Seat of Your Pants

Somewhere a magician is getting booed off stage

2010-04-22T15:47:00.008+09:00

It occasioned one night in early spring, he (who is not the aforementioned magician) decided not to go the theater, but to stay home instead. The weather was chilly and the film could wait until tomorrow. It hadn't occurred to him yet just how exactly he would occupy his evening, but his chores were numerous, among them: run speaker cable, finish reading magazine, remove pile of clothes from couch, unpack another box of books. Any one or two of these would form a productive, if not particularly story-worthy evening for our young man.

His girlfriend was admiring all the details of the night stroll, relishing, it seemed, being out of the apartment and away from the computer screen. A computer screen glowing incomplete homework into the darkness of her empty kitchen. The urgency of her homework made her abandon her plans to visit the theater, but it wouldn't interfere with her walk and all the inconsequential observances that beckoned. There was a warning taped to a bicycle rack, newspaper faces cutout and pasted on a window, a dolls head in a shrine, printed dinner ware in the style of entomology, a pencil portrait of a wrestler who may or may not be famous though nobody present knew, and numerous other things it would be a shame not to notice.

* * *

"Let's walk to Dolores," she said.

"Ok," he replied, realizing that she probably wasn't all that interested in the dream he was recounting for her, though she politely pretended to be at least. This convenient extension to the walk would give him time to finish the retelling without skimping on the elaborations. Dreams, after all, aren't about what happened but what seemed to be happening. This, of course, requires quite a lot more explanation.

"...because the camera was automatic, you see? This made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, this doesn't make any sense now, but, at the time, that I was the murderer, I don't know why, but I knew it and the investigator knew it, but he didn't show like he knew it, he kept being casual, smiling, not letting on, but I knew that he knew and I knew I was fucked because all of a sudden everything that didn't make any sense, like that guitar plug in my room, and a whole lot of other random things, pointed invariably to my guilt. And I had no alibi I realized. I didn't even know anyone in the house. You know? Then when I realized how complete the evidence was against me that when I started to doubt my own innocence and my memory, maybe this was actually my camera, and that was the really scary part. So I asked the people who owned the house where the party was if they knew everyone at the party and they said no way, there was tons of people here..."

"Let's go back."

"We just got to the park."

"It's cold. Let's go back."

"Of course, it was a huge party, they didn't know everyone, so I asked if they knew anyone there that was acting strange. I just needed anything. Well there is Harry and Sex. Harry and Sex? Harry and Sex. Harry and Sex? Yes, Harry and Sex. They told me that they were a dark couple that constantly dared each other to do more and..."

"I want to look at that chicken."

"Chicken?"

"Back there."

He turned and behind them about thirty yards, centered on the path they had just been walking along, sat what in the dark appeared to be a very white hen. She walked back towards it. He followed. She walked right up to it and squatted less than a foot away. It didn't move at all. She reached out to touch it as if that was the most natural thing to do, to reach out and pet a chicken, which was actually not a chicken at all, but a pure white dove, that was sitting in a park at night in the center of the city. It took a step away from her. She took a step forward and reached towards it again. It took a step away. This simple dance continued for ten minutes. She followed (or chased) the dove off the path and down the grassy slope. He watched, amused. An encampment of homeless men with shopping carts sat under a grove of trees and also watched, presumably amused as well.

Eventually she desisted. And, smiling, returned up the slope to where he stood. Whether she had hoped to capture the bird, simply touch it, or engage in this simple gameplay, was unclear to him.

"Did you touch it?"

"Yeah."

Now, immediately after this, the narrative gravity of this encounter struck each of them as overwhelming. They could not bring ourselves to leave the bird. It was evidently incapable of flight, though not clearly wounded. It seemed, undoubtably, to be a gift or an omen or a symbol or something they could not name handed to them and to them alone. And where could such a creature come from but from heaven? They settled to please the gods they must catch the bird and nurse it back to health. Besides, the homeless men might kill and eat it.

Without much difficulty he subdued the bird. It didn't struggle much, and soon acquiesced to the cage of his grasp. No one paid any mind to the boy carrying a dove down the sidewalk.

"Maybe it was a magicians and it escaped."

"Probably."

She emptied out a couple of crates, which they used for a cage. They made a cup out of paper in which they placed some bread crumbs and sunflower seeds. They gave it some water in the cut off seat of a plastic bottle. It never struggled, but moved to the far corner of the crate and watched them.

They named it Harry Houdini.

2009-11-25T14:42:00.000+09:00

Try living with slow internet and monitor what that does to your interest in your e-lifestyle.

Neighbors

2009-10-09T13:55:00.004+09:00

The haunts of this complex are vaporous and strange. Shaggy-haired, sad faced young men with Casios behind closed doors, a glance in the doorcrack, tangled wires and a mass of dirty clothes. There are painters of indiscriminate paintings sweeping dusty footsteps from the stairs, saying not a word, whispering secrets to golden furred cats. Eccentrics, hoarders, lunatics (probable), lesbians tattooed and pierced, and others. Live here.

The grey ghost himself, walking the halls at all hours appears. At three o’clock in the morning, I awake to see you out (fearful of the night, when you’re alone in it) we passed him on the stairs, tall, solitary figure dressed in black; gray curls curtaining the grey gaunt face; the cat with golden furs and the saddest eyes silently submits to a twilight scolding. His ex-wife perhaps, a lost love, tragedy clothed in fur and clutched close to the heart; a spell of unspeakable power was cast.

San Francisco, this is your beating heart. These lonesome souls, frozen in midstep, crossing the street. The countdown on the street outside, on 6th street, skid row, the most poignant art ever created by mechanical failure. The crosswalk sign counting down from one to zero, from zero to one, from one to zero. No sign of direction. Does it count up or down?

As I cross the street, passing confused German tourists wary to step out when the light might at any moment change to red, I imagine all these fallen bodies propped in sleeping bags against blackened brick walls, huddled above sewer grates, are crossing the street, and time freezes before they get across. I imagine they are stuck like figures in a broken tape flickering on a TV screen that no one will turn off. 1-0-1-0-1-0-1-0-1-0-1-0-1-0-

Mr. Rat, you are the virus that plagues this town.

2009-06-30T11:21:00.004+09:00

He recognized me, though I can’t imagine how. It was over a month ago that he pulled that scam. Now he’s limping downtown among the throng. It’s gay pride weekend and people have gathered to show their support in the streets of San Francisco. Butterfly wings, rainbow socks galore. On nights like these I realize, “Dude you’re in f****** San Francisco, man!” I’m listening to noise in my headphones and laughing at everything, walking past Old Navy, past the Gap at Powell and Market whose window is adorned with a rainbow pattern of colored Tees. Tonight, I’m the tourist of the tourists. Hehe. Going nowhere in particular, watching all these people watching things. I’m chewing on a popsicle stick.

He passes me going the other direction. I know it is him. He’s got the same stupid fake limp, and the same stupid scab, and the same stupid crummy suit, and the same stupid mustache, and the same stupid helpless expression on his stupid motherf****** face. I loathe him. He is a cockroach. I want to crush him with the heel of my boots. I want to boil him in oil. I want to pour him down the sink and grind him to little bits in the disposal. Such is my hatred for this man. This vile vulture.

I turn around and follow him to see if he will try his scam tonight. I hope does. That will be my moment. I’ll interrupt him and demand my money. No, I’ll play along, I’ll ask him all sorts of questions. No, I’ll just glare at him, freak him out a bit. He turns his head and looks straight at me. He recognizes me. He recognizes me? Impossible. I tail him through the crowd, keeping a comfortable distance, he darts across Market St. on a red light, so do I. He weaves through the crowd, almost jogging, so do I. My eyes are fixed on him, I’m trying to turn my vision into laser beams to sever his spinal cord. He turns North into the tenderloin, where emaciated black men sit in lawn chairs at street corners, and loose woman in loose clothing haven’t bathed in weeks, offer themselves, where every brick, every crack smells like piss and spilt booze. I catch him at a red light, act casual, but make sure he knows I know, he turns and dashes across the street just before the light changes. I follow him parallel on the other side. He ducks into a corner store to buy a forty with his ill-gotten gains. I wait, lean against a pole, glare at him in line. Turn my popsicle stick in my mouth. I’m a badass, I can tear this motherf****** to pieces. You filth. You trash. You vermin. You are the sickness of this city. You are the virus, the cancer, the raw canker sore under my tongue. I won’t tear him to pieces. I will glare at him, because I am not the kind of person to tear another person to pieces. But right now I wish I was. I want him to think that I am. I hope he is scared. Or at least a little nervous. He exits and sees me waiting for him. He definitely notices. He definitely tries not to show that he notices. He walks even faster, carrying the little black plastic bag of liquid escapism. Maybe he’s a drug head. Could be this is where he scores his H. All those tourists who didn’t know any better, thought they were gaining karma points, supporting this asshole’s habit. I keep following him, shooting lasers into his skull. Deadly, death ray lasers. From my eyeballs.

He turns down the filthiest, most god-forsaken, street in the whole city. Flesh rotten zombies troll these sidewalks day and night. Half-naked, putrid individuals holing up in half way houses and mangy rat hotels and gutters. Ha. He lives on Sixth Street. We’re practically neighbors. He gets lost in the mob. I lose interest and go home.

Missing You

2009-05-28T04:31:00.003+09:00

The Swell of the Sea

2009-05-09T11:12:00.008+09:00

Atop the stairs stood this image. Ghost from beginnings, reminder of now. Baggy pants, hair in a hand knit beanie, the color of exploding yarn. At the very top, later she would show me, a burned out star, fallen from the heavens. A rock as black as the void, perforated a million times with the heat of it’s unfathomable journey. Just as I remembered her, this wandering poet, philosopher; a lamp without shade.

The library was closing, or just nearly, my books not yet found, I mounted the steps to ascend to the higher levels of knowledge. There above me stood this old friend. Yes old friend, though neither old nor particularly close to me. Just as I remembered her. How had time folded so that one moment lead to the next, though a thousand lay between?

“Hello.” She said.

“Hello.” I said.

• • •

Dusk settled in the forest, nestled into cuddled dark approaching. A golden hour filtered through a mesh haze of grey. Clouds too long visitors, delayed. Damp ocean salt breeze, the smell: crab shell abandoned, seaweed entwined. Whispers from the West, far over the horizon, kissed us on the ears. Climbing the hill, the tree limbs grasped, twisted, begged, yearned. Atop the hill stoics, trees too, like priests, tall, stiff, straight, righteous, refused to lend a hand. Beneath the cliffs, fat seals bathed in the retreating sunlight. Pups ducked the waves of the rising tide, watched two indiscreet lovers caressing on the secluded shore, called to them, ”what are you doing there? Why don’t you come in the water and play?” Naive as he was, he didn’t realize that the two could not speak seal. The two, pausing from their lover’s gaze, looked out to sea and noticed the pup watching them and asked, “What is it doing? Why is it watching us?”

A tall, thin, and aging photographer walking through the half enchanted forest at dusk crossed paths with a young couple walking in the opposite direction. It happened that they all stopped and began to converse; the three of them beneath the righteous boughs of those stoics on the hilltop. The aging photographer unzipped his bag and took out an odd device, a large, dark colored beetle-shell of textured plastic and tin. “Seen one of these before?” He brought its mouth to his eye and pressed down the horn on its head. It moaned mechanical and shed its skin; a thin, flat, white square that began slowly to change colors before their eyes. The aging photographer took it flat on his palm and pressed it to his stomach. When a minute or so later he presented it to the couple, they saw that a magical transformation had taken place on this beetle’s skin. Where there once was only white, now was a faded but most certain image. An image of them as they were. “It’s us, just like we are now,” they both said. The aging photographer smiled and shook his head. “This picture was taken thirty years ago, we had not yet met.” He placed the image in his breast pocket and continued down the path.

• • •

On second hand couches, in a second hand store, I conversed with the girl with the star above her head. We shared stories and speculations until the voice in the loudspeaker announced that the store was closing. She handed me a green suitcase that she had brought, that she had slept on, sat on, stood on. Carried from one end of the US to the other. As she exited the building, she turned and called out my name above the crowd. “Have fun!” And she was gone. I opened the green suitcase and inside, asleep, but full of life, lay a library of poems.

File This One Under “Sins”

2009-04-05T12:38:00.005+09:00

What surprise to enter and find on the floor a visitor. A pale sheet. A spangling of black forms. Words (from a neighbor, from another dimension?). Who knows me? Why have I been chosen?

An indecipherable code, a message spilled, an operative discovered. I am a simple young man. I care not for the thrill of espionage.

A cold sweat broached his brow. Lifting the document (hitherto referred to as “the document”) to his eyes, he mouthed the printed words in air, fearful that spoken they may awaken a distant, slumbering, and hitherto unknown evil.

Having read the document, will our intrepid resident choose to:

Slice the document into thin horizontal slivers, rearrange the lines to form new messages, new words, new implications, doubly, triply indecipherable.
Invent a machine to erase his mind of all new found knowledge of the document and its contents, but risk in the procedure losing other valuable information obtained in the last few hours, for instance that Fly Pan Am is currently the main project of GYBE! guitarist Roger Tellier-Craig.
Travel back in time to yesterday and relocate to a new apartment, allowing a new tenant to bear responsibility for the document.
Spread this sacred knowledge across the internet, thereby removing his own individual responsibility pertaining to the document, voting with confidence for the democratization of decision.

There are Things and Cries

2009-03-31T02:14:00.005+09:00

There are things and cries.
Voices, a thousand voices, contained in little boxes, in plastic bags, in copper pots,
in vaults beneath the tide.

Run ye over, be ye gone.

Wouldst mask my mask, eclipse my sun with your less brilliant star?

And these whispers,
from every crackling, tearing, unraveling.
Elves are they? Fairies? Evolving, mutating crustaceans?
Listening, mimicking, mocking, surpassing, or degrading?

Crafting stars from paper and lighting them in the sky.
We are more than gods.
For an instant as your face glows in red and orange,
it would appear that you were the source.
Heavenly diabolical.

There are things and cries.
In a thousand plastic cages, this silence is the sound
of our souls escaping.

n

Make a plan, a master plan, you diabolic.

