The wet season in Southeast Asia: obviating the need for daily weather reports since time immemorial.

While I’m on the subject of motorbikes, I was musing recently that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve driven a car. Not in itself an earth-shattering piece of news, I know, but it’s one of those little things that you catch yourself missing every once in a while, along with such things as convenience store hot dogs, American football (to the rest of the world, “football” means only one thing, and the NFL doesn’t enter into it), un-subtitled Hollywood movies, and non-smoking sections.

That got me thinking that I’ve got an anniversary of sorts coming up - it was on August 14, almost one year ago, that I landed in Narita Airport in Tokyo and began doing whatever it is I’ve been doing with my life since I’ve been in Asia. It’s a pretty significant milestone. One whole year. That’s longer than some people spend in prison, or getting a master’s degree, or married. So I was thinking that I need to do something significant to acknowledge it. Not just throw a party or bake a cake or go to Bangkok and spend a memorable evening trying not to contract Hepatitis C, but something more lasting. (Yes, smartass, Hepatitis C would fit into the “lasting” category, but I’d prefer something I could share with my grandchildren, thanks very much.)

So I’ve almost convinced myself that I’m going to get a tattoo.

Yes, go ahead, make another Hepatatis crack. I’ll wait.

Got it out of your system? Good. And while you’re at it, ask yourself this: Is Hepatitis really something you want to joke about? I’d be knocking on wood if I were you.

Back to the tattoo. For starters, I don’t have any others. I was never really a tattoo kind of person. Back when I was a kid, they were the sure sign of somebody who was not to be messed with, someone who had probably been to prison, drove a loud motorcycle, ate glass shards with bourbon for breakfast, and looked for fights in which he could headbutt his opponent. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy. Then, later, when I was an adult and tattoos became trendy and ubiquitous … well, you can see the problem. Tattoos were trendy and ubiquitous. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy, either. So it just went on like this all of my life, with me never really regretting not getting a tattoo, never feeling like I was in desperate need of something that, when I was old, would look like there were melted crayons running down the folds of the skin on my back.

So were I to actually get one, it would be my first and, presumably, my only. I can’t really see one small tattoo becoming an addiction to ink or a gateway drug to multiple body piercings and suspending myself from hooks. On the other hand, I bet people who suspend themselves from hooks said the same thing once.

There’s also the issue of what kind of artwork I’d choose. Something traditional? Something “tribal”? My name translated into Asian characters? Could be risky. I heard from too many Japanese people who’d seen Americans walking around with magnificent kanji characters encircling their neck or bicep that translated as “TOILET DRINKER” or “PLAY MYSELF ALWAYS” or “BELLY BUTTON KING.”

And of course, joking aside, I really, really don’t want to catch a blood borne disease that will remain with me for probably as long as the tattoo. Here in Southeast Asia, hygiene is often a difficult concept for common individuals to grasp, to say nothing of restaurant workers. Extrapolating from this, I’m guessing medical-level sterility is an abstraction on a level with quantum electrodynamics.

The upshot is it’s still just an idea I’m toying with. Part of me hates the idea of joining the ranks of millions of brainless, attention-seeking fraternity dickheads, even if I’m not sporting “sleeves” and never, ever call it a “tat.” But I’ve got to do something to mark a year as a stranger in a strange land. One day, I want to be kicking back with my grandkids - or more likely, my sisters’ grandkids - take off my shirt, and watch them gape. “What’s that on your back, grandpa?” they’ll ask in hushed voices.

“What, that old thing?” I’ll ask, casually flexing my arms and watching their eyes pop. “That’s a memento of mine, a little something from when I was a young man and I spent a year in Asia.”

“Really?” they’ll say, agog. “What’s it say?”

“It says, ‘REMEMBER YOUR ANTIVIRAL DRUGS.’”

