Honestly, it has been so long since I’ve written and so much time has passed in between my blogs recently that my thoughts are scattered.
My apologies to the reader if I jump from place to place or time to time.
Memory is a funny thing.
Memories are even funnier.
And I don’t mean funny as in Joe Pesci in Good Fellas funny – “You think I’m funny?
Funny, ha ha, funny?
What the fuck makes you thing I’m funny?”
But more strange and difficult to describe.
Sometimes like twilight, where the edges are fuzzy but the substance or form is apparent.
Sometimes like the bright light of noon, where the edges are so harsh there is contrast and details lost in the shadows.
Sometimes like midnight, with no light whatsoever, where there are no details to be seen but a vague presence is felt more than seen.
Sometimes it’s like a song where you can remember the chorus or melody but can’t remember the words.
Most of the time, memories are difficult to nail down or dredge up from the murky bottoms of the mind.
But occasionally, they can be the only thing you see before your eyes.
Glad to be out of Hong Kong. Interesting place but too hot for anything but malaria and snakes. Some thoughts (some original, some borrowed) on HK –
Hong Kong is a pulsating fusion of two cultures and like no other city in the world. The meeting of East and West continues to shake and stir the city into an invigorating cocktail of color and aroma, taste and sensation. It has something for everyone: shopping malls everywhere; romantic vistas across Victoria Harbor or down from the Peak; museums with rich collections devoted to local history and culture; stunning modern architecture; and a seemingly endless choice of restaurants and cuisines. Even after its return to the so-called Motherland, Hong Kong’s political and economic systems are still significantly different from those of mainland China. English is widely spoken and street signs are bilingual. The vast majority of the population – in fact, some 94% - speak Cantonese, though Mandarin is increasingly used since the handover and the arrival of mass tourism from the mainland.
The history of Hong Kong is just as interesting as the place is now. European trade began with China in the early parts of the 16th century with the Portuguese granted permission to set up a base on the island of Macau. Trade steadily increased and during the 18th century really mushroomed as the European demand for silks and tea grew. But since China was at that time largely self sufficient the balance of trade was unfavorable to the Europeans. That is until they began running Indian grown opium into the country. While the drug has long been used medicinally in Asia as well as in Europe, addiction to the drug soon became widespread. The British, with a virtually inexhaustible supply, developed the trade aggressively and by the start of the 19th century this ‘foreign mud’ formed the basis of most of their transactions with China.
China’s attempts to stamp out the trade, including confiscating and destroying a huge shipment of the drug, gave the British the pretext they needed for military action. (Don’t you just love the colonial ‘everything belongs to me, you will do what we say or else, we rule all attitudes’?) Two British gun ships were sent in and managed to destroy some 29 Chinese navy boats. A little while later, in 1841, the Union Jack was hoisted over the island of Hong Kong. The subsequent Treaty of Nanking, which brought an end to the First Opium War, ceded the island to the British crown ‘in perpetuity’. Later, after the end of the Second Opium War, the British were able to wrangle the Kowloon Peninsula from the Chinese as well. Then in 1898, a 99 year lease was granted for the New Territories.
In late 1984 an agreement was reached: China would take over the entire territory in 1997. Soon thereafter the territories were declared a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong. It would retain its free-market economy as well as its social and legal systems of 50 years. The Chinese catch phrase for this was, ‘One country, two systems’.
Our time there was spent mostly dealing with our Chinese visas. Yes, it never stops! I’m working on my next one as I write this! Argh. Anyway, we had a pleasant enough time…..taking the tram to Victoria Peak for the awesome view of HK and Victoria Harbor, eating delicious waffles with peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk pour on top, walking into random store on the street not because we were interested in anything they had but only because they had the A/C cranking it felt so good!
Currently, I am sitting in the Shenzhen (pronounced shin-jin) airport awaiting our flight to Chengdu, the gateway city to Lhasa and Tibet. While my body is here my mind wanders to the recent past and I would like to visit my time in Colorado with you….
