Cape

I need a new cape.

A Week and a Day

A week and a day ago Jami had a rough night, having been kept up by some minor cramping, which later that morning turned into mild and irregular contractions. It was a stormy day, so I called and checked on her while I was hunkered down in the greenhouse out of the rain. The lights had gone out at the house, so J had scrounged up an old telephone that took power from the line. We both figured they were just warm-up contractions, or false labor, since J's due date was still three days away, and we'd been practically guaranteed that the birth would be late.

During my lunch break I called her up to check on her again, and suggested that she call the midwife (Cherie, who I've know since I was a kid) just for fun, since we'd payed all that money after all, and they may as well know about the contractions. J called, specifying that it was probably just false or pre-labor, to which the midwife responded that she'd "turn it into real labor." I left work and picked up some things for J on the way home, dodging downed limbs and traffic accidents. When we arrived at the birth center we were told that she was at three centimeters, and that we should go for an hour-long power-walk. By the end of the walk she'd had two real contractions about eight minutes apart. Upon further inspection she was found to be at four centimeters, and during that further inspection her water broke, all over Cherie's hand. We were promptly sent home to get our things together, the midwife saying as we left that we'd have a baby around midnight. This was at about 4:30 pm.

By 6:45 we were back at the birth center, where J immediately jumped in the bath. About two and a half hours later she was in transition, and then hanging off the bedpost pushing. And pushing. By the very end, a little before 11:30pm she was so worn out that they gave her a Dr. Pepper "for medicinal purposes." She certainly needed it. Her uterus quit contracting right as the baby was crowning, so they gave her a shot of pitocin, and then it was a real team effort to get the baby out. Cherie pulled on his head with a suction cup, Beverly the nurse attendant pushed on the fundus, and the rest of us held Jami's feet back. We tried that twice. Between the first and second times the scissors came out as though for an epiosiotomy, but then go back down for one more try. The second time out came a bumpy little head. The umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck, which may have prolonged the pushing stage somewhat by pulling him back up between contractions. Despite that his heartbeat was strong to the very end, never giving us any reason to worry for his sake. Once Cherie had unwrapped the cord from around his neck, I pulled him the rest of the way out, placed him on J's chest, and cut the cord. And there he was: Rhus Guy Larsen, 7 lbs 4 oz, 20 inches long.

After Cherie and all the rest tended to Jami a bit they weighed him and measured him. Later on I got to give him a bath, and then we all slept for about two hours before filling out some paper work and going home around 6:00 the next morning.

Since this was our very first child, neither of us quite realized that it was actually a difficult delivery until well afterward. Nothing was as hard as we thought it would be, and certainly not as hard as it's made out to be on TV, with women screaming for epidurals, snapping at their husbands, and swearing to high heaven. Jami was definitely somewhere else while she was pushing, somewhere pre-verbal. Cherie would tell her to take a deep breath, but it wouldn't happen unless I took one with her, coaxing her along. But once Rhus was out she was fully present, and smiling as though nothing much had happened. Now when she looks back at the photos all she can remember is how much fun it was.

The Short Update, or Rao Mai Chai Man

The notion that telecom companies can stay in business by refusing new customers is beginning to throw us into ever an ever deeper state of confusion and despair--confusion that said companies remain solvent, and despair because, well, it really sucks. I've been so desperate for news of the outside world that I spend an hour after work each day downloading podcasts on their ridiculously slow adsl connection, enough to fill the two flash memory drives I have, which ends up being about five hours of news. I am now aware of remarkable things like the collapse of the precariously overextended US housing market, and the introduction of chubby frog ipod nanos. That said, our local Apple nanostore (it's a glorified kiosk in the mall--doesn't even have doors) should have the new ipod touch by now, which we'll go look at once we leave our friend AZ's house.


