Second chances

 

I’m not going to mention my barber’s fee, which is a special fee just for me, or so she says. She also tells me she is not a barber, she is a hair stylist; I tell her I am a man, and real men do not go to hair stylists; she tells me I must be older than I look, or I wouldn’t say that. Whatever. Suffice it to say that, for the price of one visit here, I could drink enough beer to kill 1 million brain cells. Of course there are more efficient ways to dispose of a bunch of neurons.

Here I am, in Bangkok traffic, sitting on the back of a motorcycle taxi, telling myself, yet again, that I should remember never to find myself sitting on motorcycle taxis in Bangok traffic. My driver’s spare brainbucket hangs from the side of our vehicle, it being too small for my head. Anyway, the strap’s broken, not to mention the helmet is shocking pink. Whatever. Right away, I can see my driver has little or no depth perception. Given the way he leans the wrong way into corners—maybe a series of stylish attempts to lay the bike flat on the road—he might suffer an inner-ear infection as well. From the outset he keeps seeing holes among the contending currents of traffic, holes that no one else—especially me, what with my eyes closed in terror—can see. Never mind his apparent death wish, I can only conclude he’s either the unluckiest attemptive suicide in the world, or else he knows something the rest of us do not. Perhaps it’s due to some understanding on his part of extra-dimensional physics that we don’t have a head-on collision with any of these cars, trucks, buses, tuk-tuks or other motorcycles.

Big surprise—we actually get to the printer. But it’s closed. So what do I do? I suggest he takes me back to a noodleshop on my soi, my sub-street, thereby indicating serious brain damage on my own part even if we have avoided leaving my brains smeared across the road.

Never mind. The media flavor of the month is neural “plasticity" (more). Back when, in the Stone Age of behavioral psychology, we were told with confidence that, after the age of 15, our neurons started popping off at the rate of about one a second. I was never really able to relax and enjoy life after watching one prominent scientist standing there at the podium telling us this while she snapped her fingers, counting off the death of our brain cells. That was about the same time I discovered booze and the fact that sufficient quantities of this substance could erase the fear of steady neural attrition at the same time, sufficiently applied, it could erase millions and millions more cells, hopefully the ones in charge of keeping you anxious about such matters.

But good news! Current wisdom says this steady and inevitable brain death is not a fact of life, and that freelance writers and other confirmed piss-artists get another shot at sentience. That’s right. Brain cells regenerate, in some uncertain way and at some uncertain rate. I’m actually hoping that they regenerate faster than Dr. Donald Hebb, the behavioral psychologist, claimed they died by natural attrition, or else, by my own calculations, I’ll have to live 2,700,000 years to regenerate what I lose in a year, at a very conservative estimate of 1 million cells per booze-up at the rate of 2 per week, or around 700 per year, given that there are nearly 2 trillion seconds in a year, and that’s only if I stop boozing now.

I’ve just read over that last paragraph, and it confuses me, which is no more than one should expect given the fact that I’ve been drinking too much twice a week all my adult life. … Wait a minute—if there are really nearly 2 trillion seconds in a year, and my neurons had been dying at the rate of 1 per second, I should have run out of brain cells long ago. … What’s that you say? … Ha, ha. Anyway, I’m a writer, not a mathematician.

I could really use a beer.