It was smoggy today in Hong Kong. The sun never really made it out from behind the curtain of moisture and smog and clouds and yet, today was the first day when I could see into the distance. Well, not the literal distance but the theoretical distance, the possible future, the likely ‘whats-next.’ Each discussion I have illuminates new perspectives and challenges and opportunities and slowly but surely the scope of my work here is revealing itself. It’s not going to be a small job and it’s not going to be dull. I took a huge leap of faith when I abandoned my nice life in Tirol for this unknown but with each passing day I feel more confident that I knew what I was doing :)
I managed to shave my commute down to 35 minutes from over an hour because I stopped being a dumbass and because a nice colleague showed me the MTR station right next to the office. Duh. Part of the fun is the not knowing and then the next stage of that fun is the eventual knowing. Its my pattern to wait until I’m all-about-the-knowing but by then I’m also usually going…the irony….In any case, my commute allows for fresh air (tram), book reading (MTR) and a (walk) past a (coffee joint). It’s ideal. When typhoon season hits I will only have a few spots where I’ll be exposed to the elements and I imagine that this will also come in handy when the summer comes and decides to steam this island up to unbearable degrees.
My brain is a little frazzled with all the “what-ifs,” “ah has!” and “dude….i totally need to do-thats.” It’s a bit of a treat that I have a 3 day weekend to absorb all the info and ides swirling and try to relax a little. Or at least try to. The cats are finally settled but I feel like there are pieces of me that haven’t quite arrived yet. Like I’m somehow still in transition, that static person shaped blob that isn’t quite beamed up or down yet. I’m getting there but, often throughout my days, I am still surprised to see such a new landscape. My hair and skin are going to need a new routine as well since sticky, humid, salty, smoggy air is a new environ. Lots of adjusting going on here at 2bean…
In honor of the fact that I am just now beginning to see the light…
my mind is in a lot of places right now. innsbruck. new york. hong kong. vermont. mongolia. florida. cape cod…im thinking about all the places im going and all the places i’ve been. so many roads to ease my soul…
from the high road to the low, all i want is one to take me home
Live hip hop concerts are rarely as good in practice as they are in theory. Doesn't mean I won't keep trying. Tonight I have the grand pleasure of seeing my favorite Jukebox Jockey's open for an icon at the Poolbar in Feldkirch: Grandmaster Flash.
I’ve been back from holiday for a week now and more than 8 people have said to me, “welcome back to the real world!” I know that the intention is good and this is a an acknowledgement that I was in another kind of reality for the last month but these words have been echoing in my head since thier first utterance. The real world? Is that where my life is located? What does that say for the billions – yes, billions – of people located all over the Earth that have a reality different than mine? A world where water is still the primary concern followed shortly by shelter, food and community? Is that not the real world? I would make the argument that this holiday I had, this vacation, was into the real world and not the opposite.
Getting Water
Only 5 days into my normal routine and I can’t shake the fact that everything I’m doing is somehow floating above the surface, mired in an ocean of static and electricity, the tasks are like turning the gears of a clock in a world with no time. I am making and writing and shifting and doing all with the purpose of being able to do the same thing tomorrow. Like the Doozer’s living in Fraggle Rock, I am building things simply for the sake of building them. Need is irrelevant. Good design is optional. Cooperation is a luxury. The Western way, the capitalist way, isn’t as concerned with the output as the money made from the output and I can’t understand why I have always been okay with this relationship. I haven’t just been okay with it but have educated myself to maximize it and, with it, my own personal benefits.
Skin - All They Have To Sell
I refer to myself as Sisyphus all the time, the 21st century variety, and that is true but if I recall the story correctly Sisyphus was in hell. I am not. Or at least, I would like to choose an alternative. It took a journey to the East to gain some perspective on the West and now I am grappling with that new view. Don’t get me wrong, I like comfort and am deeply grateful for the gifts and luck I have had that allows me to live the life I am living but I am seeing something else now…life with purpose, concern for the output rather than the money made from it and comfort are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to take the same skills and same passions I use for perpetuating the daily grind to turn the gears of a different machine…one that impacts the ‘real world’ in a ‘real way.’
Sisters - UB Girls in the Country
Since my return I have been combing through my images, watching zillions of TED presentations, looking in the mirror and asking myself some very clear questions. I am full to the brim, overflowing in fact, with inspiration and I am considering carefully where to direct this new passion and energy so as to help reconnect me with the ‘real world’ and also maintain the flexible freedom that I have worked hard to achieve. A garden would be a simple beginning – reconnecting literally with where my food comes from – while the opposite end of the specturm would be dropping everything and heading to Africa to dig wells. As you can see, it is a big arc that I am mentally traversing and I am curious to see where on it I will land.
The honest truth is that I don’t know yet how, and how much, I want to change or how radical that change should be but I can say that the thought is pumping through me like my blood.
It is totally overwhelming to pass through these images with the aim of choosing my favorites as each of them made it through many rounds of editing and are among those images I deemed necessary to both remember and convey my experience. The 800 photos that reside in the albums are, however, more than most people have the time to comb through so I wanted to elevate the tip of the iceberg and make the whole (almost the whole) journey accessible.
Below you can get a taste of where I was, what I saw and who shared these experiences with me. It is, by no means, the whole picture – 21% of it to be exact – but it is a good place to jump off from. If you find yourself curious or inspired to see more, click here for complete albums on each leg of the journey. My hot minute in Moscow seemed like a footnote compared to the bigness of Asia so it will appear when I have time to add it.