So what's been happening here? Updates on this blog have been few and far between since April when we moved into our new house and the cable company began telling us they aren't taking new customers. Our move happened right in the middle of the week of Song-Kran, an enormous, country-wide water-fight that occurs at the tail end, and hottest part, of the dry season. It seemed we were always biking from the old house to the new house and back during the height of the celebration. Jami ended up more that soggy, since she'd a blondie, and a girl, and therefore quite an attractive target for 20ish Thai boys. Shortly after moving in we began to pis off our landlady by removing the nasty, filthy, polyester curtains and replacing them with light, clean, and airy, cotton ones; painting one of the bedrooms white (J's sewing room, it was so dark before that during the day you literally could not see certain corners of the room due to the combination of darkness and glare); owning a cat; and not shutting every single shutter every single time we walked down the street for ten minutes. The shutter bit lead to our first crisis, in which she threatened to kick us out if we weren't good, and accused us of tearing the house down (we were told that Thai houses were built to last, unlike American houses, which, presumably, disintegrate into a puff of saw dust and gypsum after six months of occupation, perhaps explaining our collapsed housing market). We've been good ever since.

Following our settling in period we left for a month to vacation with my folks on the East Coast, to bask in the beautiful blackness of J's father's new Rausch Mustang, and to assist with the ongoing, post-Rita, empty-nester remodel of the Vaughn home (they picked a swell local designer who has Brenda's tastes pegged quite nicely). Vacation included a a stay with auntunclecousins in Troy, NY, and trips into NYC from my Grandpa's Nyack apt. From there we headed to Maine for a few days in Acadia National Park, and then drove all the way to Orlando to visit my sister and her (and her husband's, yes we like you lots, Matt) new baby Magnus. We stopped in Lowell, MA and Jamestown, VA along the way, but basically it was the whole of the east coast in about 48 hours. On the way back to Dallas I got to set foot in Louisiana for the first time. It was at a Popeye's Chicken, and the parking lot smelled like garbage. Being a Texan, having never been to Louisiana is about as embarrassing as having never been to Mexico (though the embarrassment of having never been to Mexico is exacerbated by the fact that I speak Spanish--imagine how ashamed I'd be if I spoke Cajun? Perhaps we'll remedy the Mexico situation by simply moving there after Thailand manages to spit us out once and for all). Our time in Silsbee was spent keeping an eye on contractors, playing with the new (and ephemeral, she won't last much longer thanks to the red mange) boxer named Sophie. She's a pretty dog. I'd love to post photos, but I don't have any here with me.

Once back in Thailand we anxiously awaited the arrival of our friends Lucas and Merridy. They spent about ten days with us exploring Chiang Mai, and contributing to our second crisis with the landlady. I introduced her to Luke the day he arrived, and tried, in my worse-than-broken less-than-pidgin Thai, to explain how long he would be staying. The day after M arrived (several days after Luke) the landlady dragged me over to her house to explain to her nephew (while she shouted over his translations) who was staying and how long. She was of the opinion that there were more, way more, than two house guests, and that they had been there longer, way longer, than I had said (in her mind she had post-dated Luke's arrival by three or four days, even though they met within two hours of his disembarking from the plane). She claimed that the house wasn't strong enough for more than two people (its method of construction diverges in no significant way from the neighboring houses, one of which contains eight people). I stated the facts to the nephew and left, since we were leaving on a trek with uncle AZ in a less than an hour, and she was obviously lying, and nuts. The nephew is a good kid, she just never listens to him. The trek was great fun. We spent the night in a Karen village (the whole village was nominally Christian, so no long necks, but great buffaloes), played in two waterfalls, rafted on bamboo rafts, and rode elephants. Shortly after L&M left we rented a motorbike to do some home teaching, leading to phase 2 of landlady crisis #2. We'd rented the bike for 24 hours, which means it spent the night at the house, causing us to wake up to a note, posted to our front door, accusing us of still having house guests, and threatening to raise our rent by 40%. I went to bring her over to the house to demonstrate the lack of house guests (Puen yu thi nai khrap? Mai yu!), but she refused to come, so we just yelled at each other in tongues. I brought the motorbike over so that she could see that it pertained to no one but us, and wrote her a careful note, which her daughter read, and which seemed to calm her down. Temporarily.


