George Sodini, the whackjob who shot 12 women at a gym yesterday, had been blogging about his plans for months.

His site’s down, but there’s a mirror here.

He basically went nuts through a prolonged case of drydick, by the looks of things. But his last entry interested me:

“Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.”

That wonderful Christian doctrine of vicarious redemption. Gotta love it.

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Writing comedy for money is one of the several things I’m planning to try to do, now that I’m back in civilisation.

I’ve written a couple dozen sketches in the last week or so.

I thought maybe you would indulge me if I posted one here.

Feedback would obviously be very much appreciated, if anybody is reading this.

—-

INT. CAR, DAY

CLOSE on a young BOY, about eight, playing idly with a some kind of electronic gizmo.

BOY [bored]

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE [off camera]

No.

BOY

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE

No.

BOY

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE

No!

[short pause]

BOY

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE

No.

BOY

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE

No.

BOY

Are we there yet?

DAD’S VOICE

We’ll be there when we get there!

CUT TO:

They’re in a hearse, driving slowly down a residential street. A flower arrangement in the back window reads “GOODBYE MUM”

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Ever since I killed that dog in March, I’ve been terrified of motorbikes.

I miss tuk-tuks, I really do.

A fixture of my life for almost six months, I’m surprised it took me so long to notice that there aren’t any in Vietnam.

You can pay through the balls for a taxi, if you can find one and if the driver decides your journey is suitably lengthy to justify his time, or you can take your chances on the back of one of the dozens of motos that loiter like rusty dollar-hookers on every street corner.

In Hoi An, I quickly discovered, if you get on the back of a moto, you become the driver’s bitch. You unwittingly sign a contract to be his family’s primary source of income for the duration of your stay.

Ask to go to the beach and you’ll get taken to the beach restaurant his sister runs, or the one that gives him the best kickback or something.

Yesterday, I had this crazy bitch chasing me down the beach as soon as I arrived.

“Hey, you eat here!”

“No thanks, I’m just here for a walk.”

“No, you come back here and eat here!”

Hours later, I tried to get a moto back to town from a different cafe, where there were three or four moto guys hanging around, but she had spotted me from a few hundred metres away and came rushing into the shack, demanding that she phone the same guy who had brought me there to take me back.

None of the other moto guys wanted to argue with her – some kind of honour-among-twats system I imagine – so I had to wait for ten minutes, until I must have started looking impatient.

The crazy bitch then insisted I get on the back of her moto, which I certainly did not want to do. But since nobody else would take my fare, I ended up with her.

Unlike the other Asian countries I’ve been to, wearing a helmet is the law here. The moto guys and gals all carry two, one for their passenger.

But the helmets are all designed for tiny Asian heads, not bulbous mutant Caucasian bonces like mine. I’ve never found a hat that fit me, even in the West, so it came as no surprise to discover that Vietnamese motorcycle helmets simply rest on top of my massive heed like some kind of oversized cyberpunk Papal skullcap.

I look like Tron.

On the odd occasion I actually manage to get the chin-strap fastened, around my throat, it cuts off my ability to speak or draw breath through my mouth and feels like it has declared its intention to gradually decapitate me through attrition over the space of several months.

The helmets are no protection whatsoever, in other words, and I usually end up clinging on to the speeding bike with the strap hanging impotently at my shoulder.

I’m a fearful passenger at the best of times. I don’t even like riding in cars, especially if there’s a woman driving (I can’t rationalise or justify this sexist instinct, and I’m aware statistics don’t support it, it simply is what it is).

But with motos, I was even, at first, a fearful pedestrian.

In cities like Phnom Penh or Ho Chi Minh City, the traffic is relentless, six to ten lanes of 95% motorbikes. There are no WALK lights, no little green men to guide you across.

Jaywalking is the norm. You simply step off the curb and keep walking in a straight line until you reach the other side. The onus is on the motorbike riders not to hit you.

At first, until I became accustomed to this method, I’d simply find a little old Vietnamese or Cambodian lady who was trying to cross, and cross behind her.

Anyway.

I expect you want to hear about the dog now, right?

Okay.

CUT TO: Hampi, India, in March, night.

Hampi and its environs are pretty underdeveloped.

The only way to cross the narrow river, which runs through town, unless you fancy wading, is in a single tiny motorboat, operated by a fascist ten-year-old boy.

But he stops working at about 6pm.

When I was leaving Hampi for Bangalore, I found myself on the wrong side of the river at 9pm.

A tuk-tuk to Hospet, the nearest town, where my bus was departing, is supposed to cost about 80 rupees and take about 10 minutes.