Colorado, if you haven’t experienced it for yourself, is one giant playground for adults! Literally, all I did was play, play, play. Hiking, biking, rafting, dancing, climbing, swimming. Everyday there was some activity, some play to enjoy. And the weather couldn’t have been better – sun, sun and more sun! As you may know, Leigh and I are considering where to ‘resettle’ after our Tibet adventure and so far the top choice is Portland, Oregon. But I have to admit that after such a devastatingly enjoyable visit to Colorado, The first few days were spent in Denver. The big city. Built at the base of Rockies, Denver is a fairly large city that can have the small town neighborhood feel. But it is still a large city, with all its inherent traffic, smog, overcrowding, and crime issues. While there, we cooked out, played ping pong and bocce, climbed a nearby 13,000+ foot mountain peak, enjoyed a couple local bars, saw some free music at a nearby city park, rode bikes and tossed the Frisbee. In general it was hot and dry but during the Rockies baseball game I went to (with about 15 African refugee teenagers….and all I got to say is a teenage is a teenager is a teenager), it grew dark and menacing and the storm gathered fierce winds that scattered debris all over the field before it finally moved out to the east to possible spawn those nasty Great Plains tornadoes and hail we hear so much about in the relatively placid East. It was an intense few moments. It was an intense experience, especially in the 400 section in dead away center field!
The next stop on the ‘rado express was Boulder (they are almost one in the same city at this point, Boulder and Denver). There is a relationship between the two cities much like that of Atlanta and Athens. One a big business, corporate city, one a hip, alternative college town. Boulder, however, is an extreme place. A place where one can go to find themselves, lose themselves, attain enlightenment, adjust their chakras, attune their chi, have crystal massages, talk to beings from other dimensions and universes, buy Prada or Kate Spade, be Democrat, be Republican, liberal or conservative. About the only thing you can’t be is poor. Home of the ‘trustafarian’, Boulder is not a cheap place…but it is a fun one.
One of my best friends (Matt) lives in Boulder. Ironically, it just so happens he lives with my ex-girlfriend, Heather! Wanna know something else that’s really ironic about that situation? (Rhetorical question….you have no real choice in this b/c I’m going to tell you anyway!). Not only do I have two of my most influential and powerful ex-girlfriends in Boulder (Heather and Lisa - guess I know where I’m not going to live in Colorado, huh?), but they are both massage therapists!!! I don’t know, but that to me is just plain funny! So anyway, the timing of my visit couldn’t have been better actually because my old roommate from Athens and good friend from the Atlanta days, Jason Brooks (and his wife Laura), were visiting Matt and Heather while Jason was trying out for a position at the fancy restaurant in Boulder. Jason is by far one of the most gifted chefs I’ve ever known. What he does with food is illegal in several of the mid-western states. I mean the first night I was there visiting, he cooked dinner for everyone and it was phenomenal. Let’s see it was shrimp over pasta something (sorry, it’s been over a month now and my memory is definitely hazy). But anyway, it was GOOD! I’m getting all mouth water drool over here just thinking about it. And man, the beer in Colorado is some of the best in the whole country. I totally Fat Tired myself into oblivion a couple nights. So, so, good. I’ll be in someone’s eternal debt if they can get me a Fat Tire or 420 here to me in Lhasa (HINT HINT!). We had a good time, all of us – Matt, Natalie (Matt’s new girlfriend), Heather, Peter (Heather’s boyfriend), Jason, Laura and me. It was almost straight out of 1994-95 Athens, GA days! It felt really, really good to be around so many old friends. And what was really kind of funny about the whole thing was Heather and I was more comfortable about being together than anyone else there. It’s like they thought just because our relationship didn’t work out we shouldn’t or couldn’t hang out without weirdness anymore. For two days, this Boulder crew played and played. It was really, really nice.