Following shortly on the heals of crisis number two came crisis number three. Crisis number three has been escalating for some time, beginning with a large rat trap baited with fish placed prominently on our compound's spirit house. Actually, the great cat crisis may have begun with the catnapping of Pete, Tien's stray tabby buddy. The house behind us has been empty for some time, though the landlady is continually sweeping it out and showing it to potential renters. During one of those cleanings Pete ran into our house and hid under the bed, while she ran right up the stairs behind him. Anxious not to be accused of having two cats (she'd already expressed some concern over sweet T) I pulled him out from under the bed, only to see him unceremoniously stuffed into a bag of garbage. Assuming this was the end of old Pete, whose only offense would be his overabundance of good nature, I followed the landlady to her house to plead his case. Her nephew assured me he was going to a good home, Pi Lar's sister (that is the landlady's name by the way) needed a cat at her house to catch mice since hers had died recently. Shortly after this came the enormous rat trap baited with fish. Tien (and in all likelihood the neighborhood strays) had been stealing sticky rice from the spirit house. We tried to make amends by buying five sets of offering bowls, but the landlady refused to accept them, and took them to a shop owned by one of her renters to sell. This right before my very eyes. I have been assured by numerous Thai sources that this is unforgivably rude behavior here in Thailand. All this was before our trip to the States, and I assumed all was settled in the cat department until one the other renters in our compound adopted an obnoxious, sick, and starving ginger colored kitty, and an equally obnoxious, and pregnant, torty. The Ginger Kitty, as we came to call it, was always stealing Tien's food, creeping into the house at night, and dribbling diarrhea all over the furniture. Meanwhile, the torty was camped out in the neighbor's house having kittens. Now let me clarify that neither of these cats were strays. They both had collars, with bells, and they were both extremely social. Great cats really, they just wouldn't get out of our house. One morning the landlady came over to complain about the section of side yard all these cats were using as a litter box. While she was going on about meao khii the kittens made their debut appearance on the neighbor's porch. Lug meao! I exclaimed, hoping to pass the buck. She went to talk to the neighbors while I scooped poop. The neighbors, anxious as any good Thai to avoid conflict, blamed the vomiting mother torty on us (yes, she actually
threw up on the drive while they were discussing her): "We can't get rid of the things! It's those foreign devils that bring them 'round!" As the landlady left I offered to clean up any khii that our cat might be responsible for. As usual she dismissed my efforts to be helpful. The next day she showed up bright and early at our house again, and in front of our very eyes scaled to the heights of rudeness and absurdity. This is when we found out that the neighbors were blaming their cats on us. She accused Tien of seducing these poor cats and leaving then knocked up on the doorsteps of innocent Thai nationals. I called AZ's wife Dao to act as our advocate. She did such a good job that she had the old woman crying in less than five minutes. When I first put her on the landlady went off, complaining about us, until Dao said "Listen, listen, listen, listen. You always talk, you never listen. Now you have to listen. That cat is fixed, he can't be fathering kittens, or attracting female cats. I know, I went with them." Faced with Dao's startling use of facts (and a lie, though I'm sure she was with us in spirit the day Tien had his surgery) the landlady began crying and said that she didn't care for money, she just wanted us out of there. While all this was going on Jami was talking with the woman who'd been brought from one of the shops next door to act as a translator. We often have these translators arrive with the landlady, and she inevitably embarrasses them. She never listens to a word they say, and they always end up apologizing or trying to excuse her some how. Usually when the Thai are embarrassed they just smile, or laugh. Our translators always just looked scared and nervous. Here's why. While Pi Lar was on the phone with our beloved Pi Dao, she was using a very bad pronoun. Pronouns are weird in Thai. The male term for of "I" phom actually means hair (as in "the hair of my head is lower than the dust of your feet). The female terms for "I" are so unsatisfactory, that many women simply refer to themselves by name, in the third person. The pronoun for someone spoken of in the third person (male, female, or plural) is kao. The pronoun the landlady was using to refer to me to one of my best friends here was man. It is not a term you use for people. Literally it means "it." The other day I was trying to look up the word "hedgehog" in Thai, but the only word I could find was man. It means something along the line of "nonhuman creature." If I were Thai and actually had the basic human rights afforded to Thai citizens, I could have her arrested for profane speech and defamation of character. But I'm just a nonhuman creature, so oh well. I'll just go hang out with the hedgehog. After all this the translator managed to make clear that none of the other cats were ours, and since the neighbors were denying any responsibility I offered to take them away. This satisfied her, and she went away smiling. The mama and kittens had been carted of the other day for the price of 200 baht, so I caught the orange kitty and a stray tom that wasn't smart enough to run away, and took them to a Buddhist temple in the center of town. That night the we could hear the neighbor girl calling for her ginger kitty. We felt bad for her, but I figure it was karma. By lying and claiming that her cat was ours she created a condition in which our only hope of maintaining our residence (we are desperate not to have to move) was to take her cat away. I hope it's OK. On further karmic occurrences, that very morning the people in one of the shops in front of us, a building which our landlady owns, had an extra special Buddhist ceremony with about eight monks, which Pi Lar attended. Afterwards she took the head monk over to bless the house that she can't get to rent. Guess why it won't rent? Every time she is showing it to potential renters every tenth word out of her mouth is farang coupled with a dirty look shot in our direction. How can she expect to rent the place if every time she shows it off she advertises the fact that it come complete with the worst neighbors in the world? While I was transplanting cats, I stopped over at the elder's and asked then to translate the phrase, "Even though we are foreign, we are still human beings. We are not nonhuman creatures." It occupies a prominent place in our house, right below the picture of the king and queen.

