My man Fu Qiang

Has just opened up a shop selling his CDs (compilations of music he digs) and art. He takes pictures and uses software to make his own impressions. pretty interesting stuff. You can check his site out right here.

Here is a picture of Fu that he manipulated into an oil painting-type image:



Here is a picture that he put together of his shop:



And here is my lady and Chen Lin, chillin in the tea foyer of Fu's shop:

I can't stop laughing at Western businessmen

I don't even know where to start laughing and where to end. It doesn't matter. For years and years people like me (but with better jobs) have been saying that China has some issues and we need to help them along, but the money-men always trumped everything by drooling all over each other in attempts to get into the China market.

"Can't push the gov, nononono they might not let us cash in ..."

Now, only now, at the end, do they realize. And so I have to laugh at them.

The mainstream has caught on to the glaring reality: China's bureaucrats and businessmen always hated and despised you. They stole your stuff, smiled in your face and sold you shit and now they don't need you anymore. So Time Magazine whines. Big time China Hand and Businessman supreme, AllRoads, jumps on the band wagon: "Did we get suckered?"

Of course you did fool. Then again, I know a lot of people who made it rich here (me excluded, hence all of the Schadenfreude) and they basically took a good look at the China business scene, saw it for what it is and jumped in and swam in the feces with all of the other sharks, diving for doubloons.

And this guy here, Paul "I told ya so" Midler. I feel ya Paul. I told a lot of people too. You ain't the only one who saw the signs and such, that feeling. I know it. Hope yer book sells dawg.

I gotta laugh. Even though, now that the drooling suits are hating on this modern China and the Chinese netizens are hating on this modern China, the big bad bureaucrats and their brainless, soulless New Rich cronies might have to bring in their bigger, badder even more brainless PLA bully to keep this country from Gorbacheving. Or not.

I am headed out to take a walk in the sunshine (THAT'S RIGHT SUNSHINE IN THE DU!!).

Holla atchu.

The Du

Here is a little list of cool spots in Chengdu. This is actually a VERY incomplete list, but its a good start. holla.

Haiti

here is a short essay on Haiti and Chengdu and some of the similarities and differences in the disasters that struck here and there.

China reacts to Avatar the Movie

Avatar the movie opened up in China on January 4th, 2010. Lines stretched for blocks outside of most every theater in the nation for the next week as waves of Chinese went to see the next stage in movie evolution, 3D fantasy on a Hollywood scale. I went on the 6th and from the first few seconds, when water droplets from the crygenic sleep chamber floated right in front of my face, I sat agape and fascinated by the visual spectacle. All around me, I heard the elated gasps and shrieks of an enraptured audience.

What followed afterward, all across the world, was an analysis of the movie's visuals and message from dozens of perspectives. In the US, editorials criticized the movie for employing the same old "white guy saves the natives" guilt-fantasy that has been the theme of many a movie, from Dances with Wolves to a New World. In China, the reaction to the message was no less intense, but focused on a much more immediate, more Chinese problem. The problem of Home.

For the past 20 years, China has been playing catch up, economically, with the rest of the world. China as a nation is catching up with the big boys and is many ways surpassing them and an integral part of that success has been the real estate boom that has turned villages like Shenzhen into international powerhouses and forever transformed the skylines of every major (and minor) city in China. China is urbanizing very quickly and the long-sought after goal of turning farmers into factory workers and laborers is close at hand, but the sacrifices made by millions of Chinese in the name of their Motherland and Progress is starting to tear at the social fabric.

The theater fell silent near the middle of the movie when the Nav'i were forced to watch their home, the Mother Tree, be destroyed and razed to the ground. The silence was full and begged for expression. At the time, I thought it was the pain shared in a theater and did not realize how big the outpouring of comments and essays and blogposts would be the very next day. On popular blogs like Mop, hundreds of comments compared the destruction of the Navi'i home with the widespread demolition of homes across China. Other sites, like ChinaSmack and EastSouthWestNorth translated fragments of these posts for foreign consumption, but they could only give a small taste of what was really boiling underneath.

