Jet Rag

Asian jet lag is the worst, for an American, one day of travel and a week to recover, like the heroine hangover of a lost weekend. That’s the nice thing about South America, little or no jet lag when it’s all over, at least as long as the continents stay in their current configurations. You can go north and south all you want with little or no effect, except maybe a little Coriolis effect pulling you a bit to the right, like the brakes pulling to one side in my old pick-up. Maybe that’s why Asia is so different, because it’s so far away from the seat of rationalism and so close to China. Like Mexico, ‘so far from God, so close to the United States’, Southeast Asia is ‘so far from Buddha, so close to China’. For centuries everyone in Southeast Asia, all of them of near or distant Chinese origin, have been embracing other philosophies and life-ways besides the Chinese central dogma, about equally divided between Theravada Buddhism, Islam, and Communism, deriving from India, Arabia, and Europe. This is not the crossroads of history, nor the world. This is the detour, the long way home. You could get lost here, but that’s maybe okay. At least the women are beautiful, plenty of eye-candy. If this is a dead end, then you could do worse.

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