In other news, we have a hedgehog. Her name is Eleanor. She is cute and thinks that toes are food. I've been spending all this time sans internet learning Sketchup and writing. I may have actually written a novel of sorts by the time we leave here. One of the stories in it is about anarcho-syndicalist farmers on the moon. Jami has been sewing like mad, and I have been making sculptures of goofy future plants out of paper mache. I'll upload some of my drawings soon, and maybe post one of the stories once I comb through it a couple more times.

Thinking Online: Humanzees, Dimetheyltriptamine, and my Alien Abduction Story

When I was two we moved, briefly, to Dallas for a summer internship. We moved there for good the following year. All my memories from the time of the internship seem to happen at night. After being put to bed I would often lay awake for an hour or so. I had a pair of wind-up toy robots which I called Reddy and Bluey. As I lay there in bed Reddy and Bluey would start to walk across the room, along with other toys. I wasn't so bothered by the robots, since they were wind ups, but the Legos, that was a little strange. Eventually these nighttime hallucinations became more elaborate and began to inform my dreams thematically.


My bed was tucked into a corner of the room, touching the walls on the right side and at the foot. One night a group of monsters, or aliens as I thought of them, surrounded the bed and began to walk around it. The aliens had strange faces, all different, and were two dimensional (which makes me think the whole event may have been caused by cars driving around in the parking lot with their lights on), allowing them to slide smoothly between the bed and the wall. They were actually quite similar to the urSkeks in The Dark Crystal, but that film was released in 1982, and this happened in 1979. When the aliens appeared I was unable to move, but I did manage to call out to my parents in the next room, who's answer was something along the lines of "We'll worry about it in the morning." This particular hallucination set off a series of alien dreams quite similar to classic abduction stories coupled with absurd dream logic. In them I was continually on the run, or being carried around by men in silvery suits and helmets with dark faceplates. I may have been in a ship in some of the dreams, but in the one I remember most vividly I was in an oneiric version of our apartment with an altered floor plan. I was sitting on my parent's bed in their relocated bedroom playing with my sock-monkey (I think his name was George). At some point the room became illuminated by a red light that had no obvious source, as though it came from the floor (I was fascinated by lava). One of the spacemen popped up from behind the bed, but apparently couldn't get me as long as I stayed in the center of the bed and didn't go near the edges. I continued playing with the sock-monkey, and during our game he misbehaved in some unspecified way. I punished him by throwing him off the bed, which broke the magic circle, and meant that the aliens could get him, and me. One jumped up on the bed and began to carry me off. I tried to call out, but couldn't speak. I have no idea what happened after that. I seem to remember being carried down the hall, perhaps onto the ship, or maybe I woke up.