2009-03-31T01:16:00.004+09:00

Intricate it seems when webs are laid
and dimmed reality
peers as poetry is in one’s head
never spoken, nor ever read.

‘Tis a veil to veil the veil revealed.

The bird to chirp by some design,
refrains to chirp at all, but instead
would orchestrate and catalog the voices of the dead,
giving names and titles to these unexpected offspring souls.

If truth is true and the truth of truth
is true,
is yet the truth of truth of truth still true
of truth of truth of truth?

The web, delicate and firm,
strand by strand is pulled.
A word is writ, ne’er spoken nor read
and laid beneath the earth.

n

What is the clear voice in the realm of the real.

2009-03-04T09:07:00.003+09:00

Our speech is birthed of our privilege, our allotted perspective. View from the third, fourth, fifth, one hundredth floor, encapsulates all beginnings, middles, and ends. Neatly. Perfect bound. Embossed cover with gold foil stamp. Shelved unread in the sarcophagi breeding enduring bacterial growths of yellowing pages baking in the oven of time. Those seeded with the yeast of history slowly rising with time in significance, while those kneaded by trends continually oscillating high and low. All dying, withering. And we, on padded futons, lament the death of good friends while relishing the fragrance of their very rot. And of them, what did know? Their character, spirit, habits? Or did we bathe in their ephemera, failing to read the time, distracted by the tick tock tick tock.

To which replied the jester, or have we failed to hear the tick tock tick tock song, distracted as we were by our knowledge of time?

The court rolled in boisterous laughter. The monstrous powdered wig of a monstrous powdered lady fell to the ground.

The jester bowed low, strapped a rope to the banister, methodically demonstrated the tying of a noose, tightened it around his neck, and leapt from the window. His neck snapped like a cold twig and a moment later his left foot shuttered like a leaf in the wind. He pendulumed rhythmically just inches above the street. The street covered with black gum spots, spit, and oil slicks. The children were handed baseball bats. They swung and swung till he burst like a piñata showering trinkets and dime store candies into their hungry mouths.

What is our inheritance, but a rope by which to hang ourselves if we attempt to deny it? If we gaze upon the street and laud it as reality as reality. We have history and future in our hands. Where then do we hold now? In our photographs, remembered, in our books. If we are second livers, are we less real? Can we untie ourselves from that silver thread? The clarity of our greatest visionaries is as a child’s peering through the crack beneath his parent’s bedroom door.

In the coffee shop overheard:

‘I will never know not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

Did he already know, I thought?

Cut up

2009-03-04T08:54:00.004+09:00

As iron sharpens iron.

It’s raining cats and dogs.

A stitch in time saves nine.

As iron cats and dogs.

It’s raining time saves nine.

A stitch in sharpens iron.

As iron cats and time.

It’s raining time a stitch.

A stitch in sharpens cats and dogs.

As raining time a stich.

It’s raining stitch and dogs.

A stitch cats time dogs iron and..

I watched as five men in white chased him across the yard

2009-02-22T09:19:00.003+09:00

To honor the memory of one Maxwell P. Moondragon

2009-02-01T14:37:00.004+09:00

I awoke this morning at a perfectly decent hour for a Saturday morning. Having no plans whatsoever and being in no hurry to be anywhere I decided to spend a few hours in a cafe and await what may come. Scarcely had a stepped inside the doorway, having waited outside for five minutes already, than I was affronted with some most intriguing information.

I could not resist eavesdropping on the conversation taking place just ahead of me between a tall lanky bearded fellow and an attractive young woman of apparent Hispanic descent. This particular establishment, though modestly adorned, serves extremely popular and highly acclaimed siphon filter coffee. So popular, in fact, that it is unusual to order without first waiting in line for a good twenty minutes. This particular morning I was thankful for the wait, for it made my eavesdropping much more discreet and convenient.

The young man explained that he was visiting his grandmother’s grave, I did not recognize the name of the cemetery and have since, unfortunately, forgotten it. He had not visited the site for some years and soon realized, abashed, that he was not at all certain where it was. As he wandered flustered and aimless, trying to pick up on some unlikely clue, he noticed a modest gravestone with a humble poem inscribed upon it. He pulled out a small notebook, and I did the same and read from it, while I transcribed.

If deep has no meaning without shallow and small
has no meaning without large
and wet has no meaning without dry
then perfection has no meaning at all.

He said the name of the deceased was one Maxwell P. Moondragon, b. May 16 1923, d. May 1963. Likely Moondragon was the author of the little poem as well, but it is not certain. He did not find his grandmother’s grave and after some moral deliberation decided to rest the flowers on Mr. Moondragon’s. Then he laughed. After this the conversation turned towards more mundane things and I did not care to continue spying.

Having little else to do, I decided to walk with my coffee over to the public library and see if there was any record of this Maxwell Moondragon. I was delighted to find several entries, including a short editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle which I was free to read in full and which I have taken the liberty to transcribe here.

* * *

It is right to pursue your own end with your own means and to fail. It is right to sail your boat out to the farthest sea and to capsize; for no one knows the limits of your vessel, though they may proclaim otherwise, until it sinks. Yet, even then it has not reached its limit. Only the captain may ever know. Should he persist even to his very end to seek the edge of the horizon on a vessel built for much tamer waters, we may call him fool, but secretly will we not all envy and admire his foolishness? For we all harbor in our souls those shameful moments when we turned our rudder back towards land, though we knew our treasure lay beyond. And we satisfied ourselves with the bittersweet victuals of rational remorse that sustain our bodies, while devouring our souls.

Everyone’s treasure does not lie at the horizon’s end. It is not unwise for a captain to remain in shallow water if his vessel is unworthy. It is right for him to find beauty there. It is right for him to love his vessel even if it will never take him to the lands beyond. This course is right for him, if it is in his heart. But may he never surrender his vessel to another, or sign on to the crew of another sturdier ship for shame of his own. Though he may reach paradise aboard it, paradise will not satisfy him, for it is not his.

Paradise is not a land that we can travel to, but a land that we must find within.

* * *

I also found his obituary. I did not copy it down, but shall try to paraphrase as best as I can.

* * *

Maxwell Moondragon, a decorated World War II veteran and experienced sailor from the Bay Area, disappeared on Thursday. He had made it his goal to sail alone across the Pacific before he turned forty and on the eve of his fortieth birthday, he set sail. He was never heard from again. A search party failed to find any sign of either him or his boat. It is presumed that his boat sank in a gale and he was drowned some three or four hundred miles from shore. He is survived by his wife, Gina; daughter, Saline; and brother Murray.

Rotten Fruits

2009-01-29T12:36:00.003+09:00

Piss in a bottle. Booze in a pisser. Bodies in a gutter. The stench was a tangible pressure against his body, repelling him as he unlocked the gate, the iron green cage around the front door of his apartment. Night had arrived and had brought her companions, the shredded kneed, chalk calloused toed, snotty nosed, ratty, fuzzbunny haired rejects. The moldy crumbs from the loaf of humanity. He dodged them like a halfback, kept his eyes fixed like molding orbs of glass. Breathing soft and swiftly, the odor can't penetrate to the olfactoral nodes. Some swear in gutter tongue, some with twisted deformed faces glare at him. Some slur and spit (drunk or lame?) from toothless mouths as they ask for change, cigarettes, but his ears are filled wells. He hears nothing. For his sanity, he hears nothing.

Faces smashed, chipped, sunken, bulging, glaring, bruised, squeezed. He thinks of rotten fruit and wonders whether the fruit was thrown out because it was rotten or whether it is rotten because it was thrown out.

one and one is two or sometimes not

2009-01-29T12:31:00.002+09:00

Seeing two objects
without comparing
he sees two objects
lonely
and complete.

seeing himself
and the reflection of himself
yet seeing nothing
he has reached understanding.

seeing an event
without a cause
he alone knows
why.

Toy trains navigate barren fields of snow while meteors cross unseen overhead

2009-01-25T09:40:00.002+09:00

At the library, I saw a toy train running around a field of white. I thought it was a winter scene, all the buildings and trees covered in snow. How zen. I paused and reflected on the delicate little scene and then realized that, in fact, it was in the process of being dismantled. Take this as a lesson.

* * *

They tumbled through morning, two burning meteors, primordial ash and stone alight in the cosmos.
Lit by eternal fire, tossed from the hand of Zeus high atop Olympus, weaving threads of light through that great black fabric.
In eternal descent, which is neither descent nor ascent, they.
From the ground, seemed to glow as one.

2009-01-20T12:40:00.001+09:00

Make meaningful stacks.

2009-01-15T14:03:00.000+09:00

words and wordless.

2009-01-13T11:15:00.001+09:00

the universe is big.
and small.

To look back and reflect, happy 2009

2009-01-02T08:46:00.003+09:00

Ask ourselves now at the dawn of a new year, while picking up the wine glasses and tacking upon the wall the new calendar, that paper compartment with the perhaps cliche, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps clever images attached: what was and what will be? These squares blank, each waiting to be filled.

We each at the starting line stand, a countdown is heard above the throng, each in his own voice joining in, as zero called a gun shot is fired and we set out on this 365 day lap around the sun. Vowing at this outset to change something perhaps or to continue to become or to evolve into something better.

This day excuses all the rest. Our sole chance to wipe the eraser across the blackboard and return the words previously written to the white dust from which they came. There is value in this symbolic gesture, though the act is without weight or significance apart from that endowed by the collective whole. Without such an act word would overlay word until a mass of illegible whiteness, a confused mass of neglected promises, goals, and commitments, obscured the whole board.

Allowing ourselves one last glance, a weight of sincere regret descends and is chased away by one more glass of champagne. We can permit ourselves tonight, we say, if only tonight, that forbidden pleasure, forgiveness. Tonight, all our shortcomings can slip away and fall safely onto a soft bed of fresh promises.

He speaks of failure as if it were the only state mankind could ever find itself in. As if the sincere and perceiving eye could only admit to visions of failing and broken humans. He reflects also upon those successes, those events that he willingly recalls as triumphant. Wherein he rose above the situation, the limitation, or his old handicaps, wherein his vision was broadened, his mind was strengthened, and his ignorance removed. We see him, nonetheless, wading through a quagmire. These, even the best of these, do not exist to be congratulated, to be applauded, or to be gloated over. They exist merely as footstones upon which the foot treads. A path that has lead irrevocably to today, the first day of the new year.

Past deeds great and small, noble and ignoble are the victuals that supplied the dining tables of our yesterdays’ meals upon which we supped. The patterns of these meals, but not the meals themselves have commanded the shape of our bodies, the circumference of our girths. No pattern can be altered in a day, or in a promise. No pattern can be altered without much stumbling, without much effort, without much determination. Yet always this pattern is changing, with or without our allowance, with or without our forgiveness. Therefore, to promote positive change, practice daily forgiveness, cease self judgment altogether if you can. Perfection is a dirty myth, stumbling blocks a lie.

Build in your mind a castle so impermeable it ceases to be a assailed, it ceases even to be spoken of. This castle may not exist, but your approach of it does. So once your castle is built, forget all about it and mind only your steps, for each step in stepping is all that matters.

Kurt and Delina

2008-12-24T08:05:00.005+09:00

The sidewalks glazed with the slick film of a rain that must have occurred in the night, the sky a thick gauze into which even the shortest buildings disappeared, the streets deserted of all life but us. Breath, a fog of crystal hanging momentarily before a grizzled face, dissipating. And we too. Open signs in antique letters above closed windows, frosted at the edges, vague promises of communion for those less unfortunate. Within, bored shopkeepers, curious or suspicious watched us lone walkers as we passed. Each we ventured to approach, gave out sad smiles and sorry-nos in exchange for our request for work. Sweep the porch, I will, for a dollar, she’s mighty fine with the pressure cleaner, she is, yes sir, not now, I see, already hired, yes, spare some change for a bite to eat? And so the morning passed, down in a two horse town. Five days out of Amarillo by thumb, four nights curled beneath dirty blankets beneath creaky overpasses. We huddled together for warmth and awoke to find our water frozen and our caps frosted. An elderly black couple wearing Sunday clothes on Tuesday, bow their heads and walk on by. My voice, my speech, like my breath, dissipates unnoticed. Hunger is a homeless mutt barking in a cave and chewing his paws raw.

A tall young man wrapped tightly in a scarf, something aimless in his gate. He pauses to look around him, turns and walks again. Drawn forward it seems, in search of some ephemeral goal. As he passes I decide to try him out.

”Excuse me.”

The young man halted and turned towards us, meeting my eyes. I continued.

“Me and my wife here, we’re looking to get something to eat.”

“We been hitching from Amarillo.”

I expected him, like most, to turn and leave, to pretend that we had said nothing, that we were spectres, that we would disappear if we were merely ignored, but he did not. Instead he seemed to take some interest in our affairs and listened eagerly to our tale. We elaborately told of our mural job in San Marcos, the man who ripped us off, the gig set up in Corpus waiting for us when we got there, the time spent in jail for hitching in Amarillo, the ins and outs of life on the road. He emptied his change purse into my open hand, and wished us luck. I felt that he meant it.

“Merry Christmas.”

I half-wished I had told more of the truth, less of the same well-worn lie that got us by, but something in his smile seemed to suggest that he didn’t care whether the facts were accurate, that he heard something else altogether in our words. Perhaps I am merely rationalizing. In the end, a man’s gotta get by.

On an outdated atlas

2008-12-09T15:29:00.007+09:00

The veil enshrouds the treasure of the other. Immense my heart swells, pulsing with the blood of the once was, never was, inescapably impossible, unreachable, distanced by a void of space and time unbridgeable. Records remain and they themselves are legend.

Reading the population of Siam at the turn of the century sends a chill down my spine as I imagine in a split second all those lives here and vanished. Returned from the grave for a glimmering moment they hover before my eyes, barely ghosts, encapsulated in a digit of a number. The potency of these little characters, these apparently harmless shapes. They are sleighs pulled by the horses of imagination across the fields of time. How great the strength of the mind. What a fine artisan, sewing threads across oceans and histories.

