A long hiatus makes for a rambling post

So i will begin with an introduction:

hi, this has been inaccessible for me for some time, but now i have hotpost shield so its all good (addendum: not all good). I am still in Chengdu and fly out of here on the 30th to Shanghai and then back to SFO for a while.

Now straight to the business. this blog is vital to me and my spiritual and mental well being. it has replaced pen and paper as my muse and medium and dumping grounds for all that i see and hear and think every day. so i have a bout 10 days of thoughts locked up in my domicile and they are starting to cause a ruckus. breaking shit. throwin chairs and bottles.

(This is a continuation of a post that got lost in the ether due to Chinese censors. Fuck a censor)

So I am backtracking through my brain to get to a spot that will result in its own post/story so I might as well start from just a few minutes ago:

Sat and watched a couple of guys play chess and I learned three new openings. First move, push the right side inner pawn. Next move, bring the cannon to the center. Third move, push the right side horse up. Fourth move, bring the left side cannon right up next to the center cannon. Last move, bring the left side horse to the left side. Then, put your tank into play. right side tank.

The key to that opening is to push the pawn first and bring the cannons together.

This morning, i talked with my man in Chiang Mai and he told me about a kiwi porn star he met that had gotten into a car accident and scarred her face up so bad, now she has other things to do besides freak on film for cash money. The reality of her face laid him down flat and he woke up on the floor in the morning wondering wondering.

this morning i slept in cuz I haven't been sleeping well so I "watched" the nuggets play the lakers on espn play by play. fell back asleep. the nuggets were up when i fell asleep, but then i dreamt that they lost 103-97. check the score. That type of ether-knowledge seeping into my brain as i lightly sleep used to be remarkable.

then i sent bean the last 20 pages of this book i am working on called 8 years in china. i want it to be a collection of blogs, antiwar.com essays, my thoughts AND words and pics from my peoples. i think its doable .. to have like a really rounded out picture of what the hell i was doing out there. big project, when you think about ALL of the possible content. anyway, there is one passage where i describe my first impressions of her -- we met in a weird way. that, of course, was all she saw and it pissed her off. she cant see yet that a story, just like a relationship, DEVELOPS over time and towards the end attempts to RESOLVE certain things. and plus i am leaving in a week so its getting to crunch time. my funk is all up in her apartment -- i smell really strong for those of you who dont know -- and this ... well ... its a girl-boy thing man.

Last night i aint got nuthin to say cuz i was just staring at a computer.

Day before, well the night before i went to the panda club and inhaled the old dirty du scene., aint nuthin changed for real. same bitches same foolz same homies on the decks providing good tunes and train wrecks to remind me that this is a shadow world.

day before that i was in Qingcheng with my tea people checking out this yummy bittersweet local tea and a locally produced jiaogulan ... very good teas and the man in charge, peng qi, is a good man and i think we can def. work together. my long time tea homie chen shui yuan told me of his dreams and let me play with his silly lil 4 year old daughter. he also brought his father in law with him and i was reminded that a lot of east coast older men are quite elegant and composed.

before that i was in qingcheng again and that trip deserves its own post with pics and thoughts.

stay tuned.

mad love

Three Mountain Teas

I went to Mengding Mountain yesterday and took a LONG trek to find my Honey Dew Green supplier Bai Ting Ting (Xiao Bai) just so I could be there again. It a beautiful spot. Tea bushes as far as the eye can see and as clear a sky as the Sichuan fog allows.

Its real country out here. Peasants scream up and down the no-lane roads in their three-wheel go carts, ducks waddle around pigs nuzzle roadside refuse a cow hides in the reeds by the river that flows down from the peak.

Xiao Bai's processing plant sits right on the river just a few feet from the old bridge. Behind her building is the local school. Dirty kids screeched in glee when i rolled up on their classroom and took eyes-closed foul shots with their flat basketball. One rowdy lil punk through a paper plane at me so i chased hm down and threw him over my shoulder. An eye-opening experience for him for sure.

I drank the local Honey Dew and some Maofeng and it was crystal clear with hints of yellowish green and the buds stood erect int he bottom of the square glass. I swished it around my mouth and felt the cleansing. I could sit there all day and compose verse for cock-eyed peasants.

Later int eh week I will visit the second mountain and my other supplier Lao Li up in Qing Cheng Mountain. I might try and get there on the 8th, the anniversary of the quake. And then, at some point, maybe after the full moon, I trek up Emei Mountain.

Qing Cheng Daoism infused Piao Xue Green, Meng Ding's hallowed Honey Dew, Emei's Buddha chant fed Zhu Ye Qing. These are the teas from Sichuan that I bringing to the states.

Charlie took pics, so I'll have them soon.

Work is the Enemy of Doubt

Fortuitous fortuitous this is the word of the day.

I spent the last two days meeting my old tea suppliers Bai Ting Ting who provides me with the Honey Dew Tea that I love so much and my man Chen Su Yuan who has tea ware for sale and twin brothers Xiao Song and Da Song who are acknowledged tea gurus. Drank so much tea my bladder couldn't take it. Wore myself out taking trips to the john.

