The sad, inevitable end of Long Ouch.

I don't exactly go out looking for crime blotters, but I never pass one up if it crosses my path. My parents send me blotters from the Green Bay papers if they seem particularly funny, and every once in a while, I still check back to the Arcata Eye's blotter, which remains the country's best. You can get a much better feel for what's going on in a town by reading the blotter than you can reading the front pages of their papers.

That's why I was tickled when New York Press Associate Editor Alexander Zaitchik recently sent me the crime blotter from an issue of the Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia's English-language paper. It was quite extensive, this blotter, detailing dozens upon dozens of crimes from all over Cambodia. Reading through it, I noticed a few recurring themes.

First, lots of crimes seem to take place at dance halls. Then again, thinking about it, I guess dance halls and night clubs amount to pretty much the same thing, so maybe it's not so odd that so many people get stabbed there.

Also, an awful lot of people seem to be attacked and murdered while riding their motorbikes around town (motorbikes that their assailants inevitably steal). Most of these assaults, I also noticed, are committed with knives or axes?especially axes?and very few guns. In fact, in over a month's worth of tales of criminal mayhem, I only saw one that involved any sort of firearm.

And sadly, an inordinate number of 11- to 13-year-old girls are raped, often after being dragged into nearby forests.

Apart from the gun issue, maybe things aren't so different over there after all, at least as far as human behavior is concerned.

There was one entry in and amongst all those others, however, that grabbed my attention. It concerned the sad and lonely death of the improbably (but appropriately) named Long Ouch.

Didn't his parents realize what sort of hopeless path they were sending him down when they named him that? Life ain't easy for a boy named Sue, no?but can you imagine the living hell faced by a boy named "Long Ouch"? I can't help but picture a Cambodian Les Nesman. Always had a Band-Aid somewhere on his body.

Who can guess for how many years Long Ouch suffered in silence before finally taking his own life? We may never know that, but unlike so many other suicides you hear about, the story does offer a few clues as to why he did it.

Long Ouch (I wish I were making that name up?I'd be very proud of it), for those of you familiar with the area, lived and died in the village of Thbeng Tateung, which is in the Traim Kak district of Takeo.

Police officers who found the 28-year-old's body in the early-morning hours of October 1 figured that the suicide might have somehow been related to a note from his girlfriend, also found at the scene.

"I wish you to love only me," his gal Thoeun wrote him, "and I wait for a wedding day for us."

Doesn't sound so bad, now does it? A little clunky in translation, maybe, but still?it sounds like she loves him a great deal. Of course it's entirely possible that Ouch didn't want to get married, and that's what led him to wrap the rope around his neck. But even if that was the case you'd think, "Well, wouldn't it have been easier just to call the whole thing off rather than kill yourself over it?" Of course, who really knows what sorts of things go on between a man and a woman? There might have been more to it than all that.

Then you read the last sentence of what was, in the end, a perfectly constructed three-sentence tale:

"Police said he hanged himself as his wife, Noun Neat, 31, refused to let him marry his girlfriend."

Well, then, I guess that's when you say "a-hah!"

I hope his parents are proud of themselves. He didn't stand a chance.