When I arrived in Vietnam eight weeks ago, one of the very first things I noticed was that, after 10 months in Japan, I was once again in a place where cars keep to the right side of the street. Which was a relief, as it had taken me months to get used to cars driving in the left lane, a learning curve during which I nearly lost my life daily, because I’d be looking down the street the wrong way, think to myself, Well all’s certainly clear in that direction, then step into the street and suddenly see my life flash in front of my eyes to the soundtrack of a blaring horn as I narrowly missed becoming a flattened pedestrian fatality. (On one hand, this was a great way to review the highlights of my life. On the other, some of the bits were a little boring, frankly, and it was always hard to buy new underwear in my size in Japan.) Also, it makes perfect sense in retrospect, but it took me a while to figure out that, just like in America, as things go on the street, so do they also go everywhere else. I was constantly running face-first into startled Japanese people who were walking, naturally, on the left side of the sidewalk, or the office hall, or the supermarket aisle. So while I thrilled at the idea of once again traveling on the unambiguously correct side of the street and escalator, I also worried about how long it would take me to unlearn everything I’d learning about walking in Japan.

I should mention that when I first noticed this, it was technically just a few moments before arriving in Vietnam, by which I mean landing, because I was peering down at the roads through the window of the airplane as we dropped toward the runway at Hanoi International Airport. There are two other interesting things I did not anticipate about Vietnamese traffic at this time, one of which I noticed from my seat in the airplane - that there were very few cars, but lots and lots of motorcycles - and the other one I didn’t notice until later, because it can’t be seen, only heard.

And what a sound it is. Vietnam is a symphony of noise, one in which the horn section dominates. Some horns are short, piercing exclamations, others are lengthy outbursts that go on long enough to shift into incredible new registers as their owners race past, clearly hellbent on either manslaughter or suicide. The sheer variety of horns is staggering. They honk, screech, blast, whine, and babble. They bellow and cough, shriek and wail, bark, burst, and ululate. Some produce malicious, angry noises that are the fingernails on a chalkboard of the horn world, while others have the gentle gravitas of an elephant melodically breaking wind. Some sound like geese that have been goosed.

They do not stop, except in the very small hours of the night, and then they merely subside.

All this honking actually serves an important purpose. There are 80 million people in Vietnam and 40 million 125cc motorbikes, all operating on roads that in many places are more pothole than pavement. When you pack that many two-wheeled vehicles together — many of them laden with assorted boxes, shrubbery, furniture, construction equipment, live farm animals, and often entire families of five — on narrow, neglected streets, you have an accident waiting to happen. Several million accidents, actually, all at once. But they don’t happen, or at least not on the scale you’d expect.

That’s because in Vietnam, honking one’s horn does not mean “Get out of my way, you irritating, brainless, steaming pile of retarded baboon shit,” the way it does in the U.S., but rather “Here I am, just so you know.” Besides being much friendlier, it’s also much more practical. In America, all honking accomplishes is to piss somebody off, dramatically decreasing the chances that they’re going to accommodate you in whatever way you’re hoping they will. Here it’s exactly the opposite. The system works a little like the way bats echolocate to keep their bearings, or the way fish use receptors in their skin to know what their immediate neighbors are doing so the whole school can turn on a dime. All that racket is just a giant conversation happening on the streets, which is a little ironic, as most of the drivers and their passengers are also busily conversing on their cellphones.

Figure also that road rules, as such, are all but nonexistent in Vietnam. Medians are an afterthought, stop signs are mere suggestions, traffic lights are a waste of electricity, and sidewalks are considered crucial parts of the roadway. Driving into oncoming traffic is a skill that’s seemingly taught from birth, as is the ability to drive at speed millimeters away from neighbors on five or six sides or weaving maniacally through traffic while your passenger sits sidesaddle on the back in heels and a short skirt, applying lipstick in a compact with the composure of a bored housecat. The Vietnamese government enacted a law last year that requires every motorcycle driver to wear a helmet, but this seems largely understood by the population to have been an ironic joke.

The one rule that everyone observes is that the bigger your vehicle is, the greater your claim to the road. Right of way is determined by size and size alone. A utility van defers to a garbage truck, and a Kia moves aside for the utility van. The pecking order proceeds down through the ranks of passenger cars, motorbikes, and bicycles, though it does allow an exception for the technically larger but slower moving cyclo - a motorized version of a rickshaw in which the passengers ride in front, facing the tumult head-on. (It probably goes without saying that tourists rarely ride in a cyclo twice.) At the very bottom of the hierarchy stands the humble pedestrian, who if she is wise hugs the side of the road and keep her head up, eyes peeled.