One essay in particular, posted on the wildly popular Douban.com, is an emotional and in depth response to the rampant demolition of peoples' homes. The essay does not deal with the old, cultural neighborhoods and their value as historical relics, but goes into the very emotional idea of one's home. The author questions whether or not Chinese today actually can call any place they live in a home, because in China one cannot "own" a piece of property, but only "rent" it for up to 70 years. Not only does one never actually own the home or the land one lives on, but the local government can at any moment change their plans and decide to build a road through your neighborhood. Even more galling is the fact that private developers and local officials often conspire to get rid of poor workers and farmers, then use the land to build (or not to build) high rises -- the government forces the people off of the land with minimum compensation then sells the land to the developer for a good price, after which the developer sells the land and any improvements to the growing affluent class of Chinese that are thoroughly enjoying China's economic miracle. The workers are left with inadequate compensation and the destruction of their community.

The comments on this essay are also revealing, in that the majority of them express the same disgust for developers and officials and fully half of the responses say "we are waiting for you to be erased," because essays like these, stories like these are suppressed by the government in order to maintain social stability.

A case in point is the recent tragic death of a woman in Chengdu, who climbed to the roof of her home in November 2009 and set herself on fire in full view of onlookers, police and the demolition crew poised to destroy her home. The woman, named Tang Fuzhen, has a very typical story: in 1996 she built her home here and lived for 10 years without any interference from the authorities. In August of 2007, the local government decided to build a waste management plant near her home. In October, they told her her home was illegal and she would have to leave.

This story, although one of thousands of similar tragic tales, swept through the web like wildfire. Netease quickly deleted their coverage of the story, but not before thousands of netizens left their often angry, but mostly hopeless remarks.

Avatar, or more specifically the spectacle of Mother Tree falling in flames, has brought the anger of the netizen and the tragedy of the common, poor laborer into everyone's living room. People who normally would not even think of such things, just go about their daily business in a fast paced growing economy that requires fast wits and daring, these people are suddenly talking about the pain of losing a home and the absurdity of "renting" a plot of land that cannot be passed on to children or grandchildren. This is a matter of great concern for Chinese parents. The family structure here is still very strong, even after years of being battered by wars, famines, revolutions and unfettered capitalism. For a Chinese to not help his children buy a home is still very rare, so with each demolition and accompanying tragedy, this very deep-rooted need -- to provide for one's children -- is threatened.

It is very revealing to see that many Westerners, especially Americans, choose to see the guilt/fantasy of the white man redeeming himself and saving the planet.

Crib finalized

Contract signed. The crib is real nice, we is happy. I wish I could show you pics, but i have to wait till those greasy bastards at the Bad Monkey send me the battery I forgot at their bar. (Excuses ...)

The house has two big courtyards, a lily pond, a chicken area, two floors, three pear trees, four peach trees, two tangerine trees, a host of bushes and herbs and stuff that I don't even know about and I think there is some sort of fig tree too.

So its all good.

If you are interested in China matters, check out Sisci's new essay on Atimes.

Chengdu Living

Spent all day yesterday cooking up various meals and eating them on the spot. I've been brewing the soup for two days (into the third) now and its got sausage and taters and pork and garlic and ginger and all sorts of other random stuff in it. I keep imagining an inn back in the day with some unnaturally rotund innkeep's wife with huge moles on her nose and a shawl shuffling back and forth, dropping things into a bubbling cauldron. Big bearded refugees dip in and sip from cracked bowls and grumble, cuz its the first warm thing they've had.

that's my soup.

We also made wontons and sweet mushroom porridge and this weird corn meal thing and fried up some greens.

Today I go to sign the contract on my place out in San Sheng Xiang -- the flower town i lived in in 2007-08. These guys who own the spot are really amazing. They are the ones manufacturing fake eggs and trying desperately to hoard more money whatever the cost -- they are on the low end of the totem pole and the jealousy of small town small village cash competition seems to drive them nuts. I get to sign a contract with one of these fine individuals today. His God is money and it sometimes feels like i am talking to a different species. My man Zhuang helped me haggle and watching Zhuang and Yushi talk with this guy really tired me out.

Nevertheless, I should be getting everything together today.

