impervious

Hold up your hand. Now hold your thumb and your index finger as far apart as they will go. See that? That's how close i was to being killed by a taxi yesterday morning. Vroom. One has to be very careful moving around in this town on a motorbike. Anywhere, actually.

It's cooled down in Hanoi over the last two days. It's comfortable wearing long pants and a jumper (Aus English) / pullover (UK English) / sweater (US English). Yay. i love the cooler weather.

Cold weather means it's almost Christmas (or as i prefer, xmas, x-mess or christmess) - if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. As a non-Christian, x-mess means nothing to me except some welcome time off work.

Likewise, x-mess is not a special thing in Vietnam, though it forms part of the syllabus in the language school i work for. i must remind myself that getting little Vietnamese kids to sing songs about foreign religious holidays is not some sinister form of cultural imperialism or indoctrination, but is just a perfectly healthy way of using the English language and engaging in intercultural dialogue. Hmm.

This week in my rare casual moments i've been reading about and looking at pictures of Krsna, Cy Twombly, Frank Herbert, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Soviet propaganda cartoons.

The washing machine at my place isn't working. i'm bummed about that.

i have a couple of (very) little creative projects in mind and hope to have time over xmas to give them some attention, and maybe i'll jump on my motorbike and get out of town for a few days.

You?
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The other day, in a rare casual moment, i was watching an old video i made of my first trip to Kozloduy, Bulgaria, in April 2004 (two years later i went to live in Kozloduy for six months, and what a great time that was).

Anyway the first trip to Koz was with Ahongas (Aonhgas? etc - see picture), who is a some-time commenter on this blog, and all-around nice guy.

A little later i was watching the video for the Gorillaz song 19-2000, and i was struck by the similarity between a little part of it and my own Kozloduy road-trip video. So i grabbed the frames and present them here for you to compare.

i haven't seen Ahongas for several years. He is now El Hombre, the Big Cheese, in the country in which he works, whereas i still occupy the lowest rung of the corporate ladder. Which just shows that brains and good looks aren't everything.
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It took a long time to knock down the next-door-but-one house. But it was nothing compared to the time it's taking to build a new one.

i can't directly see the action (with no south-facing window), but i can sure as shit hear everything that goes on. This allows me to infer the steps necessary in house construction:

1. Start work at 07.00 - 07.30 and, in the street, start banging pots and pans together as hard as you physically can. If you can't find any pots and pans, hit large pieces of sheet metal repeatedly with a hammer or a brick. The noise will ward off evil spirits from the building site. Don't forget to call out loudly to your colleagues, to encourage their Banging Power.

2. Around 10am, go home and have a long rest. You'll need it, because you'll be working late tonight.

3. Come back around 9 o'clock at night, when Big Trucks are allowed into the city. Because if you're building a house, God knows you need Big Trucks. Rev them up, clank things around, and scream out motivating things to your work buddies (like Great work, man! or Yeah! Kick some butt!) to help while away the long dark night - at least until about 02.30 in the morning. No joke.

Et voila! in the space of two or three years, an awesome new building for someone wealthy to buy, and someone poor to pick up garbage from.
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By accidents of culture, profession, and just by pure chance, i find myself in a position where most of the people i call friends are in their late thirties or early forties, are single, and are childless.

Perhaps it's because people live longer these days. Maybe it's because, in middle-class Western society, people feel able (or even compelled) to extend that early-adult period of independence, experimentation, and freedom from - what? responsibility? accountability?

Or maybe it's that, as part of a self-organising system, a segment of a species will always automatically and unconsciously defer from breeding when resources or conditions seem limited or unsustainable (?).

It goes against the grain, though. In your forties, you should, biologically speaking, have reproduced, and possibly be a grandparent. i wonder if at some level these ageing, childless adults don't hear their own genes banging desperately at the doors of the Frontal Lobe, begging for one last chance to make good Your (genetic) Reason For Being. i wonder if it's especially hard for women.
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If someone can tell me where to find a proxy server (bearing in mind i'm in South East Asia, if that makes a difference) and how to use one, i'd be much obliged.

Time is an iceberg. A mountain range, vast, immeasurable, and cold. You crawl across it, a speck. The past is there, and the future. Immutable. They both exist. You perceive your past - it is fixed on the face of the iceberg. Only your limited perception prevents you from seeing that the future is equally fixed. Time - all of it - is not something you can 'change', any more than Space is - you can't turn inside-out into back-to-front (though these are just semantic distinctions). Time is something you may experience, but not change; though you kid yourself it's otherwise; you're making choices, you're writing history. Right?
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(this is Part 2 of the Piotr story)

Piotr burned, in great pain. And his mortal body died and was burned away.

And yet he was blessed and found that whatever gods there are had seen fit to give him a second chance, because he woke again, in his body, upon the Earth.

He was in a clearing, in a forest. He had nothing with him but the simplest of clothes on his back. It was morning, and his recent agony seemed nothing more than a bad dream; in his gratitude, the glory of the sun, the fresh air, and the birdsong.

He walked, and basked. Soon he began to hunger; but there was nothing for it. He knew not enough about the plants around him to risk eating any of them. At least he did not thirst; there was a stream nearby with fresh, cool water.

Darkness fell, and Piotr huddled by the roots of a tree for shelter. Hungry, he listened fearfully to the sounds of the night, and slept a little.

He woke, unharmed. From a dream of bacon, eggs, beans and bread. He drank a little water, and walked. Purposefully.

And he was twice blessed; because, cresting a small hill in the neverending forest, he saw, in the distance, what he was looking for. Civilisation. A town. And he made for it directly.

He arrived in the town as the sun went down again. The emptiness in his belly compelled him to root through garbage bins in the darkness, and he found discarded scraps of food that seemed to him a feast. And he slept in a quiet doorway, more comfortably than in the damp grassy forest, with its creatures and sounds. On the second day.

And this was the way he lived for weeks. Sleeping in streets, staying low by day. A shadow in the town, a spectre. And herein lay his third blessing; for - unbelievably - never once was he stopped by the police as a vagrant or an undesirable, never asked for justification, much less papers or documents. He was somehow allowed to be nothing more than a stray dog. Which never happens to people, no matter how much they might desire it.

Lucky Piotr took to begging. He sat against building walls in the street and collected a few scraps of change. He could occasionally afford to buy second hand clothing from charity stores. He cleaned himself where he could find water.

Piotr started cleaning shoes. He made enough money for a little food. He found a corner of an abandoned building where he could sleep unmolested most of the time. He learned a few words of the language spoken by the real people around him. He owned nothing but his shoe cleaning tools and his memories.

And the years were hard on Piotr and he began to die, again. On a cold night, Piotr lay alone on a filthy mattress in the corner of an empty room. Gasping a final breath, Piotr wondered at the cruelty of a god who had saved him from death, only to show him the emptiness of life.

And then, of a sudden, he understood.

But too late. He was gone
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Over the last week there have been a number of inappropriate comments on this blog with sexual and racial hate content (now deleted). i don't know who it is, maybe just a kid. But unfortunately it means this blog will change to 'moderated comments' - at least for the time being.

It means you can still comment, but that the comments will be approved before appearing on the blog. Sorry - i hope that normal, healthy humans will continue to comment.
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