Never did I imagine these were actual abductions, I took them for what they were, hallucinations and dreams. I had another batch of similar experiences when I was a teenager--sleep paralysis, autoscopic hallucinations, I even spent an entire night inside Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide-and-Seek. Those experiences along with the "abductions," have formed part of my personal mythology, somewhat along the lines of Joseph Beuys's personal mythology, I just don't give lectures on them or present them as facts.

The other day I had a chance to rethink these experiences thanks, in part, to the network structure of the internet, and something I would like to call "thinking online" (though "daydreaming" might be more appropriate). I was researching human-ape hybrids, of all things. I'm fascinated by hybrids, by the fluidity of genes, and their ability to cross our imposed boundaries of species, and even genus. For a short time I had a cat that was an F1 Bengal. Bengals are actually an inter-genus hybrid of the the common house cat (Felis catus) and the Asian Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis). Like most cat hybrids the first few generations of males tend to be sterile, and huge, as is the case with ligers and tigrons.

Six or seven million years ago the line of apes that was to become genus Homo split off from the relatives of modern chimps (genus Pan) and for 1.5 million years they were separate species. At that point the two groups reunited and hybridized, the evidence being found on the X chromosome. This would seem to indicate that the hybridization resulted in fertile females and sterile males (as is the case with the aforementioned cat hybrids). In the 1920s Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov began a series of ethically dubious, and ultimately unsuccessful, experiments to create a human-ape hybrid. One of the motivations behind such a hybrid is that the resulting creatures would be suitable for dirty, dangerous, and degrading work that "real" humans would like to avoid (umm, robots?). In my googling on the topic I came across a number of interesting stories, including that of Kelpie Wilson, author of a novel about a human-bonobo hybrid. During the writing process she became so obsessed with the idea that she came close to procuring bonobo sperm and trying the experiment herself. I also stumbled across the image on the left on a white-supremacist website (which I refuse to link to). Taken in the 1930s, it is of a North-African man, called Bassou by the Berbers who lived nearby. Information on Bassou is nearly impossible to find, most of it on white supremacist websites of dubious origin and despicable intent. Apparently he lived alone, could not speak, and lived on fruits and insects. It is my opinion that he was simply a lonely, probably microcephalous, human being. Not a hybrid, as alleged.

Many of my searches on poor, maligned Bassou did include the word "hybrid," which generated results including the alien-human hybrid theories of Dr. David M. Jacobs. The fact that a professor of history at Temple University would endanger his career on that sort of thing piqued my curiousity, naturally. Eventually that led me to the Wikipedia article on "self-transforming machine elves." Machine elves are entities encountered by Terence McKenna while tripping on dimethyltriptamine, and in some ways are similar to the classic grey aliens of Roswell fame. Supposedly these machine elves create reality as we perceive it through their constant dance. About twenty percent of all people who take DMT as a drug (it is actually a naturally occurring substance in the human body, related chemically to seratonin and melatonin) experience hallucinations much like McKenna's, and nearly identical to the experiences had by alien abductees. Naturally occurring DMT has also been linked to such things as sleep paralysis and a feeling that one is not alone (when one in fact is). Those phenomena felt mighty familiar when I read about them. What amazes me now is not so much the experiences, which in a way are quite run-of-the-mill, but the fact that frivolous research on humazees could lead to a tenable explanation for one of the central mysteries of my childhood.

