streaming consciousness…

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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.

   
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  hardie karges 2:17 pm on October 24, 2010 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 6:21 pm on October 16, 2010 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 8:34 am on October 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Tribes Without Passports, People without States 

  Borders and passports are a recent phenomenon, you know. 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 4:30 pm on September 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  SCIENCE FRICTION 

  This world is science fiction, the fractal edge of the universe in the process of expansion, chaos meeting the void, waves crashing on the beach, the fragile border area between existence and non-existence. This is Interzone, the international zone, the chaotic border where languages fall flat and desires become erect. Modern standard Pidgin English is the lingua franca according to the fashions of the day, Chinese language torture, the tongue of half-baked smiles and crocodile tears. This is science fiction; this is World War III; this is reality. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and have no idea where I am. I search an empty mind for the most recent memory, any memory, anything. What’s a computer without an operating system? Insert boot disk. Finally a reference point emerges and the rest can be extrapolated. Sometimes I wonder if a different memory had popped up, then maybe the entire extrapolated world would be different. Is history constantly shifting its point of reference? IS there such a thing as objective reality?