South-East Journals part 2 (Jan 18, 2013)
Trying times in Bali and Thailand, entry two: Harmony
Harmony. “That is my name” he says “but I’m not in harmony. Maybe the next incarnation . . .” Chad and I skipped out on a Jiu-Jitsu class taught by a white dude that was recommended to us by another white dude who was wearing hawaiian board shorts and toe-shoes. We went and sat on the corner of Jalan Raya Ubud and Jazz Road and we said to ourselves “My, my, how busy… my, my” and “What are all these people doing speeding around everywhere?” We thought we were on island time but there were scooters honking and Japanese tour-buses and car fumes, hot rubber. There were vans full of tourists, taxi-cabs waiting in traffic and big advertisements along the sidewalks like a Mexican freeway. The air was thick and mixed with smog. I could feel it collecting on my greasy face. We opened a bottle of water. What a wild place. This island. This little island in the middle of miles of ocean housing this old old stone town surrounded by rice paddies and cold infinite emptiness and jungle. We looked at each other and I looked at myself and said “Why the fuck did I come here? I gotta get out of here. Why all this concrete? I want some quiet. I want to go swimming.”
There were pretty girls walking all over. The pretty girls were mostly Balinese. I would have loved to have befriended one of them and laid with her on a humid night. It would have all been better without words to get in the way. I was not in the right mood though. This was a depressing time for me in Bali. I had so much time to think but I didn’t know what I should have been thinking about. An alternate situation was why I was in Bali in the first place. I had had no time to think about anything before. Both situations bred ennui. I had bought the ticket to Bali a week before I left. I had decided to go to Bali the day I bought the ticket. I had bought the ticket the day I first even considered Bali as being a place to go. It was all very hurried. A job had fell through in LA and in my shock I decided to jump on board Chad’s trip.
I scanned the streets taking the sight of the women walking by in for the sheer fantasy and pleasure. There were pretty white women walking too but they were all there to do yoga and chant and eat steamed rice in the footsteps of “Eat, Pray, Love”. As I sat looking into the crowds of strangers I noticed a man looking back at me. He drove away on his scooter and circled back to our side of the street introducing himself as Harmony.
He had a smooth and angular face like a hairless fox. He was 30 years old and skinny like a muscular Siddartha. We discussed the ol’ USA and we told him about reclusive rainy Oregon and explained that people were poor in the states also. He told us that he was trying to feed his family and was not doing such a good job. I told him I wanted to get out of this mess and go swimming and he was very touched when I offered him our water bottle to drink out of. Did other tourists think they were going to catch something? “Ok. Get on.” he said and turned to his scooter. He gave Chad the extra helmet and we all piled on. He zipped down the street along with all the other traffic and cut up onto the walking path as we hit Monkey Forest. We sliced past mother-monkeys holding their clinging young. We passed groups of human families gawking and feeding them. The vines grew overhead and we zoomed out, down some dirt roads, past a corner with an empty dilapidated building on one side and a new temple being built on the other, behind some houses, off the scooter, down some steps in someone’s backyard and there we were at the bottom of a small ravine with a brown river sneaking past. Thank God or Shiva or, really, Harmony. I smiled. I got naked down to my underwear, we all did. The water was perfect. There were some ducks fucking around on the bank and Harmony wanted to catch one to eat but looked up the hill and said “I think their Wayan’s ducks.” Then yelled up. “Hey!” … but in Balinese or Indonesian “Are these your ducks?” and someone up there yelled back down something like “Yeah, those are mine”. There were some naked kids swimming up stream a little bit. There were some vines hanging from above we could swing on into the water. It was refreshing.
We sat down on some rocks to warm up and dry off. Harmony starts opening up to us like we were old friends or strangers drunk at a bar. I was really touched. He was in a pretty bad place. He has these three kids and his wife and he’s fucking up with it all and really just seems like he’s on the verge of giving up but not in the good way. He got into this jealous rage for what seemed to me no reason, he didn’t explain why anyway, and had hit his wife. She is half North African and very desirable and beautiful and he hit her because he was jealous. He was very broke up about it even though it had happened a while ago and she had forgiven him long ago as well.
He used to work construction. In fact he could work construction anytime he wanted but it paid terribly compared to what a successful tour guide made. Harmony hardly got any business though. If he had a tour-customer every day he’d be set but as it was he was struggling. He liked the gamble I guess; the prospect of money for easy work. He liked the leisure in the mean-time. He was a man after my own ideals: lot’s of leisure time and no desire for responsibility and also apparently he didn’t use condoms.
As an excuse for not dealing with his woes he kept saying “Maybe the next incarnation . . .” and “I’m too attached, I’ve got too much attachment.” I knew the feeling. There’s some very pleasing desire to just forget all of the binds of this existence and relax for a moment knowing there is no one who is going to miss you, be worried about you or anger later if you return. What Harmony was missing though was that attachment is not a physical thing. It doesn’t come from not having a family and not needing money and things… you can have all that… one just can’t be attached to them. Maybe he knew that but he was upset about being attached to things. Over the course of a few minutes and a bunch of language barriers I got across to him that he might be too attached to the idea of non-attachment. People can be too worried about not being attached to things. Attachment happens. Once he realized what I was saying we all, all three of us, got a good cosmic laugh out of it. Harmony got silent with that look in his eyes for a while. Then he drove us home and asked us for some money and said he’d be back tomorrow morning to take us on a tour outside of the city. As he was leaving he made one more remark about his wife out of self-consciousness. He said “She is a little women, if she tries to leave I just grab her!” I thought he was joking and I laughed but it turned out I had misheard him and he said “She is a little woman but with a big heart.”
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2014
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