streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 4:54 pm on January 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: China ( 14 )   

  China 

  China is a mother, steamed buns in the back seat of my car.  The women smile just enough to make life interesting.  The men stop smoking just long enough to spit.  China wins by force of numbers, pregnant belly extending into the South China Sea.  Civilization wins by force of cities, the cell block organization, the weight of steel and concrete and will to conquer destroys everything but itself if it’s lucky.  The weakest people make the strongest nations, bound together like sticky rice, white sugar crystals incapable of independent existence.  They cling together for strength.  They fall apart over money.

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    wtdevflnt 8:15 pm on February 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply

    Excellent posts, really like this one- you nailed it.Glad to have found your little place in the world. Keep it up, very enjoyable.

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  hardie karges 9:58 am on January 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Asia ( 17 ), life ( 33 ), rivers   

  Rivers Meander 

  Tibet waters Asia.  It’s all downhill from there.  From its 20,000 foot plateau flow the headwaters of the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangtze, and the Huang Ho.  The headwaters of the Indus and Brahmaputra almost meet, almost making of India an island reminiscent of its former history as a transient sub-continent looking for a home plate to slide into.  The upper waters of the Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze run almost parallel for 250 miles, only fifteen to thirty miles apart as the crow flies.  Those three empty into the Andaman, South China, and East China Seas, not far from the cities of Rangoon, Saigon, and Shanghai, a distance of over 2000 miles on that same crow’s odometer.  It would be much farther than that by boat, and an immeasurable distance by yardstick.  How long is your coastline?  That depends; how short is your ruler?  Napoleon’s ears prick up and Zeno’s paradox takes over, and you never really get there, because the halfway points are infinite.  I’ll take wise old crow; he cuts to the chase.  
   
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  hardie karges 5:37 am on January 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  The Rainy Season 

  The rainy season in Asia gets old, especially when it floods, which happens a lot.  It’s not like Oregon, where the clouds are just there all the time, but really not doing all that much, just drip drip drip like excess stomach acid after a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.  Here it pours down with the force of Holy Hell, sometimes with light and sound, usually not.  But nothing can match the thunderstorms of good ol’ Mississippi, best seen from above in small aircraft, a symphony composed and directed by God. 

   
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  hardie karges 9:47 am on January 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Asia ( 17 )   

  Asia 

  Asian jet lag is the worst, for an American, one day of travel and a week to recover, like the heroin 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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  hardie karges 8:08 am on January 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), baby boom, Buddhism ( 471 ), life ( 33 )   

  Old-fashioned values 

  As a rule of thumb, I myself prefer to travel as light as possible, collecting little along the way, but still loathe to throw things away.  This is essentially a Buddhist-like non-possession, for fear of being ultimately possessed, but it works out economically also.  Poverty is a state of mind, not pocketbook.  Buddhist monks take vows to embrace such renunciation, easy for many of them that had nothing anyway, and now get state support and the adoration of society, in Thailand, at least.  We American baby boomers are all pampered and spoiled, bemoaning our fate, when things have never been better.  The old fashioned virtues of thrift and savings have been long forgotten.  I’ve never made much money by modern standards, but managed to save much of it, so can feel like a wealthy man in my fifties.  Others weren’t so lucky, nor so frugal, and so are bitter and feel victimized.  Certainly it’s nice to enjoy the present tense without stress and have nice adornments surrounding, but I don’t feel deprived, having visited almost fifty countries and loved many beautiful women, having had good friends and done good work along the way.  And I still have family; this is the true wealth of the world.  Many people in America’s rump nuclear-family mobile society can’t claim the same.

   
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  hardie karges 8:32 am on January 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  GEO-POLITICAL 

  Taiwan clings to the Chinese coast like a slingshot cocked and loaded, waiting to be flung out into the open Pacific by any earthquake with balls and bats and a love of the game.  India’s sliding into second base, Camp Himalaya, with cleats high and dust flying.  Turkey is a fragile coccyx attaching Asia to Africa and allowing Europe to get erect and stay there.  Iran is a rusty scimitar slicing into the underbelly of Asia.  Africa is breaking up and going separate ways.  We ride on the crust of a custard, on the crest of a wave, a ball of fire cooled down to magma.  It’s almost like the bloody thing is still alive in there.  In another billion years, things might be more settled, continents satisfied with their figures and waistlines and their place in society.  There will probably still be life.  I wonder if there will still be humans.  I wonder what they’ll be like.  I wonder if anyone will still remember me, us, or any of this that seems such a normal, commonplace, everyday reality.  I wonder how many times we’ll have to start over before we get it right.  The earth will survive our most vicious transgressions, but we may not.  The hard thing to realize is that we may still be in a very early phase of our lives as part of the universe.  The recent discovery that galaxies are receding at an ever-increasing rate seems to indicate that we might still be in the early stages of the Big Bang.  Our earth is barely cool enough to inhabit.  We don’t yet know our limits.  We think maybe we’re smarter than we really are.  We still maintain our youthful suicidal tendencies.  This is one of the disadvantages of neoteny, cultural or biological.  Some retained traits may not be desirable.  We’re killing ourselves.