I see on a map the nation of Chosen (Korea) and a pinpoint indicating Tai Ku (Daegu). What are the heights of forbidden ecstasy? To find yourself woven inextricably, yet unknown within the fabric of the universe. To discover traces of your footsteps before you had feet, before even your mother or father had feet. Yet, there it is, undeniable, a physical ancestor. The indication of the cartographers hand, wise to geography but blind to time, unknowingly plotting my trail.

I know the farmers in the field of this small village. In my heart I know them. Of course it is impossible, but perhaps at the bottom of the well of my longing, a reservoir runs to other wells in other lands, in other eras.

What a mysterious and magical chest is this book of numbers and maps. What spell has it cast upon me that the bonds of time would dissipate in my mind, yet leave my body in shackles? These yellowed, cracked pages are the same pages of their time, when these maps and numbers represented facts, cold information that had not yet learned the magic that causes them to glow today.

If I had a wish, a single wish, it would be that in death my soul would dissipate into all time and all place and I would no longer long, for the veil between myself and the other would be lifted.

People Behind Things

2008-12-08T16:39:00.000+09:00

Four Months in San Francisco

2008-12-07T06:22:00.003+09:00

CONTENT: Every picture I’ve taken since leaving Texas.
MUSIC: Cloud Cult, Everybody Here is a Cloud
PLUS: Various field recordings

2008-12-02T10:09:00.002+09:00

The child asked, do the facade’s sing too? The faces of the buildings and the gutters too? Does the canvas spread as wide as the sirens that wail in the city night and to the broken smell of autumn in it’s glorious golden decay?

The old man, who was blind and deaf in one ear, leaned forward in his rocking chair towards the young boy. The world as symbols and objects had slowly faded from his mind. First the snow flakes of blindness, falling one by one, until a blizzard blurred the lines of what was this and what was that. Then the distinctions of sound, once as clear as black on white, became like clouds. Hues of gray bleeding into hues of gray; each indistinguishable from the next. He could not any longer cling to the idea that bound his youth. The theory of isolation. That each and every thing was isolated and separated from each other thing. As his senses progressively failed to recognize the physical world, he became increasingly aware of the spiritual aspect he had long neglected.

Every beautiful thing is a portal, he said, drawing a doorway in the air with his finger, breaking the banal structure that binds this world. That which is color and music and delight is not that which is in this world, but is light that seeps in from the cracks to the next. It is all the same light. When you can recognize this light, you will know the beauty of the whole world. It is all the same light.

And where is the next world? Asked the child, who had now stopped playing with his toy trucks and peered intently at the flaps of skin draped over the old man’s empty sockets.

The old man took a stick of charcoal and drew a circle on the ground.

Sunday MUNI

2008-11-20T10:09:00.002+09:00

She leaned towards me. Face hovering in that safety zone empty seat separating us. The bus was still uncrowded, but at each stop more arrived and fewer departed.

Are you going to give that to him? I bet no one has ever done that for him before.

I don’t know.

I think he’d like it.

Yes perhaps he would. And if he did, would that somehow redeem me? My all day endeavor, riding bus after random bus, sketching strangers, peeling away layers of the soul, like skins of an onion, stealing that fragile privacy in public places, without asking permission or forgiveness, could be redeemed. This old man had been my favorite. Pinched lips, thick frames, hair wispy white like a snow blown hill, knuckles gnarled, labor swollen, some deep grease of some old time caked in the creases, ineradicable in his palms and beneath his nails. His eyes were keen, but distant and belied an uncommon energy or intensity dormant within his aging body. From his wrist and from his belt dangled clusters of keys like grapes on a vine. When he moved they jingled.

As the bus pulled to a stop and the doors hissed open, I stood as if to leave. In fact, I intended to leave, to give him the sketch and then exit. But I couldn’t, it seemed unfair. So I handed him the sketch. He was surprised. Simply.

I drew this sketch of you, I thought you might like to have it.

Oh. Is this me? Thank you.

I could not return to my seat, the bus was quite crowded now, so I stood nearby. A slow evolution began to take place, like a door opening and letting light in a dark room. This old man and I stood on either side, now seeing each other not as mere incidental passengers, but somehow united. He began to speak with surprising warmth and familiarity. Speaking of his father, asking my name, joking with me. He chuckled in a way that was fully present. Those around us also, the two women seated before me, and the man standing beside me, entered the dialogue, somehow affected by this uncommon gesture that I had made. I felt a glow about us and it seemed to occur to me, for the first time in my life, that art could really bring light into the world. It really could.

I fought in the wrong war. I fought in the wrong war. I fought in the wrong war.

2008-11-10T16:16:00.004+09:00

Semper fi... do or die.

A short, black man with a graying handlebar mustache and a wooden cane called aloud without any apparent purpose, but in the direction of the parade.

Between me and the marching band, that is a gang of high-schoolers much shorter and much smoother skinned than anyone I ever saw in high school, thumping drums strapped to chests with cartoonish bravado, marching nearly in rhythm down Market street in the meagerly attended Veteran’s Day parade, stood a staggering balding man with long, curly greasy snakes of hair licking his shoulders. His clear blue eyes bulged as a took a step, nearly a lunge, towards me and grinning said:

I fought there two years and this. THIS is my reward.

He gestured broadly towards the bony kneed, metal mouthed, four eyed child musicians, marching like an ill prepared army, like a children’s crusade.

Thmp. Pshooooooosh.

Semper fi... do or die.

His arm arched upward over his head. He ducked his head as his eyes followed an invisible trail through the sky.

Know what that is? It’s a... grenade. Shrapnel every fucking where. Too, too, too. All over my face, my legs.

Semper fi... do or die.

I killed... four of them. They killed six of me.

When he realized that I was listening to his rambling speech, he slowed down. He was terribly drunk. His eyes turned glassy and his gaze distant. He rocked slowly back and forth on his heels, trying to maintain balance.

I was eighteen and a half years old. Fresh out of Colorado Springs, Colorado... I didn’t have any fucking idea where I was. Dropped out there. South Vietnam... Two years. For two years!

I took part in the wrong war... I took part in the wrong war... I took part in the wrong war. And I took part hard. Hard. Hard as I could.

Those little Vietnamese deserve their freedom... just as much as you and me.

And with that he stumbled off down the street, away from the parade.

Semper fi... do or die.

Later that evening, as I was returning from the art supply store, I spotted the same Vietnam vet walking along the sidewalk toward me with a cup in hand. He recognized me, though I had the impression that he wasn’t sure where he recognized me from.

Spare a quarter?

He addressed me with the flair of an actor on stage. The way your friend might behave when you arrive at Starbucks and find him behind the counter. Acting out a script, but since both you and he are aware of the scripted nature of the forced dialogue it becomes a shared joke. And though the words spoken are the same, the message shared is of an absolutely different nature. The words “welcome to starbucks, how can I help you?” is roughly translated to “you sly old bugger, you came here because you know I’m working and you expect to get a free drink, and you will too, you know, because we’re friends, and honestly I’m terribly glad that you stopped by, regardless of your motivations,” and “yes I’ll take a double shot capuccino please,” could be understood to mean, “isn’t it great to be friends in this world and to find you working here on this day, we’re both here and can enjoy this moment where I order my coffee as if I was just another customer, but I’m not, but isn’t it fun to pretend like I am, like it’s our little secret.”

I dropped a quarter in his cup. He took a Shakespearian bow.

Words are..

2008-11-09T10:15:00.003+09:00

Crumble overbaked bricks
thrust into the nether between
two towers of unfathomable heights.
Once solid; sublimated into a cloud
a shower of sprinkling dust
upon the unfathomable heights
descending.

Into the nether,
thrust tenderskin hands and feet
and also toenails and hair
and teeth.
In the dim lit nights;
in the early dawn;
the distance is infinitesimal
and still unbridgeable.

Explore each brick
in the infinite wall
one will be loose.

The mortar will crumble to dust beneath your fingernails
and you will crawl through.

Into the black;
into the nether;
into the void.

Season would watch

2008-11-06T15:31:00.003+09:00

A cold gust in the morning
reminded me
that Autumn is my season

•

In an alley,
I suddenly felt Korea inside.
And I began to lament the day,
I no longer would.

•

We celebrated the return of a king
Dethroning the monkey king.
A figure looming larger than life,
larger than fear,
as large as hope itself.
The voice of the throng united in a chant
in celebration of a new dawn.
I among them watched.
It was enough
to watch.

Our hermetic alchemist; A flattened cardboard box

2008-10-30T10:10:00.005+09:00

He would retreat outside the stone wall of the village into a world of his own devising. Like arms in deep river sleeves withdrawn to luminous caverns of glowing mind matter. Bearded, hooded, veiled in darkness. Our hermetic alchemist. Mixing minerals to alleviate the death pangs of a suffering world. A world of his own devising. Mountains from molehills and breath from clay; a universe of particularly subjective order. Lead did not transform into gold. No. In our alchemist’s laboratory lead was gold. For reality is language is reality. He who can shape definition has dominion over all. No longer is there any need for gold to remain static, unattainable, exotic; for our alchemist has no need to change the form of the object if he can change the form of the language, the form of the world in which the object is defined.

•

I have a bed now, of sorts. The kind Japanese woman at the store didn’t stock any three inch futon mats, but I could not imagine sleeping upon anything thicker. Four inches, good, she said. But in my gut a voice without lips or lungs insisted again, three. Even this depth seems a luxury reserved for the reclined, the worshiping narcoleptics dozing prostrate before the alter of life, the eternal slumberers. Perhaps, I fear beds. Symbols, as they are, of commitment, location, permanence. I have nightmares of bed posts. They are fence posts, no, twisting black iron columns supporting a wrought iron gate towering over me. Thunderclouds and claps of bright blue light above. When the downpour is too heavy and the wolves are snapping at my heels I will test the grounds within, and warm myself at the hearth in that enchanted castle of the beast. I’ve had beneath my body while it dreams these last three months of daily nights, a three quarter inch blue foam camping pad and a flattened cardboard box.

“I’m always ready,” he said, in a voice caked in the residue of his birthplace in exile. The glint in his eyes peaking through a hedge of thick facial fur the color of autumn tree bark, was somewhere between flames, tears, and hope. He nodded. And nodded again to be sure. “Everything I need is here.” He gestured towards his rucksack. Already packed, always awaiting dilegintly the secret word, the emergency code, the thick welder’s hands to grab hold and hurl it atop that two legged vehicle. He unzipped it and pulled out two metal rods and began to assemble a dual paddled oar. He showed me how a folded mass of black plastic could transform into a kayak in moments. “How long? Ten minutes tops. Yes. Ten minutes tops.” Smiling, he patted his faithful canvas companion. I began to cry because I loved him very much and I knew that as long as that rucksack was packed, he could never escape

Somewhere between the vibrating vocal cord and the drum of the ear

2008-10-19T07:12:00.003+09:00

There seems a world recognized but never visited, that exists at the approach of beauty. An island continent of vibrant and faded, clean and decayed, composed and chaotic, where harmony and discord sing heavenly duets, and the deepest deep tree roots and highest high clouds are wed. Are there inhabitants of this realm? Permanent residents of the channels of beauty communicated, or merely engineers designing telescopes? Telescopes hung on gallery walls and projected against silverscreens or released from the cavern of the soul in Victorian draped concert halls.

I imagine a crease in the sheet music every time a song is sung, folded a hundred times, a perforation, a shimmer of light from the other side. The vibrations of voice at a certain pitch form a hole which is a tunnel. A passageway through which one can crawl to arrive in a world ungoverned by laws, logic, and morals, but instead guided by aesthetics. There, every thing and nonthing is a dance. A swimming color motion, a sea of unified chaos into which body and self and consciousness, shape, distinction, and awareness are submerged, dissolve and spin out in slow motion cloud, a tornado in reverse.

To paint the stars radiant.

2008-10-10T14:50:00.000+09:00

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

Proust anyone?

A world away, the gods still gaze serenely, slowly succumbing to nature’s incessant encroachment.

2008-10-09T06:43:00.000+09:00

2008-10-08T15:59:00.002+09:00

Every night when I go to sleep I look forward to the hot shower I will take and breakfast cereal I will eat when I wake.

The Trafalmagorians taught Billy Pilgrim

2008-10-06T15:12:00.003+09:00

How unexpected, with what secret design does fate move? Stranding and connecting threads. Will you call it choice? In this improvised street orchestra I am not trumpet or drum, I am a fretless violin with the voice of a lone cloud in an overcast sky. Do you wonder whether perhaps everything is necessary, connected in ways that we will never manage to comprehend? Imagine every evangelical standing on a soapbox preaching brimstone into a megaphone, every leather studded bear skinned homosexual on Folsom Street, every dry skinned crackhead outside my door, every prostitute in Bangkok, every hipster sporting worn out ironies, every broken heart, every film in every astigmatic eye, every auto accident, every suicide, every chainsmoker, every smile, every orgasm, every newborn child, every thing, every thought, every action somehow depended upon every other...

Each instantless instant in it’s purity defined

2008-10-03T13:03:00.007+09:00

Like I stepped into my skin. Naked before, I half moment behind, straining to hear the rhythm, ear pressed into a rotted rubber tire, squeezing every nerve to recognize the mechanical assurance, the maternal heartbeat of the machine, the clock ticking quietly buried beneath banana peals, teeth worn bone steel axles, disconnected eye socket tin arrow gauges measuring death pointing earthward, kneeling atop the mile high waste mountain junkyard.

Now, threads of everything, visible like the edge of a cloud, sparkling like Easter tinsel wrapping, connecting, but never binding each egg with the next. Discovered, nestled in a patch of tall grass, beneath the drain pipe, brushing aside the crisp autumn leaves with a Thanksgiving palette, the realization that I had already been aware, had found before finding, before searching. Known without knowing, without knowledge. Cradled where my brow meets, a quiet sound, like exhalation. The future draws us onward just as the past pushes from behind. Strapped between these two cords we find ourselves in the present moment. Yet, what is it but a measure of our experience quantified, manifested as a drop squeezed from a syringe pulled from a reservoir? All things have already been done. Only yet to be experienced. These streets, these people, they are not new to me, nor I to them.

I hear someone say once again:
You remind me of someone... I just can’t think of who.

This clock is not real, nor is this junkyard.

