Puerto Rico Files for Bankruptcy

“There has to be sacrifice everywhere.”  

Ricardo A. Rossello. Governor of Puerto Rico.

When belts must be tightened, you’ll find

That sacrifice really ain’t blind.

Those who are loaded

Stay uncorroded.

The poor get a piece of the rind.

Raul Labrador

“Nobody dies because they don’t have access to healthcare.”

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho)

Cancer isn’t fatal, if your attitude is right.

Diabetes is a breeze if you will not take fright.

A heart attack should not disturb your way of life at all.

And kidney failure does not mean you cannot have a ball.

Healthcare isn’t vital to a long and happy span.

If you are poor just suck it up and take it like a man!

From My Circus Diary

Having kept a personal journal for the past fifty years, I sometimes go back to review my sadly misspent life. I found this entry from 2009, when I was living in Thailand but thinking about the circus. I hope you enjoy it:

Thais, in some respects, are very security-conscious; in other ways, they remain as casual as sweat pants.

Two back stories, please, to set up my thesis.

A few years ago I took a hiatus from Thailand to work as the publicity director of a small, one-ring, tented circus back in the States. One of my responsibilities was to visit public schools where the circus would be playing, to hand out free tickets to students for the matinee performance.

Getting into a public school, as a stranger, in the United States, is now tantamount to getting past a sphinx in a Greek fable.

I entered one school in northern California, with a fistful of free tickets for the students, and was immediately stopped by a stern-visaged harridan who demanded some credentials.  I handed over my driver's license while explaining I had already called the principal for permission to hand out circus tickets in several classes.  With a grunt, she turned and gestured for me to follow.  I was taken into a sterile cement block room, painted pukey green, and handed a form to fill out, after which I was escorted to another room, where they took my photograph, and then I was escorted back to the pukey green room and told to wait.  I thought maybe they were going to send in a blacksmith to fit me for shackles.

 I was then presented with my photo, now embossed on an ID tag, and taken to the principal's office, where I was informed the principal was out and would not be back in until 2pm, so I would have to wait until this worthy returned to verify my story before I was allowed anywhere near the students.  Two hefty-looking cops glowered at me from a corner, fingering their holsters as if hoping I would make a suspicious move so they could plug me.

I finally managed to give away the tickets, but it took several days before I lost the urge to check my arm for a tattooed ID number.

I think you'll agree that was overkill.  From all I hear from friends back home, it's getting worse.

Back here in Thailand my Thai fiancé Joom became concerned some months ago after hearing constant news stories about car thefts in Pattaya, which is a 2 hour drive from us. She consulted the ghosts that inhabit our house (former residents who committed suicide and have a friendly relationship with her) about security measures.  The ghosts (who I would think could scare off robbers pretty easily – but apparently the ghosts have a pretty strong union and don't go in for that kind of overtime) advised Joom to have anti-theft devices installed in her truck.

Which she did.

Trouble is, she keeps accidentally triggering the piercing horn blasts and whistles and can't remember how to turn them off.  Trying to take a nap around our place now is like trying to sneak a siesta at Super Bowl halftime.

We have a dog, of course, that barks in the middle of the night at every toad and Tokay gecko that dares to intrude on our gravel drive.  I can only hope she will be equally zealous if human toads show up to despoil us.

All this leads up to the subject of security at Thai schools.

Would you be surprised to know that there isn't any?

The only guards, and I use the term extremely loosely, at a Thai public school, are the crossing guards. Usually one of them will stay behind after herding all the children across busy thoroughfares, to doze under the shade of a pink cassia tree.  They are usually superannuated and would not rouse themselves if Godzilla came rampaging down the nearest soi.

The only exception to this are the very elite international schools, many of which reside inside an exclusive muu baan where a guard zealously mans a pillbox and you are required to leave some form of identification behind when you enter.  The last time I was up in Thonburi I went to the Rongrian Nana Chad and left the guard my expired library card from Minnesota.  He seemed quite satisfied with it.

Of course, I can't remember anything dangerous or disruptive, outside of stray dogs fighting over a piece of offal, ever disturbing the somnolent droning of students during school hours. 

