Sick and Lost Day

I was sick all yesterday; bedridden and stung by poisoned food.

I had been bragging two days ago about how I had not yet fallen sick in Nepal and happily contrasting that with the weekly bout of poisoned food explusion I counted on in Lhasa.

Then, the palak paneer I ate that evening awoke me the next morning to say, "oh, by the way, your body is going to completely reject me having already digested a bit of my spinach and cheese. And, considering we have been digested only in part, we will make our exit via the nearest route, be it this way or that.

So, I spent the day laying in bed with occasional forays to the tiled bathroom to make way for my lovely but violent visitors as they flew forth with their greatest effort.

It was a funny way to spend the day. Well, funny may not be the most precise name for it. But, I was a bit surprised to walk out into Nepal this morning. It may have been my hunger, muted, but growing, but the world seemed a little abrasive this morning. I realized that I had not been out of my house in thirty or so hours. I walked down the street, soaked and muddy as usual, and was apprehensive about every step. Should I put that foot down? What will happen? I will certainly step in that curious concoction of mud and shit that paves the streets in my neighborhood.

Then looking up and taking particularly and unfairly seriously the plain stare that greets me everywhere that says, "what is that (referring to me)?" Usually, I appreciate it very much because it means eye contact, which I love, and, even though it does not mean what it may seem, it is refreshing nonetheless. But this morning, those eyes looking directly at me and mine were threats and danger for some reason. They looked at me and I looked back, but somehow I saw wrath in them and wondered if it was those eyes who were wrathful or my own confused eyes that projected that wrath into the world.

It is hard to know, but I am suspect.

So, I kindof forgot about Nepal while sleeping and writhing. I watched a couple of movies, said goodbye to a couple of friends, and did not eat a couple of things.

Otherwise, I laid around and wondered what was going on with the pain in my body. By 11 AM, the question had been answered. It was bad food that was making knife cuts in me and demanding more of my body than it really wanted to deal with.

Compounding the pain and illness was loneliness and isolation. My partner in crime had left that morning and I was feeling it. He had shown me China and I had shown him Tibet and Nepal. Without him I would speak less English, certainly, but also without him, I would not have a critical sparring partner, something very important to me. So, I was feeling it. Not to mention, I am kindof a crybaby and rarely get sick, so when I do, it might as well be as if I were dying.

Which I thought of while I was laying around: I need to do some work on that. If getting sick bugs me so much, how am I going to deal with death? I have been thinking for a while that I would like to die consciously. And, how will I do that if I freak out about a bit of pain? That is the thing, I think, to face the gross pain and the subtler fear at the time of death with conscious awareness.

While getting depressed and sick at the same time sucks, it is probably a good time to practice dying. I hope I can remember thata for next time.

Shit Eating Grin

First a shout out to the propagator, if not the originator, of this phrase-in-my-life. J-Mac, this one's for you. No, not you...you.

The artist formerly known as J-Greg who morphed, but may not have metamorphed, into J-Mac has recently noted a certain "shit eating grin" that I carry occasionally.

Today is one of those days.

The new J-Mac may be preserving this marker from the old days of New College where I wore such a smile more often than these days, I think. I was always surprised when someone mentioned it, calling me out in public, "look at this guy's shit eating grin." It was a narrow crew that did name me so, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.

The thing about that grin, and perhaps one of the reasons I was repeatedly surprised by my friends mention of it, was (and is today) that this particular kind of smile poured forth from somewhere I didn't, and still don't, know very well. The curling lips and ecstatically leaping cheeks were simply epiphenomenal of some coursing source of joy. That river from somewhere pervades my entire body, but concentrates its peak flow through my face, eyes, and mouth.

I used to get harassed for its occurrence because it would often correspond with socially questionable humor in the form of irony, private free association, light mockery, non sequitur, or sardonic discourse. It is odd to have just listed these, because it makes me realize just how much love and tolerance I got from my friends as I carried on largely nonsensical humor in their midst. And, despite the negative dialectic evident in those listed modes of jest, the flow of love and wonder they initiated welled up and erased the anger in a monsoon flood of joy and benevolence.

Funny how that works.

Oh, and yes, there is a very good reason I bear the ShitEatingGrin today.

On Love

It's been a while since I have written about love and I may never have done it in this forum. Love has been a tough word to swallow, hear, know, or embody for me for a while now. I won't date it, but the word went sour in my vocabulary and has since caused me a fair bit of trouble.

I am still a bit trepidatious about using it and as I think, I wonder if I might not write more about partnership than love here. The reason the whole thing comes up for me now is...well...I am getting sick of being alone. The more specific cause, I think, is that I met a woman. I met a woman in Lhasa with whom there will be (odds are astronomical, but I never say never) no chance.