I’ll be the small stone

2008-09-29T05:10:00.003+09:00

Will you meet me
where I can’t tell you where
there where no web will hold letters
or sounds?

I’ll be the small stone.
Look for me there.

Life Life

2008-09-24T06:52:00.003+09:00

Death does not exist
we are all immortal
and everything is immortal. At seventeen
one should not fear death, nor at seventy.
Being and light alone have reality, darkness and death have no existence.
We are all already on the shore of the sea
and are among those who drag the nets
while immortality gleams beside them.
Live in the house and it will not fall down.
I shall call forth any century at all,
to enter into it and build my house.
This is how your children and wives
will sit with me at the table.
One sole table for ancestor and descendant.
The future is happening now.

-Arseny Tarkovsky

New Old Photos

2008-09-24T03:10:00.004+09:00

I finally purchased a new scanner so I will weekly be choosing a random roll, developing it, and uploading photos from my South East Asia trip.

There are angels all around me

2008-09-22T02:21:00.007+09:00

Fog, a skyscraper’s cloak

Sidewalks beneath fetal grown men

A smile illuminates

Pumpkin Spice Latte

2008-09-16T07:22:00.001+09:00

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I have a reoccurring dream

2008-09-14T03:56:00.005+09:00

In this dream I am in a vehicle, a car, a van, a bicycle, a motorcycle, whatever. Usually I’m not driving, but sometimes I am.

This time it was an old van, GMC, navy/gray, a little compacted, sorta like a Travis Millard van, but not so happy. It was packed with people, people who I knew in my dream. We were in a hurry, I don’t remember why, some kind of mission. We were dressed like hooligans from Operation Mayhem. Speeding through this complex weave of concrete overpasses, like entering Dallas, but more so. Everything awash in dirty slate, grimy and dripping. I remember I was buckled up in the back seat with two girls I think. I sat on the far left by the window. I gripped my knees till my knuckles turned white. We careened through traffic, the man driving was older, in a leather jacket, black shades and was in the early stages of balding. He jerked the steering wheel this way and that like it was a disobedient mutt on a leash. We lifted up on the right two wheels, then slammed back to the asphalt as he pulled it back. These maneuvers, I knew, were absolutely necessary, and I did not question our action. Nor did regret enter my mind when the van lilted, swerved, failed to correct, and tore through the symbolic gesture of a guardrail like a brick though a net of stringcheese.

This is the moment that all the dreams become the same. As we fell, I knew I had been here before, I was silent, my soul was silent as I anticipated my death. For an instant my mind projects forward to the crash, the metallic crunch, the crushing and slicing of my helpless body. I know this is the closest I’ll come to witnessing my death, for by the time we hit I will be finished before my nerves can respond. No time passes and I’m back. The fall is a only a moment, yet eternal. Everything I’ve done and left undone stacks up above a horizontal line and equals zero on the graph paper of my demise.

I recall all the other dreams I’ve had of this instant and ask if this is not also a dream. But it is real, I know without doubt. This is how I die.

I close my eyes. The fall is silence, the screams are silence. Only the force of gravity, the increasing pressure in my ears remain. Soon.

Now.

I gasp, swallow mouthfuls of air. Darkness is all around me. Am I standing? No. I’m one my back. Something warm is on top of me. Where am I? It’s a blanket. I’m in my bed. I’m not dead.

I’m not dead.

Daley Hake took my picture!

2008-09-13T06:43:00.002+09:00

San Francisco
Originally uploaded by daleyhake[.com]

Some Leaves

2008-09-13T05:39:00.003+09:00

In celebration of autumn I made a flash video.

2008-09-12T09:54:00.000+09:00

Boo.

There’s no Kimchi in Chinatown

2008-09-12T02:44:00.005+09:00

It’s September 11, but I’m not thinking about burning towers, I’m thinking about Chuseok in Korea, how unpatriotic. Everyone will be going to the villages and making and eating sungpyeon. A year ago I was in a rental car driving towards Seoraksan, the northern mountain, with David and Jenny.

I didn’t know I would miss it so greatly; that my ghost would linger there; that it would not be mashed potatoes or hamburgers that I crave any longer, but kimchi. I searched the alley markets in Chinatown, but couldn’t find any. Only a small market in Japantown, sells in mason jars, that putrid, vibrant, stringy, delicious substance.

Mist in the mountain
for dinner we will eat rice
time moves so quickly

Ms. Dion’s argument against free wifi

2008-09-11T07:08:00.005+09:00

When everyone has rooted themselves in, cabled to the walls, petrified stares aglow in the radiance of a million lit pixels, long drained coffee mugs forming invisible rings on lacquered tabletops. The man behind the counter, bearded, with a tuft of hair attempting to take flight over his little lost eyes, finishes scraping the crust from the coffee filter, sets down the damp stained towel and secretly, stealthily, hits the square button on the stereo. The hip, chill music fades. Unnoticed. Without warning, quietly at first, then louder and louder. A voice, a melody, as serious as it is trite. As polished as a glass wall of pressed feathers. I find in my mind an eagle soaring through golden rays of sunlight, maybe over a beach, rich white cumulus clouds like the foam of a cappuccino, a face super imposed over it all, eyes closed lips moving in sync with voice. ‘My heaaart will gooo oooonnn.’

Wait.
Stop.
What happened?
When did the music turn sh!tty?

I see myself with a shotgun turning the whole scene to a bloody pulpy porcelain bowl of chili hurled at a white wall. I’m stomping on the skulls of eagles. Lighting fires to factories. Slashing wedding dresses with machetes. Vacuuming up stardust. Sinking my teeth into Celine’s throat, ripping ripping ripping. Chewing, choking, coughing. Spewing blood everywhere, I collapse, panting, heaving into the oil spills and stacks of rotting seal carcasses on the beach of my desolation.

The unpaying freeloaders tear their roots from the walls, cover the ears, and run out to the safety of the streets.

The chill music resumes. Sam Beam perhaps, crooning quietly as a brown paper sack.
New kids with Apple logos arrive, order the obligatory Americano, and plug in, and the cycle begins again.

Art Galleries and Barbeques or when it was Summer in San Francisco

2008-09-09T04:04:00.006+09:00

Her nose hung up hooked by some invisible fisherman above the rafters and down the shaft of her nostrils she glared at me and said, “yes, they teach appropriation at those institutions.” The word hung about her upper lip for an instant like a glove held in the hand that she metaphorically slapped across my presumably deflated ego. “Not one of us has created anything original,” I replied. But, as a machine constructed with mouths on her ears, her diatribe complete, she had no use for dialogue, so allowed herself to be pulled onward by that invisible line.

So I turned to a piece of generic art, for a living room with pale white carpet, for a restaurant tasteful in its restraint, neither with or without flavor, and I dove into it. For the simplicity, the solitude, the outright rebellion. For here was someone who did not deign enshroud originality. Here was a blank canvas, brush strokes perfected to be rendered voiceless. Upon this canvas I thrust my voice and listened to it return. Alone at last where no one would judge my care or carelessness. There, in the gallery of the office art, I sang the praise of the cliche.

* * *

One weekend, two barbeques. At each barely present; a tangent attachment to merrymaking; a parasite on the corpse of borrowed meat, borrowed fun, borrowed beer. But each growing, something like familiarity. Faces recognized, becoming friends. Surprised to see you here. With each encounter, chance or intentional, a thread woven into this fabric, a tapestry or community. I won’t step out though. Or sew my own thread. Allow the threads to be sown. And ask now and again, to let the loose ends hang looser.

* * *

Summer is over. It was a pleasent week.

Two Hasty Lists on San Francisco

2008-08-26T07:36:00.005+09:00

I still haven’t written on the subject of San Francisco. There are still so many places/things I haven’t seen/experienced, that I feel like I haven’t yet earned the right. But until I feel justified to write an actual post on the city, for those curians (those who are curious) who prefer not to or are unable to ask me in person, due to disabilities physical, mechanical, digital, or otherwise, I present for your consumption, two lists, which will, I hope, appease the impatient.

Things I like about San Francisco:

Coffee shops with eclectic couches and free wifi
Bicycle lanes
All the people riding bicycles
The Zen center
Donation Yoga class
The public library’s movie collection
Golden Gate Park
Delores park
Yerba Buena Park
All the skinny people
Chinatown
The Mission district
Wall murals
Random pieces of sculpture
Ocean
My room cube
The curious, inexplicable things that I see on a daily basis
The burritos
Tu Lan Vietnamese Restaurant
Bookstores
Amoeba Records
Good tunes being piped everywhere
Farmer’s markets
The remarkable number of conversations regarding abstract ideas with people of which I otherwise know very little

Things I don’t like about San Francisco:

The outrageous price of my room cube
The locks I needed to put on my bike
The look people give me when I say I’m from Texas, but not from Austin
Stepping over homeless people on my way home
Ignoring the homeless people shouting profanities into the cosmos
Avoiding the homeless people fighting with each other
Feeling guilty for being a complicit animal murderer and being OK with it

2008-08-20T07:32:00.000+09:00

If I had to choose, I think I'd choose to be a Swiss expat.

Coming Soon?

2008-08-19T05:40:00.003+09:00

So curious..

2008-08-18T08:41:00.004+09:00

What does all this mean to you?

What are you doing here?

There’s a ghostly fog above me punctured by the extended arms of man, shooting upward from the sea, lifting cable and asphalt, towering above the greatest of our efforts, above our births and deaths. I saw a plaque for those who lost everything to become mortar for this monument. Does it reassure me to know that a piece of me, or of my identity (supposed), too resides in this complex of steel and concrete, too is promised eternal life, too is promised conquest?

From the gate, to the South I could see the downtown towers, bleak obilisques of fortune, ascend like temple pillars of old. Are they bridging the gap between heaven and earth? Do they support the sky? Or tether it? Is their end an illusion? Maybe they reach the stars.

I wonder what the children will say, when time has rubbed out the memory of us and our fathers, our time and our legacy like smudged pencil lines on scraps of paper. Will they ask their grandparents where we were going so fast or will they giggle at our arrogance?

Me? Oh, nothing. I’m not here. I just arrived from nowhere.

Texas is the Reason

2008-08-14T09:32:00.003+09:00

We people. Hairless bipeds. Crapping, eating, sleeping, waking, loving. We of flesh, bone, ligament. We bound to earth, bound to will, bound to fate. We each naked beneath our clothes, each homeless without our homes, each alone without our families, each futile without our gods, each ignorant without our knowledge, each beautiful without our illusions. Become innocent again. Knowledge is your hindrance if knowledge is your blindfold. Allow no thing to fade the colors you see.

Your black and your white.
They are the same.

There are no answers here. Or there..

Can you see the beauty in war?
Sublimity in explosion?
God in suffering?

Yes. These and their opposite are true.

Can you hear me?
Can you understand this?

My Free Wifi is Gone

2008-08-11T02:06:00.002+09:00

A camping mat is a hundred times better than a cardboard box. There’s a humongous Goodwill store down the street. I bought a chair. There’s a cramped little Pho restaurant at the base of my apartment that sounds and tastes just like Hanoi.

I have a phone interview tomorrow with John Bielenberg for C2 Mavericks. Frankly, I’m not sure what the Mavericks are or do, but I’m pretty sure I want in on it.

A Hard Bed to Sleep on

2008-08-09T13:53:00.001+09:00

There’s a place in downtown San Francisco at Market and Sixth that rents live/work lofts designed for artists. They have a kitchenette, shared bathrooms, fresh paint jobs, friendly staff, great location, high ceilings, cheap rates, and no furniture. So this night, my first night in a place of my own in over six months, I will be sleeping on a folded up cardboard box and a bath towel. If you, my faithful reader, could do me a favor and ask all your friends to close their eyes and focus real hard on a mattress appearing at Market and Sixth, I’d really appreciate it. That’s Market and Sixth.

* * *

I got off the phone with David. He’s in paradise. That is Hawaii. And he tells me about the mountain hikes and the morning dips in the beaches and the six shades of blue in the sea and the breezes on warm days in the valleys and the beautiful girls who wear bikinis to summer class. And I tell him about the homeless guys outside and the trannies and the free wifi and the screaming fire engines. And I begin to split right down the middle.
Nathan A:
I drift back like a fog over Sokcho and the jagged rock teeth in the emerald sea on the east coast of South Korea, back to the dusty highland motorcycles in Central Vietnam, back to dirty towns with dirty roads and dirty feet. I don’t give a damn about free wifi or downtown lofts or soft mattresses or graphic design or internships or the future or any of it. Give me a quiet alley in a distant country. Give me surprise, give me the simple things like morning frost and child laughter and the sound of snow melting in the forest.

Nathan B:
I move in to a new territory. Unknown, unmapped. Take me far from my comfort, let me find comfort anew. Embrace risk, move towards the future, step boldly. The world is now. Can be what you make of it. I can be more, see more, do more. The country is the key, but the city is the door. And elsewhere, the room.

* * *

There was a fear I had as a child that the everything would overlook me. That I did not belong in the everything. That the everything operated in bigger places, among bigger people, in other rooms, behind closed doors. It was this childhood fear that emboldened me, when I got lost time and again, when I was afraid of something strange, when I was lonely in a foreign country, when I first stood embarrassed before a classroom of Korean kids. It emboldened me to seek the everything in anything. To peer into the cracks of existence, into death and fear and shame and even joy. Until finally I began to believe what I had always known, that I cannot be apart from the everything. I am always a part of the everything, though I cannot always remember how. Now that I am, what is there that I could want that I do not already have? What is there I could be, that I not already am? You see? Surfaces change, locations change, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am rich, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am married, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am a fine painter, but I already am. These can be nothing else than manifestations of the am that is within me.

I am a ball of clay. I am a stone. I am the potters hands. I am none of these things.

The path becomes a place

2008-07-29T12:47:00.005+09:00

The zen of train windows. Blur of grass and tree and dust and mountain.

