Since I’ve been on this health kick I’ve been eating more meat. I know, meat isn’t usually associated with health kicks, but I figured I wasn’t getting enough protein. I’ve been chowing down on not just plenty of fish but chicken and even ham, which I haven’t eaten in ages. I’ve lost a little weight and kept it off, and I feel rather better than before. I’ve been eating fewer carbs and almost no cheese, on account of its fat content.

But my conscience has a problem with all this meat-munching. Much as my body likes the life omnivorous, my mind doesn’t, for all the usual ethical vegetarian reasons. Most of my concern is about farming and slaughter practices*, rather than eating animals per se, though the latter is part of it.

*Thailand has huge chicken factory farms, whence, I assume, come the skinless chicken breasts I prefer for my own consumption. In theory I could buy a chook at a market and kill it, pluck it and gut it myself. The fact that I’d rather eat tofu than do this suggests to me that I shouldn’t be eating any damn chicken.

I’ve had a think, and I’ve decided to try laying off the meat again, and reducing the fish, but finding other protein sources that aren’t full of fat. I fucking hate tofu and wheat gluten-based fake meat, but don’t mind beans, and textured vegetable protein can be quite good. I can’t get the latter at my local supermarket (for a Buddhist country, Thailand is rather disinterested in vegetarian eating, except for a 10-day vegetarian festival once a year, currently going on, but it’s more than vegetarian, it’s some kind of holy bland food, and I can’t say I like it) but it’s probably available at the big supermarkets in the downtown malls. I love edamame, which you can buy here and there, so I need to find a supplier.

I’ve got one slice of ham and two chicken breasts left in the fridge. I bought a tin of vetegarian chilli “non-carne” for when they’re gone. I tried it yesterday. It was ok. And I bought M&Ms again, for moral support. I’ve given up on the ice cream. Even the expensive brands aren’t that nice. The flavours are often somehow sickly. I like peppermint choc-chip, but I haven’t seen any tubs of it; in fact, in general it doesn’t seem to be such a common flavour here as it is is back home.

I don’t believe it, but it’s true, so I guess I have to. If I didn’t already know that wowserism was back, I know it now.

Victoria’s Liberal* government under Ted Baillieu is actually going to ban the sale of the humble bong in the state next year. (*For non-Australians, the Liberal Party is conservative. Confusing, I know.)

This is silly. Cannabis is a popular drug in the Land of Oz, minor possession has been decriminalised in most states (though it’s still illegal, attracting fines around the level of a parking ticket, with much harsher penalties for large-scale possession and trafficking), and people will continue to smoke it with or without arrays of snazzy bongs to choose from.

Before I go any further, let me say that I think the stuff should be legal. Do what they did with brothels. Get crime out of the picture, let adults enjoy themselves, and tax the industry. It has been said many times and it’s hard to disagree: if we can accept a drug like alcohol, and all the violence, illness and mishap that goes with it, we should be able to accept cannabis. Prohibition of something that a lot of people want to partake of doesn’t work.

That said, fair enough if they had wanted to remove bongs from public view, in the same spirit as cigarette advertising is banned. They could have required bong shops to paint their windows, or to keep the bong selection in a blocked-off section at the back, behind all the t-shirts and whatnot. Let all pleasures be available to them as wants ‘em, but I see nothing wrong with requiring the unhealthy ones not to advertise themselves. (One might include certain foods!)

If the ban on the bong wasn’t enough to make me want to tear my hair out — or really, tear someone else’s hair out — there’s this: hookah pipes will still be available, albeit with their display in retail outlets limited to three pipes. “As we understand it, they [hookah pipes] are used primarily for cultural reasons and the ban is more focused on illicit drug use,” a government spokesman said, going from an issue of culture to an issue of legality in one sentence, and suggesting that the government doesn’t understand very much.

Now, much as I’m glad that hookahs won’t be entirely scuttled, pretty things that they are, however I turn the matter around in my mind, I cannot see how the smoking of (a substance) in a hookah is any more or any less “cultural” than the smoking of (a substance) in a bong. Apparently Arabs and Middle Easterners, representatives from whose communities were consulted on the legislation, have culture; the rest of us just have habits.

If you want to discourage tobacco smoking, there’s no reason to take one kind of water pipe off the shelves and not the other. If you want to try to discourage the uptake of marijuana, then yes, perhaps you want to hide the bongs before you hide the hookahs, the latter being not particularly associated with cannabis in the public imagination. But don’t, for Pete’s sake, make concessions to this or that group for unhealthy practices on “cultural” grounds.

I have an idea: let’s ban the potato. You can make a bong out of a potato. You can also shove potatoes up car exhaust pipes, plus they’re full of carbohydrates. However, Australians of Irish descent will be allowed to keep up to three potatoes in their homes for cultural reasons.

Over at The Atlantic, E.D. Kain, editor of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and writer on public policy and criminal justice reform at Forbes, wonders when fantasy (he’s mostly talking about Tolkien-lineage secondary world kind), once dorky, is going to lose its media popularity.