It was just the other day at the Tirdrum medicinal hot springs here in Tibet that I awoke in the middle of the night with the full moon shining bright onto my sleeping face thinking for old friends, good times and memories fond and bitter. I found myself thinking about my friend Keith the most. My mind and heart kept drifting back to that tall, lanky, slightly goofy looking young man who really became one of my closest (and craziest) friends during my 20’s. For those of you who don’t know, he was killed in a bicycle accident while I was traveling in SE Asia with Heather. We got the phone call in Singapore while I was visiting my dad during his work stint there in 1997. Of course there was absolutely nothing we could do. We couldn’t make the funeral; we couldn’t really hug other friends or mourn with them. All we had was each other and no other closure from there unfortunately. And like my maternal grandmother, Keith died before I could apologize for fighting with him. That undeserved but persistent feeling of guilt that came after the mourning was probably the toughest to deal with.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be sad here, but good friends are rare and precious jewels to be held onto tightly and never allowed to walk away or be lost. And I feel so, so blessedly fortunate that I have so many good friends scattered over this planet’s surface! Obviously, Keith had other work to do in the universe and I know, I feel, that he is in my heart and a part of me. He touched me like so many of you have touched me (and how I hope I have touched you as well). Good friends are rare. Hold on to them.
After the nice reunion in Boulder, I was off to another one with yet another good friend from college, Laine. Matt and I took his car into the Rockies for a little overnight camping and then on the next day a rendezvous with Laine so she could take me to her part of the world around Aspen. We had a great drive and found a great creek-side location to spend the night in the Mt. of the Holy Cross wilderness area. Have I mentioned how fucking beautiful Colorado is?! Heavenly. After a nice afternoon hike up to some beautiful and serene high alpine meadow lakes, we did the typical man thing and sat around the campfire talking about sex, drugs and rock and roll. The following morning we met Laine in the strange but beautiful town of Leadville for the ‘Jason Hand-off’. You see, I was going to the Telluride Bluegrass Fest!!! And I was going with Laine, her new fiancé (wooohooo!), Fab and meeting my good friends from Denver, Ethan & Jen.
Telluride, Telluride, Telluride…..Even just saying the name adds an air of mystery to your thoughts. It rolls of the tongue like a mysterious foreign port of call. For four days in June of 2006, this magical mystery vortex of serenity and joy became my home…..
I don’t really want to say too much about what happened there. For those of you who have been, you know. For those of you who haven’t been….GO! Glorious God-sent rainbows, plunging mountainside waterfalls, quaking aspens, gently whispering rivers and the merry beauty of Bluegrass! It was heaven on Earth for those four days…..I’m hooked. Is it next year yet?
Anyway, I’m tired of trying to finish this entry, so I’m just going to say it’s done. I leave you with this from ‘East of Eden’ by Steinbeck (thanks Jen!) -
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativenesses, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping the future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build an automobile quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammer blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.”
Honestly, it has been so long since I’ve written and so much time has passed in between my blogs recently that my thoughts are scattered. My apologies to the reader if I jump from place to place or time to time. Memory is a funny thing. Memories are even funnier. And I don’t mean funny as in Joe Pesci in Good Fellas funny – “You think I’m funny? Funny, ha ha, funny? What the fuck makes you thing I’m funny?” But more strange and difficult to describe. Sometimes like twilight, where the edges are fuzzy but the substance or form is apparent. Sometimes like the bright light of noon, where the edges are so harsh there is contrast and details lost in the shadows. Sometimes like midnight, with no light whatsoever, where there are no details to be seen but a vague presence is felt more than seen. Sometimes it’s like a song where you can remember the chorus or melody but can’t remember the words. Most of the time, memories are difficult to nail down or dredge up from the murky bottoms of the mind. But occasionally, they can be the only thing you see before your eyes. 
The history of 
One of my best friends (Matt) lives in 
After the nice reunion in 
I don’t really want to say too much about what happened there. For those of you who have been, you know. For those of you who haven’t been….GO! Glorious God-sent rainbows, plunging mountainside waterfalls, quaking aspens, gently whispering rivers and the merry beauty of 
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativenesses, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.