Manufacturing Consent

Q-Referring back to your earlier comment about escaping from, or doing away with capitalism. I was wondering what scheme, what workable scheme you would put in its place?

NC-Me?

Q-Or (unintelligible, laughter).

NC-Well, you know I. . . (talking over one another)

Q-What would you suggest to others who might be in a position to set it up and get it going?

NC-Well, I mean, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, "wage slavery" is intolerable. I mean I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in-order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on; and, uh, I think, through various kinds of free association.

_____________________________________________________

I first saw Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media about six years ago. I'd recently returned to the US from Spain, was working as a private gardener, fund raising for an environmental lobby, and working on my BFA. When it came to the part transcribed above, I started crying (I might have been a little stressed out for some reason...). Jami and I watched it again tonight (J had never seen it), and I was struck by how much (and how little) has changed since 1992 when the film was released. Several times in the film Chomsky expresses a desire for greater public access to media, essential asking for blogs and podcasts. I noticed, just a few minutes ago, that even he has a blog now. I'll be curious to see what he thinks of the new medium.

The picture above is from a part in the film where a photographer is getting him to pose against a fence. As he's trying to arrange himself he notices a bit of something (food I hope) on his finger, and licks it off. Funny.

An unrelated item, has any one noticed our nifty Rory (our dearly departed Manx) favicon?

¿Qué es exactamente el valiente nofolete?

Early in 2001 two friends and I made a journey through central Spain to the tiny town of Infante somewhere near Ciudad Real in Castilla-La Mancha. We were traveling in the van of my friend Capi, transporting a sculpture, my “Soup Box” (actually entitled un lugar donde comer sopa) to the family home of my friend Iñaki. On our way there we stopped somewhere to use a phone, and our search for one lead to some wordplay with the word “teléfono.” I turned it “telenofo” and Iñaki into “nofolete.” It was such a nice sounding word that it stuck, and began to have a life of its own. A nofolete is a telephone turned inside out and upside down, cut into morphemes, and shuffled--a metaphor of sorts for the web, growing from the guts of the telecommunications industry, trading text for voice for faster text for cheaper voice for image for touch for being in an upwardly spiraling dialectic. Maybe.

It is also, as I said, a delightful sounding word, and I very soon began to imagine what kind of animal it would be--something like an elephant, but also a rooster. The nofolete began to make appearances in my sketchbooks in that guise, an elephant-headed rooster, a gryphon with a trunk. You can imagine how pleased I was to find a nofolete just a few days ago at Wat Jedyod, right here in Chiang Mai, beautiful and golden. So, my life swallows its own tail, and as my brother boards a plane for Barcelona, I find Spain in Thailand.

Jami: or What Kind of Girl Would Marry Dane?

To answer a few questions:

Jami Vaughn was born in the early eighties. Well, just barely the early ones, almost the mids. We tease each other about our six years difference in age all the time, or more often I tease, “Were you even born then?” or “Oh. Well, you weren’t even in middle school.” She was born in southeast Texas, so southeast that the hospital she was born in will definitely be under water in 50 years. When she was a girl she had a horse named Ricardo. He was Peruvian. We met at the LDS student institute in Austin, TX where we were both attending UT, working on BFAs. We met August 28th 2001. Jami doesn’t recall it, but says that we were reintroduced so many times afterwards (“Oh, you study art. Have you met Dane?”), that it hardly matters. We began dating the next year, once her high school boyfriend went on a mission, and quit coming on our dates. We got married in 2004. I tagged along when she studied in Italy that fall. She finished up at UT with a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history. And now we’re here, where she will teach English.

Right now she is brewing us delicious mugs of “cereal replaces coffee.” Yes, that's really what it's called. We got it at a vegetarian buffet hoping it would be like Postum. It smells like airports.

Jami keeps making faces, this is the best
picture I took of her all day.

Here she is looking lovely in Piazza della
Signoria in Florence in 2004.