Page 9 - MN

9
Dictators and Other Crazy People
I wake up at 4:30 a.m. and realize I have almost an hour before I have to get up for an early round of golf. For once, I'm able to go back to sleep and the alarm wakes me at 5:20. I remember waking up around 2 a.m. and listening to a lecture on stoicism on YouTube for awhile before I could get back to sleep. Stoicism seems related to Buddhism, so now they both fascinate me, as does Marcus Arelius, the Roman emperor who had absolute power and could've wallowed in corruption and pleasure. Instead he spent years trying to become a good person.
Someone should come up with a ratio of bad dictators to good, but my feeling is the chances of getting a good dictator are about one percent. Yet people still fall for strongman leaders. Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, Xi Jinping, and all the other autocrats--people actually think that's a good way to go. Now, Trump. He fits the pattern and it scares me.
But I digress, and I get the feeling there will be more digressions in this book than actual action. I can do that because I'm a strongman author. I make my own rules.
I wake up in darkness. And again it's cold. For Thailand this is the dead of winter and the early temperature today is 15 degrees. I have no idea what that is in Fahrenheit, but I think it would be a mildly cold day in Seattle. Here it's Arctic.
I splash water on my hair and face (I showered before going to bed and don't think I got dirty sleeping), plug in the hot water pot and get dressed. Shorts, golf shirt, sweatshirt, another sweatshirt, and I'm ready. A little before six I head downstairs, turn off the outside lights, put on socks and my favorite Adidas shoes (wide, very wide) and head out to the car. I plug my phone into the dash and put on the Richard Russo novel. He wrote "Nobody's Fool", one of my all-time favorite books and one of my all-time favorite Paul Newman movies. I'm now going through all his books and they're amazing.
It takes less than ten minutes to get to North Hill golf course and there I meet Jeff, the guy who has a coffee-roasting business in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Jeff is one of the Canadian contingent I've met in Chiangmai, starting with Derek Schade, the golf pro who used to be at Chiangmai Highlands and is one of my favorite people in Thailand. His friend Jeff loves early, fast golf, so we are perfectly suited to play together. Oh sure, he outdrives me by about 100 yards and has me leaping out of my shoes trying for extra distance, but he is positive, good to talk to, and a new friend.