She is witty, beautiful, smart, powerful, sexy, chillaxed, Venezuelan, Australian, and 37. It is only these last two that present any problem of astronomical scale (the first for me and the second for her). Australia is far away and "You are so young."

I will not go into too much detail, but meeting this wonderful woman awoke hope in me again. Hope that love and easy (with fits) partnership is possible in my life. All we did was sit around and chat. It was that easy and, for a few days, it was the best thing in my life. Even now, I think back with a little bit of longing and not much grasping on her beamingly alive visage and it lifts me slightly and says to me, "Yes, someone can look at you that way and it doesn't have to make you squirm. It can feel good."

So, thanks to E in Lhasa. You gave me a lovely gift and I really appreciate it.

Love.

Transition: Rocks to Water

Where does Tibet turn into Nepal?

Is it the lush forested slopes that follow the arid rock fields?

Is it the political horror factory that gives way to the loose fluidity of people's movements?

Is it the Buddhist mysts that flow forth into Hindu caste?

I do not know where Tibet turns into Nepal. I tried very hard, squinting and looking closely to see the change. I saw it but could not tell where it happened. My sequential mind looked very hard for the frame, moment where it turned, but I did not see a single time when it happened. Instead, I saw a flowing river develop into rushing plunge and the monsoon rush of clouds fill the steep, green, dripping valleys.

The lack of defined boundary led me to think that perhaps there was no such thing, perhaps, even, Tibet and Nepal were not the stable containers I thought them to be.

Could it be, even, that Tibet and Nepal do not exist? Maybe it is so. I think they are there, certainly and exist as a collection of characteristics but without some essential landscape being as it seems there might be within two such distinct worlds, places, spaces, landscapes, cultures, and nations.

What is the difference? Or, are there too many to innumerate. Lhasa is vastly different than Kathmandu, that is sure. But where do they change, one into the other?

An Ode to the Border (China's Tibet/Nepal)

Oh, Border
How you rain down on the wild earth and peoples's old plans like a fierce hailing curtain.
In accurate, vast shotgun spreading cone unto the earth
Seemingly from heaven poured or earth's numina arisen

Oh, Border
Your gaudy artifice begs itself into wilderness's naturalized face and yet stands apart and wholly as an abomination to persons, love, peace, and economy.
All those big words carry you to your moral grave where you will rot (I hope).

Oh, Border
How your visage in the crooked rearview mirror relieves me from State Supervision.
How your cascading valleys into the lush Nepali jungle guide my stirred heart home to the Valley of Himalayan valleys, the garbage dump of the mountains and the holiest city

Good Morning Lhasa

Brightly overcast morning the world lifts only so high but lovely still.
Those clouds which blend together and seem to have some independence, but only still let pass the indirected and refracted in mess light.
Escher's vision is oddly manifested here in this compound of cleanliness.
Outdoor hung passages like a Sarasota motel strung out along the vein of US HWY 41. There in the stillness of a building grounded, bodies walk obliquely rising slowly along an incline plane and also descending the other (or is it?) direction.
Lhasa goes precious in its final days. I mean my final days here which are its final days in my web.

Good Morning Lhasa

Brightly overcast morning the world lifts only so high but lovely still.
Those clouds which blend together and seem to have some independence, but only still let pass the indirected and refracted in mess light.
Escher's vision is oddly manifested here in this compound of cleanliness.
Outdoor hung passages like a Sarasota motel strung out along the vein of US HWY 41. There in the stillness of a building grounded, bodies walk obliquely rising slowly along an incline plane and also descending the other (or is it?) direction.
Lhasa goes precious in its final days. I mean my final days here which are its final days in my web.

Hmm.

Wondering wild winters don't pass this way this now.
Instead, the world swims over and beyond in the blue lightened evening sky before dark and without red in the story line or clouded reservations up there.

There, behind the Public Security Bureau's panopticon, is a long pasture of backlit vapor settling in on the hills around Lhasa, god realm.
The angle at which the all-seeing eye of concrete skyscraping plateau sky strikes down at me understates its direct and piercing view.

In fact, there may not be one there knowing through seeing and controlling by knowing. There may be instead a drunk and loosely uniformed frump cradling his bottle of painkiller having just slaughtered another brief moment of conscience in which the knowledge was too much for one man's frame and needed anesthetizing.

Then below bellow belly laughs and guttural appreciations of grilled warm and luscious stick food and the teasing of small children with dripping chilli oil on their soft chins and absorbing shirts of cotton.