You all should check out Chengduliving.com -- its where some of these fine stories will come out in time. We juststarted this site, but its coming along nicely and we'll be doing this for some time. So stop by and holla.

Free to Post

I wrote an essay a while back about censorship in China, for Antiwar.com, and I basically said that within the parameters of black and white, all life transpires.

Well i am now, thanks to Freedur, safely within the gray. Freedur is a VPN protocol that allows me to surf through a proxy and avoid sneaky, evil Chinese censors. If you have problems with haters or just wanna be anonymous, check it out.

If you are interested in buying the service ($60 for one year), type in "chengduliving" and you will get 10% off. chengduliving.com is a website I am working on with my friend Charlie and it should be going live in a few days. Check it out when you have the chance.

So it is a trip to be back. The sky is always gray, which makes me feel completely isolated from the world, like the movie Dark City. I feel enveloped by the grayness and the thing about gray fog is it stretches on forever and has no borders, no shapes, no delineating lines -- it just is. So that can get kinda old.

And walking around is one of those things I forgot about. You have to get into a "China state of mind" to handle the throngs and swarms of people and vehicles passing in and out of your path with missions and dreams and plans and fears of their own. I miss being inconspicuous and part of the scenery.

Bean is plump and healthy. We brew up warm milk with anti-viral honey and sleep in late. The apartment we are in now is just a two-minute walk from the hospital. Tomorrow I will go to Dujiangyan house hunting.

Summer in Portland

is almost perfect. its not too hot and when it does get hot the rains come politely like butlers in the morning to dress up the day in dew making sure i dont know it even happened till i stretch yawn put my slippers on and walk out. a faint whiff of brimstone and stains on the concrete.

I took a trip north from Chengdu to a place called Wudu, in Gansu, with my friend and mentor Ivan. He's an engineer specializing in roads and highways and bridges and tunnels. He keeps quite busy in China. Below is a map of the area. We drove north from Chengdu to a place called Guangyuan (the birthplace of Wu Zi Tian the only Chinese Empress and also the site of Jian Men Guan -- the Sword Gate -- for years the fortress that protected Shu/Sichuan from northern invaders).



From there we headed deep into the wild mountains that blur the borders between Sichuan, Shanxi and Gansu Provinces. This region of brown dirt waterfalls and soaring cliffs is also the rocky heartbeat of the west. When properly connected, development in the western half of China can proceed as envisioned. We stayed one night between Guangyuan and Wudu in a small town called Luo Shui, I believe. I find it hard to believe that this town is real. Rock rises up on all sides and constricts the town into one or two lanes. They seemed nonchalant about our presence and one woman said they had a foreigner here for three months. Engineer. or maybe an oil guy.

In the morning kids straggled into school in ones, twos and threes. The girls held hands.

So remote yet so full of the smell of man.

It is also the area hit hardest by the earthquake ... a strip of mountain ranges that ebb out of Tibet like rings, straddling the boundaries between Han China and Tibetan China ...

there is not one inch of this road that is not under construction. we passed through tight gorges with tent cities nestled in the folds above the river. men and machines hauled stone and silt and sand from the river bed up to the road to pave another section, raise another column, wall in another home.

We headed back on a different route, along the outskirts of Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and the valley of Jiu Zhai Gou. We passed through the county seat and saw the plunder that pours out of the tourists pockets. The seat is as glorious as Beijing's Tiananmen .. government buildings rise up proudly. Hotels serene next to a snowy peak. Lights flashing in calm acceptance of their own irresistible power. Down the road, where the valley actually dives into the range, where azure lakes blush and fade like young girls in different seasons of love, Tibetans smile and wave and cook yak meat over yak shit coals in adobe houses. Some don't smile anymore.

In the brothels of Chengdu, pimps boast Aba girls ...

In the wilds of China, doozers cause muddy traffic jams deep into the night.

Mengding Mountain Tea

I took a trip last month while i was in china to my main homegirl's tea spot. here are some pics:



From Left to Right: Guan Da Ge, Xiao Bai, Chen Shui Yuan and Chen's employees. Xiao Bai run's the plant, Chen is my logistics, tea ware and oolong guy and Guan is my right hand man.





Sniffin tea.

