streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 8:58 am on June 23, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Waking up on the side of the road can change your world. 

  Wow! There’s flashing lights, police directing traffic, everything. I wonder what’s going on. One look at my wrist answers that question, giving new meaning to the term ‘limp wrist’. Now I remember. I look at my body. Everything seems intact, but I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. It all happened so fast that there wasn’t much I could do to prevent it, but every time I play it back in my mind, it’s in slow motion, up to the moment where I hit the pavement and black out. I saw them there on the side of the road, the thirteen-year-old kid riding a motorcycle with his three-year-old sister on back, just diddling around as though the major highway through the center of their town didn’t even exist. Then they cut right in front of me, why I don’t know; I guess to get to the other side. There wasn’t even time to beep the horn; I just went into a hard swerve to avoid them, thinking that any second they’ll see me and slam on brakes. They didn’t. I almost got past, but not quite. The wheels touched, plopping them to the pavement at ten miles per hour, and slinging my Honda 750 bike approximately sixty yards on a sixty-mile-per-hour Frisbee throw. I went forty yards myself in another direction, ending up in somebody’s front yard. Fortunately the gate was open.

  Little by little the village people returned my wallet, my cell phone, everything except my father’s Rolex. This is definitely a Miller moment. I wish I had a cold one right now; I guess I could use a new pelvis, too, but a cell phone will have to do. This might be a good time to call Mom. Thank God for technology. In the operating room six hours later, they pop the Big Question: will that be Visa or Mastercard? The wrist needs re-operating, but I still can’t find the definition of ‘elective surgery’ in my dictionary. The bed-rest left me with a case of nerve damage in the foot that was in traction. Other than that, all’s well that end’s well. Still any way I re-play the tape, the verdict is always the same: I probably couldn’t have pulled out of that swerve even if our wheels hadn’t touched. Without even thinking about it, I died so those kids could live. This is the afterlife. You can never appreciate consciousness so much as when you lose it.

   

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  hardie karges 12:10 pm on June 16, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

  Consciousness is its own blessing and its own curse. 

  It can give insights to higher knowledge and other worlds, or it can stew you in eternal Hell. I know I’d like to forget some things. Mostly I’d just like to get some sleep. The harder I try, the less I get. It’s one of those things that only come through NOT trying, but by allying oneself with some sort of natural flow. Not that I don’t like those moments of solitude, at least somewhat. Some of my best ideas come at 3am; the trick is getting it on paper so that I’ll remember it later. If sleeplessness would keep you slim and trim, that would make it a deal, but it doesn’t work that way, just the opposite. A little biofeedback on the bathroom scale in the morning can prove that. You’d think that being in your own home would give you the best sleep, but for me it seems to be the opposite. Seems I get my best sleep with a neon ‘Motel’ sign blinking outside, some of my best sex, too, for that matter. Forget the sleeping pills, though. I tried that when I was in traction and only had nightmares, historical nightmares, of armies attacking and refugees fleeing. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, tangled up in covers, and there’s my foot still hanging from the bedpost like a sacrificial limb.
   
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  hardie karges 12:13 pm on December 31, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Long Dark Night 

  The categorical imperative is to create meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any. If that requires a god or two, then so be it, the more the merrier. So I create new gods to offer myself up to in order that they might save my mortal soul. At least I did that night in Hanoi. The old quarter of Hanoi is pretty intense, or it least it was. It’s a classic shop-house district traditionally divided into streets devoted to a particular craft. The bottom level is the showroom, upper level are workrooms, then living quarters, going four or five stories up. This is the pattern now all over northern Vietnam, even in villages. It allows more efficient use of land in a country of some eighty-ninety million, a third more than Thailand, in a land area a third less then Thailand. It’s no wonder that people see under-populated and loyal disciple Laos as an escape valve. Anyway, the old quarter of Hanoi is dense, and of course, the old systems break down as backpackers move in to prepare the fields for the real tourists to come later. Many buildings are now ‘mini-hotels’.

  I get claustrophobic sometimes. Out of the window in my room I could probably have shook the hand of somebody across the street if there had been somebody there. Earlier that day I’d eaten local food in a local market, always a risky venture anywhere, but probably especially in 1996 Hanoi. Later I’d drunk some local hooch with some of the homies out on the street taking tobacco bong hits. Bad idea. To top it all off, my bed had bugs. I think. This is not the thing for a sensitive guy. I’ve got insomnia even on a good day, but that was easily the longest night of my life. I really did not expect to see the morning. My skin was crawling, my insides were crawling; my brain was crawling; the streets were crawling. Or at least that’s what it felt like. I just knew I’d die right there alone in some God-forsaken room in some God-forsaken hotel in some God-forsaken corner of the universe, unable to even get out of my bed and call for help. In reality I just had a minor case of Ho Chi Minh’s revenge and probably some bed bugs, though I never saw any. I moved to a different hotel the next day and everything was fine. But I made some promises to some gods that I’ve struggled to keep. I even created some new ones that I’d never worked with before. They’ll be around for awhile. That’s what guilt trips are for.