Neighbors from strangers. Don't know their names, but them sleeping there gently head on shoulder. Arm crossing the invisible boundary where the arm rest should lie to find comfort in the warmth of husbands heart and rhythm of his breath. We here all lining the walls of this mechanical terrestrial iron wheeled worm. Sentient perhaps, faintly aglow from the running lights in the ceiling, a phantom in the dusty desert night roaring westward through the brush and crackled ground along a predestined track, bound to indomitable fate by two glistening steel rails stretching forward and backward toward two infinite horizons. Infinite yes to a finite mind, a temporal mind, a drowsy in-and-out of sleep mind. Dozing and waking, moment to moment, each of us bound now, somehow, by this ritual as old as life. This resting of the soul. Together now, perhaps, as we slept our souls mingled without the hindrance of walls and awoke to find somehow more familiar than before, more comfortable than before with these nameless people on all sides.

In the lounge car, people go to talk, commune. Some people never come to the lounge car, never leave their seats, never rouse themselves from the unsatisfying slumber pull the blanket closer to the chin of their fetal bodies curled up like a gerbil in the corner of a cage. I pulled a carrot or a slice of cheese from my bag and ate at the table in the back left corner, where all was before me and nothing behind. Each other table, one on the left and its pair on the right formed a layer in a complex nonsensical narrative. Sometimes I would amuse myself watching and sketching the chaos, and sometimes drown it out with a wash of headphone induced melodies as I dove into another fantastic tale in the Arabian Nights. Yet sometimes the stories of the train were even more fantastic. I heard a man tell me of his cousin who drowned forty feet up in a tree and wasn’t discovered until months afterward when all that remained was a parched skeleton in a pair of jeans bound to the tree by a rope tied at the waist. In his pocket still a wallet to remind his rescuers that once he too had a face and a name. I heard a man tell of a city that was leveled by a ocean wave. All the rubbish that once was house piled tall as that mountain in the window and for miles concrete foundations like headless necks protruded from the barren ground.

At last in Oakland at Jack London Station. Sun not yet setting, but weary. The air, a chilly reminder that Texas is far from here. At the curb my cousin, whom I might as well have never before met, for who was I and who was he when last we met nearly a decade ago but two different people yet formed and transformed by the continual tide of time that has brought us now to converge again and not just in space but perhaps in mind and spirit as well?

Four hours to the mountains, I along with my cousin, his sister, his wife, and his child, canned in a car the size of a matchbox and quiet as a purr. We labored along mountain passes to Kirkwood ski resort near lake Tahoe, where this time of year is warm and quiet. The baby hypnotized in the back carseat by the tiny color crystals of television strapped to the back of daddy’s headrest. Ideals, mother said, came crashing down. The child’s cries must be appeased. Whatever is necessary will be done. Sanity must prevail.

What do two year olds and teenagers really want?

Weekend spent reading and watching and hiking and eating and thanking and quietly quietly waiting. For who am I here? Social stratification yet to be established. I wait. Time will come, yes, time will tell, but not now. Patience now. I wait quietly. Long for nothing. This home is established, this family is established and I the surprise guest. The guest of a guest. Twice removed and so twice cautious. Twice shy and twice gracious.

From the Oakland hills the bay is shrouded in fog. Colors turned to neutral gray. Hovering above the city of San Francisco and ceasing as it reaches the shore a cloud of ambiguous nature. Menacing? Mysterious? Protective? I stand on the short brick wall enclosing the small pool in the backyard and delineating the descent to the next tier of houses below, and peer out into the veiled city. My heart thuds, my blood condenses. There it is. Across the bay. Somewhere among the building block buildings is my home and somewhere among them is my job. And they’re waiting for me to find them.

We Must Constantly Be Jumping Off Cliffs and Developing Our Wings on the Way Down, K. Vonnegut

2008-07-23T14:21:00.007+09:00

My bags are full again. Zippers bulge like cheeks full of air, eyes popping, waiting to exhale. On the living room carpet pieces of remaining luggage, the stragglers, the weak limbed gimps, left behind, to fall prey to the hunters, the savage beasts of arbitrary sorting, saving, stowing beneath boxes of boxes of bags of bags in a garage waiting to be purged, begging for illness to tickle a gag. The sad eyes of ink lined diaries, exotic toys, and widowed socks waiting in line to be seated and watching the doors close with a mechanic zip. Steam pours from the stacks above and slowly with great effort and a hint of fatalism the great black engine pulls itself forward and with it all those displaced souls who relish in the neither-here-nor-there gap, when life the motion of life is seen as if in fast forward, the forests fall to drought and desert, tectonic plates shift secret and slow forming mountains in the plains, jagged cliffs scream for the sky, a coastline crawls up to the land pushes back the sands ebbs, recollects, and pushes forth again. I am within the body of a worm, removed from the sizzle of life, no longer a liver, a pusher and puller, a thinker, a worrier, now a spectator, a sitter, a be-er, a being.

Briefly to see or think to see a world at once large and small, at once beneath my feet and in my mouth and above my head and in my hand. To believe, without irony, in happiness, and hope without hope in the moment.

San Francisco pulls me like a slingshotted astronaut from the moon, like an arrow shot into the sky which eventually must return to the land, like a pebble tossed into an abandoned well, gravity now leads me onward, and with little thought of how or why, I plunge into a new unknown.

* * *

It’s a two and a half day ride across the desert from Fort Worth to San Francisco. I’ve got ramen to keep me full and Arabian Nights to keep me company. I’m riding coach and the train is packed. It’s 102 degrees in Fort Worth and 65 degrees in San Francisco. I don’t have a job, I don’t have a home. I have my fingers crossed.

Even a morse code message into black arctic night supersedes silence, when the time comes for speaking

2008-06-24T10:11:00.005+09:00

No ghosts will ever linger in these halls. No handworn shine will grace these doorknobs. No twilit luster of aged floorboards. The closet hinges, when they rub, will never voice the concerns of departed strangers. They will never be more than an irritation in need of lubricant. Love will never birth here. Contentment perhaps, resignation perhaps, but never love. This house is barren. A wombless woman, birthed at midage, beautiless, forgettable, and forgotten. A holding pen, a waiting room. A space to be occupied briefly, between the coming and going. This is my dwelling place.

* * *

I, even I, am caught up sometimes at night in this undertow of spring. This hand tugging, rubberbanded legs, gravitational pull. This fresh flower season, this do-you-take-this-woman season. This put on your best suit and tie season. As he and she and he and she and he and she and he and she walk down that mile long aisle, forever leaving behind that youth departed. I’m on the stage smiling, clapping, or with hands clasped solemnly left over right, rocking slowly left to right, soles aching, waiting for them to reach the opengate of the light flooded exit and fade to white, waiting for the faces to turn back, all the tearstained eyes, kerchief veiled noses, happiness at its most agonizing, back to us, the entourage. Beside me in the depressed carpet footprints of the newlywed, stand the spectres of alternate endings, previous and future lives, the outcomes of different fates, different words spoken, nights spent, cards mailed, different chemicals in the brain, in the heart. How many ghosts remain before that alter? Departed from the body in two syllables, barely a breath, inaudible to the backrow sitters, but to us backup players and the pastor and God, enough. We procede down the aisle, formally, in pairs, arm in arm, strangers or friends. From the pews the watchers watch us, endowed with importance and residual sacredness in the name of ceremony, follow in tail, the lovebonded.

I, even I, can’t keep the thoughts at bay, the curiosity. How does love feel up close? Everyday. In joy and strife. In the kitchen and the bed and the bathroom cabinet and the car and the hall closet. Like a new skin or a rubbersuit. Or deepsea diving. Never again will feet touch solid land. But always submerging. A house underwater, a job, a car underwater. Everything tossed in the sea, sinking deeper in this perfecting body of love.

Never up close is not a beach. Not a laying on a towel, marveling at the vast expanse. Never a building of sandcastles that are swept away by the evening tide and rebuilt with canals and dams and again swept away. This is love as an idea, a blue swath on a map of the world, a directory of oceangoing vessels. No. Love up close must be like diving. Deep submergence, a wetness beyond wetness. Until wetness loses all definition. Until wetness and beingness are so entwined they are one. Until dry land becomes a speck on the horizon. A lonely desert island from which one must escape.

Would that we could see one another face to face

2008-05-01T15:40:00.004+09:00

As mirrors see them.

Would that we could sit and listen. To the truths in each line. Slowly unwinding. Like a ball of twine with all the time in the world.

Would that emerging was not bound, galley-slave to the departing. See him there peeking out the porthole. He'll be a free man reach the new world.

Preparation for a returning

2008-04-25T13:23:00.005+09:00

What is return? Tell me.

I might say that I returned a book to the shelf. I mean that from the same place I previously lifted it, I have, after some period of time, placed in back again. Implicit in returning is the idea that the object's content has remained unchanged. For if, having taken the book from the shelf, I removed pages, crossed out words, wrote new passages. In sum: added and deleted where I saw fit. And then placed it back in a bookshelf that had been repainted between two books that had likewise been re-edited. Could you then say that I returned the book? Or would it be more appropriate to suggest that the situation was too disparate from the original to consider it a returning?

How can a man then ever be said to return? He, who never passes a moment in which he does not die and experience rebirth. He, who sheds his cells day by day and is remade. He, who finds himself entering a place at once familiar and foreign to him, a place, like him, molded like clay by the hands of the clock, and is familiarly greeted with, "My friend, you've returned at last."

He might reply appropriately, "Neither am I the I who departed in time passed nor is this the place from which I departed. Both have passed beyond this realm." But who can understand this? So he might choose instead to satisfy his friend and say, "Yes it is I. I have returned."

Each is then left to puzzle over the changes that have occurred, as if any other outcome where possible.

No. Say not that I have returned, but that I have come again, for the very first time.

It's not finished

2008-04-22T00:05:00.003+09:00

It's not finished.

It's not finished.

It's not finished.

It's not finished.

BANGKOK - TAIPEI	BR212	B747-400	Economy Class	57C	04/22/2008 12:15 04/22/2008 16:55	03 hrs 40mins
TAIPEI - SAN FRANCISCO	BR18	B747-400	Economy Class	37C	04/22/2008 19:50 04/22/2008 15:30	10 hrs 40mins

This is just the beginning.

Bangkok MBK

2008-04-20T17:56:00.004+09:00

Bangkok by morning. Slept as I haven't in weeks aboard an overnight train from Chiang Mai. For eleven hours out cold. Spent the morning in the park and the day in the mall. I smell like I came from the sewers. Everything is dirty. I need a bath badly. Maybe it's compounded by the feeling of oughtness here in the city. Here in the mall where all clothes are unscarred, deliberately unlived in. I ought to relish the vagabond feeling, my rawmeat knees, dirty clothes, and stench, but I am ashamed. I won't get in an elevator. Sat in a coffee shop long past ordinary. I can't go out in the heat. Aimless, mapless, and guidebookless. So I take refuge here in the godless soulless seven story stack of stores in the middle of this godless soulless city.

At Last, I will not Return Unscarred

2008-04-18T12:11:00.002+09:00

Liberated in the winding mountain roads, he sped, two-wheeled, youthful and invincible, around curves, passing cars and pedestrians. His aviators gleaming, his hair a long, brown, bellowing flag of freedom. To the temple he was bound and at the feet of its 306 stairs he laid down at an unmarked cutback, an unexpected change of mind on the road.

The moto did not complain when he tugged the brakes and twisted the wheel. It did not moan or squeal or try to make the impossible turn. It ignored its driver's demands and resigned itself to inertia and gravity, collapsing like a broken chair. From his lungs a loud burst of air escaped as he struck the pavement and slid and with it the briefest and most appropriate profanity he knew. He listened to the sound of it hurdling from his lips, unthought and unaware of its origin. He leapt up and limped the bike to the edge of the road. Knees bleeding, shoulder aching, but intact and fortunate.

They came to his aid, strangers who picked up his sunglasses, his helmet, helped him start the bike, led him to a water hose, bandaged his wounds, offered him a glass of warm whiskey.

He ascended the 306 stairs to the temple aswarm now with tourists and their children pushing strollers, snapping pictures, ringing bells. His knees ached from the climb and the noise made him sick. This Buddhism made him callous. He wandered as a ghost through the compound, the bookstore, the food umbrellas, uncertain why he'd come at all.

* * *

The morning she left, he'd hardly slept, up late discussing the minutia of love and beauty, sweating on the steps of a seven eleven, drinking 7Up and juice, watching late night motos with their prostitutes in tail, stream by, finely arrayed lures for hungry pale-flesh fish. Is love beauty or beauty love, did one beget the other, are they psychological projections, instincts for survival, or ideals drawn up by a supreme creator? Urgently they discussed and talked themselves in circles. And left the debate for a future date. But the night would not sleep. In bed between the sheets unebbing waves of heat that no fan could dissipate. So it was with bleary eyes, he breathed goodbye at the birth of morning, to the living lines of Egon Schiele, wisped away by a cloud of smoke in the back of a coughing Tuk Tuk.

Thailand, My Mistress, at Dusk from Pai Canyon

2008-04-15T19:07:00.003+09:00

Everything now so golden, so pure. Dangling earrings, shimmering gown, she covers her glowing smile with her hand and blushes, and I love her all the more for this act of false modesty. Valleys and mountains of joy form as the tectonic plates of her face dance to some unheard melody of magma beneath her pores. Laughter ripples: the sound of rustling leaves.

Yes, as it should

2008-04-08T22:30:00.003+09:00

We trudged through the jungle for two days, slept in a bamboo hut in a village, swam in a mountain river, ate traditional Lao food with lots and lots of sticky rice, drank Lao Lao, that putrid powerful homebrewed rice whiskey, with the chief, waded creeks, pulled squirming black leeches from our bleeding ankles, filled our bottles with boiled water that tasted more like charcoal, and sweated like sprinklers.

Tomorrow Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I feel much better today, thank you.

It's hard to be optomistic when you still feel ill

2008-04-05T19:51:00.005+09:00

LUANG NAMTHA, LAOS

I wish I had some amazing bit of insight to share with you, my ever faithful reader. But would you like to hear about the slow death of idealism? Or of my failure to find that which I was seeking? What that was exactly, I cannot say, though perhaps one day I will know.

After two weeks traveling, planning, partying together, we split, at last, our happy little family of five, each in their own way. By fast boat, slow boat, elephant, and thumb. David and I stood by the road, thumb extended until at last a truck stopped and offered to take us halfway for a fee. We, hot and sweaty in the noonday sun, agreed.