Chengdu Tea Feature

This is a feature I wrote about tea in Chengdu for the SCMP.

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

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?

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.

PEEP THIS!!

Julia Zimmermann came to Chengdu and stayed with me for several days chronicling the earthquake there for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung -- my favorite German-language newspaper.

Here is her finished work, in German. The photos speak for themselves and if you click on the slideshow to your right, you will see more of the same pics.

Some ill from the Du

My man Chengduxi, who put up my Auryn tattoo back in the day -- had to get it recolored by Poh in Pai, but so what -- he's got his sights set on the art scene .. he was once a drummer, still is, now he paints and generously puts it up for us to peep. (Chinese language only, but the images are universal, yo ..)

and here are a couple pics from my new home in the Dirty Du (Chengdu for ya'll not in the know).



my fragrant lil hybrid jasmine ...



Gimpy, the one that made it



and this one's for Mika, who wished it ...

When things die

I was in Chengdu for the past two days taking care of some business and I went to check out my old home in Three Gods Village. I have posted here about it earlier -- the place is getting torn down to make way for high rise buildings and the people are forced to move out for two years.

I went there at night to pick up my cats and a few last things. When we pulled in to my neighborhood, it was 11pm and there were two people, an old man and a young kid with a flashlight, roaming through the houses picking through the wreckage. Everybody had moved out already and the houses were dark with gaping black holes where the windows were. The scavengers reminded my of grave robbers, the neighborhood of a graveyard. My courtyard was strewn with blankets, broken window frames, bamboo mats, piles of rubbish and paint. I smelled vinegar -- someone had thrown a bottle against my kitchen door and black vinegar dripped down. There was a framed picture of Thelonious Monk lying amidst the refuse and I found my old house shoes covered in paint chips.

My cats were roaming around the house. Stony, Crackhead and Gimpy. The other two kittens, Champy and Fuzz, have been MIA for two days. It was a horrible feeling, looking at this place of life and beauty reduced to a collection of dying homes, remnants littering the area, cats wondering around.

Our cab driver stuck around to help us collect the cats and he left his headlights on. I stopped and looked around at my old home by the light of two beams and saw nothing but death. Not even decay left a lingering trace of life ...

We tried to get the cats in, but they fought us and scratched me all over my hands. We tied them, grabbed them, cajoled them and eventually .. left them.

I managed to grab Gimpy and take him with us. The two adult mommas, Crackhead and Stony, might stand a chance on their own and they were too strong and wild for me to get them in the taxi, so I decided to let them live free. But for reasons I can't even understand, i took the kitten and now he is in my new apartment in Chengdu. Beanmilk will be living there while I am in Beijing and back to the US.

Last night Gimpy yowled and cried throughout the night. All the kittens have been skittish about humans, and I am very worried that Gimpy won't ever accustom himself to inside living. But from what other cat owners say, it is only a matter of time.

I dreamt of hundreds of cats and kittens in my room, my own and others, crying and wailing through the night and waking me up. When i awoke, i heard Gimpy.

We call him Gimpy because as a newborn, he had a badly deformed left front leg. At the time, I was worried that he would not be able to make it, he limped heavily, so I considered drowning him. My friends thought i was crazy. But he is strong and spry now and is the only one to make it to the city, the only one that represents the days in Three God's Village when I sat in my courtyard, inspected my flowers, drank tea and watched the sun move across the land.

Last night, after we discussed the fact that the kitten I wanted to drown is the only kitten that "survived," Beanmilk said:

"Never in my life have i experienced so many events that were connected like now. These past few months have been very strange ..."

Beijing 2008

I am finally in Beijing. After several months of talking about it and changes to the plan on a weekly basis, I am now officially part of the whole "one world one dream" experience in Beijing.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The sun shone all day, the sky was blue and white lazy clouds hung in the still air. The dozens of new glass buildings sparkled. I saw some of the crazy buildings they put up here for the big party: the birds nest, the CCTV Tower and a few others on Chang An Blvd where the heart of the party will be. I live right off of Chang An Blvd in a pimp pad on the 17th floor.

