The Cultural Detective by Christopher G. Moore

Author:Christopher G. Moore [Moore, Christopher G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Undefined
Publisher: Heaven Lake Press
Published: 2011-01-11T22:00:00+00:00

Losing Your Sense of Time

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does the effect has the same disorientation as cultural shock. I am talking about the twisted mental state that comes from crossing an international date line. Last Monday I left Cooper Square Street in New York at 6:30 p.m., walked across the street and caught a taxi to Centre Street. The fare for that short trip with tip was eight dollars, or about the same as it costs for the twenty-seven kilometer journey from my condo in Bangkok to the airport. But that is another matter. The EVA shuttle picked me up at 7:00 p.m. for Newark Airport. The flight departed on time at 11:00 p.m., and I caught some sleep on the seven hour flight to Anchorage. After topping up the fuel tank and changing crews, we were off again two hours later. It was twelve hours to Taipei. Then came another two hours on the ground before the final threehour-plus flight into Bangkok. I arrived at the door to the condo at noon Bangkok time. It was now Wednesday. Something happened to Tuesday. It was chewed up and swallowed; it disappeared into the void. I was doing okay until about 6:00 p.m. Bangkok time. It was as if someone had put me in a sleeper lock. The kind professional wrestlers use but are probably fake. This was a real one, though. In such a position there is only one way forward: fight for your reality, stay focused, tough it out. But that isn’t easy. I told myself that the worst thing for jet lag is to fall asleep at 6:00 p.m. That is the rational mind talking. And when your body feels like it is free floating, and you are drifting in and out of zones of consciousness, the rational mind sputters, spits and finally drifts away. You try to chase after it, but even as you are running after that thought, you see it like a drowning man struggling for a life preserver just out of reach.

I kept my watch on New York time. I am looking at 7:30 a.m. in New York and 6:30 p.m. in Bangkok. Your mind and body try to stretch around that time distance. It is not that different from the cultural shock from trying to understand a foreign language. Your brain seeks to register meaning but fails in the task. Culture shock and jet lag are evil twins. They force us to face the limits of what our bodies and minds are capable of doing or performing. Most of the time we drift from lamp to post in our comfort zone, never reaching that outer zone where we hit a wall that causes the mind to tip over like a tricycle, the wheels spinning in the air, going nowhere.

I was happy to be back in Bangkok on Wednesday night. But the reality was that I had no sense of where I was. The fog that descends when how you process reality shuts down is a kind of insanity.

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