Would you cross the globe just to sit on a balcony, float down a river, chat with friends, spend all night perched atop a porcelain bowl?

'This sucks man...' I moaned and rolled over on the hardwood mattress. Curled up, trembling, each muscle shaking its tin cup begging for relief. My stomach is a boyscout knot, my flesh is aflame. I couldn't stop the question from bobbing at the surface of my food-poisoned mind, 'why are we here?'

Oh I've had a wonderful time. That's certain.

See the same things I enjoyed before, I enjoy now, and the same things that brought me pain, pain me still. But each is here, so far from home and unfamiliar, intensified ten fold.

So what am I saying? I'm rambling. Because I haven't anything compelling to say.

I awoke in the morning, emptied of all force and fluid, gulped the rest of my bottled water tastelessly down my paste caked palette, and went to the bathroom to try to wash off the wretchedness of the previous night. The shower was little more than a dried up river bed, now hot, now cold. But it did the job and gave me courage to cross the street to check the bus schedule.

We're travelers see? We don't belong here, yet nor do we belong at home. Maybe that's why we need each other.

Yeah?

We need and love each other. Create these surrogate families. Then awake and leave, say farewell without any great feeling. Depart to our various corners of the world, bleeding all the while for the loss. But growing stronger, more resolute as these wounds heal. Laughing and crying together because it's all so necessary, so vital, so beautiful and so sad.

Amor fati.

Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll all grow wiser.

Totally abandoning the idea of hitchhiking, at 11:30 a.m. we boarded a bus bound for Luang Namtha, that Northern trekkers haven. We snaked around the most brutal, nauseas mountain paths imaginable. I wrapped my scarf over my eyes and tried to sleep off my sickness. Eager to reach Thailand, where I entertain the unlikely fantasy that all are happy and all are well.

To Lao

2008-03-24T18:55:00.002+09:00

HANOI. VIETNAM

Before me looms a monumental 24 hour bus ride from Ha Noi to Vientianne, the capital of that forgotten gem of South East Asia, Laos.

* * *

He wandered down by the river, where the docks are, hoping to find some scenery to photograph, but the urban trash overran the banks, and the junks hundled in the middle of the stream did not move him enough to release the shutter. A short suspension bridge rifled an unending barrage of motorbikes and cars across the river. The city is quite simply inescapable. Even in back alleys and on benches at lake fronts and in green grassed parks with domineering statues of communist leaders the noise and rush doesn't stop. Resting from their work, three men sat on those small blue and red plastic stools characteristic of Vietnamese street cafes. They were drinking tea in tiny chipped teacups and and smoking tobacco from a large bamboo water pipe. One waved to the traveller to join them. So he sat and drank with them and though they spoke no english and he no vietnamese, they had an enjoyable afternoon together, drinking tea and rice wine, eating flavorful leaves from a tree, and smoking tobacco.

* * *

A SHAVE

On a side street off central, away from any tourist cafe or English speaker, he sat peering up into the concentrated eyes of the man holding a straight razor blade to his throat, and he couldn't stop thinking about where this man might have been 40 years ago.

2008-03-22T23:44:00.000+09:00

Is there anything more delightful to see than a beautiful girl on a moped?

For those with nervous temperaments, rest assured I am still alive

2008-03-21T10:39:00.002+09:00

HANOI, VIETNAM

Soon our Viet Nam adventure will end and we'll cross the border into Laos, a land of legendary beauty and river tubing. Of Vietnam, I am quite fond. Though perhaps it is true that the people here are less friendly with foreigners than perhaps Thailand or Cambodia. They are more prone to stop and stare as you pass, though you are doing nothing, more likely to charge you twice or three times the price for a cup of coffee if you did not ask the price beforehand. However, modest kindness is aplenty and enough if you do not fancy yourself a prince. The natural beauty of this small strip of coast is enough to fill a continent, which is why we have spent almost twice as long here as we had anticipated. Even now, after three weeks, I am preoccupied with thoughts of my return.

Folded like an old rag

2008-03-11T23:38:00.005+09:00

From the back of the motorcycle I saw things. A landscape of dreams more vivid than the cinema sprawl of the Vietnamese countryside. Teleported, I'm back in 1995 on a green soccer field with my old teammates beside. It's a hot Saturday morning. There's Coach Sweed screaming from the sidelines, and there is Big Nate running the center and Antonio with the homemade tattoo on his wrist, the fastest kid I ever knew, and Nolan, already talking about girls and booze and ready to start a fight if he needs to. I was a star then. I thought I was pretty good.

A loud roar, like the MGM lion might sound being sucked through a vortex, a gust of wind twists my scarf around my face, and 10 tons of steel and rubber hurtle heedlessly past. We swerve onto the shoulder toss rocks and dust, cough on the exhaust. There's a dead dog folded like an old rag on the pavement and a boy with teary eyes.

The rumble buzz of our two wheeled steed whines and reaches speed. We curl around the mountain roads and through the pockscared and weary village streets. A slat board house on skinny legs rests on wooden canes and brown skinned children with natted hair carrying wicker baskets on their backs jump and wave as we pass. The hilltops in the distance are prematurely bald from an unhealthy diet of Orange Dioxin. I study the follicles at the base of Mr. Lee's neck until I realize that I'm back in the classroom, standing before a dozen staring kids. How long have I been silent? I try to teach, but I've forgetton what to say. Forty minutes seems eternal. My palms are sweaty as I force a smile and point at the whiteboard. "What day is today?" I ask. Ben raises his hand, he always knows the answer, and even on my first day of teaching over a year ago, when I fumbled blindly through the lessons with all sorts of stupid ideas about children and work and myself in the way, I often relied on him to bail me out. "It's Wednesday, March 12th, teacher."

The pavement levels as we leave town and the hum reaches a steady hypnotic tone. I don't notice the evening fog drifting through the purple mountains. I'm already somewhere else again, away from the slap of the wind and the numb pain in my butt, retracing the dark pathways of memory to people and places I once knew.

A conversation between a northerner and a southerner and a few bullet points

2008-03-07T19:16:00.006+09:00

A: Saigon is the old name.

Z: Saigon is the famous name.

A: But, Ho Chi Minh City is the official name.

Z: It's used for maps.

N: But what do you call it.

A: Ho Chi Minh City.

Z: I call it Saigon.

A: You do?!

* * *

+ Lately I've been craving things like Lays Potato chips and rock n roll.

+ Vietnamese coffee is delicious and will take the enamel off your teeth.

+ Vietnam is not expensive.

+ Unless you actually want to do things and buy things.

+ And I do.

+ I ate a scorpion. It tasted like damp dust in a soft paper shell.

All the Fish in the River

2008-03-01T12:31:00.003+09:00

SAIGON

Giant fish shimmering in the evening light leap over and around each in a frantic race upstream. Must be mating season. They fill every nook every gap between rocks, they push and bump, tumble and return, but never do their black mirror eyes leave their goal. When I cross, and everyone must eventually cross the river, they simply swim around me, as if I were surrounded by an invisible force field. And one carfeul step at I time, I cross, while the fish continue their unnebbing battle. But they aren't fish, they are motobikes, and it's not a river, it's a street.

New crush.

two thirteen year old boys and vietnam trepidation

2008-02-27T23:52:00.004+09:00

02.26.08
KAMPOT, CAMBODIA

I met him in the sand that appears nonsequiter, dropped from a giant truckbed just in from the coast perhaps, stretching out almost touching the purple mountains on the horizon. down past the paved road that turns to packed red dust in front of Hang guesthouse (where they treated us like family and every morning I ate omeletes and coffee and upon leaving i felt homesickness) a village emerges one hut then two, and across a little bridge of broken slats and gaping cracks, the sun burns a different color, the people a shade darker perhaps. sitting from their hammocks, everyone has hammocks. watching you peddle down that narrow puddle-pockmarked street. and laughing, i don't know why, but i smiled back and nodded. and they seemed pleased. a man in a red checkered turban and no front teeth beamed a gaping grin. looked like he had something to say, but thought better of it. then at the end, when the huts flicker out and the only a short mortar wall stands between you and the river, the sand appears.

first i saw small black sillouettes skipping and dancing hand in hand across the golden sand. their mood was light i could tell, though i watched from a great distance. and immediately i was fond of them, just as i was of this place.

They led me across the sand, Vway and his friend No (who spoke perhaps three words to me, but smiled amiably all the time), waded across the riverlette, followed the treads of mechanical beasts to a hut on the distant side. What likable boys they were. He leapt with excitement everytime I spoke khmer. And giggled, and his voice reached high and rare pitches of joy as he taught me how to say salt farm and dessert and how are you.

We bought three cans of Coke and crossed the river in a little boat. They rowed with unused planks and i tried not to show my fear of sinking. We came upon the salt farms. endless stretches of black pools reflecting the sunset in all its brilliance. We followed the foot path all the way to the end before at last turning back, though they would have taken me as far as I liked, and returned in the moonless pitch black but for the pinpoint stars. I surely would have been lost without them.

"we're muslim," he said, "do you have muslim friends?"
"yes, i have two," i said, "Vway and No."

When we parted at last, just across that wood plank bridge, I gave them gifts that I had worn on my hands. A ring and a bracelette.

He bowed and called me his brother.

* * *

02.27.08

CANTHO, VIETNAM

We approached Vietnam fearfully (and folded like starched laundry in the back seat of a minibus, though for reasons i don't understand the driver eventually relented and let me sit in the front, though he previously refused mine and the older Canadian woman's requests). We spent the four hour ride from the border preparing to encounter the worst of everyone's stories. Theives and liars and touts. But yet have found none. Only smiles and hello's and very beautiful women.

Tomorrow, floating markets.

Tomorrow, Saigon.

From Phnom Penh to Rabbit Island

2008-02-23T20:53:00.003+09:00

PHNOM PENH
02.21.08

I sat, tired from walking in the afternoon heat, dusty from black truck exhaust and the storm clouds of red sand bellowing up from passing tires, and glowing pink from the unforgiving midday sun. In the shade of a tree I sat. In a rare patch of grass in front of the old stadium, just a few feet from the road and the hurry of coughing motobikes. I sat and read a book I considered immensely overrated, read for principle not joy, and I'm better for it likely as not. When I brought the book down from my eyes, I saw a truck before me. Stopped in the road, in the traffic not yet dense, and from the window of the truck on seated atop the boards in back I saw fourteen eyes watching and seven mouths smiling at me as I sat. I smiled back, and they, caught, laughed. Soon the boys dismounted the mountig in the bed. Boys no more the seventeen. Five of them leapt off and made for the shade of the tree beside me. And as boys are want to do they immediately set at teasing and horsing each other in such obscene ways that I could not restrain my laughter. They smiled at my amusement and continued, until they finally exhausted collapsed in the grass. The truck all the while, sat docilely in the street, till it was teaming with vehicles so sick with black cough they could no longer move, but mired in a cloud of toxic fumes. And I deemed it was time to get on.

* * *

From Phnom Penh, we fled. We fled the waste and filth, the children sitting in the irridescent oil puddles, the cripples and handless victims of mines waiting at the gates, the many long winding snakes of motobikes filling every nook in traffic just as water fills a vessel. The tuktuk drivers down the alley and their unebbing mantra 'weed? opium? herion? crack?' the sandle footed stoners watching reruns on old tvs on the patios of every guesthouse along the lake. we fled that undeniable bitter bile that swelled our cheeks the moment we stepped off the bus from Siem Reap. We climbed in a hot but not unbearably hot bus and fled to the nearly-coastal town of Kampot, where, if we judged correctly, nothing of note was happening.

* * *

KAMPOT

02.22.08

In a rice field, the children mocked my volleyball skills and beat us twice in a row though we were much older and much taller and much more serious.

* * *

RABBIT ISLAND

02.23.08

In hammocks rough like fishing twine, we hung our browning bodies. And with borrowed books before our eyes and a cool breeze from behind, we lay and passed the day away on the beach of Rabbit Island.

A lake, a field, and an AK 47

2008-02-21T02:03:00.002+09:00

PHNOM PENH

i watched a thousand bats spin pirouettes chasing mosquitoes over boeng kok lake in phnom penh.

i saw a thousand skulls stacked in racks to remind the children of the atrocities of their fathers.

i held a weapon designed to destroy the flesh of men and fired fifteen bullets in rapid succession into a wall of stacked black tires.

in theory bicycles are an excellent, if not ideal, way to visit the ruins

2008-02-17T22:41:00.004+09:00

SIEM REAP
02.16.08

my tire jammed, i know not how, when i tried to move from the motobike infested street to the relatively clear sidewalk. it locked against the frame and no kicking or prying or tugging of mine could set it loose again. david continued to the ruins while i rode a tuk-tuk back to the guest house to get a replacement bike.

* * *

it pulled strongly to the right the brakes were for appearance and the left pedal was broken, so my foot rode on the rod.

* * *

I turned the bend in the red dust road back beyond Bayon temple were the tourist traffic begins to thin and the jungle begins to thicken and found David, bike-upturned, hands black with oil raised in frustration. His chain had inexplicably leapt off the large gear and lodged itself quite irrevocably against the bicycle frame. I suggested he catch a tuk-tuk. Where am I going to find a tuk-tuk out here? he said. Just then, as if he had been waiting in the jungle, listening to our conversation, a tuk tuk driver pulled up, ever ready to make a buck.

* * *

As the sun was setting, a most dazzling display, red and pink and orange, behind clouds like torn cotton, I abandoned for the moment my plan to get home immediately and turned down a dirt path beneath a sign that read "Cambodia Korea Friendship Forest". I found empty open fields, tall palm trees black silhouettes on the horizon, a breeze whispering softly through the tall grass. Here and there little pale dust paths trailed off to find rickety stick houses in the distance. I waved to five little Cambodian boys playing on some green mossy ruins forgotten by tourists. I found that little temple I'd been searching for all day. Now that my time was finished. Alone with the rocks and the gentle hush of dusk I sat. A little boy, appeared from behind a wall. Feet and legs clothed with dry cracking mud. He crawled up in front of me. Sua s'dei, I said. Hello, he said. What's your name, I said. One, he said. He shows me that he could count really fast and I showed him I could count really slow. I told him that I had to go, and he taught me how to say goodbye.