   
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  hardie karges 8:56 am on January 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  The Human Dimension 

  The third world is addictive, the very lack of superficial development something attractive in itself, the sights and sounds and noises and smells and total lack of order.  I get an erection just thinking about it.  I get a stinging sensation in my mouth.  I get the same sensation the next day in my anal orifice.  I prefer other feelings.  If I’m lucky, then my stomach gets the same empty feeling you get from free-fall, vacuum, the natural feeling of weightlessness.  I live for that feeling and it certainly beats any other feeling that stomachs are capable of.  But the best part of the so-called Third World is not its food, its landscapes, nor its women.  The best part is its unpredictability, the very fact that you don’t know what to expect from one day to the next.  In that respect, it’s a lot like love, and like love, it gets boring if that’s the only basis to it.  You have to keep trying new places to get that original feeling.  But there’s no reason to feel guilty, because that’s what we are, the trip monkeys.  We like to get around, and we like to get off.  That’s what it is to be human, and that’s what makes us so successful.  Other animals wander around; we’re driven.

   
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  hardie karges 1:23 pm on January 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Tribes Without Countries 

  Borders and passports are a recent phenomenon, actually.  It’s only been barely more than a hundred years since borders have been closed and sealed.  Governments, of course, have existed much longer, but free movement was generally allowed across borders, probably because labor has generally been a scarce resource for most of human history.  Governments used to want immigrants!  One effect of the modern system is that it denies tribalism a place, because many tribes lie across borders.  Some of the best examples are the Quechua-speakers in four countries, some twenty million Kurds in four or more, the Tibetans in China and the Mons of Southeast Asia, all great nations in the history of the world, but left without a modern state to represent them.  These are tensions inherent in the modern system.  Since endless divisions are not necessarily practical, increased unification may be the only answer, so former Yugoslav states get their independence only to give some of it up willingly to a European Union, in this scenario.  Certainly everyone could have a state if the designation were largely meaningless and merely an administrative division.  This is what the US was in theory, before the Civil War negated it.  The world is not ready for a true United Nations, but it might be ready for ten or twelve cooperative blocs as opposed to two or three. 

   
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  hardie karges 8:29 am on January 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: border towns, tourism ( 4 ), travel ( 14 )   

  Tourism gets ugly when the natives get restless 

  Border towns of the world unite! Expose yourselves! Celebrate your absurdities! Strange flowers grow in strange places, back to back to the same fence with a neighbor you hardly know, selling tickets to an arena where reality is the only show. Tijuana, Tangier, and Istanbul define the turf long taken over by Bali, Bangkok, and Bora-Bora, pushing back the borders of consciousness to a neighboring dimension of time and space. Tourists line up to see the natives sing and dance and otherwise entertain the bored wealthy Europeans seeking novelty and succor. The world’s sunny beaches are increasingly filled with sons and their bitches occupying space once given to fishermen, and complaining about the high price of fish. We are all in the same boat, rich and poor, a ghost ship to the future. Don’t rock it, rock out. Time to shake hands rather than fists.

   
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  hardie karges 1:01 pm on January 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  BORDERS 

  Borders are where creativity happens, the fractal edge of turbulence where one reality attempts to mingle with another in a dance of denial.  To win is not the point.  To create a viable form in a previously unknown dimension is the fruit of forgiveness.  Mutually exclusive equations hold hands in a symbolic logic and agree to disagree for the sake of the children, taking solace in the beauty of combination, lying fast asleep in a bed of leaves.  Limbs intertwined avoid unclipped nails and other rough edges folded under for safety, weapons washed waiting for demons of the night yet unslain.  The morning comes right on schedule, like cosmic clockwork, the law of large numbers happening on such a vast scale that we don’t see the changes, the uncertainties, and minute indecisions within the scale of our own puny lifetimes, much less the passage of our sun across the sky.  Motion is the normal state of nature, a fact so obvious yet so illogical to common sense that it’s scarcely acknowledged even now.