   
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  hardie karges 4:20 pm on December 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Love in War Time 

  Black-pajama buzzard ladies line the Hanoi pavement perched on their haunches, chewing their betel nuts, grinning like Cheshire cats under their cone-shaped mushroom caps proving McKenna’s theory that we evolved from a psilo-cybernetic visitor from outer space. The men have their own perches on other branches, sucking on the business end of a water pipe loaded to the gills with long stringy shreds of tobacco. Somewhere across town foreigners light up ganja in a sidewalk café for the same reason that a dog licks itself. The lady selling cigarettes in Saigon sells those left-handed ones by special request, just like she did back in the Tet offensive. I imagine those practices are being phased out by now as Vietnam re-enters the real world. Not so Cambodia.

  Cambodia specializes in filling those little gaps that others leave unattended. The girl in Siam Riep gave me her holiday photo as though we were first loves sharing the only little bits of ourselves that were available for public consumption. She was right. I never saw her again. If Asians sometimes don’t even seem human, be assured the feeling is mutual. Many a Thai man who’d kill another Thai man for looking at his girl would readily offer her up for an hour to a Farang to bounce off of as if the Farang weren’t really human so didn’t count. It’s just phone sex with a vibrator attached. Sometimes love seems no more than the relationship between that lump in your back pocket with that lump in the front, notwithstanding exotic currencies, floating exchange rates and general arbitrage of the soul.

   
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  hardie karges 2:08 pm on December 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  The Love Market 

  The Vietnamese can’t believe that tourists go to Sapa to view the incredible hill-tribes, insisting it’s the French alpine atmosphere that draws them. Maybe it’s a poor man’s Switzerland, but certainly no more than that. The hill tribes are another story. The little Hmong girls have been photographed and appeared on book-covers many times and could speak better English than a Thai bar girl by the age of six just by being copycats and hungry, Pidgin by parrot-chat. The Dzao women are from outer space, heads half shaved and wearing outfits resembling the British Redcoats of three centuries back. Rumor has it they’d get frisky with their male counterparts during the long weekend market. It’s true. They’d sing songs antiphonally, and then just wander off, I guess.

  I was propositioned at least three times by various members of the group of varying ages, all wanting nothing more than my temporary membership in their apparently frequent openings. I think their guys smoke too much opium. Of course the young girl I fantasized about wasn’t available. Photographers followed us on our only date, to eat Vietnamese noodle soup. I wonder what it’s like now. They’d started to refurbish the French colonial atmosphere that got badly smudged by the Chinese invasion of 1979. China intended to teach Vietnam a lesson for invading Cambodia and putting an end to the Pol Pot terror. They lost almost 20,000 troops in two weeks before withdrawing. A Chinese friend insists Vietnam begged China to leave. Right. Countries do that all the time. Just ask Slobodan.

   
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  hardie karges 5:50 pm on December 10, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Vietnam 

  Vietnam is the girdle holding in China’s pregnant belly, hanging out over the ocean, threatening to dump billions more upon us, DNA in a raincoat and rubbers and carrying a suitcase filled with samples of trinkets and useless gadgets. China is the most conservative country in the world, convinced of its superiority, entrenched in its own mythology. They rule from inside, allegiance to the past, allegiance to the memories, racist ideology in the guise of ancestor worship. There’s the Middle Kingdom and then there’s everything else. Asia is the most racist region in the world and it all started in the Middle, part of the face-saving mentality in which every human interaction assumes an upper-lower relationship, a caste system of the soul. Japan’s superiority complex is legendary, but Thailand is certainly no different. All these cultures share Chinese cultural roots.

  You could probably measure a country’s racism by the number of slang words it contains for persons of other races, but that might leave out Vietnam. Maybe that’s because Vietnam’s persecution complex masks its superiority complex. It’s certainly not exempt from racism. When the Vietnamese teenager up in Sapa winked at me and proceeded to run his motorbike up against a group of hill-tribe ladies I was hanging and chatting with, I felt the anger rise up through the ground and take my fists and start wailing on the poor guy oblivious. I still can’t believe he expected to impress me by being an asshole, like Kris Kristofferson in Lone Star winking in flashback before proceeding to shoot his poor victim, the event forestalled only because he himself was shot and killed instead. Fortunately the Viet guy’s engine was already running so he was able to get away with only minor damage to his ego.

   
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  hardie karges 7:38 pm on December 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Rivers Meander 

  Tibet waters Asia. 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 12:35 pm on November 23, 2010 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. There 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.

  Barry Wightman is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Barry Wightman 3:19 pm on November 23, 2010 Permalink | Reply

    Good ol’ Missip.

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  hardie karges 8:10 am on November 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  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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  hardie karges 6:50 pm on November 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Old-fashioned Values 

  As a rule of thumb, I myself prefer to travel as light as possible, collecting little along the way, but I’m 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 one hundred 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.