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Further notes toward Indonesia



I have seen few things as kick ass as a petite, demure young Indonesian girl with her head scarf on, smiling shyly at me from her perch on her motorcycle.

"Big wind yeah," says the motorcylcist taking me from the club where a bunch of blonde bebraced good looking teenagers from America poured drinks on each others' heads.

My khakis are still wet. How like Bolivia it is, I keep thinking. And as for the ocean, how quickly it gets deep--a ravine or drop off so steep it causes a geometric reaction in the mind to dangle and look at the waves slapping a sand wall in front of you.

No happiness if one thinks about them all the time, no purpose if one doesn’t think about them at all.

Buddha gardens. Moss covered bricks. If I am alone they call me darling. "Hey honey white girl--where you stay?"

"Do you like me? Do you like me?"

"Do you need a q tip?" asks Bobby, holding out the toothpicks. Fashion TV is on in the hotel room. What did we see in the 80s?

The sweetness and smell of the water and of movement when we went river rafting. The trust Jack lost and the nastiness he says he gained when an employee at the NGO he directed in the Congo ran off with $40,000 to Zimbabwe--because some of the remaining employees had to have colluded.

The broad and insistent sound of the ocean. All the twisting bodies of bark.

Please give me enough,
Please give me
Enough. Please give
Me enough. Please
Give me enough.