Today i bought more dress clothes and some shoes and such. I bought some already, but I guess i have no sense of suit-class cuz my boss took one look at me, shook his head and took me to the genuine copy market down the road to buy some almost real threads. I got two pairs of geek pants, three nerd shirts and some dork shoes for about USD140. I blabbed with the Anhui girls that run the market and convinced them i wasn't gay. I think i did anyway. They kept bringing these shy young boys up to me and saying "try on! try on!"

Peep it:




Today is a typical China day: gray and oppressive, slightly drizzly, stankin, humid, hectic. My preliminary perspective is that Beijing is a big Chengdu. There are a lot of Westerners here and they have a Hooters, all the restaurants of the world, all the banks etc. but this city is still a huge small town. I have to say, Shanghai has Beijing beat in terms of worldly pimp-ocity and straight baller-ism-fication. (translation for non-Americans: shanghai is better.)

but let me just say here that I am down with Sichuan and the Dirty Du for life. I represent peasant pimps in the SW hills. I ride with sichuan hua spittin, sunflower seed splittin, hot booty hittin, moonshine sippin, funky pipe hittin players from the Land of Abundance. Chengdu is the bomb. Its a village and such and provincial and all that and everybody is a damn farmer no matter what they do or what they drive, but I am down with it. If i could throw up gang signs in Blogger I'd be reppin right now, fo real. Shit. I am ready to jump out of this cubicle and kick a Beijing-er in the jaw for actin funny and not respectin Chengdu like he should.

Ahem. Excuse me. Just had to let ya'll know how it is.

But for now I have to listen to this garble they call "Beijing Hua" and wear super dork clothes for a while. Its a small price to pay for bein in the middle of the mix in 2008.

here is a good lil blurb about the complexities of life and the importance of history.

The death of traditions

It is so hot and humid in Chengdu right now that my brain is bathing in its own liquid, humming strange tunes to itself and sending me images of massive artillery guns firing into the distance.

Spengler is a columnist for Asia Times who has derided the Europeans for lacking the courage to face the modern world, upholds the Christian belief in salvation through God's grace as the answer to the world's crisis of faith and who is certain that traditional societies must change in the face of today, or perish.

And many other themes, some of which he touches on in this latest column about America's special place in the world and what he believes is Obama's deepest desire: to rid the US of that which grants us this special place, modernity.

*********************

I lament the demise of funk streets the world over. I have been actively seeking out the jabbering markets where chickens are held up for inspection, approved, beheaded and plucked before your very eyes; the courtyards of stone and their rickety wooden enclosure, with door gods and drying tobacco leaf; the delicate dance of a family-supported courtship and marriage; the one stringed wailing and the gourd flutes; family charts, bamboo weaves and dog-hair sandbags.

But they are dying the world over. In some places quicker than others and a few places not at all, but their fate is sealed by the progress of the modern world.

In my own neighborhood, the old Hakka traditions are resting in the cataracts of an 80 year old as he sips tea and fingers his mahjiong pieces.

Every time I meet my man Zhuang Jian for tea, we trade bitter reports of this and that place lost forever to the modern hordes and whisper of the few that still survive. These conversations always end in silence, whereupon we turn to money issues and quote Candide:

"... one's own garden ..."

My heart aches when i read of this prognosis for the world: Modernity and the lonely quest of the individual for solace on earth and grace from heaven. Is it said any differently in Eccliastes or the Dao De Jing? I think tribalism is immortal in us and community is our last gasp to ward off death, but in the end i am my only keeper -- I suppose i lament what is gone until i am a part of what will endure.

Dammit, Spengler is right. Wherever I have gone in the world, people are choosing, being forced to choose and just plain drifting into the real world. The only way to reconcile the two worlds is to create things which cause others to dream. Make wishes and see them come true ... Aha! i finally know what the Auryn means!

And so the lamenting pray and hope for God's retribution before his grace. Only the ghosts of the dream world actually spout Mayan prophecies of 2012 to each other, discuss the civilizations that existed 10,000 years ago and that we are doomed to meet their fate.

2012 allows us to be there for it and have the last laugh on guys like Spengler when God's grace falls on those who longed for what's lost, instead of those who embraced what is. It is the Great Dream of all dreamers.