From my side of the river, I discovered, the trip necessitated a detour to the nearest bridge, which was hell and gone from here, and it was going to cost me 600 rupees, or about $15, and take about an hour.

I didn’t have 600 rupees (ATM nearby? Hah!) and I had less than an hour to get to the bus stop.

The tuk-tuk guys, insensitive to my plight, could not be bargained with, but a guy on a motorbike offered to take me there for 200 rupees.

Five minutes later I found myself sitting behind him, with my massive backpack on my lap, laptop bag slung over my shoulders, holding on as if my life depended on it (because it did) as the moto guy hauled ass along narrow, unlit, potholed country lanes, bitching at length and volume about the “fucking road taxes” he had to pay for these “shit roads”.

No helmets for either of us. Grit and kamikaze mosquitoes peppered my squinting eyes, sending streaks of grimy tears down my face. How he navigated, I have no idea.

Every so often we’d pass through a small village, each of which was punctuated by two or three speed-bumps in the road.

Somebody, my guess is the local moto guys, had carved narrow channels in each of these these speed-bumps. Useless for cars, but handy for a motorbike that doesn’t want to slow down, like my guy, to zip through unimpeded.

He knew the road pretty well. The first dozen or so bumps, he found the channel as if instinctively.

The next bump, we weren’t so lucky. We hit it at fifty, and left the road, vertically.

Roger’s Profanisaurus has a pretty good swearword for this kind of situation:

“Fuckshitfuckshitfuckshit.”

We landed on a dog.

It had probably wandered into the street to investigate the new light, as they do.

It yelped all too briefly.

The was a moment of silence, while I established that I somehow hadn’t come off the bike and was still alive and uninjured, and that we were still moving at a pretty rapid clip, then I started screaming.

“What the fuck! What the fuck!”

“It’s not my fault!” the driver was crying out, genuinely distressed. “Not my fault!”

Pretty soon, we hit a proper, sealed, two-lane road. No lights except the twin headlights of oncoming flatbed trucks heading down the other lane.

Or, as happened every three minutes or so, the four imminent headlights of an overtaking flatbed and the flatbed that steadfastly refused to be overtaken, neither of which seemed particularly concerned about the oncoming moto.

We’d leave the road, dropping into a drainage ditch sunk about a foot lower, barely slowing down, and carry on until it was safe to get back on the road proper.

This crap went on for an hour. I had blisters from clinging on so tight.

I caught the bus, which was predictably late anyway, and the moto guy got a tip, for not killing me.

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Just don’t laugh at the dead kids, alright?

Smoking is permitted at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, but laughing is not.

That’s certainly what’s suggested by the signs. There’s nothing on the walls forbidding smoking, drinking, dogs, littering, drug use, the wearing of shoes, skateboarding or heavy petting.

At first, I took the single warning sign – a man’s head, smiling, mouth wide open, inside a red circle with a line through it – as a prohibition of talking. Silence in the museum.

But Peter, the unlikely-named Khmer tuk-tuk guy who had taken it upon himself to be my tour guide for the afternoon, told me it was a warning for tourists not to laugh.

They need a sign for that?

It’s a genocide museum.

“But it’s okay,” Peter said, in his excellent English. “You can laugh if you want.”

It was such an absurd thing to say that I actually did laugh out loud, once and involuntarily, and immediately felt like the world’s biggest tool.

I’d selected Peter from the gang of tuk-tuk guys offering their services outside my Phnom Penh guesthouse because he looked the oldest of the pack.

Crowsfeet on his otherwise youthfully Asian face, and flecks of gray in his hair. Probably in his mid-forties. He’d be old enough to remember Pol Pot’s regime from maybe his early teens.

Since the main reason I decided to subject myself to Phnom Penh was to learn a little more about Cambodia’s most recent society-defining horrors, I figured somebody who was around to remember it first-hand might be my best bet for a driver.

I was not wrong.

Peter insisted on going above and beyond his tuk-tuk-driving duties, following me around the museum, explaining the story behind anything and everything I saw. Normally I would smell scam, or at the very least somebody trying to pump the tip, but Peter seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his chosen role.

Peter also always seemed terribly surprised and impressed when I understood what he was talking about perfectly. I guess many of his passengers also have English as a second language.

When I was umming and ahhing about whether to go to the shooting range, he told me point blank he’d only take me there BEFORE seeing any of the genocide stuff, despite that being the least convenient route.

“And I tell truth and warn you, it’s forty dollars US for AK-47 with 30 bullets,” he added. “A lot of foreigners say that is, what you say, bullshit? You understand ‘bullshit’, yes?”