It’s hard to dissect a zeitgeist when you’re in it. And sometimes there’s no particular reason for a fashion, other than that someone made money from a particular product and others hope to do likewise with a similar product. And some fantasies — vampires, for instance — are enduringly popular because they speak to something, perhaps something physical, that generation after generation goes through. Girls and vampires are like girls and horses — the fascination may never fade unless whatever unresolvable thing the fantasy figure brings up is, in fact, resolved. The popularity of Twilight shouldn’t be assumed to be related to the popularity of Harry Potter or A Game of Thrones.

“There’s a reason fantasy wasn’t mainstream before. It’s a genre that appeals to people who play D&D and get their kicks reading about elves with names like Tanis Half-Elven and Galadriel,” writes Kain. Hmm. So why is it mainstream now? (I have no idea, actually.) Regarding the people who play D&D etc., maybe I’m wrong (hey, the internet is the place to be wrong, innit?) but, having been one in my youth, I would say fantasy appeals to people who, amongst other things, prefer elves and dragons to whatever fantasies the popular mainstream is pushing. A materialist fantasy? A religious fantasy? A fantasy of power, beauty and love via possession of brand-name items? Someone who sees through all this crap still needs an outlet for the natural human tendency to dream and imagine, and perhaps would like to dream of a world that isn’t full of crap. Elves? Better than crap. Dragons? Better than crap. (I was more the kind who would have gone for at least some of the crap if I could have afforded it, I admit.)

More complexly (is that a word?), some people might want to live out popular fantasies as fantasies only. Military conquest is a dangerous but enduring fantasy. Better to enjoy it in the privacy of a book, or a roleplaying game, hopefully aware of what you’re enjoying, than to go forth and kill real people who don’t need killing.

The dreams of science fiction, that other refuge of nerds, haven’t come true, except for one or two that we aren’t sure we want to be true, like cloning. The holy grail of the popular science fiction dream, FTL travel, is probably locked out of reach by the laws of physics. Our itch to explore goes unscratched.

Our minds have to go somewhere to play.

Human beings live through our dreams in so many ways. We dream collectively. The post-war dream, the capitalist dream, doesn’t have an external enemy these days — at least, not one against which it can wage a narratively satisfying war. A madman with a dirty bomb could do a lot of damage. The Yellowstone supervolcano could do a lot more. We’re at the mercy of chaos, just as we’ve always been. The climate? Science makes a compelling case that we’re our own enemy on that front, which is no fun, and we seem not to have the will to fight ourselves.

Fantasy provides an escape into a world where there are at least a few rules — as many if not most books do, but the presence of rules in fantasy is highlighted by their unfamiliar nature. As for fighting ourselves, though, fantasy does tend to offer heroes who overcome their own weaknesses, and who endure privation and pain and make sacrifices. They could serve as examples in many situations (if we ask them to do myth duty rather than just entertain). But there’s a danger in being satisfied with vicarious experience of the example, so that one doesn’t enact it in life. I think I’m as prone to this as anyone.

I have no idea when fantasy’s spell will wear out, but I find it interesting to wonder why, at certain times, a culture gets a boner for certain forms of dreaming. Sometimes it’s obvious at the time, but although I can think of reasons why we’re into fantasy right now (and I’m aware that this post isn’t any kind of cogent presentation — I’m out of practice at even pretending to be cogent — but more a vague drifting around what those reasons might be), nothing leaps out at me going “This is why!”

On a soapbox on a tangent: Kain diverges briefly into talking about fantasy and genre, getting right under the bunions of the Clomping Foot of Nerdism with “whether the Harry Potter books qualify as true fantasy is more controversial, with many fans and many detractors in the fantasy traditionalist camp”, and claims “no self-respecting fantasy purist would ever be caught dead reading [Twilight].” I don’t know what a fantasy purist is when it’s at home — my mind helpfully makes a picture of Oliver Cromwell armed with Excalibur. Then Excalibur goes all Stormbringer and starts laying waste to Cromwell’s nearest and dearest before plunging into Cromwell’s chest and claiming his soul for God. Fade to black. Anyway, most conversations about what is or isn’t fantasy remind me of metalheads arguing about whether some screaming distorted paean to the rotting anus of Christ is Blackened Death Metal or Black Christian Metal. In a word, disturbing.

“Fantasy” is a broad-reaching term. It covers all manner of myth, including science-fiction, as well as its other, real-world meaning, where it covers pornography, advertising and of course religion, and is implicated in psychology and political ideology — and I think an understanding of fantasy’s operations out of reality help to identify its operations within reality, where they otherwise may go camouflaged like ninjas in out midst. Maybe we need a special word for “secondary world fantasy with dragons, magic swords and optional elves” to avoid confusion?

Whew. Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything but “this is what I did today” or “I like this.” Give my brain a week off writing and it gets the blithering urge!