* * *

I got lost following the dazzling setting sun West to the farm fields. There is the airport, a young Cambodian told me, just follow this road around and it will take you back to Siem Reap. Ah kohn, I said. He smiled and nodded. From the airport it took another hour to town, by the time I reached it, the sky was already dark. Down dusty alleys I dodged the invading monocle headlights of motobikes falling ever towards me like a flood of tetris blocks, then inevitably I would turn, wrong again, and head back up as the flow of lights seemingly reversed as well as I returned to the main street. Eventually I made it home, tired and covered in dust, butt aching from my long and scenic ride.

* * *

SIEM REAP
02.17.08

We never found that secluded little temple to sit and read passing the afternoon far from tour buses and flash photography, though we rode an hour out of town to the oldest ruins, the Roulos group. Instead we spent the afternoon sitting on iron bar seats riding through little villages as villagers waved congenially from their hammocks and the toddlers all called hello (and then as we passed back the other way, goodbye). We, so sick of our Quixotic quest, weaved back through the dirt roads to the temple we knew, ignored the fact that it was already spotted with Japanese DSLR enthusiasts and sat down for a disappointing, small, and relatively pricey late afternoon lunch. And decided to beat the night, endure the pain, abandon our quest altogether and return to town.

* * *

On one of our frequent stops to stretch and rest our weary hindsides, we spotted two little girls in a driveway across the road imitating our stretches. Then continued a little game of copycat to everyone's great bemusement.

* * *

We arrived at the guesthouse and the Islamic wedding music that had shocked us out of sleep at seven a.m. was still blasting from the huge speaker pointed, as if to purposely torment us, directly at our window.

These 4 AM mornings are going to kill me

2008-02-15T22:40:00.003+09:00

Pitch black but for the myriad stars. Outside the gates of our guesthouse (where we ate a most fabulously delicious Amok (a traditional Kmer dish, some sort of beef or pork in sauce with a side of rice)) Pon, a twenty four year old Cambodian who learned English from tourists conversations in restaurants and can't afford to pay $400 for a year of English class (its about that much per month in Korea) and our hired tuk-tuk driver called my name. I saw two little red beads of light hovering in the air. He and David were having a little breakfast smoke.

* * *

Still pitch black we arrive at Angkor Wat (city temple). Here, says Pon. Quite confused and disoriented we head towards a bobbing light nearby. It belongs to a couple Japanese girls. They agree to let us follow them. We cross the a huge bridge across a moat that would humble any medieval lord. Suddenly two great coned shapes loom above us. A chill runs down my spine. The gates of Angkor Wat. A Cambodian man offering to sell us coffee and breakfast without invite leads us through the dark to what he proclaims to be the premier sunrise location within the grounds. The one you see in the postcards, he says. When we get there, little boys immediately swarm around us with plastic chairs and invite us to sit down. Those of us not paying deny. Apparently this spot is no secret and when the tour buses arrive it's suddenly alight with flash bulbs and chitter chatter. There is still some thirty minutes until sunrise so I get up for a walk around, cursing that stupid invention for stupid people, autoflash.

* * *

The squeaking of bats in the hundred nooks and cracks of the long decayed pointed stone ceiling above my head. Endless black hallways to my left and to my right. Alone, I wander through the temple, mesmerized. An occasional flashlight bobs in the dark. All is quite save the bats and the crunch of my footsteps on loose sand. I sit on a ledge on the far outer wall of the temple and watch the sun rise pink and orange over the treetops. I feel unreal.

* * *

For over twelve hours we traverse the massive ruined city on foot and in tuk tuk. Pon waits for us and naps in hammocks in shaded restaurants. He seems honest and kind. He reminds me of a Mexican boy I used to play soccer with. David confesses the same. Perhaps that is why we agreed to pay him, though we could probably have gotten cheaper elsewhere. I can't bargain with these people. After seeing the wretchedness of PoiPet, it would feel like stealing from the Red Cross Santa at Christmas time. So I end up paying more here than in Bangkok. I lose David in the morning before asking for the sunscreen, so I try to stay in the shade while wandering in and out of endless abandoned ruins. I don't see him again for four hours. By evening, I'm exhausted, roasted, and thoroughly amazed, staggering through the ruins like a ghost, too tired to take note or photos.

* * *

She made a fool of me. When I refused to buy a shirt, she began quizzing me on the US capitals. I failed miserably. She, on the other hand, not only named them all (except South Carolina) but also the capitals of many nations, South American, European and Asian. Then she started speaking in Spanish, then Polish. Her English of course was excellent. And she couldn't have been more the ten. With this little Cambodian girl David and I spent our last hour at Angkor. In some remote temple I never learned the name or significance of. She lifted our spirits. Among the throng of children selling books, shirts, cards, memorized eloquent speeches on the nuances of the reliefs in the walls, we could pay only a few, give a couple pens, and walk away and ignore a great many. It's truly humbling. So she, this little girl named Corn, received the last of our expendable money (100 baht and 1000 real), those not owed to our faithful driver. And in return we received a pair of pants and a souvenir T shirt. But it was the presence of her spirit that sold us. That rare, jubilant spirit that promises hope for the rest of us. She drew us flowers for good luck and wrote my name in Kmer. The sun set behind the fallen walls and it was time for us to leave.

Hasta la vista, she said.

Happy Valentines Day from Siem Reap

2008-02-14T20:12:00.003+09:00

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA

4:00 am awake from a night of fickle sleep. the heavy night has worn away with the cool morning breeze. Soon I forsake the idea of further sleep and rise to prepare for the long day ahead. The alarm sounds from the other room and i hear the stumblings of slowly waking bodies. the light from the bathroom illuminates a dazed Mark sitting at the edge of his bed staring blankly and sadly at his off tv waiting to say goodbye. David stirs on the couch and rises. We say thank you very much goodbye and head towards the waking streets to catch a cab to the train station.

So begins our 12 hour journey from bangkok to Siem Reap.

The train, much regailed, turned out to be quite pleasent. As far as third class train rides go. We feared it would be quite crowded. We'd heard in fact from another foreigner who trave led the whole six hours standing. This morning everyone got their own seat. Or two if they so wished. We rumbled through the absent countryside. past farming communities and staggered trees. this was a joy in itself and much better than any aircon bus.

Around noon we arrived at the Cambodia border and crossed over into the filthiest most impoversihed armpit of a casino town i'd ever seen. the thais often come here to the border to gamble as it is illegal in thailand. we trudged glasseyed past the childbeggars tugging at our arms, the racketeers selling fake visas, the tuktuk drivers, and cops. we trudged all the way to the end of the line in spite of demands to stop and fill out forms. from what we've read we decided to trust no one at all.

you don't have a visa? ok 1000 baht.

we'll pay $20.

impossible.

so they sent us to sit down. then as we didn't budge they sent us back down the way we came to a little depot to speak with another official, behind him snoozed a government man asleep in a hammock. he told us the same. but his shiny ear to ear grin betrayed him. we told him we'd only pay the official $20. he told us to go back to the beginning to a building we had passed coming in. the on ewe thought was false. we thought we had set out on a kafka chase. through a maze of misdirections. a game of endurance till one party caved in. we exchanged wearied glances and decided it was best (or inevtable) to play along.

tourist visa - 20 USD

at last!

no no. old sign. new price. twenty five USD.

we managed, after some haggling, to get through for $47 for the two of us. and it only took two hours.

past the gates a swarm of taxi drivers motorbike drivers and tuktuk drivers buzzed around every entering party. we had met a couple sweded at immigration and they agreed to abandon their bus (after i told them about the infamous bangkok - siem reap scam) and join us in a taxi to the city.

we marched passed the initial throng and were found by the taxi mafia who took us aside to their lot of camrys and offered to take us there for $40. not too bad. we agreed and climbed in for the 4 hour dust cloud potholed spine-compressing ride that followed, weaving through the surprisingly thick traffic of bicycles motorbikes and cows.

by 530 we made it into the city of siem reap. that jumping off mat to the legendary ruined city of the ancients, angkor wat. we joked around with some tuktuk drivers who eventually conceded to take us to the guesthouse of our choice free of charge. we, ever unprepared, secured the last room at Garden Village Guesthouse, leaving our new swedish friends to find another place. Though i wonder if the bamboo walls and ceiling fan would be quite to their taste. i like the atmosphere so far. free internet a restaurant upstairs and $2 bike rentals. and its hard to beat the $4 a night price tag.

tomorrow we meet the sun at the gates of angkor. riding a tuktuk at 5am. booked $10 all day. with a bonus tip if it's especially good.

i haven't eaten but a couple of oreos all day. fearing an irritable bowel emergency aboard less then luxury transport. so i think i'll test the grub upstairs.

Suwadicup Bangkok

2008-02-12T02:07:00.000+09:00

Sleeping on the tile floor in the unairconditioned flat of a gracious acquaintance in Bangkok. The air is notably heavier here. Even in the airport last night I felt it. It clings to you. Not drippy, just sticky. The night is especially thick. Without the pleasant breeze we felt all day. It's late now. And we've sworn to reform our sleeping habits, after once again knocking on locked doors of famous sights after hours. Slumping around the city at dusk in dismay. I feel like I could write a page on Bangkok already. At last something new again. Something exciting and strange. But like i said, my sleeping habits must be reformed and it's already after midnight. We won't stay long here I think, just a couple days before heading to Cambodia and the wonders of Angkor. Angkor. Angkor. I want to get away from people. And crowds and tight places. Sit alone by a river or at a mountain. Think a while.

What Hong Kong is

2008-02-10T15:58:00.001+09:00

HONG KONG AIRPORT

Free wireless internet in the Hong Kong Airport. How perfect.
Leaving in an hour on flight CX701 to Bangkok.

They say Hong Kong is the city where East and West collide. I suppose that is true, though no doubt more so forty or fifty or one hundred years ago when it was still a dangerous port town full of pirates, opium dens, rickshaws, and thieves. Somewhere along the road they were gradually removed and replaced with yuppie housing developments, living room art galleries, glamorous shopping streets, and glitzy bank towers. Of all the places I’ve been in Asia, this city felt the least Asian. Every sign had English subtitles, every waiter and public servant spoke proper British, the cars the roads, the street signs, all lacked that exotic appeal. But here let me digress. Something that occured to me as I wandered back alleys in Central looking for stray graffiti sprays was this idea of exotic and how my perception of it is drastically changed. My reference point when seeking the exotic or even speaking of it, is no longer America as much as it is Korea. In fact I think I would probably find returning to the USA more of a culture shock than visiting Hong Kong. We shall see as my journey progresses if I retain this sense of familarity. But to return to the subect at hand. Hong Kong feels much less like a collision than a tacit agreement between to merchants. For what is good for one is good for the other. Hong Kong seems to belong to no one. It floats on clouds of prosperity like a hovering spaceport free for the whole world to enjoy. We all dock our ships, buy, take a few photos, and leave.

But to be frank, I still don’t know what Hong Kong is.

Oh! I think I smell a rat.

2008-02-08T00:44:00.000+09:00

Happy New Year!

How to Reserve a Bed in Hong Kong

2008-02-07T14:42:00.000+09:00

Did I fail to mention, faithful reader, that arriving in Hong Kong, D and I failed to reserve a room for all six nights of our stay, opting instead to pay for two nights in order to allow freedom to choose later on? This choice was based largely on reviews we had read on the internet of shady hostels, but proved to be foolish when we learned that everything was pretty much booked for the Lunar New Year holiday. So as we walked around the city, the thought that we may have to spend a night or two in a 24 hr McDonald’s or worse the Chunking Mansions, a rat hotel not fit for the Pakistani druglords and prostitutes that inhabit it, haunted my every step. And each sight we stumbled upon, the Orchestra of Lights, the Temple St. Night Market, the Bank of China Tower, Man Mo Temple were foggy like beneath wax paper upon which was scrawled in Crayon too close for my eyes to focus, ‘Stupid Fool’. I did not wish to worry you my reader, with thoughts of my secret desperation. A burden I did not even recognize myself until D tapped my shoulder while I was scouring the web for an alternate bed and said “we’re good, you can stop searching. We’re good.” A place just up the stairs with a couple empty beds and a decent price tag would accomodate. Relieved I couldn’t help but smile in disbelief. At last now I feel I have arrived in Hong Kong.

But what about Hong Kong? The million faces, decrepit peeling walls of green and red and teal and yellow, the pipes like vines twisting and hugging the towering apartment complexes climbing up and up, clawing over each other to the gray-pink sky above. The dance of lights of the skyscape across the harbor at eight o’clock on that island of transplanted America clean and crisp. A quiet yuppie utopia on the day before New Years. Shops selling living room art, beautiful and sweet without questions or challenge. Hip enough to make your friends smile still unaware at your cocktail party. You’ll surely get that promotion this year. The unfathomable mansions atop Victoria’s peak, as we walked the trail down in the cool drizzly night, unwilling to wait in the line to be crammed back into the “must-see” tram car. The views spectacular through the tropical foliage, we stopped and took photos, I doing guesswork with my Pentax, operable, but blind. 15 seconds, 30 seconds a piece. We peak through The giant latticework of the towering gates of fathomless wealth, and ponder the life within. Would I recognize the man who built this? Would I feel any brotherhood with him?

Today the city is barren. All at home with family on this holiday. The store fronts closed, walled off with garage door gates. We still inside the hostel, back in a two bed windowless box breathing stale air. Shuffling from room to room to keep a roof over our heads. Soon to head out wander around for a bit and find the famous night parade at the star ferry pier, sure to be a suffocatingly popular affair.

H.K. Day one

2008-02-05T10:56:00.000+09:00

Hong Kong.

Dragon Hostel.

On the three hour flight, I found my mind wandering away from Hong Kong. Doodling in bits of nothing. I was a little aghast at my lack of interest. My failure to anticipate. I didn’t even realize until we landed and found ourselves on the unfamiliar streets of this unfamiliar city, that it was because I knew absolutely nothing about Hong Kong. We had no guidebook, no plan, barely a room to sleep in. What do we do now? Was the prevailing question. Confused we roamed about debating this way or that. And found a huge mall complex where we purchased a Lonely Planet guidebook, sat down with some coffee and made a rough itenerary for the six days we’ll be here.