Now I'm not saying that the Thai public school officials are negligent about the welfare of their charges.  On the contrary, if you are a farang and want to teachEnglish in a Thai school you are going to have to produce a criminal background check, otherwise it's no go.  In today's depraved world, sadly, that is to expected.

The fact of the matter is I am amazed, and tremendously grateful, that here in Thailand there have been no Columbines or madmen attacking little children with hammers.  I hope the Thais appreciate this wonderful blessing their schools still enjoy – something that has passed out of existence in much of the Western world, much to the sorrow and disgust of all thinking people.

Civilization

To civilize the native tribes

We offer them all sorts of bribes.

Disease and liquor, pants and skirt --

Sugar that makes their teeth hurt.

Instead perhaps we ought to push

Ourselves back to the jungle bush.

The Circus Changeling

Not everybody survives working for the circus. I don’t think I did. It has nothing to do with the physical dangers of broken bones from inept pratfalls or being mauled by an uncaged lion. It is the mindset engendered by the sorcery of the entire big top adventure that proves so inimical to a successful return to quotidian existence. Ringling Brothers was and always will be a fairy kingdom -- one that can change a person’s very DNA before letting him go, and not always for the better.

The encomiums are coming thick and fast for Ringling, now that it is become extinct. There is nostalgia and honest mourning for the passing of a way of life from the American scene. As a clown on the Ringling Blue Unit fifty years ago, I share in such emotions -- but I can’t let it rest at that. There are darker passions and obsessions that come into play -- at least for me.

Like Christina Rossetti’s famous poem “Goblin Market,” where the imps inveigle the virginal Laura to “come buy, come buy” their wares that “men sell not such in any town,” I was bewitched the moment I read about the Ringling Clown College in Life Magazine. It spoke to my deep need to make people laugh as a way to validate my own existence. I was not curious so much as lustful for what that place seemed to offer. And so it fell out that I attended that Goblin Market in the fall of 1971.

Untalented, awkward, and completely jejune, I think my presence was an embarrassment and irritation to most of the other students and staff -- but no one could deny my powerful longing to exist as a circus clown. In the end, the only reason I was allowed into that fay realm that is the circus was because I was thin and not too tall -- just the right size to fit into the preexisting show costumes that were hand-sewn and thus so expensive to create. I was, in a very real sense, just another warm body to Ringling.

Thus began my “Lost Weekend” with the circus. The circus became my bottle; with it, I could do no wrong, and without it I was a miserable and unknown cipher. This became the pattern of my life -- one which still haunts me today.

How I relished strutting out into the ring in time to Fillmore’s “Lassus Trombone” to become embroiled in some ridiculous scrape that involved foam rubber mallets, shaving cream, and black powder explosions! Or playing at inflating a huge balloon in front of a raucous crowd while the band tootled Allen’s “Whip and Spur!” The off-kilter camaraderie of clown alley -- where I knew I was accepted once Swede Johnson gave me an official nickname: Pinhead. Intoxicating flashes of inspiration when a new idea for a clown gag came to me like a religious epiphany -- sometimes they clicked with the audience, and sometimes they didn’t. But the sheer exhilaration of juggling those sparks in my mind was very bliss indeed!

This began so long ago that there was as yet no such thing as ‘creepy clowns’ or coulrophobia. Clowns were still thought of as icons of innocent and robust mirth. Each Sunday when I was asked to stand up and introduce myself in an LDS Sunday School class I would brazenly state my name and occupation -- Tim Torkildson: Clown at Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Combined Shows. There would be ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ from the class members, and several invitations to Sunday dinner after church. Cub reporters (they really did have such people on newspapers way back then) interviewed me with envy -- they often spoke of wanting to do just what I did, kicking over the traces to become a wandering gypsy. The townie girls that I met in bookstores and restaurants treated me like an exotic hothouse flower. And even when I left the circus to serve as a volunteer proselyting missionary for the LDS Church for two years in Thailand, Salt Lake City asked me to bring along my clown trunk so I could entertain at schools and hospitals instead of knocking on doors. I was transformed into the One and Only Clown Elder!

It was all insidiously wonderful.

