. That was all just as-if, you know?”
“Aren’t they beautiful?”
And so they are. Elegant shape, exquisite bell-like tone when you clink them. (“Clink” doesn’t really describe it.)
“Is there any money left over for some wine that might do justice to these glasses?”
“We can save up.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, really. We have three months.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve given up drinking wine for Khao Phansa. For three months."
Well, sure. You buy the nicest wine glasses in town—in the whole world, for all I know—and then, I guess, you merely sit around and contemplate them for three months. It’s probably some kind of Zen thing. Even if we could afford it, there’s actually no wine perfect enough for such glasses, so we instead use them as meditative vehicles to appreciate the idea of the perfect wine. Perfect.
“I also bought these panties. Eighty percent off.”
Yow. As women’s undergarments go, these are the Czech crystal balloon glasses of all panties… Wait a minute. Surely not.
"This stuff you're giving up for Khao Phansa," I ask, "is there anything you aren't telling me?"
Man for an age
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