* * *

We looked for a man who looked like a fortune teller. Crazy eyes or long hair. Something unusual. Among the hundred beckoning tellers beneath their red light tents. In the alleys just behind the Temple street Night Market where I purchased more nicknacks than I ever thought I would want in the endless sprawl of shops and stands, tellers gather at night to unveil your life. Sucker as I am for those more unique forms of entertainment. We decided to give it a chance. We had come to the end of the long line of tents and that man with the long nails and snaky silver hair waving as over seemed as good a bet as any. David recorded the whole thing on tape.

Of course he revealed little I did not already know or expect to hear.

But that’s not really the point anyway. Is it.

* * *

Millions of people. In Kowloon, once the most densely populated area in the world. Neon lights aglow. Red yellow green. No end to the people. The faces marching endlessly by. So unlike Seoul. So many variations. Staggering. In Korea there are five or six people. Repeated ad nauseum. Student, militaryman, clubber, businessman, mother, old woman. Pretty much sums it up. Here there is no end. No two alike. So it seems.

And the walls are all peeling layers of paint. The food is delicious and cheap. The buildings loom like giants with head lights. Everything grown together with time and septic tubes. A marsh of human life.

The camera

2008-02-05T10:30:00.000+09:00

It had been my full intention to write a long detailed entry before my Korea departure. But my final weekend was not as I had expected. And I could not find time to sit and reflect as I had planned. I did, however, get a final tour of Seoul. Hitting some of the attractions I had hitherto missed.

When my temple stay plans fell apart (for the second and third time), I resorted to plan B and contacted my friend So Hyang who I met a few months ago at an art gallery near my home, and who had since moved to Seoul. She promised my a great time, but failed to tell me that she worked all weekend. So I ended up seeing her hardly at all and spending all weekend with her friend Dong Bin.

The weekend, as unpredictable as it was. Led confusingly to one camera shop among a dozen camera shop in one complex among a dozen complexes. We, searching for the elusive Panasonic Lumix LX2 (which despite its apparent noise reduction shortcomings, I had decided to purchase based admitedly largely on cool factor, but not without due consideration of its Leica lens), were told that the last had been sold yesterday, that now was a bad time to purchase a Japanese product as the Yen was rising. I dismayed, wandered head-hung by numerous glass cases, manageries of gleeming polished aluminum and black textured plastic. A hundred glass eyes staring seductively back, they winked and waved, offering me hours of pleasure, but not without a pretty price. I declined their offers, for my heart was somewhere else. Then I saw her. The Pentax MX I had been looking for.

Ask him how much he wants for it.

He wants 190000 won*.

I got it for 175000 with a Vivitar macro zoom lens. I thought it was a pretty good deal. I’d never seen one below 200000 before in Korea. I desperately needed a new SLR. This one just floated down from heaven. I was so excited, I forgot to make sure the light meter worked. It wasn’t until later that night in the taxi, that I realized it was broken..

Don’t cry.

*$190

Cloverfield

2008-01-25T09:13:00.000+09:00

See it.

Please.

* * *

The email I sent my sisters:

I know y'all aren't movie goers and that any advice on movies you will take with a grain of salt. but i really think you should go see cloverfield. it looks like a monster movie, but don't let that fool you. it's all about the human drama involved. it could just as easily have been about the Iraq war or 9/11 (and in fact invoked references in my mind to both events). But the way it was made is absolutely revolutionary. it is without a doubt unlike any other major film ever made. Even if you're skeptical, you must go see it for the historical value. i can't stop thinking about it. i can replay every scene, shot by shot in my head. it was so good that even though i just saw it last night, i'm going to go see it again tonight. My palms were sweating, my heart was racing. I felt it in my gut. The fear and anguish. I've never been more compelled by or attached to action on a screen. This wasn't like a moviewatching experience. It was like dreaming, but more like stepping into the mind of another person and living through a catastrophic event. I felt like they had attached sensors to my nerves, inducing responses. When I left the theater I was in a daze. Gleeful that the world still existed, that there was no monster terrorizing NY. That I was still alive. And yet the impact did not leave me. Imprinted on my mind were the images of giant reptilian claws smashing through skyscraper walls raining chunks of concrete and dust down on the pedestrians below. And even as I walked home, I kept my eyes on the horizon, peering down the long streets to make sure the creature had not come this way.

Don't wait for DVD.

Passing out, I Daydream

2008-01-22T12:57:00.000+09:00

I come home and it's all blah blah nonny nonny in my head. So I spread myself out
on the couch legs dangling at the calf forearm resting against forehead tussling my hair. And David's got some spittle spattle hum buzz coming from the stereo. Should I ask who it is? Or should I already know? Less effort, say nothing. My mouth is aching from the second and third ulcer spreading tiny pale deadskinned
fingers along the southern-most edges of my gums. So I talk quiet and slow like a cowboy mouth full of chaw. For dinner I'll eat that room temperature rice sitting in the wok, maybe that's why I have these sores. Maybe I don't eat enough bananas these days. Maybe I'm not taking care of myself again.
I daydream of Thailand.
Tuk tuks clitter clattering down dirt roads pockmarked and long running scars bleeding deep brown sludge. I'm standing there mesmerized by the buzzing bells of newness. The rain just stopped and the leftover drops slowly find there way down my red mountain anorak. I'm waiting for the bus. The clang-clang, tin-and-twine number that'll take me down to the coast. Down to the pier. Down where the people move slow and easy. Where the beaches are glittering and endless. Down where the tall blond Germans don't go. I'll cover my body in perfect white sand and lay all day by the jade colored water until the great red god in the sky dips his toes, then torso, and finally his head into the sea.

This week could take all year...

A Couple of Videos for You

2008-01-11T18:48:00.000+09:00

One Year of Faces in Korea
My yearlong project. I took a picture of myself (nearly) every night. To be frank I didn't do so well the last couple of months, but early on it was every night.

Chuckles and Walnut: Episode Gerry
A short film that David and I made last summer about two toys that get hopelessly lost and must face life's most puzzling problem.

374 Days

2008-01-04T18:38:00.000+09:00

Has it really been that long?

Since I saw you face to face.
Since I hugged my mother.
Since I ate real Tex Mex.
Since I drove my Jetta.
Since I stepped off the plane that bitter cold night, breathed the grey air, coughed seven times, and entered this strange and wonderful fusion bubble.

Outlook Upon a New Year

2008-01-01T16:05:00.000+09:00

The wind stung my face as I stood atop the rocks and overlooked the sprawling, devouring city of Seoul, a mass of buildings like a giant circuit board stretching to the horizon in every direction. Just twenty minutes up the trail and already the noise and smog of the street was gone. A pervading stillness enveloped the mountain trail. I climbed a crooked staircase through an empty Buddhist village, past a chalk white dog, and through a low concrete canal to find the entrance to the trail. An old Shamanist route on the outskirts of the city. I found an alcove where the blackened stone testified to a great number of candles burned at the spot. I sat where the sun was warm and the wind was blocked and listened to an old woman chant an ancient oscillating lament to the wind and bang a cymbal in time, now quiet, now loud, with the heartbeat of the mountain. Calmness wrapped its arms around me, the city down below slowed to the pace of the mountain, all was still, but for the swooping flock of synchronized pigeons. I sat without moving for more than an hour. Till the sun’s warmth began to wane and the approaching night bade me move on.

In Seoul as I wandered the neon lit streets bustling with coats and mittens, scarves and faces I felt my soul rise in the presence of itself. I find being alone in a great city as sublime as standing before a cascading fall or a mammoth cliff. Overwhelmed by the power of the city and my own insignificant place within it, I could hear clearly a description of myself. A lonely passerby in this ancient world. One recently born and soon dead. One who could easily be crushed beneath the thumb of this mightier beast. One who is at the mercy of so many forces. The city spoke so honestly to me, concealing nothing, that I couldn’t stop a smile from creasing the edges of my lips.

Alone in the coffee shop, the subway, the tunnels, the palace, the museum, the bar, the streets, the mountain. For two days I wandered alone in the frigid cold in a strange city and felt once again myself emerging within this skin. I felt a joy welling up to bursting. The more sensitive organs swelled with anticipation. For life spread out before me like a banquet and at that instant I was ready to devour everything, the appetizers, entrees, and deserts, the napkins, the wine glass, the silver fork, the knife, spoon, porcelain plates and ice cream dish, crunching and tumbling down my bleeding gullet to my cavernous stomach below. I could scarcely sleep that night. Lying on the hard floor of the house of a generous stranger I wrote and wrote. I wanted to call everyone I knew. But I had nothing to say, no words to express. I simply wanted to scream to them, to release upon them this energy, if need be to devour them as well.

2007-12-29T11:19:00.000+09:00

Will I take a bus to Seoul today? For no reasonable reason, but because my reptilian brain demands it.

Language is lacking in subtlety. Must remember to speak slowly and in long sentences, when appropriate words are unavailable. I think how we think and relate to people is largely influenced by how easily we can communicate; whether we have the right word in our lexicon...

Be well.

Resolve

2007-12-27T11:50:00.000+09:00

Go now. And no longer quake before your desires.

Sailors

2007-12-26T13:15:00.000+09:00

Only then will we know sadness as sadness and the joy of joy. and then when we laugh it will sound as one. We'll be loneless and thoughtless. Each a sailor bound to each future by pinpoints of starlight.
When sky is black and a silver moon breaks through a tear in the fabric, I'll be glad if a brother ship still sails beside mine, but if I find myself again sailing the seas alone I will be glad for the sadness of your absence.

Just do it!

2007-12-23T09:54:00.000+09:00

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy new year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is not about a conversation I had yesterday

2007-12-21T18:50:00.000+09:00

Occasionally I am confronted with the rather unsettling question "Are you, in fact, a lazy underachiever?" Usually this follows the unusual feeling of obligation to achieve something. Typically I don't feel that impulse. It arises, instead, from the outside.

"Don't you think you are wasting your life?"

"No.. Should I think I'm wasting my life?"

"Well... I'm not one to judge."

We could all do more, I suppose. But for what. For what. For what.

I wish you a merry Christmas.
I wish you a merry Christmas.
I wish you a merry Christmas.
And a happy new year.

Some Alphabet Soup at Lunchtime

2007-12-18T12:42:00.000+09:00

I’m sure you, my faithful reader are agonizing these days. You are asking yourself “Why doesn’t he write? I am hungry for his words and he is starving me.” I’m sure you are starving, but trust me there are plenty of other writers out there in this great fishbowl of words who’s alphabet soup is far more delicious than mine. You might try a spoonful of William T. Vollmann who traveled the Earth thoroughly in the course of two years and went to every prohibited place imaginable. Or perhaps Henry Miller, who speaks so directly of his affairs, you might avoid buses and other public places for fear that your cheeks may Benidict Arnold your voyeristic pleasure, and who you might shut away indignantly if not for his elegant craft and insight.

I like to take sips now and again, while half-lying, legs propped at angles over the arm and back rest, back to the wall on my yellow vinyl couch, the one that is enchanted. It’s true, it is enchanted. Justas told me of his unimaginable dreams, recurring every time he awoke and drifted away again. David slept and visioned the future of his family five or ten years from now. And to me it grants peace of mind. A sitting place where thoughts evaporate, language and image are forgotten and music pulsing from the other wall sails idly through the vessel of my mind, erstwhile I take spoonfuls of alphabet soup, warm in my hands and sweet on my tongue.

Winter comes, but softly again. Wrap your face in a scarf upon waking, but by noon a sweater will do. I walk down the steps of the gym. The sun still in the early stages of a cycle of that eternal act of rising. Rays filter through the nightshift fog and evenly light the morning streets like a studio. I breathe lightly as I walk by the overpass. That concrete structure and the shopwalls create a channel for the stench of sewer and smoke. Some days I must stifle a gag. Pigeons alight as I pass my alley and pause, camera in hand, to contemplate whether this is the morning to remember... or not. At five to nine I arrive at work, breakfast roll and juice bottle in hand, say good morning to the early rising desk staff and head to the computer room to surf the net for a few minutes before duty and boredom compell me to stop staring at the screen and go prepare for kindergarten classes.

What did I used to do on the internet for hours anyway?

It’s boring, isn’t it?

That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?

My Consolation

2007-12-13T11:12:00.000+09:00

Some mornings my only consolation is in completing the menial coloring pages activities I assign the children. Meanwhile they roll the paper into tubes and chase each other around the table squealing like frightened little piglets.

2007-12-10T11:53:00.001+09:00

It's never felt so good to relax all weekend.

Trying to wake up

2007-12-06T11:30:00.000+09:00

Don't you realize how magic and precious and temporary life is?

A Plan

2007-12-05T18:42:00.000+09:00

I think I'll lay in bed tonight and think about all the times and things and people I will truly miss.

The Taco Fiesta

2007-12-04T17:16:00.000+09:00

They came and drank and ate. One by one, two by two. Tacos and tequila. Chili and vodka and beer. Red wine and soju. Twenty plus tightly packed my two room flat. Sitting on the floor, standing in the kitchen. From America, New Zealand, Uruguay, the Philippines, Korea, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Cuba, and Brazil, they came. All passengers together that night. For what reason? When the air was heavy and our heads were light, we turned the lights down low and danced in the living room till the cops came. We were keeping the slowly dying awake, they said. Apologies, because someday won't we all want to die quietly in peace? The music off, we strum our guitars, and Justas produces two mouth harps, which none but him can will to sing. Gabe is still heating tacos till late in the night. The chili's gone and so is the Filipino ceeceek. Someone's passed out on my bed or on the floor. Someone's spilled candle wax by the door. Justas has started doing card tricks, everyone's watching, but I'm too tired now to abandon my seat on the couch. Was she stroking my hair? Or was I dreaming?

Come morning, Justas and Fyaz remained. Ara and her Busan friends caught the first train home at 6:30. I awoke, just newly asleep, to say farewell and thank you for coming and shake your hand warmly, and see you again soon. Get up past noon and fry up the last taco for breakfast and survey the wreckage of the previous night. We're all smiles and groans. The party was a success, but the headaches are hammers, the trash bags are waiting, and a biting rain is beginning to fall on a cold winter's afternoon.