But ultimately this potent brew I had been drinking for so long left me unfit for normal daily life and its accompanying responsibilities, duties, and inevitable dullness. I met my wife Amy at church after my mission in Thailand; we married and raised eight children together until the day she put them all in the van and said to me “Everything bores you but the circus” and left. I couldn’t deny her diagnosis. During our fifteen years of marriage I had tried and failed at several different careers. We moved frequently, sometimes living with her parents and sometimes living with my parents, while I tried to find suitable work -- or gave up on normal employment and went back to the circus. We even tried reversing roles -- she got a teaching job while I stayed home to tend the kids, do the laundry, and cook dinner. I was pretty good at it, if I do say so myself -- but it eventually broke Amy’s heart that she was married to a man who couldn’t tolerate the commonplaces of existence. Every boss I ever had was ripe for a pie in the face. Every office routine I was tasked with had to end in comic disaster. Every social cue I was given demanded a loud raspberry. I honestly believed that I could get away with the same kind of misanthropic stunts that Harpo Marx or W.C. Fields pulled --  and eventually come out on top with wealth and fame. I was seriously compromised as a functioning member of society. To me the idea of the clown was inextricably identified with Genesis 16:12 -- “And he will be a wild man - his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him - and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”

My real income declined each year as one career disaster followed another. My divorce did not act as a wake up call for me to come to grips with reality. Instead I sunk deeper and deeper into my delusion that this clown gag called Life would end with a happy blow off.  I would win the fight, find the pirate treasure, blow up society, and wander off into the sunrise with Paulette Goddard on my arm like Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.”

Instead I wound up in a homeless shelter in 2012.

Since then kind friends and government assistance has seen me placed into a cozy apartment with subsidized rent, where I  collect a modest Social Security pension that keeps me fed and clothed and occasionally able to see a doctor. Where my kids invite me over for Paleo diet dinners so the grand kids can laugh when I make funny faces at them, and so I can give them Kennedy half dollars as good luck charms. Where I still dream, and write, about shaking the laughter down from the trees. Where I no longer believe I am a member of the human race -- I am a circus changeling. God help me.

********************************************************************************************

This email response came from an old friend up in Salt Lake City a few weeks later:

Dear Tim,

                And He will!  He has already!  And He will forever!  I read your essay below before retiring for the night last night.  I was very tired, but something about your essay kept replaying in my “father and sons’” outing very tired brain. (from the previous night when I substituted for my son who could not be there for the full outing).  Mingled with my replay of your essay was another essay which I wrote in my brain.  Thus, what follows is a hodge-podge of that brain salad.  It might not make sense to you, but somehow under the surface it does to me.  Here goes: 

                The other “essay” in my brain had to deal with a friend (and former missionary associate from my younger mission).  This friend, Fred, worked for many, many years as an associate warden at the Utah State Prison.  Working in police work, prison work, parole work and all related jobs requires two fairly opposite mind sets.  First, you must learn to mistrust your prisoners.  Yes, you must treat them civilly, but for the sake of your own safety and that of other prisoners and co-workers, you must mistrust them.  Then you go home after work and must shift to another mind set – that of loving husband and father.  That shift is not easy.  In fact it is near impossible.  As a result, my friend Fred was married and divorced 3 times – I think because of the difficulty or flat out impossibility of making that mind set shift.  Yes, he’s an active member of the church; he serves well where called.  But now retired, tries hard to focus on the pleasanter mind set/self.  I have another friend – also a former employee of the prison – who made the mind shift more easily and gracefully.  But he was a teacher at the prison, not a punitive officer.  This latter fellow knew of the difficulty of the mind set shift and strove mightily to keep his pleasanter self at the forefront of his life and dealings with his wife and children.  Yes, those in law enforcement work can and often do have a negative influence on their relationships at home, but there is an old saying in Idaho that goes like this “It’s a damn thin pancake that doesn’t have two sides.”  While I cannot (and will not) judge the impact of circus life on you or anybody else, I doubt the accuracy of your self-condemnation.  And, yes, women – especially mothers crave and need security, both financial and emotional.  But they must deal with their side of the “pancake” and not blame all the relationship troubles on the other.  Relax!  Take off the judge robes, and be kind to my friend Tim!  You did the best you could with what natural skills and heritage and training gave you.  You are talented, gracious, respectful, kind, and good.  There will be a Kind, Gracious, Ultimate Judge who knows all this far better than this mere mortal.  Trust in that ultimate judgment.