Strangely, this formulation changes once the pedestrian wishes to cross the street instead of to move with traffic. In fact, it’s upended altogether. Given the negligible reasons for traffic ever to pause, it does not, and so a pedestrian waiting for a break in the traffic to cross the street will wait a very long time indeed. Therefore, the way to cross a street is simply  - and for newcomers this takes a great deal of faith - to step into the street and begin moving toward the opposite curb. (If this seems counterintuitive from where you’re sitting, you should try it on a major Saigon thoroughfare.) The key, like swimming with sharks, is not to make any sudden or unexpected movements, and to maintain a slow, steady pace toward the other side of the road. Miraculously, the traffic parts around the person as smoothly as a stream flowing around a boulder. The result is a cacaphonic mechanical ballet that seems to defy the laws of space, time, inertia, causality and common sense. But somehow it works.

I owned and rode a series of motorcycles in the U.S. on and off for about ten years, so I thought I’d have a leg up when it came to renting one of the thousands of motorbikes available to visitors for $5 a day or so and zipping around Hanoi. It’s amusing, really, when I reflect back on my naive self climbing aboard that first scooter and looking forward to a day of carefree cruising, taking in the sights, the wind in my hair, or what’s left of it. I was still unaware that you age differently driving on the streets of Vietnam: one minute there is like a year in the real world. And that this speeded-up time is reflected daily in your physical appearance. I was oblivious also to the fact that letting your concentration on the road and the other drivers waver from 100 percent to 99 percent is akin to standing on a golf course clutching a steel pipe over your head in a thunderstorm.

I learned quickly. These days, I’m a different driver than I was in America. I climb sidewalks in my Honda Dream for the pole position beneath the red light, watching for a moment to dart into the oncoming traffic for a shot at jumping the median so I can beat the horse-drawn cart I can see hogging the road two blocks away. I fill my tank with petrol poured from a plastic one-liter Coke bottle at a “gas station” on the roadside before jockeying for street space with scarred, grizzled veterans of the road. And when I have a close call, which is often, my life flashes before my eyes, and I pay attention even to the boring bits, and the soundtrack is music, sweet music.

Greetings from Bali, Indonesia, where it’s the dead of winter and 85 degrees.

Any regular reader of this blog could be forgiven for thinking I’ve given up the ghost - that I’ve joined the ranks of briefly prolific but ultimately doomed bloggers whose shelf-life was revealed to be that of a jar of pickles. It’s been more than a month since I last posted in this space, after all. I’ve been kicking around in Southeast Asia for almost five weeks - five weeks without a single post! In that time I’ve traveled through Vietnam (Hanoi, Ninh Binh, Hue, Hoi An, Da Lat, Saigon, the Mekong delta, Chau Doc) and Cambodia (Pnomh Penh, Siem Reap and Angkor, Kep, Ko Tonsay, and Kampot) and down to the southern hemisphere, where I’m now closer to Australia than Asia and everyone’s home looks like an explosion at a Pier 1 distribution warehouse.

But I’m here to tell you that despite what you may think, it ain’t so. I’m haven’t faded out! I’m still blogging - in spirit if not in actual ones and zeroes. The excuses are many, but what it boils down to is this: I don’t have a laptop, and I’m really not very good at writing in an open-air internet cafe in a crumbling rattan chair, using a computer that was probably built when the first Bush was in office and a spotty internet connection that’s slower than a one-legged DMV employee, all the while surrounded by a heaving throng of college-aged, Facebook-obsessed backpackers who haven’t showered in a week. Email can be checked in such conditions, and camera memory cards can be cleared, but little else. In the meantime, however, I can assure any and all readers that photos are being taken, notes are being scribbled, natives are being engaged, unlikely paths are being trod, strange foods are being sampled, package tours are being steadfastly avoided, unfamiliar bathroom facilities are being experimented with, large rodents are being watched carefully, exotic intestinal bugs are being wrestled with and overcome, uncommon foreign phrases are being memorized, useless trickets are being haggled over and bought, and experiences are being racked up by the crateload. It’s all going to make it onto this blog at some point, you have my word.

