ALL My Children, Damn It -- Yes, the Buddhist Ones Too

In the back seat Jones says: "I tried watching Thai TV last night. I think I got a soap, but not a soap like I've ever seen before. People kept dying and being reborn and carrying on the conversation they were having just before they died, and there were ghosts and a bunch of wizards who could defy gravity and lived in some enchanted land about five miles above the earth. Would you say that represents the Thai mind?"

"Five miles high is about right. But you left out the skeleton."

"That's right, there was this nifty human skeleton following the lead couple all over the place. What was he doing?"

"You have to bear in mind that we are a holistic people. We cannot take little bits of life, like lovers walking off into the sunset, and pretend that's the final word."

--Bangkok 8, by John Burdett, p. 133.

A Satirist and a Gentleman

In the end I finished OCS [Officer Candidate School] only because, mainly to amuse myself, I had written a number of satirical songs and sketches for our battery to perform on graduation night. These revues, in the style of Hasty Pudding or the Princeton Triangle, were a tradition at Fort Sill and a big headache to our training officers, whose talents did not lie in this direction. Along with hundreds of other visitors, the post commandant and his staff would be in attendance. There'd be hell to pay if the show was a flop. When the time came for the final cuts to be made in our class it was discovered that I was the only one who could put the whole thing together.

They kept me on to produce a farce. That was how I became an officer in the United States Army.

In Pharoah's Army, by Tobias Wolff, p. 59.

Revenge of Morpheus

Thirty-six-year-old American adventure racer Rebecca Rusch, whose Team Montrail won the gruelling 2003 Raid Gauloises [a multi-sport event], says three hours of sleep a day for a weeklong race is common. As are hallucinations: she once conjured up a Vietnamese fruit stand in the middle of a New Zealand field and was so convinced of its existence that she asked her teammates if they had any money. Instead of wasting time trying to convince her it wasn't real, they just told her they were broke. "Oh, OK," she said, and kept going.

--from "Miles to Go Before I Sleep," by Tim Zimmerman, in Outside, April 2005, p. 70.