I found some amazing Qing Cheng Mountain tea that comes from the same people that rolled with Charlie in this story right here. Its a bitter tea with a very sweet aftertaste with an amazing green color like natural neon lights in a glass.

But i suppose the topic of the day should be the huge music festival going on right now here in Chengdu. It is an outdoor fest with a pretty big lineup. Goes for three days on the outskirts of the town and everybody and they mama is showing up. The fest is the kick off bash for an all-Chinese MTV channel -- so goes the rumor -- and in true MTV fashion the place is crawling with TV crews and streaks of light from huge screens onthe maiin stage. It is quite a show, I must say. I saw Brain Failure as soon as I walked in and the SJ Family (wak dudes, amazing girl) took it to town with some serious singing from their female lead.

Peep Chengdoo here for more info on that fest.

My boy Josh of Proximity Butterfly was there with his wife Heather and their child Aetheria Hope Love.

This one here is for you lil girl:

First time I saw you
You were passed out in a tent with red splotches on your face
Two young Chinese girls cute as could be
stood guard outside the tent flap.
They kept checkin to see if you were awake
Cuz they wanted to coo and coo and coo
Yer daddy said:

"She's gonna walk before she crawls ... she ain't down with crawlin."

After that me and yer dad sang the blues, the funk, the soul, the lament of love and cracked pitchers of beer together under the lights of Chengdu's biggest outdoor fest.

When you woke up, girls materialized out of the muck of the field
and gathered round you,
fingering your curls and fat cheeks and looking deep deep deep into
your mama's blue eyes.

I told you what i thought about the whole thing,
but you had Shrek-like earplugs in yer ears.

So instead I talked about Giving Voice to Others
And Daniel Boorstin with yer dad.

Love ya.

The Du

MM-MM something about the Du makes me feel all homey. its easy as pie out here. the sky looks like dishwater and i aint seen the sun yet but instead i got down on some Pickled Pepper Beef and some of the tastiest gong pao chick en this fool has ever scarfed down. Got with my man rippey and smoked two and then geeked out with charlie talkin bout Warcraft.

Did you know that the world video game olympiad will be held in Chengdu this november?

Chinese girls are silly

My man told me earlier i the week that he would never marry a Chinese girl, even though he has been here for several years and chases them down like the bunnies they are.

I remember thinking the same thing for a while, but it only hit home when .. i went home (or Portland). After chilling with american girls, i realized that here in China we purposely slim our brains down, chop our personalities in half and become lesser men in the pursuit of sex. its like going back to high school with these girls. I guess i always knew that, but it never seemed so blatant and front and center.

It also has a lot to do with who I am hanging out with. My man Zhuang once told me that all of the good girls (good being intelligent, charismatic, ambitious, cool, etc) would never date a foreigner.

So i see a vicious cycle here and if you enjoy lotsa random sex with no commitments, then china is heaven. but i have been infected by the brains of Lacey and Mika and Nico and Susan and so on and now i can't have this. I get really fed up with the bullshit these chinese girls (well my man's girls here in Shanghai) try to pull.

I find it moronic and repulsive. And i am most angry not at what they do, but at what I made myself do and become while I was here. Its a sick mindset. Beanmilk helped me turn the tide of shallowness while i was in the Du. I suppose we met because it was her job to prepare me for the Return to the US and my job to help her defend herself against the silly behavior of SOME Chinese girls.

But its not the girls, like i said, that make the cycle. Its the combination of silly, but innocent and hopeful young girls & opportunistic and jaded hopeful young men.

Heartbreak is rampant.

I have a reputation to uphold, but I think i'll be doing it with my words rather than my penis.

Shanghai

I miss the quiet of my dungeon and the wind through Oregon's trees. Its sunny here and i am about to be in the Du with all my friends again and its gonna be hard to leave. I am trying to stay for one month but i can feel the pull of oblivion on the road. Its going to be hard not to just disappear again. but i won't. don't worry nico ...

i love shanghai, the city usually treats me very well, but i am reminded every time I come here why i could never live here. my best times here are either drunken madness or yapping with old shanghainese ... i love making old people laugh here. they don't really get my Sichuan hua ... and the cabbies aren't pimps like in the Du ... so many damn buildings.

I am reading Wendell Berry's book, Sex, Economy, Community and Freedom. i highly recommend this book. It is right up our US alley (me and the Tribe) and it informs my summer project that I am doing with ole Lace-dawg.

Go out and get it. (mad love to Jen for the hook-up)

Back in China

Shanghai is a sea of skyscrapers as far as my eye can see. There are pockets of two-story blocks of old school homes with laundry hanging from lines strung between houses. The glow of the sun is like that of a streetlamp through fog. When i see the orange orb in the sky it looks as if its shining through the aftermath of the apocalypse.

Two or three days chillin with Ferchak, Mario and Amir then I am off to the Dirty Du, my third home.