Perhaps what may be more satisfying would be to view this slideshow full screen, I recommend that, and you can click this link to make it so.
My skin has been tingling for the last 24 hours and I can also detect an elevated heart rate…normally the hypochondriac in me would diagnose any number of ailments to explain these facts away but at this moment I am 99% sure its just the call of the wild. 24 hours and counting until I head East…
There aren’t too many moods a little Townes can’t lift or sing to sleep. This article in the NYTimes had me thinking of both him and the amazing night I spent at Amsterdam’s Paradiso shooting Steve.
i had an incredibly unsatisfying conversation just now…so unsatisfying, in fact, that upon signing off i felt a strangely deep sadness. Mesureless melancholy, actually. Sometimes even no expectations are still too many expectations. Painting a prison built on materialistic greed to be a perfect pleasure dome, though its easy to do, makes me sad.
I had to learn memorize this poem in 10th grade and i’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten it but tonight was the first night in years when i remembered that i hadn’t forgotten it.
Waiting for my cold medicine to kick in and spin me into chemical-induced, dreamless sleep I figured that I could do a little spinning of my own while my eyes stay open and string some thoughts up here on 2bean. My whole flat is restless tonight and were it not for this Nyquil, I imagine that I would not find sleep for many hours to come…
Doozer and Walter are in the midst of one of their WWF-style kitty smack downs and there are things falling and breaking all around me as they fight for the coveted role of ALPHA kitty tonight. What they always forget is that I am the alpha kitty and all their hair pulling, rug flipping, cat growling insanity can only ever get them to second place. I dream sometimes of video taping them when they behave this way or of making them little kitty-friendly mexican wrestling masks and shiny capes…I have other strange kitty notions as well. Sometimes when they do the little figure 8 between my legs when im trying to feed them breakfast and circle me like sharks i envision making them little hats with dorsal fins…Landshark! Candygram!
I bet you’re imagining that a) the cold medicine is working and b) perhaps i took too much but in both instances you would be mistaken. I am simply putting out into the world some funny images that have lived in my head for a long time. Sometimes buried treasure chest, sometimes toxic waste dump there’s a wealth of random tidbits in there and sometimes I gotta set them free…even the ridiculous ones about turning my sweet kittens into landsharks. Especially those, I think.
All the work and congestion and snow in the Springtime and longing and waiting has me feeling all stirred up inside. Like i’m rattling my own cage trying to break out and fly away… This feeling comes over me often and is usually followed by a credit card bill and airline ticket. Im never quite sure if Im running away from myself or straight into myself. In a matter of a couple months I’ll be able to contemplate that exact question from a felt ger in the middle of the Gobi desert.
Music has a way of setting me free in the moment…those moments when I have to stay put and do what i’m supposed to so that I can, eventually, fly off into my dreams and see the world like the child I know I am. Patience is something im learning with age. This song has debuted here before but here’s a new incarnation…it makes it ok for me to sleep and wake and work again and again and again waiting for those moments of freedom and real, life-affirming adventure.
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”
Its a good fucking question.
My head is starting to clear up thanks to chemistry and with that opening is coming a simultaneous closing. Closing up shop. Im tired and needing to close my eyes and sleep. Its true that believing in this living is a hard way to go which is why its good to believe in more. Tonight Im gonna believe in free, rambling men….the truth of the Gobi…the strength gathered from routine….the strength gathered from breaking routine. I gonna believe in something I can hold onto and close my eyes a happy woman….
I got a one line email today from my sister saying “hes fine. dad in cape coral hospital.” my first thought was, ‘if he’s fine then he surely wouldn’t be there.’ worry and fear and questions and no answers remind me how quickly everything can change. i say ‘remind me’ because i know what that feels like all too well. one second life looks north and without even turning around or bllinking you can find yourself pointing south. a sneak attack-less pain in the chest, even if it missed the heart by only a kiss, is still something that worries me and i am sending love (and light) to El Capitan…even though he would probably tell me that thats ‘hokus pokus, ugga bugga, bullshit’ most likely. Regardless, I send the sincere advice to Daddy-oh! . . . get out of the hospital and back on the Whaler and enjoy your summery winter. Oh yeah…and no bunking!
Its been snowing for what feels like weeks and I vacillate between feeling safe and insulated and outright suffocation. This could mean that I’m overdue for some winter fun in the Wonderland or maybe I was just spoiled by the tepid Florida sun. The snow is beautiful but its also wet and cold and slippery as hell. Tonight I feel protected by the vast, white blankets though also not…also a little cold. Mostly I’m just worried about my Pop and, as is the case when you’re far from the ones you love, a little helpless.
I’ve known mornings
white as diamonds
silent from a night so cold
such a stillness
calm as the owl glides
our lives are buried in snow
I was sifting through the piles
in my hand a tangled thread
each patient tug upon the snarl
is a glimpse of what has been
burdened bands gain strong hands
gaping holes where diamonds should be
must have been morning that stole them
a glint of white in the pocket of winter
and some hearts are ghosts settling down in dark waters
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stones
some hearts are ghosts settling down in dark waters
just as silt grows heavy and drowns with the stones
I’ve known mornings
white as diamonds
silent from a night so cold
such a stillness
calm as the owl glides
our lives are buried in snow