Until then, can somebody send a can of Lysol? These internet cafes get awfully ripe in the heat.

When you step onto a Japanese train at rush hour, it’s strangely quiet. The car will be jammed to the windowsills with people, hip to hip on the seats and standing packed as terra cotta soldiers in a Chinese cave, but there’s hardly a sound. Only a murmered, indistinct conversation somewhere within the bright fluorescent glare and the creaking of the plastic hand straps complaining against a stainless steel bar. Close your eyes, and you could imagine yourself in the hold of an 18th-century ship of the line. But open them again, and you’re surrounded by the bleeding edge of the 21^st century, every last soul immersed in the onanistic tools of technology. They’re listening to music on personal music players, watching  TV or typing e-mails on their cellphones, playing games on a PSP or Nintendo DS, thumbing through an electronic Japanese-to-English dictionary - sometimes all at once. A few of them are even reading newspapers or books, the story inevitably running back to front, up-and-down sentences falling off the bottom of the page.

I’ll miss that.

I climb on a bus for Kansai airport in less than an hour. From there, it’s to Taipei, where I lay over for the evening. Then on to Hanoi tomorrow. For the next month, at least, I’ll be living in The Land that Time Forgot. I’ve sold my laptop to Will, since with a busted monitor it’s not much good on the road. I have much that I still want to say about Japan, now that it’s in the rear-view mirror. But I haven’t had much of a chance to get it all down here, what with the events of the past week bunching up in front of me like an interstate pile-up.

But I expect I’ll have plenty of time in the coming days to work on it. For now, it’s sayonara to Japan - and it’s hustling convenience store clerks, its svelte population, terrible pop music, paradoxical ATM machines, thousands of temples and shrines, and breathtaking scenery; its startling dental lapses, microscopic shoes, million curious indiosyncracies, and the friendliest people I’ve ever known.

It’s sort of been lost in all the hubbub lately, upstaged by gang-related beatings (do they have witness protection programs in Japan?) and me being shown the door by Japanese Immigration, but a few weeks ago I started a photoblog. It’s sort of a brother blog to this one, like succotash - the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn - except that it’s all photos, with none of the annoying yammering that goes on here. It’s called The Daily Edamame - you may remember the name from the title of an M&A category I introduced with fanfare and subsequently ignored.

The pitch: one photo per day, a brief caption, and nothing else. Like edamame, it’s briefly distracting, tasty but not too filling, and it lets you feel like you’re partaking of something that’s good for you without, of course, being good for you. Unlike succotash, which really is good for you (I’m mixing vegetable dishes on top of metaphors; maybe I’d better bring Hemingway instead of Bukowski to Vietnam). So go ahead, subscribe. One more RSS feed won’t bring your browser crashing down in a smoking pile around your feet. Unless you’re using Internet Explorer.

While I’m on the subject, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Man and Ultraman for the next few weeks. Best case scenario: It will seamlessly morph from a staid-life-in-Japan blog to a fresh new life-on-the-trail blog. It will fairly crackle with new characters, overflow with tales and adventures from the underbelly of Asia, and groan with the weight of all the new photographs. Revivified by the salt air and the thrill of the road, it will glitter like the sea at night and shine like the eyes of young lovers.

Worst case scenario: Well, we all know what that is.

The crystal ball is hazy because I don’t know if I’ll be taking my laptop with me. I’d like to, but in a stroke of bad luck that I refused at the time to take as a karmic comment on my decision to move to to Japan, it took a body blow during the flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, destroying the monitor entirely. Since the day I arrived, I’ve had to use it with an external monitor. Which has worked fine. Except that now when I most need a mobile computer, mine’s not remotely mobile.

Most of Southeast Asia, I’m told, is more wired than than a roomful of West Hollywood talent agents, and internet cafes are as common as noodle joints. So keeping connected won’t be too much of a chore, but I may have to do most of my writing old school-style, with pencil and paper - which is a lot more conducive to short and to the point than it is to rambling, stream-of-consciousness monlogues. And I have no idea what I’ll do about saving photos without a computer to download them to. The last time I tried that, I lost everything. Of course, the last time I tried anything like this was 1991. Hopefully I’ve learned something since then.