“Oh, yeah, I think so.”

I guess the cow lives, for today.

Peter told me his doctor dad had been killed by Pol Pot, and that he’d been forced to work the rice paddies, gratis, as a ten-year-old. Chain gangs, more or less, judging from the photos. The only food he was allowed to eat were meagre portions of “porridge” and scavenged banana and papaya roots.

He showed me some scars on his belly he said were from diarrhoea, a scar above his eye he said was from taking a beating with a bamboo cane, and some cracks on his tongue he said was from some other form of abuse I didn’t quite understand.

Frankly, he could have been making any or all of that shit up. I have no idea. I didn’t think diarrhoea did that to a person. If it did, I expect most of the surface area of my body would be a single patch of luminous pink scar tissue, the last few months I’ve had.

Building A at Tuol Sleng contains the interrogation chambers. Thousands of people were tortured horribly there in the late 1970s, before being carted off to Killing Fields to be beaten to death.

There’s a metal bed in the centre of each room. On each bed, some manacles, and a metal ammunition case that the torture victims had to use as a toilet.

Each room also has a single blown-up monochrome photograph of the room’s final occupant, chained to the bed, in whatever condition they were found when the facility was liberated.

That is: dead, and fucked up beyond recognition.

“The stains on the floor, you’re standing on,” Peter said, “are blood.”

I almost called bullshit – it’s been 30 years, for crying out loud – but the faded brownish smears on the tiles seemed to match closely the patterns of those in the photographs.

In one room, on the bed was the rusted blade of a small garden shovel.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Look at the photo, and tell me,” Peter said.

The photo was low-quality, black-and-white, angled wrong and blurred slightly by the blow-up, but I could tell there was something terribly wrong with the man’s head.

“They used it to cut off his face,” Peter said. “He was Australian journalist. You understand ‘journalist’, yes?”

“Yeah.”

Building B is filled with mugshots of the guards and prisoners. A lot of them are children – on both sides. Guards and prisoners significantly under the age of majority.

At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, a little south of town, I learned that the younger kids were mostly killed by swinging them against a tree. The adults were either beheaded, stabbed, or beaten to death with big bamboo. Often, the women and kids were raped first – their bodies were almost all exhumed naked.

A handful of the photos at the museum showed some of the results of the tortures and killings. People with all or part of their faces or heads beaten to jelly, or with bits sliced off.

Choeung Ek also has a massive, yet perversely rather tasteful, yellow-grey stupa, set amid disturbingly serene grounds, which is filled to the brim with the skulls of many of the thousands of local victims

It’s rather macabre. I asked Peter why the bones had not been reburied, or burned, or subjected to whatever passed for a funeral rite in this culture. It seemed wrong, given that this all happened in my lifetime. Some of these skulls will have living relatives.

“So nobody forget,” was all Peter would say.

Building D at Tuol Sleng has more photographs, and some artistic representations of the various tortures carried out at this former primary school building.

One of the paintings depicts waterboarding. The original wooden waterboard itself, resembling a tilted medieval rack, is right there in the middle of the room.

I listened, bemused, while Peter explained in detail how it was used.

“You do realise,” I said, when he had finished, “that they’re doing this exact same thing right now to unconvicted terrorist suspects in America?”

He shook his head.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. This is from Pol Pot time. Not now. Not any more.”

“Peter, mate, trust me,” I said. “They really are still doing this shit in America.”

He looked at me like I was smoking crack.

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The first thing I saw was a dead woman.

Dead, or dying.

“You might not want your son to see this,” I said to the woman sitting in front of me on the bus, and, after a glance out the window, she held her kid’s head tightly into her chest.

A middle-aged Khmer woman was lying motionless, on her back, in the road, in the middle of traffic, a few people standing around, vehicles creeping around her perimeter.

She’d come off her bike.

Her face was covered in blood, and her helmet was lying a few feet away.

A man was pressing hard on her chest, and blood was bubbling out of her mouth by the litre.

It seemed unlikely that an ambulance, assuming they have such things, would have been able to make it through the traffic in time.

This city is, apparently, notorious for this kind of thing.

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Jeremy Beadle’s dead.

It was very fashionable to hate Beadle in the 1980s and 1990s.

In fact, when I told my dad he was dead a few moments ago, my dad merely deadpanned: “I have an alibi.”

With hindsight, I can’t think why he was so detested. He was easily less than a tenth as irritating as most of the idiots presenting crass, populist TV programs nowadays.

Maybe I’ll say the same when Alan Carr dies.

But I doubt it.

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