There’s a huge cockroach on the ceiling in the stairwell. That’s just breaking all the rules. I can’t go down the stairs to get the roach spray!

I now have a Goodreads author page:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/217735.K_J_Bishop

Found these and more gems of old SF zine covers at Ptak Science Books, in a feature on The Savage Distress of Women in Science (Fiction); Pulp Covers, 1930-1960. I couldn’t resist captioning a few.

It was the last time Margaret bought anything from Alessi’s Knob Head range.

“And Barbara said Dan’s sleeping with Rosie,” the alien confided.

“I’m David Bowie. I’m here to rescue you!”

Ugh. There’s writing when you don’t want to write, which is normal, and writing when you really want to do something else, which is another kettle of hagfish. I should’ve just gone into the studio today like I wanted to. Technically I’ve done 500 words in this draft; really I’ve pasted 400 and written 100. I’m trying again, pretending 7:15 pm is 7:15 am.

Now it’s 8:30 and I’ve gone over my 1000 word quota, but I can see where I want to jiggle a couple of things. There’s a lengthy bit that I’d like to compress, and a conversation that I want to knock into better shape before going on. Which means I have some kind of plan for tomorrow, rather than just a ‘fix this.’ And yep, I’m going back to earlier drafts with some of it.

Disliking my own work, second-guessing myself, overthinking things, obsessing over details — I do it all. I often hate my writing while I’m writing it, which makes it hard to sustain writing beyond short story length. It’s helpful to write about a character I love, since affection for the character can offset the discouraging thoughts about the work. One needs to be self-critical, but it would be helpful if the inner critic was able to give a thumbs up when things are basically working, rather than see every fault as a fatal flaw. I think the inner critic that looks at my writing is the same critic that looks at my thighs. She’s sucked a lot of fun out of my life one way and another. Yet maybe, to the extent that I write well, if at all, it might be because of her. I don’t know. Anyway, no one ever said life was meant to be easy. Gonna call it quits for the day and watch I Saw the Devil, a film apparently packed with the old ultraviolence, in which something very bad clearly happens to Byung-hun Lee’s hair. This might be in the rain, but this? I expect the film to also feature the Mona Lisa with a mullet.

So: flying dragons are real! Just tiny. Draco volans, native to the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia and around 20 cm long, glides with the wings attached to its long, movable ribs — so it has wings and four limbs. How far it can glide ranges from 8 metres to a wind-assisted 50 metres depending on which website you read. It can’t sustain powered flight, but give evolution some time and who knows? D. volans in flight.

This sprained ankle has put a slight dent in my plans to get fitter, although it isn’t a bad sprain, so it shouldn’t be too long before I can at least do tai chi again. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing crunches and persevering with the ‘more real food, less crap’ plan. One consequence of the latter is that I’m at last learning to cook. I can now make a couple of quite edible fish-in-wok dishes, and yesterday I made devilled eggs according to the instructions on this site. The egg-boiling method proved to be excellent. Though I didn’t have any of the filling ingredients, I was able to rustle up substitutes (cheese/herb pasta sauce for mayo, wasabi for mustard, chilli sauce). I threw some capers on top and they were pretty nice.

I also looked up the calories in a banana. They’re lower than I thought. Good value. No reason to stop at just one banana a day, so yesterday I had two, and I think the second one helped stave off cravings for less healthy food.

Well, I got through another week without potato crisps, fruit juice or cheese. The ice cream ran out and I didn’t have an urge to buy more, although I’ve restocked on M&Ms. I had bad sinuses for a couple of days and thought I was getting a cold, but didn’t. I only did tai chi once a day this week, as twice a day was too boring. I’ve almost finished working out the left-hand version of the 24-step sword sequence.

I haven’t lost any more weight — in fact, I think I’ve put it back on, but it’s hard to tell, as my weight goes up and down during the month — but anyway, I’m still interested in shedding some wobbly bits! I was going to start jogging just a very little next week — ten minutes on two mornings, with a plan to build up very slowly over many weeks — but continuing the accident prone theme that’s been running through my life lately, I’ve sprained my ankle — not really doing anything, just walking on Bangkok pavements. It was going to happen sooner or later. So I’ll be doing a lot of sitting still for a few days. On the other hand, I can’t easily get to the kitchen, so this might work out. Fortunately I had a bandage — I bought it when I thought I was going to use it on a sculpture. Fun times!

After the Spock’s bedroom dream with the red padded floor, I had another dream featuring red padding. This time there was a monastery or church that was a place of pilgrimage, with an extremely tall tower — I think it was several kilometres high. You had to climb up inside it, but there were no stairs, just a very steep ascent inside the tower, which was about as wide as your average concert hall, leaning at about a 20 degree angle, and lined with soft, understuffed red velvet. It was very hard to climb, and I knew I couldn’t do it. Other people were climbing, but I had to give up. I have an inkling what the Enterprise dream was about — logic might not be a perfect refuge, but it beats other options — but this one, nope.