I teally love old maps....or any maps at all. I have spent many a day a map gazing. This is an old one of China. Dig the illustrations. Cartography was a pure art! Humans trying to visualize their world in concentrate...I love the conciet!
I was told that my passport would be at my door at 4:30 P.M. on the 4th of January 2006. At 4:15 P.M. the big white FedEx truck was outside the house, at 4:19 P.M. my passport was in my hand. I am obsessed with the mail. To send a physical object accross a contry/continent/world, have it handled and move by hundreds of real (maybe) humans and then it actually gets to where it was planned almost on the minute that it was figured to arrive is beyond my comprehension. People like to fuck with things, the weather fucks with people, traffic, flight delays, political unrest, disasters, mechine problems....oh, boy! everything that could go wrong and the Mail still arrives. It is because we believe in it. We have made the mail a sort of demi-god. The Mail comes above all else....it is the manifestation of order....the ideal of order that adheres the concepts of western society together.....what it is built upon. I am almost afraid of the mailman.
That done I will go on to flaunt the service of Visarite Services www.visarite.com. They did what they said they would....and they were actually kind of polite to me when I called them to make sure that they existed.
This is a collage of Old-time Hangzhou done by my East Asia mate Gavin Watson. Visit his site at: http://www.eastasiacenter.net/gavinwatson/
Damn do I wish that I could have one of those old wooden barqs and just ride those Chinese canals all day, just digging the entirety of the slow flowing scene.
"...Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..." -- "Big Sur”
These are from "The Drifters" by James Michener:
Gretchen suggested, 'Why don't you try India? A lot of people find the answers...the illumination...in India.'
Now Big loomis broke in: 'You would be out of your mind to waste one minute in that country. No fable of our time is more ridiculous than the one which says that India has the answer to anything.'
'I was speaking of the spirituality,' Gretchen replied.
'So was I,' Loomis said. 'I lived in India for the better part of a year....also in Sikkim and Nepal....good grass.....good conversationamong the Europeans. But the illumination referred to by starry-eyed kids in Greenwich Village and Bloomsbury...it's not there. That's an illusion sponsored by half-ass professors in half-ass American colleges.'
'People who live in grass houses shouldn't get stoned.'
When I'm lonely, dear white heart,
Black the night or wild the sea,
By love's light my foot finds
The old pathway to thee.
-'Eriskay love lilt'
Our country is wherever we are well off. -Cicero
Jungle, desert, tundra, icecap, the long wastes of the sea......
these are the mansions of the lonely spirit.
Lasca used to ride
On a mouse-gray mustang close to my side,
With a blue serape and bright-belled spur;
I laughed with joy as I looked at her!
Little she knew of books or creeds;
An Ave Maria sufficed her needs;
Little she cared, save to be at my side,
To ride with me, and ever to ride...
-Frank Desprez
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. THe great affair is to move. -Stevenson
A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every nation but his own.
-Canning
Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.
A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country guided by blind impulses of curiosity is only a vagabond. -Oliver Goldsmith
Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the long course of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, and the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass themselves by. -St. Augustine
Young men should travel, if but to amuse themselves.-Byron
I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 'Tis all barren.' -Laurence Sterne
Went to a party at a punk squat in Buffalo. Was real fun. Bands played to subdue coversation, so we all just made out....and danced. I really love my Buffalo friends but I fail to believe that they exist when I am not there, and they probably feel the same about me when I am gone. We just pick up where ever we leave off as if we never part. This has been the first year in the past five that I did not spend my cyclic month living an attic in this city. Buffalo is but a skelaton but the folks that live there have heart. They also know how to laugh.
Went to a Farmer bar in upstate NY a few nights back. A Chinese marine said that he was going to kill me because he thought that I did not believe that he was the brother of a caucasian woman. "She is my sister, we just have different parents." He seemed far too concerned about this for me to tell him that I simply did not care. So I just looked at him. I suppose that this was not sufficient because I had to arm wrestle his marine buddies......for honor, maybe? I dont know. So I arm wrestled them out. Fared well against a fat one but lost fairly against their leader. They were an all right bunch of meatheads.
At least marines seem to have some degree of passion about being hired killers. I have yet to meet a marine that said he joined solely to recieve money for college or some other such nonsense. I have also found that if I am conjenial with them that they will teach me a few of the skills of their trade. Like how to rip off noses, ears, eyeballs, and balls; how to break elbows, fingers and crush windpipes. There have been mercenaries in all times; engadging them in lowlevel verbal conflict will not make them go away, it will only stifle a situation in which I can learn from people who are much different than myself. To argue politics is to cerebrally degrade life into manipulatably segments. I am black and you white. I washed my hands of this long ago. But it is rather humorous to try to take oneself seriously once in a while.