                I hope some of this makes at least a little bit of sense.

                With every good wish,

                LRC

Watermelon Seasoning

Watermelon seasoning

Is something without reasoning.

Perfection cannot be improved;

Those who try should be removed.

May those who sprinkle on a spice

Be pressed into a garlic vise.

The Peony

“It isn’t as bad as you sometimes think it is.”

Gordon B. Hinckley

The dead stalks of my peony lay on the frozen ground.

All color dashed away to dust -- twas just a lifeless mound.

What comfort could this quietus give unto me at all?

It was a bleak reminder of my mortally slow crawl.

A melancholy fool was I, for underneath the land

My peony still slumbered, preparing something grand.

I looked upon my peony this morning to behold

Its sudden reaching to the sky, with globes of pastel gold.

A touch of warmth, a bit of rain, had given it the power

To once again revive and create flower after flower.

The world is full of peonies, and so I need to strive

To see them ev’rywhere I go and keep my hope alive.

Thank you, Lawrence Pisoni!

To my many readers who continue to promote my clown memoirs like ‘Remembering Abe Goldstein’ I want to say Shukran! May the wind-blown sands bring you nothing but blessings!

Lorna Hymer Spellman; Madelaine Whitmore; Victor Ruiz; Mike Johnson; Matt Kaminsky; Gabriel Romero Sr.; John Riordan; Hal Guyon; Anna Lima; Sandy Winters Hapke; Dave Letterfly; Franklin David Ripple; Riccardo Mattioli; Kenneth L Stallings; Alison Church; Bruce Rechtsteiner; Marion Seidel; David Bastian; Keith Campbell; Lawrence Pisoni; Scott O’Donnell; David Orr; Shalil Kumar; Laszlo Kolozsy; Judy Earnest Rhodenizer; Margaret Biscope; Brenden McDaniel; Jim Elliott; Owen Leonard; Sonja Barta; Giuseppe Arnetta; Tim Cunico; Jenny Guerrero; Robert Cline; Kevin Smykal; Randy Jackson; Michael Meinhart; Fay Janzen Schmitt; Monica Chaney; Richard Greeson; Laura Lee Vaughn Nadell; and the redoubtable Jim Aakhus.

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way!”  Ray Bradbury.   

Dougie Ashton Rides Again!

There are many adjectives you can throw at Dougie Ashton that will stick like glue:  Loud. Impressive. Funny. Irreverent. Accomplished. And resilient. He and I did not always see eye to eye when we worked together in clown alley at Ringling Brothers, but he always had my respect -- and now that the years have softened me up and cut me down to size, he also has my affection.

Dougie’s first words to me when I arrived at the Ringling Winter Quarters for rehearsals some fifty odd years ago are engraved in my adamantine memory as:

“Another newbie, eh? Don’t let ‘em get you down, kid! Buck ‘em all, mate -- that’s what I sez!”

(It should be noted that never once in his life has Dougie actually used the word ‘buck;’ the actual Anglo-Saxon verb he said so frequently and with so much relish is not part of my writer’s vocabulary -- but you know what it is!)

Dougie did a Tramp, or Character, makeup which was heavily influenced by Chaplin. He even used a bamboo cane in his act. His bushy mustache -- a Colonel Blimp embellishment that Dougie cultivated each morning with Morgan’s Mustache and Beard Cream -- was a sandy brown; he simply blackened the middle part, rouged his cheeks, and blacked his eyebrows. When taxed about his meager makeup compared to the rest of clown alley’s thick blanket of greasepaint he merely snorted that he was NOT a clown, mate, but a comedian -- he didn’t need to hide his comic features, but display them in all their risible glory. He wore baggy pants and a threadbare purple coat that appeared to be a Goodwill reject. A bowler hat, of course. He cut holes into his knee-length black socks and wore oversize hiking shoes he claimed were issued by the Australian military.

Dougie was excellent at standard acrobatics and an accomplished Risley artist. His trumpet playing could wake the dead -- and he often kindly played it full blast first thing Saturday morning in clown alley to awaken those who had overindulged the night before. His backflips, which he called ‘108’s,’ were inimitable -- graceful and forceful at the same time.

Always friendly to the First of Mays, in a general sort of way, Dougie did not have the patience to teach us anything from his large bag of comedy tricks. Having grown up with his family’s circus in Australia, he had plenty of performing skills and insights -- but his standard line when asked for some help by a newbie was “Ya gotta learn it yerself, mate. Watch and learn, watch and learn -- that’s how me dad had me learn it.”

And that’s what led to a contretemps with Performance Director Charlie Baumann one afternoon in clown alley, much to the gawking amazement of the other clowns. In Clown College we newbies had been assured by Bill Ballantine, the Dean of the school, that owner Irvin Feld himself had mandated that every veteran clown still on the show would tutor us in the arcane science of laugh-snatching whenever we asked for their help. And they all did. Swede Johnson, Prince Paul, Mark Anthony -- I had but to ask them for a suggestion on how to fix a prop or get a bigger laugh and they would work with me one-on-one. But not Dougie. He was above that kind of thing. And when Baumann reminded him, in his heavy Teutonic way, in front of clown alley, that he was under orders from Mr. Feld to help the new clowns -- well, Dougie went slightly ballistic.

“Am I a bloody school teacher to these fruit loops?” he angrily shot back at Charlie. “They got college educations, the stinking lot of them -- let ‘em teach themselves! I got no time to babysit amateurs.”

Baumann did not equivocate with anyone on the show, least of all a lowly denizen of clown alley. He began to remonstrate strongly with Dougie, reminding him his contract specifically stated that he had to teach the new clowns. But Dougie did not know how to back down, and so he interrupted Baumann with a rather unique suggestion as to what he could do with the bucking contract. As Baumann turned beet red at such unexampled Meuterei, Dougie picked up his horn, his hat, and his cane, and stormed out, yelling that he was headed back to Melbourne rather than put up with any more bull dust.

So that was it, I thought -- the great Dougie Ashton quits! And, indeed, he was gone for two whole days. The Bulgarian baggage smashers came and took his trunk away. There was talk that two of the newbies, Rubber Neck and Anchor Face, would get his suite on the train.

But then on the third day Dougie’s trunk was once again back in the alley. And Dougie himself strolled in just before come in to put on his lightweight makeup.

“I thought you quit, didn’t you?” I had to ask him.

“You’re barmy, mate. Never did no such thing. I’m a perfessional, see? I don’t pull stunts like that. Never have. Not sporting to take a header in the middle of the season.”

“But you told Charlie . . .” I started to say. Dougie cut me off.

“Charlie’s a square dinkum sort. No problems with him. We know each other years back. He unnerstands me and I unnerstands him. Got it? Now shut yer gob, newbie.”

Finished with his makeup, Dougie strolled out of the alley playing “As the Saints Come Marching In” on his trumpet.

I scratched my head. It didn’t make sense. But by then I was learning that in clown alley you should never take what a clown, or a comedian, says at face value. Or, as my Grandma Daisy used to say about the world in general -- “They’re very tempermental; about ten percent temper and ninety percent mental!”

Thailand's Golden Triangle -- Care for a grilled cicada?

Over the last few decades the area has been rediscovered. As they reclaim it from the drug smugglers and blissed-out backpackers who made it notorious in the 1970s, travelers today find a bracing climate — it can be 25 degrees cooler at night here than in the coastal cities — along with natural beauty, verdant courtyard lodgings, riverfront restaurants and street markets where a handful of fat, juicy grilled cicadas can cost just a dollar.
by Donald Frazier

Travel writers talk about the bugs they like to eat
when in distant countries where the food is not discreet.
I betcha that they make it up -- for only the insane
would chow down on some beetles when there's lots of sugar cane.
Traveling five thousand miles to sample centipede
is not the way a writer ought to live, or even feed.
The next time that one writes he's having crickets with cold beer,
I'm gonna put a flea or two inside his doggone ear!